Freer trade under Brigadier Solano gives Santo Domingo its best decade

Spanish commercial policy had long kept Santo Domingo poor, taxing and restricting the dealings that its colonists conducted with their French neighbours and with foreign ships. When Charles III came to the Spanish throne and liberalised colonial trade, the colony's economy began to move. Traders from several nations found their way to its coasts. Jose Gabriel Garcia, writing in the 1870s, singled out the 1770s under Brigadier Jose Solano as the happiest and most fortunate stretch of the whole colonial period he was describing. The improvement was brief. Within twenty years the revolution in the French part of the island had begun, and the concern of officials in Santo Domingo shifted from controlling smuggling to keeping revolutionary ideas out. Garcia treated the whole episode as proof of his own liberal argument, that Santo Domingo suffered from Spanish protectionism and prospered whenever Spain relaxed its grip.

The southern province of Saint-Domingue came under cultivation last, and its terrain suited small holdings rather than the great sugar plains of the north. Free people of colour whose wealth was limited bought there because the land was cheap and within reach. From the seventeen seventies about six thousand of them controlled much of the region and built a near monopoly of coffee production in it. By the end of colonial rule free people of colour owned close to a third of all the land in the colony and a quarter of the enslaved people, and the wealth of a typical free coloured proprietor was approaching that of the average white. This was the material basis of what came next in the south. The civil war that opened in 1791 turned on the claims of this class, and its descendants dominated southern politics for the following century. Land nobody else wanted had produced a rival power.

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.

A French mission worked in the kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the river Zaire from 1766 to 1775. The Capuchins had never reached those societies and they had stayed non-Christian, yet the French kept running into individual Christians, enslaved people and traders originally from Soyo, who were delighted to meet a priest. In 1773 a man named Pedro came to tell them that a whole group of Soyo Christians had migrated across the river years before and were living in Kakongo under their own head, Dom Iouan. The prefect went with him to their settlement at Manguenzo, was met by the community, saw the great cross standing in the middle of the village, and went into the chapel to pray while the people sang. In a week the visitors baptised several hundred children. When they came back later to live there they were disappointed and left.