A long price rise begins in the 1730s and runs almost to 1820

Ernest Labrousse described the period from the 1730s to just before 1820 as the great century of prosperity. He was writing about France, and the description fits Great Britain and the world economy as a whole. Production, prices and revenues rose together for the better part of ninety years. Michel Morineau objected to treating this as one smooth movement. In his reading it was a succession of short price rises caused by poor harvests, each one linked to the next by an unwillingness to let prices fall back afterwards, so that the increases accumulated. The disagreement is about the mechanism and not about the trend. Wallerstein asks the question that the phrase invites, which is prosperity for whom. The same decades saw sugar and coffee production in the Caribbean reach its height, and the answer to his question in Saint-Domingue was written in the number of people landed there to grow it.

An inventory taken in 1738 of a coffle walking from Caconda to the coast at Benguela recorded, for close to one person in ten, an injury to the leg. Umbundu speakers in this region built two new nouns from the same root they used for the diviner and healer, ochimbanda. One was ochimbandanga, an affliction of the legs, a paralysis, which can be read as an affliction caused by sorcery. The other was okambanda, a young slave, formed by adding a diminutive prefix. A young adult was what the Atlantic market wanted most, and such a person had been cut off from their people and was very likely bound. Neighbouring language speakers made similar moves, layering onto an old verb for being strong the sense of being swollen and captured by illness, and building words for disease and health out of a root meaning to tie up. People described the trade in the vocabulary of sickness.

In October 1741 the Conseil Superieur of Martinique told Paris that the deaths of enslaved people and livestock came from particular slaves misusing medical knowledge, making powders and drugs from plants and handing them round as remedies. It warned that such practitioners might turn their skills on owners, argued that medicine could not be told apart from poisoning because the composition was kept secret, and said other slaves would never denounce them for fear of becoming victims. It concluded that slaves should be barred from giving any remedies, powders or drugs for any illness. Before the royal answer came, the court had to deal with Jean Francois, who admitted in January 1742 to distributing remedies across many quarters of the island. No accusation of harm could be found, and with no law the court could not execute him, so it argued about irons and deportation. The royal declaration arrived on 1 February 1743 on precisely the terms requested.

Before she was called Defilee she had fought beside her two brothers, as Sanite fought beside Charles Belair and Marie-Jeanne beside Lamartiniere. Both brothers were killed in one battle and her mind gave way. She stopped recognising people, including her three children, and spent her evenings kneeling at their grave in the cemetery at Cap. By the end of 1806 she was wandering in Port-au-Prince, a scrap of green ribbon pinned to her headscarf. On 17 October 1806 at five in the afternoon she came on a crowd of soldiers, generals, onlookers and children throwing stones at a body in the road. It was Dessalines. She knelt, then collected the broken bones and the flesh, put everything into a sack, and carried it to the inner cemetery with the help of a beggar called Dauphin. The two of them were seen at nightfall kneeling over what was left of the man who had declared the country independent.