King Agaja tells George I that armed women keep his palace doors

In a letter written in 1726 to George I of England, King Agaja of Dahomey described his own court. He mentioned the doorkeepers of his palace and their assistants, calling them a robust sort of women slaves. This is the earliest firm evidence that armed women held posts inside the Dahomean palace, and it comes from the king himself rather than from a visitor. The letter says nothing about who started the practice. By the 1760s and 1770s the doorkeepers had multiplied, carried firearms and were being described as royal wives rather than slaves. In the same letter Agaja described military reviews at which some of his wives fanned him, held umbrellas or filled his pipe while others carried his guns, pistols and sabre, which is why later European travellers who saw armed women standing behind the throne cannot be assumed to have seen bodyguards.

James Papaw was set free in Virginia in 1729 by order of the governor and his council, the reward for disclosing what he knew about curing yaws. The condition attached to that freedom is the striking part. He was required to go on working for the government until he disclosed some other secrets he was said to hold, for expelling poison and for curing other diseases. Rewards of this kind were not unusual in the British colonies of North America. An enslaved man named Caesar in South Carolina was freed in 1749 for sharing what he knew about curing snakebite, and almanacs and recipe books reprinted his remedy for the rest of the century. The same secrecy that made such knowledge valuable made it frightening. A runaway advertisement of 1745 described a middle aged African man with the marks of his country on his face as a cunning, subtle fellow who pretended to be a doctor and had a great acquaintance.

Colonists in Saint-Domingue rose against the French Indies Company between 1722 and 1724, objecting to the monopoly the company held over their trade. The last of the great chartered companies to dominate the colony gave way, and the settlement was written down as the Cul de Sac Treaty of 1722. What that paper did was introduce the principle of representation into colonial administration, giving white planters a formal voice in how they were governed. Sixty years later Moreau de Saint-Mery assembled the first French colonial legal archive, six volumes of laws and constitutions for the French windward colonies published between 1784 and 1790. He approved of the fight against the monopoly. He also found the treaty alarming, because planter democracy sitting on top of a slave society pointed somewhere he did not want to go, and he cut the document from the official record. Almost everything now knowable about maroons, enslaved people and free people of colour in the colony survives inside the archive he shaped.

The earliest surviving poison case in the records of the Suriname court dates from 1731 and turns on a calabash. Inside it were pieces of a red stone and a bird's beak. Several enslaved people reported having seen the practitioner who owned it near the graves of the dead and using the calabash to pray to leaves behind his house. Isaac did not deny owning it or using its contents. He said it served medical purposes and that he had never used it to cause harm. Objects of this kind worked as compositions rather than as single ingredients, and their power lay in the assembly and in the words and gestures that activated them. Another Suriname case turned on a small stick packed with herbs and tied up with what may have been cowrie shells. Court volumes survive from 1722 onward with gaps, so earlier trials may have existed and been lost.