In Virginia the enslaved outnumber indentured servants four to one

By the 1690s the enslaved black population of Virginia outnumbered white indentured servants there by four to one. For most of the century the tobacco colony had run on indenture, which meant English and Irish people bound to labour for a term of years and then released with a claim to land. That arrangement carried an end date inside it. Slavery carried none, and the Atlantic traffic had grown large enough to supply planters at a price they preferred. The ratio is the visible result of decisions the Virginia assembly had already taken in law: making slave status inherit through the mother, closing the escape route through baptism, and fixing condition by race. The colony that later produced the sentence about all men being created equal had, by this decade, settled the prior question of who counted as a man. The same substitution of African slavery for European indenture was under way across the plantation Americas at the same moment, on English, French, Dutch and Portuguese ground alike.

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.

Around the end of the seventeenth century the money in the Americas moved. For most of the two hundred years since Columbus, the wealth Europe drew from the hemisphere came out of the ground in Mexico and Peru, in silver dug by conscripted indigenous labour. By the 1690s the largest returns were coming from sugar grown on the Caribbean islands and along the coast of Brazil. Sugar demands land, mills, capital and an enormous supply of workers who can be compelled, and the plantation complex that supplied all four expanded through the Atlantic basin at once. This relocation is the reason the slave trade reached the size it did. Silver mining drew on indigenous labour drafts organised in place. Sugar drew on Africans bought across an ocean and shipped in, and it consumed them fast enough to require permanent replacement. Every feature of the eighteenth century Caribbean, including the colony that became Haiti, follows from the centre of gravity moving off the mainland mines and into the island cane fields.

Willem Bosman lived on the Gold Coast as a merchant of the Dutch West India Company from 1688 to 1702 and published his description of the coast in 1705. He wrote about priests conducting divination and sacrifice before decisions on war or travel, consecrated objects placed in the rooms of the sick, and payment for healing collected from a patient's relatives in proportion to their means. He disapproved of most of it. He also conceded, grudgingly, that he had watched several of his own countrymen cured by remedies that looked wrong to him, at moments when the European physicians had no idea what to do, and wondered whether African medicines worked better on Europeans because the climate had altered European bodies. What shocked him was that Europeans on the coast had taken up the practice of putting consecrated objects beside sickbeds. The exchange ran both ways long before it reached the Americas.