Portuguese troops end a century old African state in Brazil

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.

The Treaty of Ryswick, concluded in 1697, obliged Spain to cede a third of Hispaniola to France. The ceded territory took the name Saint-Domingue. Sugar was already being made there, and the arrival of enslaved labour in quantity was about to change how it was produced. Through the eighteenth century the traffic in captives climbed to its peak before falling away, in the language of the day, for want of supply. Ships were built larger to carry more people. Captives lay chained in pairs in holds that the trade itself called floating tombs, and the crossing to Saint-Domingue took between forty and ninety days on short rations. Most African regions were represented in the colony, and among the three largest groupings the Fon of Dahomey, combined with the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria, supplied the framework on which the transplanted religious practice of the island was built.

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.

This is my favorite thing on the whole timeline and it exists only because the data was read whole. Saint-Domingue took 2,336 recorded voyages landing 695,398 people, ranking fifth among all destinations in the Atlantic trade. But the composition of who arrived changed completely across the century. In 1700 the Bight of Benin supplied 59.9 percent of arrivals and West Central Africa supplied zero. By 1760 West Central Africa is at 57.1 percent and Benin has fallen to 16.2. By 1790, the year before the rising, it is 42.1 against 9.6. So the generation that took the colony by force in 1791 was demographically a different population from the one that built it. Anybody making an argument about continuity of African military tradition into 1791 has to survive this table first, and most of those arguments have never been shown it.