Portugal lets the Dutch inspect its slave ships on the Gold Coast

Portugal and the Netherlands signed a treaty in 1678 that allowed Dutch vessels to monitor Portuguese slave ships along the Gold Coast. The agreement came out of decades of fighting between the two powers in Africa and Brazil, during which the Dutch had taken and then lost Portuguese possessions on both sides of the ocean. The settlement that followed divided rights instead of territory. The Dutch held the strongest forts on the Gold Coast, and the treaty confirmed their authority to check who was trading there and on what terms. Arrangements like this are how the African coast was carved up, in treaties signed in Europe by men who had never seen it. African rulers on the ground took no part in the negotiations and frequently ignored the results, selling to whichever captain paid best. The paper divisions still shaped which colonies received which people, and the African composition of Saint-Domingue was set by decisions of this kind.

Between 1679 and 1704 enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue organised four separate armed conspiracies. Their object was the destruction of the master class in its entirety. The dates matter more than the plots achieved on their own. The colony was barely established, its enslaved population was still small, and resistance of this order was already being planned and had to be hunted down. The usual telling of Haitian history begins the story of revolt in August 1791, as though a hundred and thirty years of obedience came first. The record says something else. Conspiracy, poisoning, flight to the mountains and open revolt run continuously through the colonial period, and marronage was permanent. What changed in 1791 was scale, timing and the collapse of French authority in Europe, which gave a rising the room to grow into a war. The intention was present in the first decades, and the colonists knew it.

The first great expansion of Atlantic slaving produced the longest voyages and the highest death rates in the whole history of the traffic, for the crews as much as for the people in the hold. Ships were slower, provisioning was worse, and nobody had yet worked out how to keep several hundred confined human beings alive for three months at sea. Within the period the regional differences were enormous. People embarked in the Bight of Biafra died at two to three times the rate of people embarked in Upper Guinea, a gap that reflects the length of the route, the disease environments at either end, and how long a captive had already been held on the coast before boarding. Faster ships and later regulation brought the overall figures down. The seventeenth century numbers stayed in the record as the baseline, and every improvement the eighteenth century claimed for itself was measured from here.

Between 1677 and 1682 an investigation at the court of Louis XIV drew in close to four hundred suspects. At its centre was a circle of noblewomen who commissioned love magic from a sorceress in Paris. Investigators then turned up something else. The same sorceress was said to have sold deadly poisons made from toads to heirs impatient for their inheritances, and to have had charms consecrated by rogue priests. The French script of the moment held that women used potions to make men love them, an inversion of order that frightened the powerful. The affair produced a royal edict in 1682 that criminalised pretended magic, punished superstitious use of sacred objects and prayers, and tightened the sale of arsenic and mercury sublimate. Its effect in France was to cut accusations of sorcery by renaming the accused as false sorcerers or poisoners. Forty two years later that edict was extended to the French islands of the Caribbean.