1600 to 1780 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Parliament argues whether a company may own a conquest

Saint-Domingue's newspaper printed the history of the East India Company for its readers in 1767.

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1600 to 1749 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

England's wealth multiplies by five in a hundred and fifty years

A total of 216 million pounds in 1600 had reached a thousand million by 1749.

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the seventeenth century · African

Missionaries in Arda render the name of Jesus as Lisa

The kingdom the French later called Arada was evangelised long before its people reached Saint Domingue.

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the seventeenth century · African

Lemba treats the wealth of the slave trade as an affliction

Membership required a sickness understood to come from ancestors angered by the trade.

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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries · Africanspan

A city whose main religious duty was baptising people before they were shipped

Almost every Portuguese priest in Angola lived on money the trade produced.

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the seventeenth century · Pre-Revolutionary

White indentured labour builds the islands and is then priced out

Thirty six months of service under the conditions of a slave.

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January 1601 · Africanmonth known

Elizabeth I licenses a merchant to carry black residents out of England

The complaint was hunger and crowding, and the visible answer was the newest arrivals.

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1604 to 1608 · Africanspan

Kongo sends an ambassador to the Vatican and he dies in Rome

Ne Vunda told his hosts that the trade in Black people appeared nowhere in the ten commandments.

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1604 to 1640 · Caribbeanspan

Northern Europe takes every Caribbean island Spain left alone

In under forty years the English, French and Dutch held all the smaller islands.

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About 1604 · Africanapproximate

A man in Amhara declares himself Christ born again for the Gentiles

His followers built a hierarchy and a communion service before the state destroyed them.

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1605 to 1606 · Caribbeanspan

Spain destroys its own north coast towns to stop smuggling

The burnt coastline emptied of Spaniards and later gave the French their opening.

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1605 · Caribbeanyear only

Spain empties its own north coast and hands rivals a foothold

Governor Osorio's evictions wreck the Dominican economy and leave western Hispaniola open.

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1605 · Caribbeanyear only

Spain empties its own west coast and loses half the island

The devastations moved settlers east and left the whole western shore to whoever landed next.

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1606 to 1833 · Caribbeanspan

Trinidad's sugar arrives late and Liverpool supplies the labour

About 44,000 people were landed there, most of them in the closing decades of the legal trade.

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1606 · Caribbeanyear only

A colonial census counts 9,696 enslaved people and a collapsed sugar trade

Only 800 of them still worked in sugar, in a colony of perhaps sixteen thousand souls.

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1607 and 1620 · Africanspan

Two Portuguese revenue papers give the earliest measure of Allada's trade

One line in a tax estimate turns into a count of people leaving a single African port.

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5 January 1608 · African

The Kongo's ambassador reaches Rome on the eve of Epiphany and dies that day

The Pope visited his room, heard his message, and the man died as he finished it.

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1615 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Louis XIII permits slavery on condition that it saves souls

The French crown licensed the traffic by attaching a religious purpose to it.

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1616 to 1863 · Africanspan

The Gold Coast stops selling gold and starts selling people

With the Bight of Benin it supplied about a quarter of everyone carried across the Atlantic.

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1616 · Indigenousyear only

Guaman Poma writes to Philip the Third from Tawantinsuyu

A Quechua author addressed the Spanish king from inside the world Spain was dismantling.

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1619 to 1775 · Africanspan

The Chesapeake takes its people from the Bight of Biafra

Some 128,000 Africans landed on the tobacco coast, and British ships carried nearly all of them.

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1620 to 1835 · Africanspan

Captives land at Buenos Aires and walk to the silver mines

The Rio de la Plata was a door to Potosi, two thousand kilometres inland and four thousand metres up.

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about 1620 to about 1750 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Grain stays cheap across Europe for one hundred and thirty years

The long fall in cereal prices bit hardest at its end, and hardest in the biggest exporter.

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1622 to 1807 · Africanspan

Efik houses at Old Calabar control who is sold and to whom

African trading families ran the port's supply, and British ships took the results to British colonies.

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1622 to 1781 · Africanspan

In Kongo, dancing a war dance was the phrase used for declaring war

European writers in Africa recorded sangamento as a formal act of state, not a celebration.

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1622 · Africanyear only

A war with Angola begins the ruin of the Kongo monarchy

Portuguese Luanda attacks its Christian neighbour, and Kongo never recovers the peace.

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1622 · Africanyear only

Rome creates Propaganda Fide and the Kongo becomes its favourite cause

Over four hundred Spanish Capuchins had already volunteered and Lisbon blocked every one.

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1625 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

French adventurers land on Tortuga and begin working west

The settlement off the northern coast becomes the base for displacing Spain.

