The World

Durranis and Saids, Hemingses and Toussaints

AFGHAN CONQUERORS AND ARABIAN KINGS: DURRANIS, SAUDIS AND OMANIS

Nader’s head was sent to Ali Qoli, who declared himself Shah Adil and then hunted down his uncle’s sons and grandsons, not only killing them all, even two-year-olds, but also eviscerating Nader’s pregnant concubines. When the Qajar tribe bid for power, Adil killed their chieftain but castrated his four-year-old son, Agha Muhammad Khan, who decades later would avenge himself on all, restore Iran and become that rare thing, a eunuch who founded a dynasty. The atrocious Adil was himself assassinated and Shahrukh, Nader’s surviving grandson, was blinded, launching decades of turmoil – though out of the flames his bodyguard Durrani thrived while his Arabian allies shook off Iranian power.

The Afghan, riding home, stopped and held a jirga (assembly) which elected him shah, Durr-i-Durran, Pearl of Pearls: he declared independence from Persia, advanced on Kandahar and crushed intriguers under the feet of elephants, then set about creating for the first time the vilayet – in this case meaning the state – that later became Afghanistan. Exploiting the mayhem in Persia and India, he emulated Nader in his conquests but learned from the folly of the Hotaki: he would build an empire around an Afghan core. Marching east, he annexed territory down to the Indus in Sindh (Pakistan), then moved westwards to take Mashhad and Nishapur (Iran) where – honouring his promise to Nader – he established Big Daddy’s blind grandson Shahrukh as puppet.

Durrani was not the only player who benefited from the downfall of Nader:^* in Arabia, two dynasties emerged who still rule today. When the news of Nader’s killing reached Arabia, the Iranian garrison in Oman was invited to a banquet by his local ally, Ahmed bin Said. In his fortress at Barka, he slaughtered them all, founding a new empire that would ultimately extend from the coasts of Pakistan to the shores of Africa. In 1749, he was elected imam,^* a rise that was regarded with hostility by his Arabian rivals – the Saudis, who were building their first kingdom. Ever since Saladin, a single family – founded by Qatada, a sharif, descendant of Muhammad – had ruled Mecca, Jeddah and Hejaz, controlling the revenues of pilgrimage; their position was confirmed by Selim the Grim in 1517. But the Ottomans never ruled the interior of Arabia, Nadj. A typical tiny oasis town, Diriyyah, with just a few hundred inhabitants, was the fief of al-Saud, now led by Muhammad ibn Saud, landowner and merchant. Then in 1744 a former date farmer named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, son of a line of religious notables, arrived in Diriyyah. Wahhab had started to preach after his return from the hajj, disgusted by the impure pollution of Mecca and Medina, tainted by the cults of saintly tombs and holy men. Any mediation between God and man was heresy. Visiting Basra, he had seen Christians and Jews living together under the heterodox Nader.

This firebrand preached holy war to purify Islam, assert tawhid – the doctrine of one God – and create a sacred amirate, based on the return to the origin – salaf – of Islam. Unambitious for himself, Wahhab was adept at forming political alliances while inspiring awe among his followers. ‘What is there beyond truth but error?’ he asked, disowning his father, his brother and some of his children. There was no compromise in his Manichaean worldview: ‘unsheath the sword’ against idolaters, charlatans, Shiites. Any mixing with infidels was evil. He shocked his home town of Uyayna by stoning an adulteress. He was expelled and escaped to Diriyyah, where he made the alliance that changed world history.

‘This oasis is yours,’ said ibn Saud. ‘Don’t fear your enemies. We’ll never throw you out!’

‘You’re the town’s chieftain,’ replied Wahhab. ‘Promise me you’ll wage jihad against Unbelievers. I’ll be leader in religious matters.’

The imam and sheikh immediately launched their jihad, conscripting all men aged eighteen to sixty, later joined by Bedouin cameleteers, conquering the towns of Nadj one by one, and assassinating opponents. After the death of Saud in 1764, his son Abdulaziz, advised by Wahhab, took Riyadh. The Saudi–Wahhabi alliance had boundless ambitions, aiming to conquer not just Mecca and Medina but Iraq, to vanquish even the Ottomans. But first they threatened the Hashemites of Hejaz and the loathed Ibadites of Oman.

