A bad harvest made the big producer rich and the small one hungry

The crisis of the old regime, as Labrousse described it, was a harvest crisis and a short one. Bread was the staple, transport was slow and costly, and a local shortfall moved local prices at once. A large producer with grain in store saw prices jump and profits with them. A small producer saw the opposite. His harvest was divided into seed for next year, tithe, rent in kind, food for the household and the part he sold. In a bad year the part he sold vanished first, and he often had to buy grain himself at the very moment it cost most. Everyone else who bought bread faced the same bill while their earnings fell, because much wage work was seasonal farm work that a poor harvest made unnecessary, and because textile producers cut back when their customers had no money left. Hunger and unemployment arrived together.

Between 1750 and 1775 the sources of Saint Domingue's captive population shifted decisively. Of 218,800 people recorded as landed in the colony in those years, 122,586 came from West Central Africa and Saint Helena, fifty six per cent of the total. The Bight of Benin supplied 52,911 and Senegambia and the offshore Atlantic 8,991, which no longer even made it the third largest source. Earlier in the century the balance had run the other way, with Senegambia a leading supplier and West Central Africa a distant third. Two developments explain the reversal. Governments in the Senegambia region grew stronger and more centralised and shut down the raiding that had fed the market there. In the Kongo region kingship stayed fractured and armed force remained the ordinary way of settling political disputes, so the flow of captives grew as the region came apart.

In 1748 the Virginia legislature made it a felony for an enslaved person to practise medicine of any kind, on pain of death. The act said that many slaves, under pretence of practising physic, had prepared and given out poisonous medicines, and described the resulting illnesses as long and tedious indispositions sometimes ending in death, which is exactly how the earlier accusations had described them. Two provisions softened the sentence. If the court decided there had been no ill intent and no bad consequence it could impose something lighter, in practice a brand on the hand and thirty nine lashes. And the law did not apply where all the owners concerned had agreed to the treatment. Contemporary English law held that poisoning could never be manslaughter because it carried its own evidence of deliberate malice. Virginia dropped the requirement of harm or intent altogether, which let county courts punish people for what they might do.

Coffee reached the Caribbean in the second quarter of the eighteenth century and suited land the sugar planters had left alone. It grew on slopes and it took heavy rain. In Dominica the number of coffee trees went from 684,700 in 1743 to 1,367,700 in 1749 and 1,585,400 in 1753. Over the same decade the enslaved population tripled and the number of white residents doubled. By 1763, when France gave the island up at the Peace of Paris, annual output stood at 1,690,360 pounds, so what France ceded to Britain was in effect a coffee colony. The consequence held for seventy years. In the early 1800s Dominica was the only British Caribbean possession where a majority of enslaved people worked coffee, and it had the lowest share working in sugar anywhere in that empire. At the abolition of slavery in 1833 coffee still brought in about half of the island's export earnings.