Dahomey's annual customs are already running in 1726

The letter reports that the king is obliged to go out at various times of the year, scatter great quantities of goods and money among the common people, and sacrifice to the gods and forefathers, sometimes slaves and sometimes horses, oxen and other animals, and adds that this custom differs from Allada practice and that he has much reduced the human offerings. Law identifies this as the annual customs, at which largesse was distributed and human sacrifices offered to the deceased kings of the dynasty rather than to gods. The evidentiary consequence is chronological. Traditions claiming the customs were an innovation of Agaja are supported, but the suggestion that they began in 1730 is refuted, since they plainly existed in 1726. Law treats the claim of reduced sacrifice as unsupported elsewhere and probably deference to European sensibilities. Where this account departs from the standard one: Refutes Law's own earlier suggestion that the Dahomian annual customs were inaugurated around 1730.

Until 1724 Martinique had no legislation on poison at all. The Code Noir of 1685, which governed slavery in the French colonies and stood on the island until 1831, said nothing about poison, sorcery or medical practice. In February 1724 a royal ordinance extended to the Windward Islands the edict of 1682 that had come out of the poison affair at the court of Louis XIV. Most of the wording was kept. The preamble was replaced. The French original had warned about pretended diviners, magicians and enchanters who added spells and poisons to their sacrilege and seduced the credulous. The Martinique version spoke instead of the enormous crimes of malicious slaves administering poisons to the detriment of the king's subjects. Through one act of copying, a law about aristocratic love magic in Paris became a law about enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, and the legal tie between poison and slavery was made.

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.