Ahmed bin Said and his immediate successors were expanding, making Muscat the entrepôt between India and Africa. As the French expanded their sugar and coffee plantations on Mauritius (Isle de France) and as the military conflict intensified in India, the Omanis supplied the slaves from their east African empire based at Zanzibar, then seizing Kilwa. The sultans of Oman annually traded 50,000 slaves, but even this was dwarfed by what was happening in the Atlantic.

AGAJA, THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH AND THE MONSTER OF JAMAICA

In west Africa, Agaja, the dada (king) of small but aggressive Dahomey, attacked Ardra and Ouidah, Fon kingdoms that traded slaves to the French and British. Agaja, son of the founder Houegbadja, faced constant challenges from his dominant neighbour, the Oyo Kingdom. Its alafins (kings) commanded a formidable cavalry and were enriched by their huge trade in slaves with the Europeans. Dada Agaja accepted Oyan tributary status, but that did not stop him deciding to seize a slice of the Franco-British slave trade that was now reaching a terrible intensity. Agaja watched how the ports of Ouidah and Allada (Ardra) generated massive profits. ‘The king [Haffon of Ouidah] is an absolute boar,’ noted an English naval surgeon. ‘If he can’t obtain a sufficient number of slaves he marches an army and depopulates. He and the king of Allada adjoining commit great depredations inland.’

Ruling from Savi, his capital, surrounded by the factories of the Europeans, Haffon sat on a throne given by the Compagnie Française des Indes Occidentales, wearing a crown presented by the British RAC, sourcing and controlling his human merchandise. In 1724, Agaja of Dahomey first seized Allada, then in 1727 Ouidah, killing Haffon and shattering his occult power by eating his sacred pythons. When Agaja purged dissidents, he sold them as slaves to Brazil. Amassing a regular army of 10,000, he expanded the existing female bodyguard, recruiting female prisoners, manumitted slaves, runaways, whom he trained to kill and seize slaves to sell to the Europeans. Based at Agaja’s capital at Abomey, these forces terrified their neighbours with attacks on innocent villages in which old and young were slaughtered while strong males and females were kidnapped and marched to the slave markets. Even today, their descendants recount stories of these exploits. The female guards only reflected the power of women at the Dahomean court, where all the inhabitants of the Big House palace were called ahosi – royal wives – including the male ministers, while the actual princesses, all of whom had special roles at court, sat as a Council of Wives, which could overrule the dada. (In Oyo, when an alafin was unpopular, he was strangled by his wives.)

Agaja and his son Tegbesu, who succeeded him in 1740, ran a slave-trading monopoly, earning an estimated £250,000 per annum. Tegbesu killed or enslaved his rivals including his brother Truku, who was sold to Brazil. Tegbesu negotiated deals with the Europeans, receiving them ‘on a handsome chair of crimson velvet, ornamented with a gold fringe, smoking tobacco, with gold-laced hair, a plume of ostrich feathers, a rich crimson damask robe’. Under the Dahomeans, Ouidah became west Africa’s busiest slave port: after 1700, between twenty-five and fifty ships sailed annually to the Americas.

Nearby, west of Dahomey, inland from the Gold Coast (Ghana), an Akan leader, Osei Tutu, united bands of hunters and farmers, using Dutch guns, to defeat a rival gold-rich kingdom, Denkyira, and crown himself asantehene – king. In 1680, creating a capital inland at Kumasi, Osei Tutu advised by his priest Anokye adopted a curved seat of solid gold, the Sika Dwa Kofi, delivered from the sky, as the mark of his kingship and the spirit of the Asante people. After the founder’s death in 1719, his successor Opoku Ware ‘ruled violently as a tyrant, delighting in his authority’, noted the Gonja people, who were victimized by Asante. ‘People of all horizons feared him greatly.’

The asantehenes were chosen from the family by an assembly of 200, dominated by four families, advised in power by a council of eighteen officials and the queen mother – ohemmaa. Their palace was ‘an immense building’; their craftmanship in gold trophy heads and jewellery was exquisite. Among their medical traditions, they had long practised a form of inoculation against smallpox. By the end of the century, 25,000 lived in their capital (at a time when Glasgow had 77,000, New York 40,000) and they ruled around one million. The Asante initially imported Portuguese slaves from Angola to work their mines and farms, serve at court and, at the death of asantehenes, suffer sacrifice. But now they raided the interior to supply slaves to the British and Dutch, trading gold, cloth and nuts in return for weapons and metals.

