A string of machines runs from the seed drill to the self acting mule

The familiar list of British inventions runs from Jethro Tull's seed drill of 1731 and the threshing machine of 1786 in agriculture, through John Kay's fly shuttle of 1733, James Hargreaves's jenny of 1765, Richard Arkwright's water frame of 1769 and Samuel Crompton's mule of 1779, to Richard Roberts's fully self acting mule of 1825. In iron the sequence runs from Abraham Darby's coke smelted cast iron of 1709 to Henry Cort's puddling of 1784, and above all of them stands James Watt's steam engine of 1775. These are the machines usually offered as proof that Britain was exceptional, since they were built in England and not in France. The dates themselves are unstable. Histories of technology disagree about them because the year a machine was conceived, the year it was first used and the year it was patented are often three different years, and successive versions of the same machine attract different claims.

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 May 1745 Governor Mauricius wrote that poison was one of the greatest troubles in the country and that the executions were not answering, because this population did not fear death or even the most wretched torments. Beheading, burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel had all been tried. The Society believed the condemned expected to return to their homelands after death. So in December 1745 it issued a short ordinance that changed the punishment rather than the definition of the crime. Anyone convicted of poisoning another slave or livestock would have the tongue cut out and the forehead branded, and would work in chains at Fort Amsterdam, secluded, without communication or meeting, so that they should never form a community. The target was the network. At least three men suffered it. The practice was dropped after that decade, and cases involving practitioners and their networks ran on for another thirty years.

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.