Allada sends an ambassador to the court of Louis XIV

The Aja kingdom of Allada, on the stretch of coast that later shipped tens of thousands of people into the Caribbean, put a senior envoy in front of Louis XIV in 1670. Embassies of this kind ran through the whole slaving period. Two representatives of Asebu had crossed to the Dutch republic early in the seventeenth century. A group of rulers from the Gold Coast were received by the Elector of Brandenburg in 1683. A king's son from Bissau spoke for his people at Lisbon in 1696. On the African side these missions came from places as far apart as Senegambia and Kongo, and in Europe they reached from Portugal up into Scandinavia. The traffic grew in the eighteenth century, and alongside it a trade in men posing as African princes. Students travelled too, most of them landing at Liverpool, some the sons of rulers and some sponsored by companies or by individual traders. They walked through cities where Africans were auctioned in public.

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.

English settlers and enslaved Africans from Barbados were among the first people to settle South Carolina in 1670. The English brought decades of experience in producing lucrative staple crops through the enslavement of human beings, and they brought the system entire. That is the mechanism by which Caribbean slavery arrived on the North American mainland fully formed. The slave societies that grew on both sides of the water shared a high ratio of Africans to Europeans, and in both, people of mixed descent occupied a legal status that varied by place and period. The link between the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America, and then the United States, has run for roughly four hundred years, through slavery, emancipation, independence and migration, and it has made for uneasy social bonds the whole time. It began with planters who already knew exactly what they were doing.

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.