The enslaved were force-marched, chained in atrocious coffles by Afro-European agents, many of them female. At Cacheu, Portugal’s west African slave port, the most powerful trader was Bibiana Vaz, who launched a coup against another female slave trader, Crispina Peres, who was accused of ‘fetishism’ (surely a syncretized version of Catholicism and African religion) and deported to Lisbon to be tried by the Inquisition.

These agents delivered their victims to the fearsome slave castles where the transatlantic slave trade, dominated by the British, French and Dutch, was intensifying. It is currently estimated that 6,494,619 slaves were traded across the Atlantic in the period 1701–1800, over half the total of the entire Atlantic slave trade between 1492 and 1866. British ships transported over three million persons between 1618 and 1807, mostly during the eighteenth century. The French transported over two million between 1625 and 1848. It was a well-tried coercive system, but there was resistance.

Out of 36,000 voyages, there were 500 rebellions. The story of the Dutch slaver Neptunus demonstrates why they so rarely succeeded: on 17 October 1785, off the west African coast, 200 enslaved prisoners were delivered via canoes by African slave traders to Neptunus. The prisoners rebelled and seized the ship, but African slave hunters – paid to recapture escapees – surrounded it, aided by British slavers. Faced with recapture, the courageous rebels lit the gunpowder in the hold and committed mass suicide.

The diabolic cruelties of the British plantations were so much part of settler life that a planter on Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood, recorded his atrocities cheerfully in his diary. Younger son of a Lincolnshire farmer, he arrived aged twenty to become overseer of a large plantation in Jamaica named Egypt. The island was still recovering from a prolonged revolt by runaway slaves led by two armed Maroon communities under Queen Nanny and Colonel Cudjoe, both Akan from Gold Coast, who worsted the British enough to win their freedom – in return for their aid in crushing future slave revolts. Like many planters, Thistlewood hired the Maroons to hunt down runaways, describing Cudjoe’s ‘majestic look’ with ‘a feather’d hat, Sword at his Side, gun upon his Shoulder … Bare foot and Bare legg’d’. Nine years after he arrived, Thistlewood witnessed another slave revolt led by Tacky and Queen Akua, both of whom were hunted down by soldiers, settlers’ militiamen and Cudjoe’s Maroons.

The revolts shocked the British – the first of the rebellions that, as much as the abolitionist campaign, gradually discredited slavery. Buying his own estate, Breadnut, Thistlewood lived the genteel life of a gentleman of the Enlightenment, ordering scientific books from London and living with and having children with a female slave, Phibbah – while simultaneously ruling his slaves with demented sadism, punishing them with whippings, shacklings, picklings (when the escapees would beaten, with salt pickle and pepper rubbed into their wounds) and a penalty he proudly invented for a slave called Derby who had eaten sugar cane. He called it ‘Derby’s Dose’, and in January 1756 recorded: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt [a fellow slave] shit in his mouth.’ When another slave, Port Royal, ran away, Thistlewood ‘Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.’ Thistlewood recorded 3,852 of his own rapes (including gang rapes) of 138 women, many underage, carelessly spreading VD.

Most of the Enlightened luminaries – from Diderot in Paris to Samuel Johnson in London – were horrified by slavery. Voltaire had a mixed record, deploring the institution, regarding Africans as cousins – ‘no one could treat their relative more horribly’ – and in his novel Candide asking, ‘At what price do we eat sugar?’ Yet he regarded Africans as having a different origin to Europeans.^* Diderot and Guillaume Thomas Raynal denounced slavery in their Histoire philosophique des deux Indes and approved slave rebellion. Yet the German philosophe Kant opposed any ‘fusing of races’ and in his essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’ supported slavery, believing it reflected a hierarchy of races with the whites at the top, Asians and Africans in the middle (‘the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized … he falls of his own accord into savagery’) and Native Americans ‘far below the Negro’. Kant’s racist ideology was unusual in these circles, yet Euro-American slavery required a theoretical justification for its unchristian dominance, the violence necessary to maintain it and the luxurious lifestyle and vast profits it delivered to its masters. Racialized ideas about Africans were not invented by European slave masters in the eighteenth century: medieval people were obsessed with heredity and breeding; Arab slave traders and intellectuals like Ibn Khaldun propagated racialized ideas about Africans not that different from those of European slave owners at a time when slavery was not based on racism at all since slaves were as likely to be white as black. But now, in a more scientific age, a more systematic approach was on the rise: in 1774, Edward Long, English judge and Jamaican planter, furnished a racist ideology in his History of Jamaica, suggesting that Africans were a separate ‘race of people’ who were ‘indistinguishable from the animal’, with ‘bestial manners, stupidity and vices’. This new strain of an old idea was designed to justify chattel slavery. ‘Slavery was not born of racism,’ wrote Eric Williams. ‘Racism was born of slavery.’

