Father Labat beats men to death for what he takes to be sorcery

Father Jean-Baptiste Labat produced one of the first descriptions of the religious life of enslaved people in the French part of the island. He was a missionary and a sugar planter at once, and he admitted in print that he had thrashed to death men he believed to be sorcerers for keeping up African rites. His view was that magic came naturally to Africans. Before baptising an adult, he wrote, one had to identify those who had served as sorcerers at home, since whatever they promised they would seldom give it up. His book was received in France as agreeable and useful reading. Where African religion was noticed at all in this period it was noticed in order to be banned, and the healing practices people used when they fell ill were punished with fines and beatings. Arrests, ordinances and reports kept the prohibition visible without ever explaining what was being prohibited.

The Treaty of Ryswick of 20 September 1697 moved the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France and created the colony of Saint-Domingue. The figures it eventually produced are worth stating plainly. By the 1780s something near forty percent of the sugar and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in Europe came out of this one territory, an area smaller than Belgium. More than half a million enslaved Africans were living and dying there to produce it, and the mortality was such that the colony needed tens of thousands of fresh arrivals a year simply to hold its workforce level. The elegance of eighteenth century France, including the coffee houses where its philosophers argued about liberty, ran on this. Ryswick also drew a line. The boundary the treaty left vague became, after a century of adjustment and dispute, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A European peace conference created the legal object the revolution would destroy and fixed the shape of the country that replaced it.

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.

The Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years' War in 1697 and, among many other provisions, handed France the western portion of Hispaniola. The territory was named Saint-Domingue. Within fifty years it led the world in sugar, coffee and indigo, and by the 1780s it earned France more than any other colony earned any other European power. All of it rested on one input. The enslaved African population of that third of an island passed five hundred thousand, against roughly forty thousand whites and a similar number of free people of colour. The link between those two facts is what makes the colony worth understanding. Extreme output was bought with extreme mortality, and the deaths had to be covered by continuous imports, which is why the ships never stopped arriving. Saint-Domingue held its place as the most valuable European possession in the Americas until the people producing the wealth destroyed the machinery that produced it.