France takes a third of an island and builds the richest colony on earth

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.

Thornton uses the movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita to show how far Kongolese ideologues could rework Christian material. Claiming to be permanently possessed by Saint Anthony, she set out to end the civil wars and restore the kingdom, and in defining her position she retold Christian history so that the nativity happened at Nsundi, the province traditionally tied to Afonso, which she named as Bethlehem, while the capital São Salvador became Jerusalem and the place of the baptism. Thornton's point is that Macaya's later description of the kings of Kongo, France and Spain as descendants of the Magi was not eccentric improvisation but an established Kongolese habit of mind. Kongolese, he argues, viewed kings much as northern European thinkers did, as necessary but potentially limited.

In 1698 the Dominican priest Labat was told one night that a man practising medicine was in the cabin of a sick woman on the estate he ran in Martinique. He went there meaning to have the man punished and driven off. Reaching the door he stopped and watched through the gaps in the palm trunks that walled the cabin. The sick woman lay on a mat on the ground. A small clay figure stood on a stool in the middle of the room. The man he had come to punish was kneeling in front of it and appeared to be praying with great attention, then took half a calabash holding juice, put gum on it and censed the image. Labat wrote it down as evidence of what he was up against. It survives as one of the earliest eyewitness descriptions of an African healing rite inside a slave cabin in the Caribbean.

Jean-Baptiste du Casse took charge of the French settlements on the western side of Hispaniola in 1691 and spent twelve years turning a buccaneer coast into a colony. He shifted the capital to Leogane in 1695. In June 1694 he led a raid on English Jamaica that stripped the sugar works of their machinery and carried three thousand enslaved people back across the water to be put on Saint-Domingue estates. That is how the colony was capitalised: by seizing equipment and people from a neighbour. In 1697 the Peace of Ryswick gave France formal title to the territory he had been assembling. Du Casse treated the place as a base as much as a plantation, a place d'armes from which France could reach at Spanish Mexico and Peru. His final act was the charter of the Compagnie de St. Louis in 1698, which settled the southern peninsula with fifteen hundred French emigrants and twenty five hundred Africans. The ratio in that last sentence is the colonial project stated in figures.