The battle of Mbwila opens a century of Kongo civil war

Thornton fixes the start of Kongo's civil wars at the battle of Mbwila, the culmination of war with Portugal. For much of the period that followed, the wars set partisans of two great family alliances, the Kimpanzu and the Kimulaza, against one another. Some kings, such as Pedro IV early in the eighteenth century, won general recognition, but the unity was fragile and repeatedly collapsed as several families contended indecisively for the royal title. Thornton's argument is that these wars were fought at least partly to settle constitutional questions, namely who was to be king and what a king's powers were, and that the second question travelled to the Caribbean with the captives. Kongolese thought, in his account, alternated between an absolutist concept granting the king full powers and a limited one requiring rule by consent and consultation. Where this account departs from the standard one: Thornton rejects the reading shared by Eugene Genovese and C. L. R. James in which the royalism of Saint-Domingue's rebels was an archaic African survival to be outgrown, arguing instead that Kongo supplied a positive political philosophy of limited kingship as revolutionary as anything coming from France.

Bertrand d'Ogeron reached Tortuga in February 1665 and set about converting hunters and pirates into settled colonists. He pushed cocoa as a crop that paid, and lent money at low interest out of his own pocket to men starting plantations. He also arranged the shipment of about one hundred women from French jails, recorded as orphans, to be married to the settlers. The count of planters rose from 400 to 1,500 by 1669. In June 1670 the colonists revolted briefly over the prices charged by the chartered company, and it passed. When d'Ogeron died on 31 January 1676 the economy of the French west had shifted from raiding to farming, and the civil and religious institutions of a permanent colony were in place. Read the measures together and the shape is plain. Credit for the planters, a crop that sells, and women delivered like stock. The workforce for these fields was already being bought on the African coast.

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.