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1625 · Caribbeanyear only

Tortuga becomes a base, and the raiding turns into a colony

French and English crews stopped visiting the island and started living on it.

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1625 · Caribbeanyear only

Depopulated islands are the opening the other empires use

Britain, France and the Netherlands settled where Spain had emptied the land and then walked away.

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1625 · Caribbeanyear only

France plants a colony on Tortuga

A rocky island a few kilometres offshore becomes France's way into Hispaniola.

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1625 · Caribbeanyear only

Tortuga is where French Haiti begins and where it ends

The island that gave France its foothold in 1625 is where Leclerc died of fever in 1802.

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August 1625 · Africanmonth known

A printed catechism in Kikongo arrives and becomes the only book the country has

Mattheus Cardoso handed copies to literate chiefs along the road to the capital.

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1626 · Africanyear only

A duke drives the king out and credits the women of the royal council

Four high ranking women sat on that council, each representing a faction with a claim.

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February 1626 · Africanmonth known

A patriarch declares Ethiopian baptism invalid and loses the country

Alphonsus Mendes ruled that every priest be reordained and every believer done again.

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1627 · Africanyear only

A ship where the crew will not go below the deck

An account from 1627 describes men chained at neck and foot in a hold nobody would enter.

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1629 to 1667 · Caribbeanspan

The Brethren of the Coast invent a word and a way of living

Boucanier gave English its buccaneer, and the same smoking frames gave the world barbecue.

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1629 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

French buccaneers settle Tortuga and begin working inland

Pirates, cattle hunters and hide traders take an islet off the north coast.

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1629 · Caribbeanyear only

Planters driven off Saint Christopher take Tortuga instead

Spain cleared the island with great cruelty, and the survivors rowed away to a rock nobody watched.

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1629 · Caribbeanyear only

Spain attacks Tortuga while the fighting men are away hunting

The defenders were across the channel on Hispaniola, so the raid found women, children and the sick.

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1630s to 1816 · Diasporaspan

In Brazil a rich woman went to church on the backs of two men

The covered hammock was furniture, and the men carrying the poles were listed as property.

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1630 · Africanyear only

The Dutch take Pernambuco and become a Brazilian slaving power

After the conquest, Dutch slavers were fitted out at Recife instead of in the Netherlands.

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1631 · Africanyear only

A martyr list from Mombasa names only Portuguese and omits a hundred and fifty Africans

Dom Antonio of Malindi refused to renounce his faith, was killed, and was left off.

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1635 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A royal order requires every captive to be baptised and taught the catechism

Louis XIII attaches a religious duty to the founding charter of the French island trade.

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September 1636 to April 1637 · Africanspan

Two Dutch ships buy 836 people east of the Volta and 38 on the Gold Coast

The Dutch West India Company entered the trade for Brazil and went straight to Allada.

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1638 to 1775 · Datasetspan

Ships to Brazil buried fewer of their captives than ships to the islands

Sorted by African region, the survival pattern on the Brazil run inverts the Caribbean one.

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1638 to 1775 · Datasetspan

The South Atlantic currents made Brazil the short crossing

Wind and water fixed how long a ship stayed at sea, and how many walked off it.

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1640 · Africanyear only

After 1640 the slave trade is run from Liverpool and Nantes

The business moved north out of Iberian hands into ports that had been marginal to it.

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1640 · Caribbeanyear only

Spain and Portugal separate and the Spanish colonies lose their supplier

Sixty years under one crown ended, and Madrid had to buy its captives from foreigners.

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1640s · Caribbeandecade

Barbados swaps tobacco for cane and invents the Caribbean plantation

Dutch and Sephardic merchants supplied the technique, the credit and the captives.

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1640s · Caribbeandecade

Cane reaches the easternmost island first, and the wind explains why

Barbados lies to windward of everything, the first landfall for a ship running from Africa.

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about 1640 · Caribbeanapproximate

Spain kills the cattle to starve out the men hunting them

The boucaniers lost their herds, went to sea, and found buyers in Curacao, Jamaica and western Hispaniola.

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31 December 1640 · Diaspora

A sale ledger in Dutch Brazil prices captives ten at a time

Buyers, lots and totals in guilders, written down on the last day of the year.

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1641 · Caribbeanyear only

Sugar exports from the eastern Caribbean start to count

The first serious shipments mark the point where the islands begin importing people in bulk.

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1641 to 1863 · Caribbeanspan

Curacao and its neighbours sold on more people than they kept

Three dry Dutch islands moved over a hundred thousand captives onward to other markets.

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1641 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

French cattle hunters move off Tortuga onto Hispaniola itself

No charter, no governor, no plan. Fifty-six years later France holds the western third.

