The Sahara slave trade outlived the Atlantic one by a century

Early in the nineteenth century Britain backed Yusuf Karamanli, pasha of Tripoli, who pushed his authority into the Fezzan and built working relations with the sultanates of Bornu and Sokoto far to the south. British patronage did not disturb the business. Tripoli stood at the end of the trans-Saharan caravan roads and was one of the largest slave markets on the Mediterranean coast. Karamanli died in 1830, civil war followed, and Ottoman authority was restored by the early 1840s. Real order across Cyrenaica, the Fezzan and the central desert came instead from Muhammad al-Sanusi and the religious order he founded, which preached a purified Islam and reconciled feuding clans so effectively that Ottoman governors had to stay on good terms with it. Sanusi merchants traded slaves with equal determination. Here the traffic proved almost impossible to suppress and survived into the twentieth century, ending with the Italian conquest of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica around 1911 and French advances further south. The Sanusiyya went on fighting the Italians into the 1930s.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843. He is remembered for two pieces of legislation. The rural code of 1826 tied the Haitian peasant to a marginal existence and went on doing so long after his fall. The penal code of 1835 placed Vodou under the heading of superstitions and made its practice illegal, punishable by fine and imprisonment. One article specifically exacted fines and prison from anyone who made zombies or cast spells, which meant the state had written a belief about the dead into its criminal law and then undertaken to prosecute people under it. Practitioners responded the way people respond to that: they went further into secrecy, and priests surrounded their worship with mystery and with a reputation for power. Both effects outlasted Boyer by more than a century, and the sensational literature about Haiti drew much of its raw material from the court cases the article produced.

The first Pan-African Congress met in London in July 1900, convened by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, with delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and the United States. Haiti was represented by Benito Sylvain, a journalist and diplomat from Cap-Haitien who had worked in Paris and served the Ethiopian emperor Menelik. The congress issued an address to the nations of the world warning that the problem of the twentieth century would be the colour line, a formulation W. E. B. Du Bois carried into his own writing three years later. Haiti's presence in that room carried weight. For delegates who came from colonies with no self government, a black republic that had beaten a European army was the standing proof that the argument could be won. The congress commanded nothing and legislated nothing. It named the central question of the century a few months after the century opened, and it did so with a Haitian at the table.

Louverture issued agricultural regulations that reorganised the colony around exports. Planters were pushed to grow cotton, sugar, indigo, ginger, coffee and cocoa, and were offered government subsidies and land concessions to do it. New industries were welcomed and the customs barrier between the eastern and western parts of the island was removed. The mechanism that made the scheme work was coercive. Agricultural labourers were forbidden to leave the plantations, and the police force was given the job of enforcing the labour rules and keeping order among the workers rather than ordinary policing. Woodward pairs this with the road building programme that improved transport, presenting the whole package as recovery rather than as a return to servitude. He does note that Louverture also encouraged the return of white planters and appointed wealthy men of colour and whites as judges and administrators to run the machinery.