Istwa Nou

The Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, and merchants from Genoa and Venice used the opening to set up ports on the northern shore of the Black Sea where they could buy people. They kept at it for two and a half centuries. The captives were Armenians, Circassians, Tatars and Bulgarians, and European clerks lumped them together under the loose heading of Slavs, which is where the word slave entered the languages of western Europe. Where those people went matters as much as who they were. A good number were put to work growing and milling sugar on Cyprus and Sicily, an operation that needed gangs of labour under supervision through a fixed season. The plantation with a bound workforce on it was therefore a working European business two centuries before anyone crossed the Atlantic. When it was carried to Madeira, then to Hispaniola, then to Saint-Domingue, nothing about it had to be invented. It had to be enlarged, and the supply had to be found somewhere else.

Through the fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish builders produced ships made for the open ocean, and their navigators learned to use the compass and to read the Atlantic's currents and prevailing winds well enough to sail out and get home again. That combination opened the Atlantic islands. Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde were reached and settled. Italian merchants, who had financed and run sugar around the Mediterranean for generations, worked with the Iberian colonisers to establish the crop on those islands, grown by enslaved people. The plantation of the Americas was assembled there first, in miniature and offshore. The ships did something else as well. Until then the winds and the distances had kept the Western Hemisphere out of contact with Africa and Eurasia. Once the route was solved that barrier was gone for good, and everything that followed for the people of the Caribbean followed from a set of technical problems being solved in Lisbon and in Seville.

The Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 closed the route that had carried captives from the Black Sea and the Balkans into Christian Europe. That traffic was turned toward buyers in Islamic territory. Two things went short in Europe at once: sugar, and the European captives who had been made to grow and mill it. Portuguese merchants were already trading down the African coast, and they answered the shortage by buying more black Africans and shipping them north. Within a few decades the enslaved populations of Sicily, of Naples and of southern France had changed colour. Historians of the trade call this the blackening of Mediterranean slavery, and it happened four decades before Columbus sailed. Sugar and African labour were bound to each other in the Mediterranean before either of them crossed the Atlantic. The plantation complex that eventually reached Hispaniola did not have to invent that pairing. It carried it west already assembled.

Christopher Columbus opened the Atlantic trade in human beings by shipping about five hundred indigenous people from the Caribbean to Spain for sale. He was not improvising. Italian merchants and bankers in the Atlantic ports had been financing sugar estates and dealing in enslaved labour for generations, and the men who backed his voyages knew what a new island with a workable climate was for. What followed was the collapse of the people already living there. Smallpox, influenza and other diseases reached populations with no prior exposure and no immunity, and epidemics of that kind kill adults as readily as children, so households lost the people who planted and fished. Spanish violence and the wrecking of local food systems finished what the pathogens started. Millions of Caribbean islanders died within a few decades. The labour supply the Spanish had counted on disappeared, and the shortage they made themselves is why ships began sailing to Africa for replacements.

By the middle of the sixteenth century roughly ten percent of the people living in Lisbon were black Africans. Portugal had been buying captives on the West African coast since the 1440s, a century before the American plantation complex took shape, and for most of that period the destination was Portugal itself. The people brought into Lisbon worked as domestic servants, dockhands, water carriers, artisans and crew on the same ships that fetched more. A confraternity of black Catholics operated in the city and bought members out of slavery. This changes the shape of the story. African slavery in the Atlantic world was already an ordinary feature of a European capital, visible in the streets and in the parish registers, before Hispaniola had a single sugar mill. The plantation took an institution that already existed and enlarged it beyond anything its originators had pictured, and the enlargement is what turned a commerce into a system that shaped two continents.

Barbados began as a tobacco colony worked largely by indentured Europeans, and it did badly, undersold by Virginia. In the 1640s the planters changed crop. Sugarcane needs a mill, a boiling house, fuel and a large permanent workforce, so changing the crop changed everything else: land consolidated into estates, smallholders were bought out, and the workforce became African and enslaved. Dutch and Sephardic merchants trading out of Brazil and Amsterdam supplied the technical knowledge, the credit and the shipping. Within a generation Barbados was the most valuable ground in the English empire, and every other island copied it. Saint-Domingue copied it later than most and then outgrew all of them, producing more sugar by the 1780s than Barbados and Jamaica together. What the Barbadian model fixed was a ratio, a small planter class governing a large enslaved majority that it could neither replace nor reproduce. That ratio is the precondition for everything that happens in Saint-Domingue in 1791.