In London and Paris, slave-owning sugar barons now fused with the nexus of aristocrats, merchants and India nabobs: Henry Lascelles, scion of Yorkshire gentry, arrived in Barbados at twenty-two, collecting Caribbean plantations while maintaining a British life, becoming an EIC director and MP. By the time he committed suicide in 1753, he was the richest man in England, leaving half a million pounds, a fortune that funded the establishment of a classic British dynasty – the estates, mansions and earldom of Harewood.

Unlike the laws in the Americas, British common law did not recognize slavery. In 1729 slave owners petitioned the attorney-general, who backed them, giving his opinion that ‘a slave coming from the West Indies to Great Britain does not become free’. Slaves were openly advertised: ‘To be sold. A pretty little Negro boy about nine years old’ reads one in the Daily Advertiser. Yet, despite the 1729 opinion, while slavery was entirely legal on ships making the Atlantic crossing and in the colonies, its status was ambiguous in the metropolis. It was the same in France, where a slave could sue for freedom in the Admiralty court.

In both countries, there were many freed slaves and even more people of mixed race. We will look at Paris later, but there may have been 15,000 black Britons by mid-century. And there were rare exceptions to the horrors: in 1752, a slave owner, Colonel Bathurst, sold his Jamaican estates and returned with a seven-year-old slave called Francis Barber, probably his natural son, whom he freed in his will. After a short adventure in the navy, Barber became the much loved servant of Samuel Johnson, the closest British equivalent of Voltaire, rambunctious lion of the London Enlightenment, wit and lexicographer. An opponent of slavery, he educated Barber, making him a figure in literary London and, on his death, one of his heirs.^*

But these were exceptional characters: most enslaved persons were not rescued by duchesses or scholars but died young on ships mid-Atlantic or on Caribbean plantations.

The Atlantic trade was one part of a world of bondage, but its record-keeping allows historians to estimate that in total over four centuries around 12.6 million were enslaved. The Portuguese/Brazilians transported almost half of the 12.6 million; the British a quarter; the French 10 per cent, the Dutch 5 per cent. During the four modern centuries, it is likely that over thirty million people were enslaved: twelve million across the Atlantic, approximately ten million from east Africa across the Indian Ocean, and ten million Turks, Russians, Georgians and Circassians from the Eurasian steppes. That does not include the Barbary–Moroccan trade in western Europeans nor the several million Serbs and Albanians enslaved by the Ottomans: some of these enslaved children became viziers and valide sultans, but that does not diminish their tragedy. Many Islamic slaves were females who served in households – but domestic service almost always included sexual abuse. It is estimated that the Crimean khans alone enslaved four million. Since there is no paperwork whatsoever for any of these trades, it is likely they are grossly underestimated.

From Ouidah and other slave castles, the ships were loaded with hundreds of slaves in their holds ‘crammed together like herrings in a barrel’ and set off on the dread trip to Portuguese Brazil, French Saint-Domingue or the British ‘Old Dominion’ – Virginia.

THREE AMERICAN FAMILIES: HEMINGSES, JEFFERSONS AND TOUSSAINTS

In 1735, a newly arrived ‘full-blooded African’ woman, in the words of her great-grandson, who had been enslaved in west Africa, was either raped or seduced by an English sea captain named Hemings at Williamsburg, possibly arriving as a captive on his slave ship. Slaves preserved their African origins as baKongo or Akan as long as they could. Masters, fearful of such affinities, were keen to sever any dangerous links, granting fresh enslaved identities with new, often classical names: there were many Hannibals and Caesars. Her name might have been Parthenia.

