A manual explains how to get the most work out of new arrivals

In 1765 a writer named Monnereau published in Paris a handbook on the management of newly landed Africans in the French colonies. It ran through their supposed faults, their treatment, and the cultivation of coffee. What makes it unusual is that the author explained his own method in the opening pages. He had criticised their vices, he wrote, while allowing that they had virtues. He had written that way because he was addressing clients who wanted to know how to extract the greatest possible quantity of labour. The book states in a single sentence the relation between how a people is described and what is to be done with them. Manuals of this kind circulated among planters and estate managers in Saint-Domingue during the decades when the colony was importing Africans faster than anywhere else in the Caribbean, and they shaped how new arrivals were handled in their first months in the fields.

Between 1750 and 1775 the sources of Saint Domingue's captive population shifted decisively. Of 218,800 people recorded as landed in the colony in those years, 122,586 came from West Central Africa and Saint Helena, fifty six per cent of the total. The Bight of Benin supplied 52,911 and Senegambia and the offshore Atlantic 8,991, which no longer even made it the third largest source. Earlier in the century the balance had run the other way, with Senegambia a leading supplier and West Central Africa a distant third. Two developments explain the reversal. Governments in the Senegambia region grew stronger and more centralised and shut down the raiding that had fed the market there. In the Kongo region kingship stayed fractured and armed force remained the ordinary way of settling political disputes, so the flow of captives grew as the region came apart.

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.

From the late 1750s the enslaved people of New Orleans gathered every Sunday on an open piece of ground behind the city to trade and to enjoy themselves. They were Bambara, Mandingo, Wolof, Fulbe, Fon and Yoruba, and they were joined by free people of colour and by Native Americans. The site had been used for the corn feasts of the Houma before the French came. It was known as the Place des Negres and later as Congo Square. What went on there was drumming and dancing performed in public by hundreds of people of African descent, the bamboula, the calinda, the coujaille and the pile chactas, all of them related to Vodou rites, and it was the market where the charms called gris gris were sold. The word comes from Mende, spoken by Mandingo and Bambara people. No other place in the United States let African religion be performed so openly for so long.