Liverpool becomes the largest slaving port in Europe

Liverpool was a modest harbour on the Irish Sea until it went into the slave trade, and by the middle of the eighteenth century it was carrying more captives than anywhere else in Europe. Its position on the west coast of England put it near the Atlantic and near the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and the Midlands that produced the cloth, guns and metalware traded on the African coast. Its captains built standing commercial relationships with African merchants and rulers at Bonny and Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, which meant quicker loading, better terms and repeat business. Bristol and London had been in the trade first, and Liverpool passed them both. At the height of the traffic its ships were serving markets across the plantation Americas, from the Chesapeake to the French and British islands. The docks, the insurance houses and the merchant fortunes raised on that business are still standing in the city, and its streets carry the names of the families who owned the ships.

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.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.

Before she was called Defilee she had fought beside her two brothers, as Sanite fought beside Charles Belair and Marie-Jeanne beside Lamartiniere. Both brothers were killed in one battle and her mind gave way. She stopped recognising people, including her three children, and spent her evenings kneeling at their grave in the cemetery at Cap. By the end of 1806 she was wandering in Port-au-Prince, a scrap of green ribbon pinned to her headscarf. On 17 October 1806 at five in the afternoon she came on a crowd of soldiers, generals, onlookers and children throwing stones at a body in the road. It was Dessalines. She knelt, then collected the broken bones and the flesh, put everything into a sack, and carried it to the inner cemetery with the help of a beggar called Dauphin. The two of them were seen at nightfall kneeling over what was left of the man who had declared the country independent.