West Central Africans were six in ten of the Africans in the North

Plantation records from Saint Domingue in the 1780s give the origins of the African population province by province. In the North, where the great rising began in 1791, people from West Central Africa, whom the colonists lumped together as Congos, accounted for almost sixty per cent of the Africans. Aja-Fon speakers from the Bight of Benin, the group whose religion supplied Haitian Vodou with its principal deities, its main ceremonies and most of its African vocabulary, made up twelve per cent. On the plains of the West Province the Aja-Fon and the Yoruba each formed sixteen per cent, Central Bantu thirty two per cent, and in the mountains behind them half. The South resembled the North. The pattern was old. Records reaching back to the 1720s show Congos among the largest groups in the colony from the start, and at no point did Aja-Fon speakers pass twenty per cent of the Africans there.

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.

Jean Pierre Boyer was born in the colonial capital in the year the United States declared independence, a coincidence Baur uses to frame a life spent between the Atlantic revolutions. He was in France as a young man, returned home in time for the English invasion of 1793, and later fled again toward France, a voyage interrupted when his ship was taken by Americans during the undeclared naval war between the United States and the French Republic at the end of the decade. Released once the crisis passed, he lived in Paris until the autumn of 1801. The article treats this itinerary as the making of a politician who understood European powers from the inside, and who returned to a country where Dessalines proclaimed independence at the start of 1804 and was killed by an assassin's bullet two years later.

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.