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August 1641 · Africanmonth known

The Dutch take Luanda and Nzinga gains an ally

A fleet sent from Brazil breaks Portugal's hold on Angola for seven years.

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1642 to 1794 · Africanspan

Dutch slavers took their final orders in the roads off Texel

Amsterdam owned the ships. An anchorage at the mouth of the Zuiderzee dispatched them.

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1642 to 1806 · Africanspan

Copenhagen ran the Baltic's share of the slave trade

One company, one fort on the Gold Coast, two small islands in the Caribbean.

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1642 to 1807 · Datasetspan

Nearly half of all slaving voyages were organised in the Americas

Brazil accounted for more than three quarters of the captives that half of the trade carried.

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1642 to 1807 · Diasporaspan

Recife opened Brazil's own slave trade and paid in tobacco rolls

The Dutch held the region for twenty-four years and the traffic outlasted them by 150.

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1642 to 1807 · Diasporaspan

Bahia sent out more slaving voyages than any port in the Atlantic

Tobacco cured in molasses bought people on the Bight of Benin that European goods could not.

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1642 to 1807 · Diasporaspan

Rio de Janeiro became the largest port of entry in the whole trade

Locally owned ships, Brazilian and Asian trade goods, and no European house in the chain.

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1642 to 1807 · Caribbeanspan

Barbados fitted out more slavers than any British port except London

Between 1696 and 1705 the island bought its own labour, and it paid in rum.

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1642 to 1807 · Africanspan

Lisbon lost the Spanish market in 1641 and turned to Brazil

The break with Madrid cost the port its best customers and forced a new route open.

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1642 to 1807 · Africanspan

The trade out of West Central Africa multiplied sevenfold

Loango, Malembo and Benguela joined Luanda, and the northern ports stayed African.

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1642 to 1807 · Diasporaspan

Rhode Island fitted out half the slave ships in North America

Newport, Bristol and Providence traded rum for people at Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle.

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1642 to 1807 · Datasetspan

The minor slave traders of the Baltic still carried a hundred thousand

Denmark, Sweden and the German Hanse towns count as small only by comparison.

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1642 to 1810 · Africanspan

London's advantage in the slave trade was everything but the weather

The largest city in Europe supplied the cargo, the credit and the insurance.

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1643 to 1793 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

La Rochelle was France's second slaving port and quit before abolition

Ouidah and Malembo at one end, Saint-Domingue at the other, and Le Havre in the way.

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1643 to 1831 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

France paid its slave traders a bounty to keep Saint-Domingue supplied

The third largest national traffic in the Atlantic existed to feed a single colony.

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1644 to 1807 · Caribbeanspan

The Guianas took half a million captives and grew maroon republics

British, French and Dutch territory on one coast, with rivers running back into forest.

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the 1640s · Diasporadecade

Two women in New Netherland use the record to keep children

Dorothe Angola adopted an orphan and Maria Portogys placed her daughter in a Dutch house.

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February 1644 · Diasporamonth known

A petition in New Amsterdam wins a freedom children cannot inherit

The council granted half freedom and bound every child of the petitioners to the company.

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1645 to 1860 · Diasporaspan

American ships carried a quarter of all captives in 1806 and 1807

The traffic collapsed during the Revolution, then found its buyers outside the country.

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1645 to 1647 · Africanspan

A Dutch agent buys 1,277 people at Allada across three seasons

An average of 425 a year, and the buyers on Sao Tome said Allada captives were worth more.

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May 1645 · Africanmonth known

Twelve friars land at Soyo and begin two centuries of Capuchin work in the Kongo

They were greeted as priests of the great God and immediately caught in a local war.

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1650 to 1850 · Africanspan

Asante, Dahomey and Oyo grew as the trade reached its peak

Large African states supplied the machinery that moved Akan, Ewe and Yoruba speakers.

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after the mid seventeenth century · Diasporaapproximate

Amsterdam closes its community to its own black members

Mixed race men had studied in the yeshiva and circumcised black Jews had been called to the Torah.

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1652 to 1700 · Datasetspan

In the seventeenth century the crossing killed at rates never seen again

People shipped from the Bight of Biafra died at two to three times the Upper Guinea rate.

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1652 to 1851 · Africanspan

A lagoon let Lagos load captives out of the navy's sight

Between 1815 and 1850 the port shipped over seven thousand people a year illegally.

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1652 to 1851 · Africanspan

New Calabar led the Bight of Biafra before Bonny overtook it

The main delta outlet of the seventeenth century sank to second rank in the eighteenth.

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1652 · Africanyear only

Garcia II has two women of the royal council arrested and the younger one killed

A minor noble sent to do the killing refused, saying their rank forbade it.

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1653 to 1808 · Africanspan

Cape Coast Castle changed hands three times in a decade

Built by Swedes, seized by Danes in 1663, taken by the English the following year.

