Parliament enclosed the fields and France did the same thing quietly

Enclosure in England meant three separate things: ending the common grazing of harvested fields, abolishing common rights over waste and manor land, and consolidating scattered strips into blocks. The first two took away the ability of people with little or no property to keep an animal. The third made the improvements possible that landlords wanted, and what they wanted from those improvements was higher rent. Whether enclosure actually raised yields is much less clear than the confidence of the older accounts suggested, and O'Brien holds that the massive enclosures between 1750 and 1815 cannot be shown to have made much difference to output. Enclosure had begun long before 1750. What made it look sudden was Parliament, which took the process over and gave it scale. Marc Bloch showed that France was enclosing too, and that the pace there also picked up after 1730. The difference lay in the strength of the English state.

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.

Oostindie records that a hundred enslaved people rose on Curaçao in 1750 and were crushed the same day. The casualty pattern is what makes the episode strange: the rebels killed fifty-nine enslaved people belonging to the West India Company plantation and only one white man. Some of the rebels killed themselves; of the fifty-two taken alive, thirteen were sold off the island and thirty-nine executed. Contemporaries blamed newly arrived Africans and read the violence as aimed more at seasoned or locally born slaves than at whites. Oostindie sets this beside the revolt of 1716, led by first-generation Africans who spoke in interrogation of Elmina, where Africans had reportedly set the example by killing the whites in and around the Dutch fort. Both revolts, he argues, show that resistance was as embedded in Curaçaoan slavery as anywhere in plantation America even though the island had almost no plantations.

Dubois narrates the execution as a piece of theatre that failed. In January 1758 a fugitive named Makandal was made to kneel in a plaza at Le Cap wearing a placard naming him a seducer, profaner and poisoner. He was tied to a post and a fire lit beneath him. As the flames reached him he struggled, the post gave way, and the Black onlookers shouted that Makandal was saved. Panic broke out, soldiers cleared the plaza, and he was strapped to a board and thrown back into the fire. He had often claimed he could change shape and had said before his death that he would become a fly to escape the flames. Few actually saw him die, and many believed he had returned to the hills to plan another rebellion. Dubois notes his occasional invocation of Allah. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the execution to January 1758 and describes a botched burning, against accounts that have him simply executed on the square.