148,000 people were shipped from the Sierra Leone estuary

Regular slaving from the Sierra Leone estuary began in the late seventeenth century, and most of the people taken from it left between 1750 and 1807. British ships carried the bulk of that traffic, an estimated 148,000 Africans in total. About 70 percent of the figure rests on documented voyages and the rest on estimates built from partial evidence, which is the normal proportion in this field. When Britain abolished the trade in 1807 shipments from the estuary fell away quickly and permanently. The same estuary then took on a second role. Freetown, founded on it in 1792 as a settlement for freed people from Britain and Nova Scotia and later joined by Maroons deported from Jamaica, became the base of the naval squadron that intercepted slavers and the port where recaptured Africans were put ashore. Tens of thousands landed there, some within sight of the water they had been shipped from weeks earlier.

At the end of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue held between 400,000 and 500,000 enslaved people, about 40,000 whites, and some 25,000 free black people and people of mixed descent. In 1789 the colony had 793 sugar plantations. It accounted for more than a third of all French trade outside France, which made it the richest possession the country had, and every year five hundred ships unloaded its sugar, coffee, indigo, copper and timber in French ports. The whites who lived there, whether petty clerks or great planters, were occupied with dinners, balls, taverns and theatres, and with quarrels over the mistresses of estate managers. They resented the rule that colonial produce could be sold only to France and only at prices France set. Visitors were already describing the place as a volcano under the feet of the dancers, and the arithmetic at the head of this entry explains why.

In 1848 the budget of the Haitian army stood at 3,232,225 francs, which came to sixty five per cent of everything the national government spent. Faustin Soulouque was in his second year as president and would crown himself emperor the following year. The figure is worth setting beside what the state did not do. It ran almost no schools outside the towns, maintained few roads, and drew most of its revenue from a tax on coffee grown by farmers it otherwise left alone. No European power was preparing to land. France had recognised Haitian independence in 1825 and the threat that justified this spending had passed a generation earlier. The army existed at that size because control of it was the route to the presidency, and every president had to pay for the loyalty that had put him there and could remove him. Two thirds of public money went to the one institution that decided who governed.

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.