She became pregnant. In 1662, the Virginians had ruled that partus sequitur ventrem – if the mother was a slave, the child was. So when she delivered a daughter, Elizabeth known as Betty, Captain Hemings offered ‘an extraordinarily high price’ for his ‘own flesh’, but her owner refused.

Hemings tried to kidnap the baby but finally gave up. Betty Hemings found herself owned by Martha Eppes, who had inherited her from her father, himself descended from founding settlers who had acquired lands. In 1746, Martha married a self-made frontier lawyer and slave broker named John Wayles, born in Lancashire, England, who had been brought over as a gentleman’s indentured servant and had gained an estate and wealth – an early version of what would one day be called the American Dream. All the American colonies had elected assemblies – Virginia’s was called the House of Burgesses – dominated by planters of tobacco who created a legal infrastructure to protect their human property and their lives against any rebellion: 40–50 per cent of Virginians were slaves. In 1723, Virginia decreed that ‘no negro, mulatto, or Indian slaves shall be set free upon any pretense’. Wayles became the owner of Elizabeth Hemings.

Two years after the marriage, Martha Wayles died giving birth to a second daughter, named Martha after her. Wayles married two more wives, both of whom died young, after which he took Betty Hemings, described as a ‘bright mulatto’ woman – ‘bright’ meaning light – as a ‘concubine’. Although society disapproved, this was so common it was almost universal. ‘The pervasive doctrine of white supremacy supposedly inoculated whites against interracial mixing,’ writes Annette Gordon-Reed, but that proved ‘unreliable when matched against the force of human sexuality’. Wayles and Hemings had six children together. It is clear that sexual bondage was always a part of enslavement, whether in pagan Rome, Islamic Istanbul or here in Virginia: sex between owners and slaves was ‘on the terms of the males, beyond the eyes and scrutiny of the outside world … either through rape, using outright or implied force, or, in some cases, when men and women were genuinely attracted to each other’. It is impossible to evaluate such relationships on our terms: ‘enslaved women practically and legally could not refuse consent’ and testimony ‘makes clear the prevalence of rape during slavery’.

When Wayles died, Betty, her children and the rest of his 124 slaves would be inherited by his daughter Martha – and by her future husband, one Thomas Jefferson, who had been born in 1743, not long after Betty.

Jefferson, scion of the Virginian slave-owning elite, was growing up nearby. His father Peter was an adventurous second-generation frontiersman who managed to survey new lands, pushing the frontier westwards, mapping a route to the Allegheny Mountains. He served in the House of Burgesses and as a justice of the peace, while amassing 7,000 acres and sixty slaves, and creating the genteel, intellectual lifestyle that produced Thomas. A child of the Enlightenment, Thomas read Locke, Newton, Voltaire and played the violin, telling his daughter that ‘there’s not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me nor anything that moves’. Six foot two, slim with light red hair, hazel eyes, pointed nose, Jefferson was sociable yet inscrutable, polite and ostentatiously frank yet privately ambitious. Behind his charming gloss, he was also passionate and highly strung, suffering stress-induced migraines. On his father’s death, he inherited 5,000 acres. At twenty-six, after training as a lawyer, Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses. Martha Wayles meanwhile had married and been widowed. In the compact colonial society, it was only a matter of time before he came to call.

Just as Elizabeth Hemings’s mother arrived in Virginia, Hippolyte, enslaved son of an Allada governor, probably captured and sold by King Agaja of Dahomey, was delivered to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, half of the island of Hispaniola (the other half being a Spanish colony, Santo Domingo). In one of slavery’s millions of daily tragedies, Hippolyte’s wife Affiba and their children were also captured but traded separately to Saint-Domingue. Without knowing they were toiling on a nearby estate, Hippolyte married a woman named Pauline, a fellow Allada. When Affiba discovered this, she died of sorrow. Hippolyte and Pauline had five children, the first of whom was a son: Toussaint.

‘I was born a slave but nature gave me the soul of a free man,’ recalled Toussaint, who grew up on the Bréda sugar estate owned by an absent French aristocrat, Count Pantaléon de Bréda, that gave him his name Toussaint Bréda. Working from a young age as a cattle herder, he was trained by his father in Allada medicine and baptized as a Catholic while also revering voodoo; he spoke Fon, French and creole. Toussaint knew the tragedy of slavery ‘to tear son from his mother, brother from sister’.