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1655 to 1775 · Diasporaspan

Perth Amboy existed as a landing place because New York taxed imports

Nine captives in ten entering the Middle Colonies came through New York or New Jersey.

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1655 to 1775 · Caribbeanspan

Jamaica took six hundred thousand captives in a single century

Bristol and Liverpool ships, Biafra and Gold Coast origins, Akan and Igbo consequences.

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1655 · Caribbeanyear only

Calling the colonists degenerate was the first step in taking their land

A phrase used at the English conquest of Jamaica was later turned on Hispaniola.

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1655 · Africanyear only

English invaders describe Jamaican houses with broad galleries

The shaded outdoor room was standard on the Guinea coast long before it reached the islands.

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10 May 1655 · Pre-Revolutionary

England tries to take Hispaniola and does not get it

Logan dates Britain's long appetite for the island's western harbours to this failure.

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1657 · Africanyear only

Allada sends an ambassador across the ocean to ask Spain for priests

The request for missionaries came from an African king and travelled by way of Cartagena.

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1658 to 1825 · Caribbeanspan

Suriname absorbed three hundred thousand people into its sugar estates

Dutch vessels held a near monopoly on landing captives in the colony until the 1780s.

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1658 to 1838 · Africanspan

Cameroon came into the trade last and left it late

Regular departures began in the 1760s and Brazilian ships kept the route open for decades.

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1658 · Africanyear only

The first book printed in a West African language was a catechism

Madrid presses turned out prayers in the speech of Allada before any mission had sailed.

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1658 · Africanyear only

A Spanish catechism translates the Christian God as vodun

The word Haitians use for a spirit was chosen in Madrid to carry the God of the missionaries.

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1659 to 1664 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

France takes Tortuga and charters a company to work the profit

Jeremie Deschamps holds the island for Louis XIV and Colbert builds the monopoly behind him.

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1659 to 1726 · Africanspan

Ouidah became West Africa's chief slaving port before 1700

European nations at war with each other went on trading side by side on the same beach.

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1659 to 1807 · Africanspan

Bonny rose with Liverpool and with the Aro trading network

Two independent ports a few miles apart, feeding the second largest source region.

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1659 · Africanyear only

France builds a fort at the mouth of the Senegal

Most of the people shipped out through this post were bought for one colony, Saint-Domingue.

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1660 · Datasetyear only

The English take over the northern half of the Atlantic traffic

From 1660 the trade splits into two circuits, and English ships run one of them for 150 years.

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1660 to 1690 · Africanspan

Offra ships for Allada until a war burns it down

The kingdom's outlet to the sea lasted thirty years, then the business moved to Ouidah.

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1660 to 1807 · Africanspan

The Gambia is navigable far inland, and that is why it was raided

Four in five of the people taken from the estuary went aboard British ships.

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1660s to 1807 · Africanspan

Loango's Vili brokers sold more people to Saint-Domingue than anywhere else

African middlemen set the terms, and the largest buyer at the far end was the colony that became Haiti.

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The 1640s to the 1700s · Africanspan

Friars smash the charms of a village and leave a hole nobody can fill

One Flemish Capuchin threw a shrine into a fire at Ulolo and died of his beating.

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January to May 1660 · Africanyear only

Five of twelve Capuchins are dead four months after landing at Allada

The king who had asked for priests lost interest once baptism was explained to him.

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1660 · Africanyear only

A king asks for priests to stop thunder, lightning and war

Allada wanted the ritual technique of the new religion and wanted it kept inside the palace.

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1660 · Indigenousyear only

Britain and France agree to leave Dominica to the Caribs

Two empires signed an island away in 1660 and broke the agreement for a century and a half.

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1663 to 1860 · Datasetspan

Long voyages killed people, and what came before the ship killed more

Ships bound for North America took longest, yet some of the longest crossings had the lowest death rates.

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1663 to 1664 · Africanspan

A Capuchin in Kongo records that Europeans look ugly

Only slaves were called negros, he wrote, so nobody there wanted the word.

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1663 to 1665 · Africanspan

A brass crown sent to the king of Allada ends up as a Dutch war trophy

The English company that carried it was destroyed at sea before the gift arrived.

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1664 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

France gives the buccaneers a governor named d'Ogeron

Tortuga and the western coast get an administrator whose job is to turn raiders into farmers.

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1664 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A royal appointment turns a squatter colony into French territory

Naming a governor was the legal act that made the western coast France's, on paper.

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1664 to 1829 · Caribbeanspan

French Guiana bought captives in small lots from passing ships

Vessels headed for the big island markets stopped at Cayenne and sold off a few people at a time.

