A free Kongolese man in Florida tells a priest he still prays in Kikongo

A baptismal register entry of 26 January 1748 from Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the free black town north of St Augustine in Spanish Florida, records that a free Kongolese man named Miguel Domingo told the priest there he had already been baptised and that he continued to say his prayers in Kikongo. The prayers he knew were probably those printed in the Kikongo catechism of 1624, a book Italian clergy reissued in 1650 and of which copies survived into the nineteenth century. Kongo had produced its own church, its own schools and its own written devotional language, and people carried that language across the Atlantic with them. Nine years before Miguel Domingo made his statement, men from the same kingdom had revolted at Stono in South Carolina and marched toward the Spanish possessions that Mose guarded. What the register catches is a man practising in captivity's aftermath a religion he brought with him rather than one he was given.

Beard makes two claims about Toussaint that carry the whole argument of the book. The first is racial: he wants it emphatically marked that Toussaint had no white blood at all, because the point of the biography is to show that everything Toussaint achieved was achieved with faculties common to the African race. The second is biographical: Toussaint lived fifty years of his life in slavery before he emerged as the vindicator of his people. Beard treats the long wait as an advantage, giving the man time to learn both the sufferings and the capacities of the enslaved before he had to act. Modern archival work on the Breda estate papers, including the study by Geggus in this same batch, has since established that Toussaint was legally free and had himself owned a slave well before 1791. Where this account departs from the standard one: Beard presents Toussaint as enslaved until the revolution, which archival research on the Breda papers has since overturned.

Coffee reached the Caribbean in the second quarter of the eighteenth century and suited land the sugar planters had left alone. It grew on slopes and it took heavy rain. In Dominica the number of coffee trees went from 684,700 in 1743 to 1,367,700 in 1749 and 1,585,400 in 1753. Over the same decade the enslaved population tripled and the number of white residents doubled. By 1763, when France gave the island up at the Peace of Paris, annual output stood at 1,690,360 pounds, so what France ceded to Britain was in effect a coffee colony. The consequence held for seventy years. In the early 1800s Dominica was the only British Caribbean possession where a majority of enslaved people worked coffee, and it had the lowest share working in sugar anywhere in that empire. At the abolition of slavery in 1833 coffee still brought in about half of the island's export earnings.

Oyo was a Yoruba kingdom in the interior to the north east, and it had invaded Dahomey repeatedly. Tegbesu spent his first years fighting it and made peace in 1748 on the condition of an annual tribute. The military reason was obvious enough, since the invasions were ruinous. There was a commercial one too. Oyo had been the main supplier of captives to the coast, and peace opened the possibility that its caravans would come down through Whydah again. During 1746 to 1748 Tegbesu had criers announce at Whydah that the paths were open and free. The second and third announcements named the places by name, Epe, Weme, Ajara and Popo, and invited their traders in. Dahomey had spent twenty years accused by European buyers of strangling the routes from the interior. It now set out to become the middleman on those same routes.