Colbert's code forbids torture and the planters price it out

The Code Noir was drafted under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister who built Louis XIV's navy and his colonial administration, and it reads like the work of a capable bureaucrat. Owners had to be Roman Catholic. Every enslaved person had to be baptised. Sunday work was prohibited. Torture was prohibited. Masters owed their people food, clothing and care in sickness and in age. Anyone freed acquired the standing of a colonial subject. The same code expelled all Jews from French territory overseas. In Saint-Domingue the protective clauses were treated as advice. The planters there worked from an arithmetic later called the planter's policy: an adult brought from Africa cost less to replace than to keep alive, so the cheaper course was to exhaust people and buy more. France could hold up its statute book as evidence that it governed like a civilised power while men holding its commissions ran the harshest slave regime in the hemisphere. The distance between the printed article and the cane field is where colonial power actually operates.

The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly from the captain's cabin. They had been taken in the raid of 1683, held at Petit-Goave, and had worked their way back through Baracoa in eastern Cuba and Havana. On the last leg they travelled as free women and Spanish subjects, seasick and dependent on other passengers for food, but with their status unquestioned. The people below them were about to be branded, quarantined and measured. Matias later gave her age as twenty two and called herself a free mulata. She said the pirate Lorenco had taken her prisoner with other women and carried her to Petit-Goave, where she remained. She named no owner, no husband and no companion, and said nothing of how she had survived four years among the French.

Eleven people on Andre Gomes de Medina's plantation in Bahia, and more in the neighbourhood around it, had died over the course of a year from illnesses nobody could name. In 1688 the enslaved people there searched the cabin of a man called Simao and found a pot of animal teeth and powders. Simao later told the Lisbon inquisitors it was made from the heads of snakes and served as a cure for venomous bites. Before that he was put through a boiling water ordeal, a judicial procedure closely resembling ones then in use in West Africa. Afterwards he was said to have confessed to killing other slaves. Three enslaved people, Domingos, Joanna and Ursula, heard the confession, and the slaveholder heard of it only at second hand. Domingos, about twenty five years old, gave evidence to the commissioner himself, and he and Joanna testified to finding the pot. The enslaved ran this investigation from beginning to end.

Eric Williams, the Trinidadian historian and politician, put the point in a sentence. The English settlement of 1688 gave a decisive push to the doctrine of open commerce, and the traffic in captive Africans was then opened on exactly the terms every other line of business was opened on, with a single difference, which lay in the nature of the goods. The goods were people. That settlement is normally taught as the moment parliamentary liberty was secured in England. In the same decades the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and English shipping was opened to any merchant who wanted to fit out a slaver, and the volume carried across the Atlantic rose sharply in consequence. The expansion of liberty at home and the expansion of the traffic in human beings abroad were produced by the same act. Saint-Domingue was reaching its first sugar boom while this was happening on the other side of the Channel.