A war that ended in Europe legalises a colony in the Caribbean

The Treaty of Ryswick, signed on 20 September 1697, ended nine years of war between France and the Grand Alliance of England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic. The negotiators met at a country house near The Hague and traded fortresses, ports and colonies. One clause among many awarded France the western third of Hispaniola. Nothing changed on the island that day. French buccaneers had been established on Tortuga and along the northern coast since the 1620s, and by 1697 they had cleared land, planted tobacco and indigo, imported Africans, and installed a governor and a council. The treaty attached a legal name to a settlement already in place. That is generally how colonies come into being. Someone occupies ground, and a document drafted afterwards in Europe converts the occupation into title. The territory took the name Saint-Domingue and went on to earn more from sugar and coffee, worked by enslaved people, than any comparable piece of ground on earth.

Palmares in Pernambuco lasted nearly the whole of the seventeenth century and fell to Portuguese attack in 1697. It was already known as an unusually powerful mocambo by 1612, from the Kimbundu word mukambo, a hideout. Its people were drawn from across the Guinea coast, the Congo and Angola, and it later took in creoles and people of mixed descent. It was no egalitarian refuge. Subjects prostrated themselves before an elected king, a royal enclave had its own officials, and outlying settlements were governed by potentates in the king's name. The ruling families were closely related and one dynasty held throughout. Its political system and most of its population came from West Central Africa, probably the hinterland of Luanda. Slave disturbances in Brazil ran from 1641 to 1697 and were tangled up with wars against the quilombos, reaching their height in the campaigns against Palmares in the 1690s.

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.

In 1700 the Jesuit missionary Jean Baptiste Labat described St Vincent as the centre of the Carib republic, the island where the Amerindian population was largest, with Dominica nowhere close. Living among them he found a great number of runaway Africans, most of them from Barbados, which sits upwind and gave escapees a straightforward passage by boat or on rafts of light wood. A second French observer that same year wrote that the crossing required nothing beyond letting the currents carry you. Labat noted that the Caribs had once handed such arrivals back to their owners, or sold them on to the French and Spanish, and said he did not know what had made them change. Also in 1700 the Caribs asked the governor of Martinique to settle a boundary dispute among themselves. They were conducting their own diplomacy with a European colony, on terms they set, a century and a half after the Spanish first labelled them hostile.