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1664 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

France claims the western third of an island Spain still owned

Madrid took thirty three years to concede the point, and did it in a European peace treaty.

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1664 to 1665 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Colbert founds a company for captives and ships poor whites on the same terms

The engages were bound for thirty six months and worked beside the people they had been sent to supplement.

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1665 to 1676 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

d'Ogeron buys wives from French jails to settle the buccaneers

Cocoa, loans from his own pocket, and a hundred women shipped from prison raised the planters from 400 to 1,500.

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1665 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Port-de-Paix becomes France's first town on the Haitian mainland

The settlers cross from Tortuga and build an administrative base on the northwest coast.

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30 October 1665 · African

One battle kills the king, ninety five title holders and the old Kongo order

Antonio I took his crown, his sceptre and the royal archives to the field and lost them all.

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29 November 1665 · African

The battle of Mbwila opens a century of Kongo civil war

War with Portugal ended in a defeat that turned Kongo's politics into a permanent succession fight.

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1667 · Africanyear only

Kongo splits into rival capitals and the wars feed the slave ships

Two lineages crowned their own kings and treated the kingdom as family property.

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1667 to 1772 · Caribbeanspan

European writers admire the Indians of the Caribbean after their extermination

For the African on the plantation there was only a vague compassion.

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1668 to 1803 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Nearly 800,000 people were landed to build the richest colony on earth

West Central Africa supplied the largest share, and Nantes and Bordeaux carried them.

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23 March 1668 · Caribbean

A Barbados treaty asks the Caribs to hand back runaways

St Vincent agreed on paper to return escapees and then kept them instead.

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1669 to 1808 · Caribbeanspan

Britain takes Grenada and turns it into a market for the French

A third of those landed came from the Bight of Biafra, and Liverpool carried most of them.

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1670s · Datasetdecade

Virginia swaps indentured servants for slaves in twenty years

A ratio of four to one in favour of white servants runs four to one the other way by the 1690s.

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1670 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The buccaneers plant tobacco and stop growing only what they eat

A crop grown for sale rather than for the pot is the first step toward the plantation.

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1670 to 1802 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Le Havre sold most of its captives into Saint-Domingue

France's first slaving port did almost 40 percent of its business in the eight years to 1792.

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1670 · Africanyear only

French buyers raise the price of a person by half in a single season

The king of Allada told them the Dutch already sent more ships than his country could load.

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About 1670 · Pre-Revolutionaryapproximate

Buccaneers from Tortuga build Cap Francois in the Indian style

Forked posts driven into the ground, walls of wattle or split palm, roofs of thatch.

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1670 · Africanyear only

Allada sends an ambassador to the court of Louis XIV

African states sent envoys and students to Europe throughout the slaving centuries.

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1670 · Caribbeanyear only

Barbadians carry the plantation system to South Carolina

English settlers and enslaved Africans from one island founded a mainland colony on its model.

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Around 1670 · Pre-Revolutionaryapproximate

France empties its prisons to supply wives for Saint-Domingue

Buccaneers who wanted households got women shipped out from French jails and houses of correction.

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18 October 1670 · African

Soyo wipes out a Portuguese army and turns the date into a national feast

The province had already lost its prince to the same enemy earlier that year.

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1672 to 1752 · Africanspan

The Royal African Company was the largest slaving firm ever built

A crown monopoly, forts along the coast, and eighty years of losing ground to independent traders.

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1673 to 1765 · Africanspan

A French nun sees a burning heart and Ezili acquires her emblem

The Sacred Heart went from a convent vision to Breton teaching posters to a Haitian temple wall.

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1674 · Caribbeanyear only

The Dutch West India Company is rebuilt as a slaving business

Reorganised in 1674, it supplied its own colonies and sold to everyone else through two transit islands.

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1674 to 1806 · Caribbeanspan

Nevis fills with captives around 1680 and then slowly empties

London ships carried the labour for a sugar revolution on 36 square miles of volcanic rock.

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1675 to 1723 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

A merchant's manual supplies the argument that slavery is salvation

The practice came first and the theory explaining it was assembled after.

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1676 to 1802 · Datasetspan

New England ports fitted out slave ships for a century and a quarter

The northern colonies were carriers in the trade even where few captives were landed.

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1676 to 1802 · Datasetspan

Only about 10,000 Africans reached New England straight from the coast

Most enslaved people in the northern colonies arrived second hand, by way of the West Indies.

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1677 to 1820 · Caribbeanspan

Antigua landed more than 5,000 people a year at its peak

The island outfitted its own slavers, and after 1808 its arrivals came from wrecks and seizures.

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1677 to 1682 · Caribbeanspan

Four hundred suspects in the poison affair at the court of Louis XIV

Noblewomen bought love magic from a Paris sorceress, and heirs bought poison made from toads.

