Seventy-two people try to row off Curaçao and five reach Venezuela

The third recorded Curaçao revolt began as mass marronage. All seventy-two enslaved people of the De Fuijk plantation tried to board a large canoe for Coro on the Venezuelan coast, roughly forty miles away. The escape failed. Five got across in a smaller canoe, the rest withdrew into the countryside and eventually surrendered or were taken by free blacks. There were no mass executions this time; instead the owner sold some twenty-five of them to Saint-Domingue. Klooster adds that in that same year of severe food crisis on the island, one hundred and forty enslaved people succeeded in escaping to Coro. The mechanism running underneath both figures is that Curaçao had no interior forest for maroons, so flight meant a sea crossing, and Spanish law granted freedom on arrival to those who converted to Catholicism.

From 1775 until the rising of 1791, ships landed 301,320 people from Africa in Saint Domingue. West Central Africa and Saint Helena accounted for 143,181 of them, about forty seven and a half per cent, far ahead of the Bight of Benin with 56,198. Sixteen years is short enough that a large share of the people alive in the colony in 1791 had come through that trade and had been born on the other side of the ocean. No other French Caribbean colony looked like this. Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana all saw their West Central African share fall in the same years. Saint Domingue was the only French colony where the number from that region rose and stayed the largest group right up to the revolt, and it was the only French colony where the enslaved population rose in force and won.

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.

In 1774 the Lisbon Inquisition issued a regulation that demoted the wearing of protective pouches and other sorcery practices to ignorance, and called those who made them manifest imposters. The effect in Bahia was immediate. Accusations had already been falling since the mid 1760s, and the last report of feiticaria in the prosecutor's notebooks appears in 1778. Feiticaria did not stop happening. The Inquisition had announced that it no longer wished to hear about it, and denunciations collapsed across the last quarter of the century. The change ran alongside the reforms pressed by the Marques de Pombal, secretary of state from 1750 to 1777, who wanted a strong central state and weaker church institutions and thought the empire backward. The Inquisition itself was dissolved in 1821. What had been a crime worth an Atlantic crossing and a full trial became, within a generation, something officially beneath notice.