Racial exclusion drives free people of colour into the coffee hills

Dupuy dates the emergence of the affranchis as a class to what he calls the coffee revolution. Excluded and harassed by whites in the lowlands, people of colour withdrew into the interior and the hill country, where they acquired or occupied unclaimed land and planted coffee and other crops. The discrimination that drove them there produced their economic base. By 1791 they owned up to a third of the productive properties in the colony and about a quarter of the enslaved people, which made them a substantial bloc of proprietors rather than a marginal group. Dupuy insists on this because it governs everything that follows. The free coloured population, some twenty-eight thousand strong, held property and people, so their demand was for equality with whites inside the slave system and not for its abolition, and their interests diverged from those of the five hundred thousand enslaved from the beginning.

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.

Governor William Henry Lyttelton of South Carolina marched into Cherokee country and took twenty-four Cherokee men as hostages, to be held at Fort Prince George until an equal number of others were handed over to him. Twenty-three were surrendered. He kept twenty-one of the hostages anyway, against further demands. Cherokee fighters then raided settlements along the South Carolina frontier and attacked the fort itself on 14 February 1760, and the garrison killed the hostages it was holding. Lyttelton had been given a formal welcome at Charleston five weeks before, on 8 January. Eliza Lucas Pinckney wrote that February that his was the first army ever to go up into that country, that he had acted with spirit, and that he had obtained what no Indians had granted before. A historian of the state later called the hostage-taking immoral and stupid.