Tegbesu takes the Dahomian throne through a civil war

When Agaja died in 1740 a report written at the time stated plainly that two of his sons were making war on each other over the succession. Other contemporary evidence shows that Tegbesu was the second son, was not the designated successor, and during his father's reign had no expectation of ruling and stayed out of his father's business. Within about thirty years the story had changed. Robert Norris, writing while Tegbesu was still on the throne, said the principal chiefs of Dahomey had chosen him unanimously over the designated heir, and that the disappointed elder brother then plotted to seize power, was detected and was executed. By the time the court historian Agbidinukun gave his account to a French official early in the twentieth century, Tegbesu had been formally named heir by his predecessor, and his brother's claim had become a rebellion against lawful authority. Law traces three Dahomian kings whose irregular accessions were rewritten in this way.

On a Sunday in September 1739 some twenty enslaved men, called Angolans by the colonists and led by a man named Jemmy, broke open a store of firearms near the Stono river in South Carolina. They killed as they went and marched south toward the Spanish settlements around St Augustine, carrying two drums and flying banners. Their numbers reached sixty, and at a large field they stopped, beat the drums and danced in order to draw more people to them. Ninety strong, they met the colonial militia and were scattered after a fight in which they left some of the militia dead. A body of about ten kept going until mounted troops caught them the next day. Seven days after that, a further party stood and fought an open battle against the militia some thirty miles below the site of the first clash. English officials in Carolina blamed Spanish agents and priests, who had been offering freedom to any runaway who could reach Florida.

Historians agree that a population upsurge began in Europe around 1740, give or take a decade. The mechanism most of them now favour is fertility rather than medicine. Death rates were held down by better food and cleaner habits, and inoculation against smallpox mattered far less than it was once given credit for, since medical treatment had almost no measurable effect on mortality before the twentieth century. What moved the birth rate was the age at which women married. In the seventeenth century, hard times had pushed marriage later and had probably increased the use of withdrawal as a check on births. A run of good harvests between 1715 and 1750 made it possible to set up a household earlier, and the age of marriage fell. More households meant more children. This is the demographic base under the whole expansion that followed, including the expansion of the Atlantic plantation trade.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.