Colbert founds a company for captives and ships poor whites on the same terms

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, controller of French finances, created the Compagnie des Indes in 1664 to supply the island with enslaved Africans. Demand for labour ran ahead of supply, so the company also shipped poor Europeans, called engages, who were held on the same terms as slaves for thirty six months. The following year Louis XIV judged the French presence on the island substantial enough to need an administrator and named Bertrand d'Ogeron governor. D'Ogeron was a former privateer who had already done the work of persuading the buccaneers of Tortuga to plant crops instead of only hunting cattle. Between the two appointments, the commercial one and the political one, the French foothold stopped being a nest of raiders and became a possession with an economy. The engages are worth remembering. For a few decades the plantations of the Caribbean worked white and black bodies side by side before the law hardened around colour.

On 30 October 1665 the army of the Kongo met the Portuguese forces of Loanda at Ambuila and was destroyed. The king, Antonio I, died there, along with his son, the dukes of Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi and Gorimba, the marquess of Mpemba, and ninety five title holders altogether, as well as a Capuchin who had come against his prefect's orders. Antonio had brought his crown, his sceptre and the royal archives with him. Everything was lost. Angola's expansion had made a strong independent kingdom to its north unacceptable, and Angola's economy was the traffic in slaves feeding Brazil. The kingdom that had existed since Afonso I, and the Christian ruling class that had formed inside it, never recovered. Succession disputes multiplied between rival clans, and in 1678 one of the contending armies sacked Mbanza Kongo itself. The churches and palace were left in ruins and nobody lived in the city for twenty five years.

Large planters in Virginia began buying enslaved Africans in quantity during the 1670s, as the flow of white indentured servants out of Britain thinned. The reversal took about twenty years. In the late 1670s white servants in the colony outnumbered enslaved black people four to one. By the early 1690s enslaved black people outnumbered servants by the same margin. What replaced indenture differed in kind. A servant served a term and then walked free. A slave served for life, so did the children, and the condition was fixed to skin. Virginia was writing that attachment into statute across these same decades. The pattern repeated across the North American mainland, and it had already taken hold in the Caribbean. I keep it on a Haitian timeline because Saint-Domingue was built on the same logic at greater scale, and because the racial law the mainland invented in the 1670s was still on the books of the United States when Haiti declared independence.

On 23 March 1668 William Willoughby, governor of Barbados, concluded a treaty with several Carib captains of St Vincent. The island lies directly upwind of Barbados, so a boat pushed off from the sugar plantations there would come ashore on the Vincentian coast with almost no steering required. Enslaved people had worked this out. The treaty obliged the Caribs to seize and deliver up anyone arriving as a fugitive from Barbados or any other English island, and to acknowledge themselves subjects of the English king. In return the English would leave them St Vincent and St Lucia. The Caribs honoured none of it. Thirty two years later the missionary Jean Baptiste Labat found a great number of escaped Africans living on the island, and recorded that the Caribs had stopped selling such people back and now treated them as members of one nation with themselves. The refuge the treaty was written to close stayed open for another century.