The Inquisition decides African sorcery is mere ignorance

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.

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.

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.