The peace of 1763 sets Britain up to outdistance France

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.

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 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.

Historians are reasonably confident that Dahomey and Asante, the two best known military powers of the region, came to blows exactly once, in 1764. The Dahomeans won, possibly with help from Oyo. An Asante tradition about facing women soldiers has been linked to that battle. Taken by itself the tradition proves little, since oral memory of an unusual enemy can migrate between events. Taken with about a dozen other scraps from the same decades, it forms part of an argument that women were fighting for Dahomey in the 1760s and 1770s, under kings Tegbesu and Kpengla, long before the celebrated corps of the nineteenth century. No single one of those scraps is conclusive. For the history of a precolonial African state, assembling a dozen of them for one proposition is about as much as the surviving record allows.