Virginia reaches sixty five poison trials in a single decade

Poison prosecutions in Virginia were rare before the law of 1748: five cases in the whole stretch from 1730 to 1748. Then they climbed to thirty in the 1750s, fifty six in the 1760s and sixty five in the 1770s, before dropping to twenty three in the 1780s. Across the eighteenth century more enslaved people were tried in Virginia for poisoning than for any crime except theft. After 1748 the phrase poisonous medicines, which had appeared in neither law nor cases before that year, turns up in a majority of them until the end of the century, and the number of cases naming no victim at all rose in step with it. Of the twenty seven cases in Brunswick and Cumberland counties in these decades, just over half involved medical practitioners. The statute that created the offence created the wave of prosecutions that followed it.

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.

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.

Prince Hall was born in Barbados about 1738 and was enslaved in Boston. He was manumitted in 1770 and sought acceptance within white American Freemasonry, which refused him. Within ten years he had established African Freemasonry as a social structure of its own, and it still bears his name. The refusal and the reply together are the shape of the thing. A free Black man in revolutionary Massachusetts could not enter the institution that organised the civic life of free men, so he constructed it a second time alongside the first, with its own lodges, its own charters and its own line of succession. The order became one of the oldest continuously working Black institutions in the United States and a network by which Black men in distant cities knew and vouched for one another. Hall died in 1807. He was the most notable of the Caribbean born figures in early Black America.