Planters begin dying of poison and the colonial police cannot find the cause

Between 1750 and 1791 the slave owners of Saint-Domingue lived in fear. A great many of them died of poisoning, and the colonial police could make nothing of it. Selling or preparing suspicious drugs was banned, African magic was banned, and neither prohibition touched the problem. Out of the maroon camps came leaders with reputations for power who announced that the whites would be exterminated and the enslaved set free. Some of them were politicians in every practical sense, working out how independence might actually be won. Their means were the ones available: knowledge of poisonous plants, prepared potions, and charms called garde-corps, body guards, given to rebellious slaves and said to make them proof against weapons and free of any fear of white people. What frightened the planters was that the two things came together. The pharmacology worked and the political programme was serious, and the colony had no answer to either.

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.

Mocombe presents Makandal as an oungan from Guinea who turned religious authority into a weapon of war. Working at night, he and his followers burned estates, killed owners and, over roughly six years, poisoned as many as six thousand whites. The French captured him in 1758 and executed him publicly in the square of Cap-Francais, present day Cap-Haitien. The article treats the choice of a public square as deliberate: the colony needed spectators, because Makandal's power rested on the belief among the enslaved that he could not be killed. Mocombe places this in a wider argument that marronage was the most persistent form of refusal, and that maroons in the mountains were not simply fleeing but rebuilding African forms of production, worship and authority from which raids on the plains could be launched.

The treaty that ended the Seven Years War in 1763 included a clause by which France gave up any territorial right to St Vincent. Britain treated this as possession. The thousands of Caribs living on the island had not been consulted and did not consent. Until that year both powers had classed St Vincent as one of the neutral islands of the eastern Caribbean, a status that existed because its Carib population made conquest expensive and neither side would let the other have it cheaply. France had gone further than neutrality in argument, insisting the island belonged to the Caribs, since indigenous ownership would void any British claim, and had forced Britain to acknowledge the neutrality again in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Once France withdrew, the argument that had protected St Vincent for a century disappeared with it, and the surveying of Carib land for sale began within four years.