The Hannibal loses 320 captives to dysentery in one crossing

The Hannibal, commanded by Thomas Phillips, sailed from St. Thomas on 25 August 1693 for Barbados. The crossing took more than two months. Before it ended, fourteen of the crew and three hundred and twenty of the Africans below deck were dead. Phillips kept a record. He wrote that smallpox was the danger everyone expected, and that on his ship the killer was the flux, meaning dysentery, spread through a hold where several hundred people lay chained in their own waste for weeks. His account also sets out the commercial arithmetic without embarrassment. The Royal African Company forfeited ten pounds for every captive who died before delivery, so three hundred and twenty deaths came to three thousand two hundred pounds. That figure is the system in a single line. A ledger in London booked the dead as damage to cargo, and the survivors of the same voyage walked off at Bridgetown into the cane fields of Barbados.

Between 1679 and 1704 enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue organised four separate armed conspiracies. Their object was the destruction of the master class in its entirety. The dates matter more than the plots achieved on their own. The colony was barely established, its enslaved population was still small, and resistance of this order was already being planned and had to be hunted down. The usual telling of Haitian history begins the story of revolt in August 1791, as though a hundred and thirty years of obedience came first. The record says something else. Conspiracy, poisoning, flight to the mountains and open revolt run continuously through the colonial period, and marronage was permanent. What changed in 1791 was scale, timing and the collapse of French authority in Europe, which gave a rising the room to grow into a war. The intention was present in the first decades, and the colonists knew it.

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.

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.