A historical background of Saint Domingue within the wider context of the European colonization will be the focus of the second chapter, which frames the island originally known to the Taíno as Ayiti as a space of human commodification, death, and slave resistance since the first Africans arrived in 1503. Less than twenty years after arrival, enslaved Africans were constantly escaping, taking up residence with remaining Taíno in the mountains, and participating in organized revolts. These rebellions were reactions to the brutal treatment of Taíno and Africans in the encomienda labor system, the emergence of the slave plantation-based sugar economy and processes of racialization, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. In examining the immediate social world of enslaved people, I look at their social lives and recreation, particularly cultural and spiritual creations, considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival.

A historical background of Saint Domingue within the wider context of the European colonization will be the focus of the second chapter, which frames the island originally known to the Taíno as Ayiti as a space of human commodification, death, and slave resistance since the first Africans arrived in 1503. Less than twenty years after arrival, enslaved Africans were constantly escaping, taking up residence with remaining Taíno in the mountains, and participating in organized revolts. These rebellions were reactions to the brutal treatment of Taíno and Africans in the encomienda labor system, the emergence of the slave plantation-based sugar economy and processes of racialization, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. In examining the immediate social world of enslaved people, I look at their social lives and recreation, particularly cultural and spiritual creations, considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival.

Violence was intrinsic to chattel slavery in the New World, and within slave societies in particular. This chapter analyses the level and forms taken by physical violence, especially corporal punishments meted out to enslaved men and women of African descent in early English and French North American and the Caribbean colonies. Violence was a daily reality within every economic unit relying on slave labour, although the intensity of it varied in time and space. The main reason why slaveholders used physical violence was to constrain their enslaved labourers to work and to accept their conditions. Violence against slaves involved masters as well as non-slaveholders and the public authorities. The pervasive and extreme character of violence in slave societies fuelled a debate on the need to regulate it. All social actors acknowledged its prevalence while describing contrasted regimes of violence and ascribing different meanings to the various forms taken by chastisements. Descriptions of violence create two opposite impressions: violence against slaves remained arbitrary, but at the same time it tended to become normalised. The slave system also sparked violent reactions from enslaved men and women.