Both his parents died young, after which Toussaint was ‘adopted’ by an Allada freedman and African-born friend of his mother, an example of the informal affiliations that made the unbearable bearable. Most slaves in Saint-Domingue were worked to death before they reached thirty-seven, then replaced by new arrivals from Africa known as bossales. Sixty per cent of male slaves, who on average survived three years, were worked to death – approximately 500,000 in total. It was an environment that encouraged what the Haitian intellectual baron de Vastey later called ‘crapulous debauchery’. The Code Noir was widely ignored, and French masters treated their slaves atrociously: many were raped and tortured in ingenious ways, including by packing them with explosives to blow them up, known by the French as ‘a little powder in the arse’, buried alive, burned in furnaces, genitally mutilated, routinely forced to wear muzzles.

The French colons lived a life of luxury on Saint-Domingue,^* but all the while they were terrified of being murdered by their slaves, whom they characterized as both lazy livestock and menacing aliens. Society was strictly divided between the whites, the growing population of mixed-race people and black freedmen who often owned slaves themselves – and the slaves.

The way to survive was to become a coachman or a servant in the planter’s mansion:^* Toussaint was promoted by his estate manager Bayon to coachman. As he grew up, he witnessed the rebellion of François Makandal, a one-armed holy man (oungan) from west Africa – he spoke some Arabic – who practised rituals that, merged with Catholicism, became Haitian voodoo. The colons claimed that Makandal had poisoned them though new research shows this was an outbreak of anthrax. Nonetheless Makandal led an insurgency that was a lethal threat, so he was captured and burned alive in Port-au-Prince. The slaves believed that his spirit escaped the flames.

‘The virtuous Bayon de Libertad’ manumitted Toussaint, who leased his own slaves on his own farm. Although he married his godfather’s daughter Suzanne and had children with her, he was a prolific lover who had many paramours, black and white. Meanwhile he joined the underground of slave brotherhoods and voodoo believers who started to dream of revolution. Yet Toussaint’s worldview was never racialized. A product of both Makandal’s world of African voodoo and kalinda combat dances mixed with his Catholic faith and his Enlightenment, he believed in the potential of human nature.

At the same moment, these two remarkable Americans, Toussaint and Jefferson, were reading the same books – Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal – and yet dreaming of different versions of freedom.

Maria Theresa did not know much about America but a remote American massacre led by a young colonialist now gave her the opportunity to destroy Frederick the Great.

MIMI AND ISABELLA: YOUR ARCHANGELIC LITTLE BUM

On 28 May 1754, in the vastness of Ohio County, a young British officer led his force of 300 Americans and Mingo Native Americans in an ambush of French and Iroquois troops under Sieur de Jumonville. French and British officers were competing to colonize the American interior.

The officer, George Washington, aged twenty-two, six foot tall and strapping, was, like Jefferson, the son of a wealthy planter descended from the first settlers who owned thousands of acres and many slaves. Washington’s father died young, his mother was frostily overbearing and he grew up reticent, solid and cautious. But like Cromwell he was much more canny and ambitious than he ever let on.

Thanks to his friendship with the Fairfax family, descendants of Cromwell’s commander in the civil war, who controlled five million American acres, Washington at sixteen had started surveying the Shenandoah Valley. By the time he was twenty, he owned 2,000 acres. During these early years, he fell in love with Sally Fairfax, the dazzling wife of his best friend and patron, the singular passion of a phlegmatic life that he later referred to as ‘a thousand tender passages’. After this romantic crisis, he married a rich, plain widow, Martha Custis, who brought with her land and three hundred more slaves, making him one of the richest men in the colonies. Jefferson noted that Washington ‘always ruled severely’. Indeed he was ‘first brought up to govern slaves, then an army then a nation’. Washington constantly watched for his slaves’ laziness, complaining that ‘there’s not to be found so idle a set of rascals’. When his slaves ran away – 7 per cent of them did – he was tireless in recapturing them. He sent badly behaved slaves to early deaths in Caribbean plantations.

