The Royal African Company was the largest slaving firm ever built

The Royal African Company was chartered in England in 1672 and became the biggest single slave trading business in the history of the Atlantic. Its charter gave it a monopoly of English commerce with Africa, and it spent heavily on fortified factories along the coast, permanent posts where goods were stored, captives were held, and relations with local rulers were kept up. The monopoly did not last. Independent English merchants wanted a share, Parliament stripped the exclusive privileges at the end of the seventeenth century and again early in the eighteenth, and the company never recovered financially. It was wound up in 1752. The direction of change is what to take from this. Ending the monopoly shrank the company and enlarged the trade, because the number of firms competing to carry people multiplied and English shipments rose. The same thing happened in France, and it is what allowed Saint-Domingue to be supplied at the pace its planters demanded.

The Code Noir of 1685 ordered that every enslaved person in the French islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic religion, and required a planter buying newly arrived Africans to notify the governor within eight days so that instruction and baptism could be arranged. The same text forbade the public exercise of any other religion and directed that offenders be punished as rebels. Marriage of the enslaved was prescribed as well, and the Church pressed it through the following century. The purpose of this apparatus was the quiet reproduction of slavery over a long stretch of time. Masters and administrators watched for anything that might interrupt it: abortion, infanticide, and above all flight from the plantation. Alongside the whip, which had never been sufficient on its own, the colony now had a machine for supervising the few hours of rest a slave was allowed.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.

On a Sunday in September 1739 some twenty enslaved men, called Angolans by the colonists and led by a man named Jemmy, broke open a store of firearms near the Stono river in South Carolina. They killed as they went and marched south toward the Spanish settlements around St Augustine, carrying two drums and flying banners. Their numbers reached sixty, and at a large field they stopped, beat the drums and danced in order to draw more people to them. Ninety strong, they met the colonial militia and were scattered after a fight in which they left some of the militia dead. A body of about ten kept going until mounted troops caught them the next day. Seven days after that, a further party stood and fought an open battle against the militia some thirty miles below the site of the first clash. English officials in Carolina blamed Spanish agents and priests, who had been offering freedom to any runaway who could reach Florida.