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1678 · Africanyear only

Portugal lets the Dutch inspect its slave ships on the Gold Coast

A treaty after the Luso-Dutch wars gave one empire policing rights over another's traffic.

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1679 · Datasetyear only

A French ship lands 241 people in Saint-Domingue

Voyage 33733 in the slave trade database is one arrival out of tens of thousands.

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1679 to 1704 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Four armed slave conspiracies are laid in twenty five years

The plots aimed at killing every master in the colony, and they began almost at once.

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1679 to 1819 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Saint-Domingue was the largest slave market in the Caribbean

More than 770,000 people were landed there, and every French Atlantic port aimed for it.

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1679 to 1860 · Caribbeanspan

Montserrat's slaveholders were descended from Irish servants

London and Bristol supplied the island, and the men buying were the sons of former bondsmen.

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February 1679 · Datasetmonth known

Ninety two people are landed at Port-de-Paix in February

Voyage 33528 brought Senegambians to a town founded fourteen years earlier.

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1680 to 1807 · Caribbeanspan

Denmark ran its own slave trade out of a fort called Christiansborg

Copenhagen supplied St Thomas and St Croix, and the surviving records undercount the early years.

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1680 to 1830 · Africanspan

The price of a captive in Senegambia rose tenfold

European demand pushed prices up, and African sellers took cloth, iron, guns and spirits in payment.

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1680 to 1867 · Africanspan

148,000 people were shipped from the Sierra Leone estuary

British vessels carried nearly all of them, and 1807 ended the traffic almost overnight.

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1680 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Four thousand Europeans are living in the French settlements

A thin population on a coast France had claimed sixteen years earlier.

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1680 to 1849 · Datasetspan

Five hundred and fifteen poison cases across four slave societies

Different empires, laws, crops and populations, and one shared curve.

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1681 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The count of 1681 puts 6,648 people in Saint-Domingue

About two in three were white, and fewer than a third were enslaved.

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1681 to 1807 · Africanspan

Cabinda stayed under African jurisdiction and sold to everyone

The Atlantic outlet of the kingdom of Ngoyo kept European forts and monopolies off its shore.

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1681 to 1791 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

From 10,000 enslaved in 1681 to half a million in 1791

Madiou thought the real figure passed 700,000, since planters hid people from the head tax.

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1681 to 1684 · Africanspan

A chapel burns the night before a king of Whydah is to be baptised

Agbangla had agreed to the water and to one wife. The fire ended both.

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the early 1680s · Africanapproximate

Hens are fed to a shrine at Sestro in the days before the rice harvest

The village priest knew the medicinal plants and was consulted when people felt in danger.

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1683 to 1691 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

The French governor dies at Limonade and the northern plain is sacked

De Cussy attacked Santiago in 1689, and the Spanish answer killed him and about 500 others.

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1683 · Datasetyear only

Martinique counts nine thousand enslaved people and 122 sugar works

By 1726 the plantations had nearly quadrupled and the enslaved were 77 per cent of the island.

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1669 to 1683 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

The church has the Jews expelled from Saint Domingue

Jesuits asked the crown to act against tavern keepers, undesirable women and Jews.

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1 March 1683 · Caribbean

A slave ship lands captives in March and raiders take them in May

Hundreds of people survive one Atlantic crossing at Veracruz and are seized again within three months.

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17 to 30 May 1683 · Caribbeanspan

Buccaneers hold Veracruz for two weeks and take its black residents

Thirteen ships leave Mexico's main port carrying close to 1,500 people of African descent.

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26 to 30 May 1683 · Caribbeanspan

A sorting on an islet decides who leaves for Saint-Domingue

Over four thousand people are penned on a sandbar off Veracruz while the raiders choose.

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c. 1684 to 1706 · Africanspan

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita relocates Bethlehem to Kongo

Claiming permanent possession by Saint Anthony, she rewrote Christian geography to end the civil wars.

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1684 · Datasetyear only

Africans are four fifths of Suriname by the census of 1684

By 1752 the enslaved were 95 per cent of everyone in the colony.

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1684 · Africanyear only

A black Catholic from Brazil argues slavery down in front of the Pope

Two years later the Holy Office issued a wide condemnation that changed nothing.

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November 1684 · Caribbeanmonth known

A runaway reports that her own owner is held at Petit-Goave

A young woman rescued into Santo Domingo tells the president where the widow who owned her is being kept.

