Bettie buys time by offering to test her poisons with a doctor

In August 1766 the Suriname court sentenced a woman named Bettie, along with Sara and Januarij, to burn for allegedly poisoning other enslaved people. Bettie then obtained at least a delay by agreeing to work with a Dr Moedner on experiments with the various poisons and counter poisons she knew. The resolutions of the governor and council record the arrangement without saying how long the delay lasted or whether the sentence was ever lifted. The court's attitude to such knowledge was inconsistent. In 1749 it had examined a substance another woman called Bettie gave her owner, concluded that it had no physical effect and was one of the things slaves used to put owners in a good humour, then ruled that such practices were evil and dangerous in themselves and deserved punishment. The same expertise counted as superstition when it soothed a master and as science worth a laboratory when it might kill one.

Until the late eighteenth century, cloth in western Europe meant wool first and linen second. Cotton was woven there in small quantities, and a large share of the cotton cloth sold on the European market was made in India. Braudel puts the point bluntly: machines were the only thing that could compete with Indian textile workers. The new cotton technology was above all labour saving, which is what an expensive workforce needs when it is set against a cheap and highly skilled one on the other side of the world. Wallerstein adds the political half of the story. In wool the European producers competed against each other and could copy one another quickly. In cotton they competed collectively against India, and they were eventually able to make sure, by political means, that the new machines did not reach Indian weavers. The market was captured twice, once by invention and once by force.

From the 1740s there was no priest living even in Soyo and rarely more than one anywhere in the Kongo. In 1763 the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal's anticlerical chief minister, barred Italian Capuchins from sailing out of Lisbon. Through most of the period of his power the country's only missionary was Cherubino da Savona, who spent fourteen unbroken years there, travelled almost every province, and reported baptising more than seven hundred thousand people, plausible in a place where a whole population expected infant baptism as a matter of identity. His report of 1774 rates the provinces. Soyo was still almost entirely Christian and its prince, Dom Miguel Castro da Sylva, could read and write Portuguese, though the churches were ruins whose sites were kept swept. In Mbamba the duke paid three teachers and gathered his vassals every Saturday for the catechism. In Nsundi, the oldest Christian province, the people were now almost all pagan.

In 1768 William Young and the other British settlement commissioners informed the Caribs of St Vincent that they were now subjects of the British Crown. Joseph Chatoyer refused. He asked which king this was, of Great Britain, and said the Caribs would listen to the governor of Martinique and to nobody else. That is the first appearance of Chatoyer in the surviving documents. His answer was a piece of practical politics rather than confusion. The Caribs had dealt with French administrators in Martinique for generations, had allowed French cultivators onto the leeward side of St Vincent to grow coffee, cotton and cacao on small plots, and had used the rivalry between the two empires to keep either from taking the island outright. In 1778, when France and Britain went to war over the American colonies, the Caribs asked France for troops. They arrived in 1779, and St Vincent was out of British hands until 1783.