Labat finds a Carib republic on St Vincent

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.

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, 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.

The Italian Capuchin Luca da Caltanisetta, travelling in Kongo, set down what happened on 10 February 1701. An officer holding the title Mani Lumbo came back with fifty eight people taken as slaves on the king's orders, having destroyed the village of a vassal accused of treason. Among those fifty eight, the priest noticed, were a number of free people: some who lived in the village, and others who had simply been there on business. This is how a large share of the Atlantic trade was actually supplied. Armies moved on a settlement and everyone inside it became merchandise, whatever their standing that morning. Caltanisetta recorded a second case in the same years. A woman already enslaved learned that her master had decided to sell her on to a trader with connections to the coast. She killed her baby and then herself rather than be deported. Kongo before 1665 had been orderly enough that few of its own people were enslaved. After the civil wars began, that protection was gone.