A count dances the sangamento outside the church at Soyo

A Portuguese observer named de Lucques described the feast of Saint James as it was kept in the Kongo province of Soyo around three centuries ago. On the morning of the feast the count went to his wife, who sat on the ground, and took the bow and arrows from her hands. With two of his principal chiefs he then performed a private sangamento, leaping and flourishing the bow. Only afterward did he go to mass. On another day the sangamento was public, outside the church, and the observer wrote that so many people shouting made him think he was watching a scene from hell. The whole celebration ran eight days, which is two Kongo weeks. The structure survives at Plaine du Nord in Haiti: the crowd holds the ground outside the building, a small elite goes inside for the mass, and the priest complains about what happens in the yard and allows it anyway.

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.

The Treaty of Ryswick of 20 September 1697 moved the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France and created the colony of Saint-Domingue. The figures it eventually produced are worth stating plainly. By the 1780s something near forty percent of the sugar and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in Europe came out of this one territory, an area smaller than Belgium. More than half a million enslaved Africans were living and dying there to produce it, and the mortality was such that the colony needed tens of thousands of fresh arrivals a year simply to hold its workforce level. The elegance of eighteenth century France, including the coffee houses where its philosophers argued about liberty, ran on this. Ryswick also drew a line. The boundary the treaty left vague became, after a century of adjustment and dispute, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A European peace conference created the legal object the revolution would destroy and fixed the shape of the country that replaced it.

Willem Bosman lived on the Gold Coast as a merchant of the Dutch West India Company from 1688 to 1702 and published his description of the coast in 1705. He wrote about priests conducting divination and sacrifice before decisions on war or travel, consecrated objects placed in the rooms of the sick, and payment for healing collected from a patient's relatives in proportion to their means. He disapproved of most of it. He also conceded, grudgingly, that he had watched several of his own countrymen cured by remedies that looked wrong to him, at moments when the European physicians had no idea what to do, and wondered whether African medicines worked better on Europeans because the climate had altered European bodies. What shocked him was that Europeans on the coast had taken up the practice of putting consecrated objects beside sickbeds. The exchange ran both ways long before it reached the Americas.