Diderot prints thirty five volumes over thirty years

The Encyclopedie of Denis Diderot came out in Paris between 1751 and 1780. It ran to thirty five folio volumes, of which twenty one held text, twelve held plates and two held tables compiled by Mouchon. Jean le Rond d'Alembert handled the mathematical articles. The work is usually treated as the fullest statement the Enlightenment made about itself, and its plates of trades and machines carried the claim that useful knowledge could be described, drawn and sold to anyone who could pay. Printing a single work took thirty years, and by the time the last volumes appeared its readers were spread across Europe and its colonies. This matters for a Caribbean chronology because the same decades in which Paris was printing an inventory of the known world were the decades in which French ships were carrying the largest numbers of captive Africans to Saint-Domingue, and the men who read the Encyclopedie were often the men who owned the plantations.

Poison prosecutions in Virginia were rare before the law of 1748: five cases in the whole stretch from 1730 to 1748. Then they climbed to thirty in the 1750s, fifty six in the 1760s and sixty five in the 1770s, before dropping to twenty three in the 1780s. Across the eighteenth century more enslaved people were tried in Virginia for poisoning than for any crime except theft. After 1748 the phrase poisonous medicines, which had appeared in neither law nor cases before that year, turns up in a majority of them until the end of the century, and the number of cases naming no victim at all rose in step with it. Of the twenty seven cases in Brunswick and Cumberland counties in these decades, just over half involved medical practitioners. The statute that created the offence created the wave of prosecutions that followed it.

A French mission worked in the kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the river Zaire from 1766 to 1775. The Capuchins had never reached those societies and they had stayed non-Christian, yet the French kept running into individual Christians, enslaved people and traders originally from Soyo, who were delighted to meet a priest. In 1773 a man named Pedro came to tell them that a whole group of Soyo Christians had migrated across the river years before and were living in Kakongo under their own head, Dom Iouan. The prefect went with him to their settlement at Manguenzo, was met by the community, saw the great cross standing in the middle of the village, and went into the chapel to pray while the people sang. In a week the visitors baptised several hundred children. When they came back later to live there they were disappointed and left.

An enslaved woman named Quamina died in 1775 on a Suriname plantation after weeks of pain in her belly. Everyone on the estate went together to the overseer, H. C. Dorfeld, accused Quacoe of poisoning her and asked that he be put in irons. Quacoe was the head carpenter and, judging from the letter Dorfeld sent the court, a healer too; the others believed he could have cured Quamina and had refused. At the funeral in the slave quarters the crowd ran behind the coffin and flung it against Quacoe's door. They searched his house for evidence and found none. They washed the body and gave him the water to drink, on the understanding that a guilty man would die of it, and he drank it willingly. Later four men beat him, joined by several young women with sticks, and he reached the main house covered in blood. The court punished the four and let Quacoe go.