Eight hundred Germans are settled near Dondon and die there

In 1764 French proprietors in Saint-Domingue tempted about eight hundred Germans out to the colony and established them near Dondon, in the mountains behind the northern plain. Within a few years most of them were in the ground. Some of the survivors were moved west to Mole Saint-Nicolas, where they soon disappeared as well. Schemes to raise the island's population by importing settlers were tried repeatedly and mostly ended this way. The exception was the people from the Canary Islands, who did well. About a thousand of them lived in a suburb of Santo Domingo city that they had built themselves and occupied alone, farming extensive lands nearby, and another prosperous settlement of the same people stood at Savana la Mar on the south shore of Samana Bay. Nobody recorded what killed the Germans at Dondon. Fever is the likeliest answer, and the pattern repeated wherever Europeans were put on this land in numbers.

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.