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March 1685 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

The Code Noir writes slavery into law

Baptism required. Education deliberately omitted. Read what it leaves out.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A raid on Campeche sends another 243 people to the French coast

Saint-Domingue's early parishes fill with Spanish-speaking Catholics taken from one port after another.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The Code Noir hands Sunday and Holy Week to African religion

A law written to make Catholics of the enslaved created the protected hours they used for something else.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The Code Noir makes Catholic instruction a condition of holding slaves

Eight days to declare a new arrival, and no other religion in public.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The Code Noir makes Catholicism the only lawful worship in the islands

Sixty articles, and not one of them softens anything that is done to a slave.

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March 1685 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

The Code Noir puts slavery into French law

Sixty articles on masters, baptism, punishment, rations and the status of children.

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March 1685 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

Louis XIV writes a slave code that leaves out schooling on purpose

The same law that ordered a priest into the quarters kept a teacher out of them.

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March 1685 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

The Code Noir orders baptism within eight days of landing

Every other religion is banned in the islands, and every gathering for one is declared seditious.

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March 1685 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

Sixty articles turn a person into an instrument of cultivation

Louis XIV's edict regulates religion and servitude, and leaves the enslaved one right.

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March 1685 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

Louis XIV's edict builds a class of free people of colour into slavery

The code licensed extreme cruelty and, in one clause, made the group that later demanded rights.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A slave code the planters simply ignored2 sources

The Code Noir barred rape, family separation and private torture, and no one enforced any of it.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The Code Noir bars Jews from the French colonies outright

A slave code written for Africans also made Jewish residence in Saint-Domingue illegal.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

France writes African worship out of the law for its colonies

The Code noir made African religious practice a policing problem rather than a faith.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

One article of the Code Noir makes freed slaves French subjects

Article 59 gave the affranchis the standing of the free born, and the colony spent a century taking it back.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

France gives slavery a single legal text for every colony

Sixty articles written in Paris, printed, shipped out and registered in colonial courts.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Colbert's code forbids torture and the planters price it out

Replacing a worker cost less than keeping one alive, so the protective articles went unread.

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1685 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The law that defined a person as movable property

Meuble in French law put a human being in the same column as furniture and cattle.

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1686 to 1804 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Bordeaux arrives late and buys its captives in the Indian Ocean

The best West African outlets were taken, so its merchants sent ships around the Cape instead.

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1686 · Diasporayear only

Two enslaved people are bought for their reputation as healers

The owners meant to hire them out and make money from the practice.

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15 June 1686 · Caribbean

A future Massachusetts governor fishes treasure off Hispaniola

New England knew the island as a place of sudden money long before any government had a policy about it.

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1687 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Saint-Domingue's enslaved population passes three thousand

Captives seized from Spanish ports close half the gap in a colony with eight men to every woman.

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February 1687 · Africanmonth known

Europeans bring Gold Coast mercenaries into a local quarrel at Offra

Hired soldiers arrive on the Slave Coast, and the wars of the 1690s get bigger.

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6 May 1687 · Pre-Revolutionary

The colony's own court registers the Code Noir two years late

A royal edict had no force in Saint-Domingue until the men it governed agreed to enter it in their register.

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24 May 1687 · Caribbean

Three Veracruzanas come home in the captain's cabin of a slave ship

Four years after their abduction, free women ride above deck while 580 Africans lie below.

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27 August 1687 · Pre-Revolutionary

A French governor asks Versailles to sell the freedwomen away

Cussy calls free Spanish blacks the enemies kept at home and proposes shipping the women out.

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1688 to 1770 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Indigo carries the colony before sugar and coffee do

The dye had to undercut growers in Guatemala and South Carolina for eighty years.

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1688 to 1736 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Three fires in fifty years force Cap Francois into masonry

Thatch was outlawed in 1721 and stone or brick between posts required in 1736.

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1688 to 1695 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Sixteen women from Veracruz marry into freedom in Saint-Domingue

Parish books at Leogane and three other churches record every one of these brides as a free person.

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1688 to 1702 · Africanspan

A Dutch merchant admits the Gold Coast cures work

Bosman had seen his own countrymen recover when the European physicians were lost.

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1688 · Diasporayear only

Simao is made to plunge his hand into boiling water

Eleven people on one Bahian plantation had died in a year of illnesses nobody could name.

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1688 · Africanyear only

The Glorious Revolution frees the trade in people

Eric Williams noted the one particular in which this freedom differed from all the others.

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24 December 1688 · Caribbean

A woman taken at twelve describes ten years in Petit-Goave

Juana Tomasa tells a Spanish judge what the French port bought, what it sold and what escape cost.

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the 1690s · Diasporadecade

In Virginia the enslaved outnumber indentured servants four to one

Indenture had an end date written into it. The arrangement that replaced it had none.

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the 1690s to the 1860s · Caribbeanspan

The sugar lead passes from Barbados to Jamaica to Saint-Domingue to Cuba

Inside fields designed to make labour interchangeable, one enslaved specialist judged the crop.

