Five hundred and fifteen poison cases across four slave societies

Counting full trials and investigations together, four widely different slave societies produced 515 poison cases between 1680 and 1849: 99 in Bahia, 120 in the Dutch Guianas, 179 in Virginia and 117 in Martinique. Medical practitioners of African descent appear in 150 of them. The shape of the curve is what matters. Bahia begins alone in the 1680s, the Dutch Guianas and Martinique join in the 1730s, and the total climbs from 22 in that decade to 73 in the 1740s, 91 in the 1750s, 93 in the 1760s and 96 in the 1770s. It falls to 29 in the 1780s and never recovers, except in Martinique, where the 1820s produce 36 cases and the 1830s 27. Colonies with separate empires, laws, crops and populations moved in step. Two famous cases, Makandal in 1758 and Tacky's rising in 1760, sit inside a wave that began decades before either.

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

In the region around the Gulf of Benin, each ethnic group, village, family and lineage kept its own vodun, guardian deities tied to ancestors. Relations between these groups were marked by rivalry and frequent war, and religion moved with the fighting. At the opening of the eighteenth century the royal family of Abomey, extending its power, set out to centralise worship. It appropriated deities belonging to its enemies, among them Yoruba ones, suppressed some spirits and imposed others across the whole kingdom, so that these became public vodun. Priests who had until then worked independently of rulers were turned into dignitaries of the court. One imposed figure was Agassou, founding ancestor of the royal line at Abomey, held by tradition to be the child of a woman and a panther. Families went on honouring their own vodun regardless. Both habits, the state cult and the household one, crossed the Atlantic in the slave ships.

The most violent of the rural codes written by the Haitian state was the one promulgated by President Jean Pierre Boyer in 1826. It bound peasants who owned nothing, or owned a fragment of land, to three years of compulsory labour on a large estate. It forbade them to move freely outside their rural section. It placed their work under the supervision of the army. The estates in question had belonged to French colonists who were killed or fled, and after independence they were divided among the black and mulatto generals and the senior officials of the new state. A succession of Haitian governments issued codes of this kind and they resembled one another closely, because they all answered the same problem: how to make people who had just stopped being slaves produce export crops on somebody else's land.