Istwa Nou

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.

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.