Port-au-Prince is founded and its first buildings go up in stone

French colonists founded Port-au-Prince in 1749 on the coast of Saint Domingue, the sugar colony that would become Haiti. The first buildings went up in stone. Masonry was what a European town was supposed to be made of, and it carried the authority of the metropole with it. That choice survived two years. What followed set a pattern which governed the capital for the next two and a half centuries. Each generation built in the material that answered the last disaster, and each material carried a fresh hazard of its own. Stone gave way to timber and adobe, timber gave way to concrete, and concrete was what stood in the city on the afternoon of 12 January 2010. Port-au-Prince sits close to a fault line and in the track of Caribbean storms, so the question of what to build with has never been settled there on grounds of taste alone.

In 1748 the Virginia legislature made it a felony for an enslaved person to practise medicine of any kind, on pain of death. The act said that many slaves, under pretence of practising physic, had prepared and given out poisonous medicines, and described the resulting illnesses as long and tedious indispositions sometimes ending in death, which is exactly how the earlier accusations had described them. Two provisions softened the sentence. If the court decided there had been no ill intent and no bad consequence it could impose something lighter, in practice a brand on the hand and thirty nine lashes. And the law did not apply where all the owners concerned had agreed to the treatment. Contemporary English law held that poisoning could never be manslaughter because it carried its own evidence of deliberate malice. Virginia dropped the requirement of harm or intent altogether, which let county courts punish people for what they might do.

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.