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the late seventeenth century · African

Ouidah keeps a snake house and the king walks to it every year

Women who fell into what Bosman called madness at harvest were confined there for a season.

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1691 to 1703 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Du Casse rebuilds the colony with people stolen from Jamaica

A raid in June 1694 carried off three thousand enslaved people and the sugar machinery to work them with.

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1691 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

An armed revolt at Port-de-Paix, a century before the rising

Fick keeps this one because it dates resistance to the beginning of the plantation system.

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1692 · Caribbeanyear only

The wealth of the Americas moves to the sugar islands

For two centuries the returns came out of mines. After this they came out of cane fields.

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1692 · Caribbeanyear only

An earthquake drowns Port Royal and closes the buccaneer era

Two thirds of the busiest port in the English Caribbean liquefied and went under the harbour.

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1693 to 1846 · Africanspan

Winds and currents give Amazonia a slave route of its own

Ships fitted out in Lisbon bought in Senegambia because that is where the equatorial Atlantic carried them.

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25 August 1693 · African

The Hannibal loses 320 captives to dysentery in one crossing

Thomas Phillips also recorded what each death cost the Royal African Company.

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1694 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Ducasse offers to supply France with all its indigo

He wanted a monopoly, the offer was refused, and the crop later vanished.

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1695 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Port-de-Paix is destroyed and no group is spared

The northern coast learned early that a colony without walls could be erased in a day.

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1695 · Africanyear only

Gold in Minas Gerais redirects the traffic to West Central Africa

The deposits needed no engineering, only enormous numbers of people to wash gravel.

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1696 to 1810 · Africanspan

Liverpool becomes the largest slaving port in Europe

Its captains kept standing relationships with the merchants of Bonny and Old Calabar.

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September 1697 · Pre-Revolutionarymonth known

Ryswick makes the western third legally French

A treaty in northern Europe hands Spain's neglected coast to France, and Saint-Domingue begins.

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1697 to 1803 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Nantes runs the French slave trade from Loango and Ouidah

Colonial sugar came back up the Loire and paid for the great houses on the Ile Feydeau.

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1697 · Africanyear only

Portuguese troops end a century old African state in Brazil

Palmares had a king, a dynasty, provinces and a hundred years of existence before it fell.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Ryswick gives France a third of the island and the name Saint-Domingue

A treaty signed in the Netherlands converts a smugglers' coast into a legal colony.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

French pirates and cacao farmers take the western third of the island

Decades of raiding from a neighbouring islet ended with a partition that still stands.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Spain signs away the western third and Saint-Domingue is named

The Treaty of Ryswick converts a buccaneer foothold into a French colony.

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1697 · Caribbeanyear only

France takes legal title to land it had already occupied

The Treaty of Ryswick converts squatting into sovereignty over western Hispaniola.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Conquest done, the state fills the land with captives

Casimir dates the start of the colonial machine to the signature that closed the conquest.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Ryswick hands France the west and the plantation machine accelerates

Spain's cession converts a feebly worked frontier into the deadliest sugar colony in the Americas.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

A treaty converts a pirate coast into a French colony

Ryswick gave France the western third of an island Spain had emptied and abandoned.

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1697 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

France takes a third of an island and builds the richest colony on earth

Sugar, coffee and indigo, produced by more than half a million people held as property.

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the end of the 17th century · Pre-Revolutionaryapproximate

Father Labat beats men to death for what he takes to be sorcery

A missionary who was also a sugar planter left one of the earliest accounts of slave religion.

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20 September 1697 · Caribbean

Spain signs away the third of the island it could not hold

The treaty left the boundary vague, and the vagueness lasted two hundred years.

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20 September 1697 · Caribbean

A war that ended in Europe legalises a colony in the Caribbean

French settlers had been on the coast for seventy years. The paperwork arrived in 1697.

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20 September 1697 · Caribbean

Louis XIV and William III trade an island neither of them had seen

One third of one Caribbean island would out-earn the whole eastern seaboard of North America.

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20 September 1697 · Caribbean

Forty percent of Europe's sugar would come from this one territory

Ryswick created the legal object the revolution destroyed and the borders of the country that replaced it.

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1698 · Caribbeanyear only

A priest stops at the door and watches an African rite instead of stopping it

A clay figure on a stool, a half calabash of juice, and incense.

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1699 · Africanyear only

A king of Whydah calls the mass very fine and keeps his own god

Two Portuguese Augustinians got a church, a hospice and one polite refusal.

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1699 · Caribbeanyear only

Twenty people paddle from Jamaica to Cuba and are granted asylum

Spain offered freedom to fugitives from Protestant colonies, and it did so as a weapon.

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