Sleeping sickness and rinderpest arrive just before the Europeans do

Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1920s much of eastern and central Africa lost people. The slave trade had made the countryside unsafe, so scattered homesteads were abandoned and families gathered together for protection, which let the bush grow back and carried the tsetse fly forward with it. Sleeping sickness followed. Around Lake Victoria it killed some 200,000 people, and across equatorial Africa the death rate reached ninety percent in places. At the end of the 1880s rinderpest arrived, probably with infected Italian cattle landed in the Horn, and swept south, taking up to ninety percent of the herds in some districts and ruining pastoralists such as the Maasai. The timing decided a great deal, since this was exactly when European armies were coming ashore. New strains of smallpox came with them, along with jiggers from Latin America and outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever and meningitis. Of an estimated 80,000 Herero, 15,000 were alive in 1911. The rains failed across the savannah through the 1880s and 1890s and did not recover until the 1920s.

On the night of 24 December 1492 the Santa Maria drifted onto a reef off the northern coast of Hispaniola, near what is now Cap-Haitien. A ship's boy had the helm. The hull opened and could not be saved. Columbus was left with one seaworthy vessel, since the Pinta had gone off on its own some weeks earlier, and the Nina was too small to carry every man back to Spain. He decided to build a fort out of the wreck and leave part of the crew in it. This accident produced the first European settlement in the Americas, and it produced it on the coast of what is now Haiti. Nothing about the site had been chosen. Rouse notes the practical consequence for the return voyage. Columbus sailed for Spain in January with a crew cut down to what one caravel could hold, and with a garrison behind him that he expected to find alive.

On 28 November 1493 Columbus returned to find La Navidad burned to the ground and all thirty nine men he had left there dead. The reason was obscure to nobody on the island. The garrison had spent the year seizing food, taking women and roaming the interior after gold, and the people whose country it was put a stop to it. Columbus filed the event under indigenous savagery and used it to justify what came next, which was war on the chiefdoms and the forced labour system that emptied the island. That interpretation stuck for centuries and it is still doing work. Whenever a colonised population fights back, the record produced by the coloniser reclassifies the fighting as the natural violence of the people being fought. Haiti met this again in 1791, when a rising against the most lethal labour regime in the Americas was reported in Paris and Philadelphia as a race massacre. The template was cut here.

The Code Noir was drafted under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister who built Louis XIV's navy and his colonial administration, and it reads like the work of a capable bureaucrat. Owners had to be Roman Catholic. Every enslaved person had to be baptised. Sunday work was prohibited. Torture was prohibited. Masters owed their people food, clothing and care in sickness and in age. Anyone freed acquired the standing of a colonial subject. The same code expelled all Jews from French territory overseas. In Saint-Domingue the protective clauses were treated as advice. The planters there worked from an arithmetic later called the planter's policy: an adult brought from Africa cost less to replace than to keep alive, so the cheaper course was to exhaust people and buy more. France could hold up its statute book as evidence that it governed like a civilised power while men holding its commissions ran the harshest slave regime in the hemisphere. The distance between the printed article and the cane field is where colonial power actually operates.