An English visitor counts 860 armed women parading at Abomey

Robert Norris, an Englishman, watched a parade at Abomey in 1772 and counted the ranks as they went by. In front were ninety women bearing arms, with drums. Behind them came six troops of seventy each, every one of the six headed by a favourite of the king walking under an umbrella, who was most likely its commanding officer. Seven more units of fifty followed. The total was 860 women. On the same visit he saw the palace guardhouse holding about forty women with a musket and cutlass each, alongside twenty eunuchs carrying bright iron rods. Antoine Edme Pruneau de Pommegorge, who commanded the French fort at Whydah in 1763 and 1764, had already described five or six units of female troops of eighty to one hundred women each, mostly aged sixteen or seventeen, marching four abreast behind their own flags with musketoons and short swords, and being rewarded by King Tegbesu when their drill went well.

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.

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 First Carib War began when the British settlement commissioners started surveying and selling land on the windward, or eastern, half of St Vincent, which was the heart of Carib territory. The Caribs knew the mountains and the fighting went badly for the British troops, who were held up and could not force a decision. British forces did take some ground. In 1773 the Caribs agreed to a peace treaty that cut their land holdings by two thousand acres and declared them subjects of the British Crown. Two decades of pressure followed on their movement, their planting grounds and their freedom to trade. The treaty settled nothing except the arithmetic of acreage. In 1795 the same population, with the same knowledge of the same mountains, began a second war that took the British three years and a deliberate campaign of starvation to end.