A colony smaller than Massachusetts outsells the entire United States

Geggus opens with the scale of what the revolution destroyed. On twenty thousand square kilometres, less ground than Massachusetts, the colony had grown from a buccaneer refuge into Europe's chief source of tropical produce and was at different moments the leading world exporter of sugar, coffee and indigo. At its height late in the 1780s it exported more than the whole of the United States and far more than Mexico or Brazil, and it was the largest single market in the Atlantic slave trade. Measured as wealth created per inhabitant it was probably without equal. It drove the growth of the French Atlantic ports while the rest of the country stagnated, and its reach extended to the Mediterranean, with Marseille supplying a sixth of the colony's merchant shipping in 1789. Three quarters of the tropical goods France imported were re-exported to markets from Scandinavia to the Middle East.

Audubon was born on 26 April 1785 at Les Cayes, the illegitimate son of a French sugar planter and a French servant woman. He was taken to France as a child as the colony destabilized and later sent to the United States to avoid Napoleon's conscription. He became the defining ornithological artist in American history, and almost nobody who owns a print knows the man was born in Haiti. I keep him here for one reason. The diaspora is usually narrated as something that starts in 1915, or 1957, or 1991, and it starts before the country does. Saint-Domingue exported people to Louisiana, to Cuba, to Philadelphia, to Charleston and to France for decades before independence, and the cultural residue of that scattering is sitting in American museums under captions that mention no island at all.

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.

Dubois separates the planning meeting from the religious ceremony, and gives the meeting the organisational weight. On Sunday 14 August 1791, just over a week before the insurrection began, two hundred enslaved people gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in the parish of Morne-Rouge. They were delegates from estates across the central northern plain, including Limbe, Petite-Anse where the Gallifet plantations lay, Port Margot, Limonade, Plaine du Nord and Quartier Morin. Gatherings of this kind had happened before and were common enough that several planters had given permission for what they were told was a dinner. This one was different: final plans for a mass uprising were made. Most delegates were privileged people, many of them drivers. Dubois reads the choice of delegates as the reason the plan held across dozens of estates without leaking.