The buccaneers plant tobacco and stop growing only what they eat

Around 1670 the French boucaniers on the western coast moved from growing food for their own use to growing tobacco for sale. The change looks small and it is the hinge. Subsistence farming needs a household. Tobacco needs curing sheds, a merchant, a ship, credit, and more hands than a household has. Tobacco was the entry crop across the Caribbean for exactly these reasons. It grew on small plots with modest capital, and it taught men the habit of producing for a European market and borrowing against next year's harvest. Once that habit existed, the move into sugar followed wherever soil and water allowed, and sugar demanded labour on a scale nobody would supply willingly. The tobacco fields of this decade are the start of the plantation economy that made Saint-Domingue the most valuable colony in the world, and the start of the traffic in people that filled it.

After Ambuila the Portuguese moved to crush Soyo, the coastal province that had grown rich on direct trade through the port of Pinda and had been drifting away from the Kongo crown for a generation. A Portuguese army beat the Soyo forces in 1670 and killed their prince. Soyo regrouped and destroyed that army in a surprise attack on 18 October, the feast of St Luke. Nobody threatened Soyo like that again. St Luke's Day became a national festival of deliverance with processions and war dances, and the church took a full part in it. Soyo was also the one place in the whole country with an almost unbroken Capuchin presence from 1645 into the eighteenth century, and it developed something like a settled Christianity, with eight churches in its capital, lay brotherhoods whose membership was near compulsory for high office, and princes who could read and write Portuguese.

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.