Coke smelting waits fifty years for the price to be right

Abraham Darby smelted cast iron with coke in 1709. English ironmasters did not take up his method for about half a century, and the reason was cost rather than blindness. Charcoal pig iron was still cheaper and of better quality, so continuing with charcoal was the rational choice while it lasted. The cost of coke pig iron fell steadily through the first half of the century while charcoal costs rose sharply in the 1750s, and only then did the balance tip. Hyde argues that the Darbys themselves persisted because coke pig iron gave them a profitable by product, thin walled castings, and they kept the technique as a guarded industrial secret. The episode is a warning about how inventions are usually dated. The year of invention, the year of first use and the year of the patent are frequently three different years, and the interval between them is a matter of prices.

The Antonian movement did not die with Beatrice. The population of Sao Salvador stayed with it until Pedro IV retook the city in February 1709. In the final battle his opponents shouted Salve Antoniana and the cry of mercy that had begun on Mount Kimbangu, while the king advanced holding a crucifix. Their commander fell and Pedro won. He then rebuilt a workable order, balancing the capital against the provinces, that lasted a hundred and fifty years, although the crown by then was much reduced. Soyo had gone its own way in the seventeenth century, Nsundi and Mbamba followed in the eighteenth, and by the early nineteenth century the king controlled little more than the villages around his capital. Her judgement that the Kongo had to have its capital back was socially accurate, and the men who killed her acted on it within three years.

In May 1712 Governor Arnoul de Vaucresson opened his report to the ministry in Paris with a long run of losses among enslaved people and livestock in Martinique, from illnesses so unusual that the owners could not explain them. Several owners had arrested their slaves, held them in irons on the plantations, extracted confessions and then sent them on to the king's prison. One case in that report concerns an enslaved man named Francois, who claimed particular skill in detecting poisons, spells and the people who used them. His owner, a Mr David, hired him out during the crisis and collected money from the neighbours for it. The court dropped the case against the accused for want of proof, rebuked the owners who had abused them, and made David return the money for tricking the public. Slaveholders were learning who to suspect, and how to look, from the enslaved themselves.

The Constitution of the Archbishopric of Bahia, issued in 1707, addressed the overlap between sorcery and medical practice entirely in European terms. The church held that nobody could manipulate nature, or appear to, except through a demon and a pact with the Devil. Lay healing worried it for a related reason. Seeking a cure by unsanctioned means opened the door to superstitions that endangered the soul. So the law forbade anyone to perform cures without a licence and the archbishop's approval, and stressed that no layperson might expel demons from a human body. Nothing in it mentioned Africans, and the rule on jurisdiction sent sorcery cases to the Inquisition only when they amounted to open heresy. Meanwhile free and enslaved practitioners of African descent went on treating afflictions attributed to poisons and charms, using divination and spirit possession, and Europeans as well as Africans went on paying them for it.