Makandal is convicted of poisoning and the colony bans his amulets

Makandal was convicted in 1757 of organising a campaign to poison the wells of planters in the north of Saint Domingue, during which more than six thousand white people were said to have been poisoned. He was a maroon leader and an accomplished botanist. The colonial reply came the next year in a decree of 1758 forbidding the use of garde corps or makandals, objects charged with spiritual force and worn on the body to protect the wearer. Such objects are still made in Haiti and are called pwen, points. The list of offences charged against Africans and Creoles in the colony repeated, item by item, the list medieval Europe had charged against Jews: sorcery, poisoning, stealing and defiling the host, drinking blood, cannibalism. A decree of 1761 complained that when slaves met at night in churches and catechised in houses and plantations they were really arranging prostitution and escape.

Enslaved people rose against the Dutch in Berbice on the Guyana coast in 1749 and again in 1752, and both risings were put down harshly. From 1762 to 1767 a far larger revolt aimed at something else. It set out to turn the whole colony into a free black state, which would have carried consequences for Surinam, Demerara and Essequibo alongside it. In ambition and in what it achieved, it was second only to the revolution that later took Saint-Domingue. That distinction matters. Most slave risings in the Americas involved the people of one plantation or one district and often prepared the way for flight into the bush. A revolt aimed at an entire colony required planning across estates and a plan for what came after victory. Cartagena in 1599 and 1600, Jamaica in 1760, and Berbice belong to that smaller and more dangerous category.

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.