Tracking the enemy in Ohio County, Washington earned the nickname Conotocaurius – village destroyer – from his Mingo auxiliaries. When his force caught up with the French and Iroquois, they ambushed and slaughtered them: many were scalped. While Washington was interrogating Jumonville, one of his Mingo allies split the captive’s head with a tomahawk.^*

When the news reached London, the flappable prime minister, Thomas Pelham, duke of Newcastle, one of the brothers who had continued Walpole’s system, studied the map, struggling to find these obscure places. ‘Annapolis must be defended to be sure,’ he huffed. ‘Where is Annapolis?’ Newcastle had run British foreign policy for thirty years, but it was the first time a British statesman had needed to master America. Now even he realized that a colonial war against France was inevitable: the French were challenging British interests in America, India and west Africa. Newcastle had always backed Maria Theresa against Prussia – his ‘Old System’ – but in a dizzying change of dance partners he ended up backing Frederick the Great against Maria Theresa, who in turn found some surprising allies who were threatened by Prussia. Louis XV and his mistress Pompadour loathed Frederick, as did Peter the Great’s steely blonde daughter, Empress Elizaveta of Russia: Frederick did not help his cause by calling Pompadour and Elizaveta ‘the whores’.^* Maria Theresa dramatically switched alliances, allying herself to her traditional enemy, France, and they were joined by Russia.

Funded by British subsidies but now facing a lethal coalition, Frederick launched a pre-emptive strike into Bohemia and besieged Prague, unleashing the first world war. At Kolín on 18 June 1757 Maria Theresa’s armies smashed Frederick’s: as his troops wavered, he cried, ‘Rascals, you want to live for ever?’ Forty per cent of them were killed and the king barely escaped with his life. ‘Phaeton has finally crashed to the ground,’ sneered his jealous brother Prince Heinrich. ‘We don’t know what will become of us.’ But Frederick, aided by Austrian inertia and Russian unreliability, darted at the French, defeating them at Rossbach, then routed the Austrians at Leuthen, his greatest victories.

But the Cossacks were coming. ‘I mean to continue this war,’ said Elizaveta, who owned 5,000 dresses, ‘even if I’m compelled to sell all my diamonds and half my clothes.’ Pompadour agreed: ‘I hate the king of Prussia … let’s demolish this Attila of the North.’ Maria Theresa just called him ‘the Monster’. Frederick sneered at ‘the first three whores in Europe united together’. In August 1758, at Zorndorf, he fought the ferocious Russians, a gruelling draw of a butchers’ battle. At year later, at Kunersdorf, the Russians smashed him. ‘My coat is riddled with musket balls,’ he wrote, ‘and I’ve had two horses killed beneath me.’ He considered suicide: ‘It’s my misfortune to be alive … I’ve only 3,000 men out of 48,000 left … Everything is lost … I shan’t outlive the downfall of my fatherland. Farewell for ever.’ Russian cavalry raided Berlin. Frederick’s position was desperate: ‘My only motto now is conquer or die.’ Gambling was all that was left: ‘I must embark on a great adventure and play double or quits.’

Maria Theresa, anxiously charting the slow manoeuvres of her generals and the intermittent ferocity of her Russian ally, watched his demolition with satisfaction. Meanwhile in 1760 she arranged the marriage of her impressive but dogmatic nineteen-year-old son Joseph to Isabella of Parma, aged eighteen, a dark-eyed, olive-skinned sensual brunette, who for a short time illuminated his obstinate egotism and sparked passion among the Habsburgs. Isabella, a clever, wild, brooding romantic who wrote on philosophy and economics, was instantly adored by the empress-queen and her husband (sharing his love of music and philosophy). Yet neither noticed Isabella fall in love with Joseph’s cleverest sister Mimi, still only seventeen, her mother’s confidante and favourite.

‘Believe me, my greatest, I can say only, joy, is to see you and be with you,’ Isabella told Mimi in one of more than 200 love letters. ‘Never in heaven or earth, neither because of absence or anything or anyone else, shall I change in this.’ Her passion was volcanic: ‘I adore you, I burn for you.’ After sending one of her letters, she wrote, ‘Here I am again, my all too cruel sister, on tenterhooks until I know the effect of what you have been reading … I can think of nothing but that I am head over heels in love like a fool. Because you are so cruel, that you really shouldn’t be loved yet how can one help it if one knows you?’

After giving birth to a daughter, she emerged even more passionate, her mind a jumble of ‘Philosophy, morals, stories, profound reflections … and rapture for you’. They arranged secret meetings around Joseph. ‘If the archduke goes out, I’ll be at your house,’ Isabella told Mimi.

