A king marches on Agouna at the head of eight hundred armed women

Dahomey paid an annual tribute to the Yoruba empire of Oyo for most of a century. Archibald Dalzel, drawing on Lionel Abson who ran the English fort at Whydah for over thirty years, described what happened when the envoys came to collect and Kpengla's second minister, the Meu, died. The envoys demanded a hundred of the dead man's women. Kpengla handed over some to be rid of them, and three months later the king of Oyo threatened invasion unless he received the rest. Rather than give up more Dahomean women, Kpengla sent troops into neighbouring Agouna to seize the number required. They were beaten back with heavy losses. Hearing this at midday, the king put on his cartridge box, shouldered his firelock and marched on Agouna at the head of eight hundred armed women. The enemy fled. Dalzel dated this to 1781, and documents show the Meu died in early 1779.

Les Affiches Americaines was the newspaper of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti. It began in 1766 and stopped in 1791, and across those twenty five years it printed notices placed by owners whose enslaved workers had left them. Each notice tried to make one person findable again, so it recorded height, scars, teeth and clothing, the languages the person spoke and the way they talked, supposed habits of character, and the people they were thought to visit. Nowhere else in the paperwork of the colony do so many enslaved people appear as separate individuals. The same press carried a second kind of document, the lists drawn up by jails naming those who had been recaptured. One fairly complete run of the paper survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. From it, 10,772 advertisements and 6,535 jail lists have since been transcribed, which makes the newspaper the largest single record of flight from slavery in Saint-Domingue.

When the French government drew its colonial slave law together in 1685, it also stated that Africans who reached France as slaves could become free under French law and custom and could not be forced back to the West Indies. Owners found ways around it. A decree of 1716 let planters register enslaved people as having been brought over for education, which blocked their freedom claims. Read alongside the remnants of serfdom, that reasoning allowed four thousand enslaved people to be kept in France in 1738. Later, labour shortage in the colonies moved the government to order them shipped back, even though they returned carrying a spirit of independence. In 1777 a royal decree closed France to black and mixed race people, free and enslaved alike, allowing a West Indian owner only one personal servant while travelling. The stated reason was the well-being of the colonies. The following year a decree forbade black and white marriages in France.

Perry notes that the insurgent army in Saint-Domingue was for a short time called the Army of the Inca. Geggus attributes the name to a mistaken belief that the Taino descended from the Inca. Sinclair Thomson offers an alternative that Perry prefers to leave open: the Tupac Amaru rebellion against the Spanish received extensive coverage in the Saint-Domingue press, so the name may register a sense of solidarity with aboriginal peoples that reaches beyond the Taino as local predecessors. She uses the ambiguity to develop her central distinction. The relationship the revolutionaries built with the Taino was not filiation, which would require biological descent, but affiliation, secured by an analogy between two historical situations involving two entirely different sets of actors, Taino against Spanish and African-descended against French.