Dahomey and Asante meet in battle once, and women soldiers are remembered

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.

Between 1750 and 1791 the slave owners of Saint-Domingue lived in fear. A great many of them died of poisoning, and the colonial police could make nothing of it. Selling or preparing suspicious drugs was banned, African magic was banned, and neither prohibition touched the problem. Out of the maroon camps came leaders with reputations for power who announced that the whites would be exterminated and the enslaved set free. Some of them were politicians in every practical sense, working out how independence might actually be won. Their means were the ones available: knowledge of poisonous plants, prepared potions, and charms called garde-corps, body guards, given to rebellious slaves and said to make them proof against weapons and free of any fear of white people. What frightened the planters was that the two things came together. The pharmacology worked and the political programme was serious, and the colony had no answer to either.

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.