Istwa Nou

Systematic shipping of African captives to Brazil began around 1560, when Portuguese planters in Pernambuco and Bahia had sugar mills running and needed a workforce larger than indigenous labour and warfare could provide. The traffic continued until 1850. About forty-four percent of everyone forced across the Atlantic ended in Brazil, more than all the Caribbean islands together and more than twelve times the number landed in mainland North America. It was also organised differently. Ships were fitted out in Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro instead of Lisbon, financed by Brazilian merchants, and paid for in Brazilian goods, tobacco and sugar brandy that African buyers wanted. A direct commercial relationship ran across the South Atlantic between Brazil and Angola for three centuries with Europe barely involved. That is why the African inheritance in Bahia can be traced to particular regions with unusual precision, and why Candomble and Haitian Vodou share structures without either having borrowed from the other.

For sixty years a single king ruled both Spain and Portugal, and the arrangement solved a practical problem. Portugal held the trading posts on the African coast, Spain held the American colonies that wanted labour, and Portuguese ships could deliver captives into Spanish ports without breaking any law. In 1640 the union ended. Portugal recovered its own crown and its vessels lost the legal right to sell in Spanish territory. Madrid then had to license foreigners, which it did through the asiento, a contract granting one company the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonies with enslaved Africans for a term of years. The asiento passed in turn to Dutch, French and British holders and became one of the most fought over prizes in European diplomacy. Santo Domingo, the Spanish half of Hispaniola, sat inside that system and was starved by it, receiving few captives and little investment while the French west filled up. The line that eventually split the island into two countries was drawn partly by who was licensed to sell people where.

1641 is the year that sugar leaving the eastern Caribbean became a quantity worth recording. Barbados and the Leeward Islands had turned to cane, and these first substantial exports open what historians call the sugar revolution. The phrase covers two things happening at once. Land in the islands was reorganised into large plantations built around a mill and a boiling house, and demand for enslaved African labour climbed in step with the tonnage shipped. Slaving vessels that had worked the Spanish and Portuguese markets now had nearer and richer buyers, and the eastern islands became primary destinations rather than places ships passed. From this point the link holds for two centuries: high volume commodity production in the West Indies is paid for by the systematic importation of people from Africa. Saint-Domingue enters the arrangement decades later and pushes it further than any other colony. The mechanism it inherited had been tested on islands a few days' sail to the east.

The Royal African Company was chartered in England in 1672 and became the biggest single slave trading business in the history of the Atlantic. Its charter gave it a monopoly of English commerce with Africa, and it spent heavily on fortified factories along the coast, permanent posts where goods were stored, captives were held, and relations with local rulers were kept up. The monopoly did not last. Independent English merchants wanted a share, Parliament stripped the exclusive privileges at the end of the seventeenth century and again early in the eighteenth, and the company never recovered financially. It was wound up in 1752. The direction of change is what to take from this. Ending the monopoly shrank the company and enlarged the trade, because the number of firms competing to carry people multiplied and English shipments rose. The same thing happened in France, and it is what allowed Saint-Domingue to be supplied at the pace its planters demanded.

The Dutch West India Company was reorganised in 1674 after its first form failed, and the version that emerged was built around the trade in people. It carried captives from the Gold Coast and West Central Africa and delivered them to Dutch possessions and to foreign buyers alike, working through two entrepot islands. Curacao lies off the Venezuelan coast and served the Spanish mainland. St Eustatius sits in the Leeward Islands among the French and British colonies. Neither island had much of a plantation economy of its own. Their business was transit, and their warehouses held goods and people together. The Dutch were losing ground to growing British and French sea power, so they positioned themselves as the middlemen of everybody else's empire. St Eustatius later became the busiest smuggling port in the Caribbean, and Saint-Domingue planters bought there whenever the French supply fell short of what their fields required.

Gold was found in the interior highlands of Brazil in the 1690s, in the country that took the name Minas Gerais, the general mines. The deposits lay in stream beds and called for no engineering, only enormous numbers of people to wash gravel. Portugal supplied them by buying more Africans, turning increasingly to West Central Africa and to the Bight of Benin, and moving the arrivals inland from Rio de Janeiro along a road cut through the coastal mountains. Tens of thousands went up it. The rush pulled population and capital away from the sugar captaincies on the coast and made the interior of Brazil, for the first time, ground worth holding. Minas Gerais remained the premier mining district of the Americas into the middle of the eighteenth century, and it remained so because the ships kept arriving. Gold and sugar bought from the same suppliers, so a strike in a Brazilian creek moved prices on the African coast and changed what was available to the buyers in Saint-Domingue.

The Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years' War in 1697 and, among many other provisions, handed France the western portion of Hispaniola. The territory was named Saint-Domingue. Within fifty years it led the world in sugar, coffee and indigo, and by the 1780s it earned France more than any other colony earned any other European power. All of it rested on one input. The enslaved African population of that third of an island passed five hundred thousand, against roughly forty thousand whites and a similar number of free people of colour. The link between those two facts is what makes the colony worth understanding. Extreme output was bought with extreme mortality, and the deaths had to be covered by continuous imports, which is why the ships never stopped arriving. Saint-Domingue held its place as the most valuable European possession in the Americas until the people producing the wealth destroyed the machinery that produced it.