Jamaica's 1760 revolt runs on an Akan nation with an elected king

Thornton points to the Jamaica revolt of 1760 as the nearest Caribbean analogy to the Haitian Revolution in size and scale of mobilisation, and notes that it was organised through Akan national organisations including an elected king and queen. He uses it to set up the two competing principles he sees in Saint-Domingue: the estate, headed by creole leadership and relying on plantation hierarchy for authority, and the nation, a looser but more popular form. Because colonial legislation in Saint-Domingue made open ceremony by national leadership illegal on security grounds, national leadership there was vested in the heads of secret societies, whose leaders were selected on a religious basis and served as orators and arbitrators. Neither principle could operate alone, he argues, since creoles could not stage a revolt without the mass of enslaved people behind them.

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.

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.

Makandal was an African born man who lost an arm working on a sugar plantation of the northern plain and kept a lifelong grudge against his former masters. He claimed powers drawn from a mixture of Islam, Christianity and African religion, and after running away in 1751 he organised a wide conspiracy to poison French colonists and their livestock, which Girard says killed thousands. He was said to be able to turn into a mosquito and fly off when cornered. In 1758 the French caught him and tied him to a stake at Cap Francais, and as the flames rose he broke loose of the pole, at which the enslaved people in the crowd cried out that he had escaped. The authorities cleared the square and put him back in the fire. As late as 1791 many still believed he was alive and would return to call a day of reckoning.