Berbice rises and tries to make itself a free black state

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.

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 left Great Britain in a position to do what it had been trying to do for a hundred years, which was to pass France decisively in trade, in state finance and in military power. Wallerstein dates the completion of that work to 1815 and insists it was not easy. This third and last open round between the two claimants to hegemony ran through a general expansion of the world economy, and it ended in the Franco British wars of 1792 to 1815, which he calls a period of profitable turbulence. Saint-Domingue sat inside that contest as the single most valuable colony either side held. Every British landing in the Caribbean, every French decision about the sugar islands and the shape of the peace treaties belong to the same fifty two year struggle, and the colony's own war of independence was fought across its closing years.

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.

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.