Migrants who left Soyo years earlier are found keeping the faith across the Zaire

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.

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 1775 and 1791 Guadeloupe received 2,271 people from Africa. Only 287 of them, thirteen per cent, came from West Central Africa, which left that region fourth behind the Bight of Biafra, the category the database calls Other Africa, and the Bight of Benin. A quarter century earlier West Central Africa had been the largest supplier to Guadeloupe. Martinique shows the same fall, from twenty eight per cent in the years to 1775 down to twenty per cent afterwards, on small numbers. French Guiana fell furthest, to 220 people out of 2,722. In the same sixteen years Saint Domingue took 143,181 from that one region. The contrast is the whole point of the comparison. Every French Caribbean colony had enslaved people and none of the others produced a revolution, and Saint Domingue was the only one whose arrivals were overwhelmingly and increasingly from a single African region.

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.