A priest stops at the door and watches an African rite instead of stopping it

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.

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.

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.

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.