Europe runs out of wood and turns to coal

By 1750 the shortage of wood had become the principal obstacle to industrial growth in Europe. Forests had been cut for centuries to smelt iron, fire glass and brick, build ships and heat houses, and the supply had thinned faster than it could grow back. England had felt the shortage earliest and most sharply, which is why the English had been burning coal since the sixteenth century and had accumulated a body of knowledge about how to handle it. The answer to a fuel crisis was a technology that could use the cheap fuel efficiently, which meant coke in the furnace and the steam engine to turn heat into motion. France did not make the same switch, and the reason offered is not French stubbornness. French forests still stood, coke made poorer iron at greater expense, and there was no pressure to change until much later.

Colonial officials in Martinique kept running into the same difficulty. Poison cases produced almost no evidence the law would accept, and courts were often left with the testimony of other enslaved people and nothing else. On 5 November 1749 they answered with an ordinance requiring any slaveholder who suspected that a person or an animal had been poisoned to call a surgeon and have the body opened. The language was urgent. The crime could no longer be ignored, it was real and even common among the slaves, and its spread had to be stopped and if possible pulled up by the root. The ordinance was printed and posted on church doors throughout the colony, and a version of 1758 repeated it and required surgeons to perform the service free so that owners would actually use them. Publishing the law was also a way of spreading the idea the law described.

In October 1749 several residents of a Salvador neighbourhood complained to the Inquisition about deaths they blamed on Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, a well known free couple of African descent who could both inflict and lift illnesses caused by charms. Witnesses called Ignacia the greater of the two, a master of the calundu dance and a queen, and stressed her African origin. A neighbour who had worked beside Gomes as a stonecutter for decades described him attending the calundus of other people before he ran his own, travelling every Sunday and holy day to Rio Vermelho and Itapagipe, and going as far as Pernambuco to visit the houses of other practitioners. He saved money, bought Ignacia's freedom, then bought a farm where they could work. Reputation was built by learning from rivals, and the network of clients and teachers that made a practitioner successful was the same thing that made him easy to accuse.

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.