A girl of fourteen breaks the colour bar at the Port-au-Prince theatre

Minette and her sister Lise were born on the rue Traversiere in Port-au-Prince in 1767 and 1769, daughters of a white colonist and a freed woman of mixed descent. Their mother taught them their letters in secret and spent the takings of a small trade in odds and ends on a tutor. Around 1780 a creole actress at the colonial theatre, Madame Acquaire, offered them lessons in sight singing and diction. Minette sang at the Christmas concert of 1780, and on 13 February 1781 the director Saint-Martin let her appear in the title role of the opera Isabelle et Gertrude. She was fourteen. Moreau de Saint-Mery, who was there, wrote that the manager had chosen to set colonial prejudice against colonial pleasure, and that her talent carried the day. She was engaged for three years, and after Saint-Martin died she mounted her own productions, choosing the sets, the costumes and the staging herself.

Felice Fontana published his treatise on viper venom at Florence in 1781. Its structure was a collection of more than six thousand experiments he had performed himself. He tested the remedies people swore by against snakebite and found theriac, electricity and sucking the wound with the mouth all useless. Earlier writers had disagreed about what venom tasted like, so he tasted it, calling this a philosophical necessity. He also worked on poison ivy from North America, giving up when the rashes became unbearable, and on ticunas, the arrow poison of Yameo speakers in the Peruvian Amazon, using arrows a friend at the Royal Society supplied. He trusted neither the traveller who first reported ticunas nor any account from a person native to that country. The citations show the shift. Ancient writers supplied about a third of Mead's references and five per cent of Fontana's. Knowledge made in a European laboratory now outranked knowledge made anywhere else.

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.

Ottobah Cugoano was captured and enslaved, worked on Caribbean plantations, and came to London in the middle of the eighteenth century with the man who owned him. There he wrote a critique of slavery that starts from a different place than the abolitionist argument around him. In the late eighteenth century he described the imperial organisation of the slave trade and the triangular Atlantic economy it belonged to. His conception of sovereignty considers people first and institutions afterwards. No human being has the right to enslave another, and therefore the task is to build institutions that cannot do it, rather than to reform the state so that it complies on paper while surviving intact. He named the Atlantic nations whose internal quarrels set the rules of that trade, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, and observed that Africans and the peoples of the Americas were not consulted about any of it.