‘I love you furiously and yearn to kiss you,’ Mimi wrote. ‘To kiss and be kissed by you. I kiss your archangelic little bum.’

‘Pray for fine weather if you wish to possess me,’ wrote Isabella. ‘I kiss everything you let me kiss.’

Isabella called Mimi ‘the most adorable creature’ whom she was ‘very inclined to suffocate by kisses’. Yet she was weirdly macabre: ‘Death is a good thing.’ Mimi was triggered by Isabella’s fatalism: ‘Allow me to tell you that your great longing for death is an outright evil thing. It means either you are selfish or want to seem a heroine.’ Did Isabella crave death as an escape from an unbearable love or did her wild love express her edgy fatalism?

At the height of this intense relationship, the Habsburgs invited a musical family to perform for them. The empress adored music and singing in public. Joseph played the keyboards, Leopold and Marie Antoinette the harpsichord and all the girls could sing.

On 13 October 1762, the Habsburgs gathered at Schönbrunn to watch the little pianist Wolfgang Mozart play. The six-year-old was accompanied by his family. His father Leopold, a gifted, driven but morose violinist and assistant Kapellmeister of the prince-bishop of Salzburg, descended from a creative family, early recognized that his son was a prodigy: at five, Mozart composed his first piece. Now Leopold played violin, then Wolfgang played harpsichord and, when challenged by Emperor Franz, he placed a cloth across the keys and played perfectly. Archduchess Isabella played violin. ‘Suffice to say that Wolferl [Mozart] sprang on to the lap of the empress, put his arms around her neck and vigorously kissed her,’ wrote Leopold Mozart. The next day the Mozarts received a big payment. Maria Theresa was so delighted by Wolfgang that she sent him a special lilac brocade costume that surely contributed to his future taste for sartorial extravagance.

Mozart was ‘a fundamentally happy man’, writes Jan Swafford, witty, exuberant, energetic, constantly infused with musical ideas of power and beauty – very different from the cliché of the brooding genius expected by the Romantics in the next century. ‘Wolfgang is extraordinarily jolly,’ wrote his stern father, ‘but a bit of a scamp too.’ Leopold was moody, disappointed by his own career – ‘All men are villains,’ he told Mozart – but his wife was playful and scatological. In his teens, Mozart found a mischievous partner in his cousin Maria Anna Thekla: ‘The two of us are made for each other because she’s a bit of a rogue too.’ Their sexual explorations inspired his pungent letters: ‘I’ll kiss your hands, face, knees and your … whatever you permit me to kiss.’ Even while performing for aristocrats he privately guffawed as ‘a number of high nobility were present: Duchess Kickass, Countess Pisshappy, also Princess Smellshit with her two daughters’. But he was already composing: ‘The concerto I’ll write him in Paris, it’s fitting / For there I can dash it off while I’m shitting.’

Inspired by Vienna, Leopold took Mozart on a European tour to Paris (where traumatically his mother would later die of typhus), London and back to Vienna. There Joseph would become his patron.

Joseph was already wildly in love with Isabella when she played so well with the Mozart family. Isabella managed him excellently while, perhaps for Mimi, writing a treatise on men as ‘useless animals’, looking forward to female empowerment.

Then: disaster. After the premature birth of a second daughter whom Isabella named after Mimi, she caught smallpox. Her last letter was to Mimi: ‘God is too benevolent not to let me have the pleasure of kissing you again … Goodbye, be well.’ Isabella died aged twenty-one, then the baby followed.

Mimi was poleaxed – though she later married happily – but Joseph was inconsolable: ‘I have lost everything, the object of all my tenderness, my only friend.’ He told his mother, ‘I’ll never marry again … my existence is strained to breaking point.’ The queen-empress immediately ordered him to marry a Wittelsbach princess, Josepha of Bavaria. He resisted. Mimi, placing the dynasty first, showed Joseph her letters from Isabella in order to shatter his illusions, though he did not understand them. Acquiescing, he hated his new wife – ‘short, without a vestige of charm, her face covered in spots, her teeth horrible’ – and complained to a friend, ‘My wife is unbearable, they want me to make children. How can I? If I could put the tip of a finger on the tiniest part of her body not covered with spots, I would try.’ Observing her brother’s meanness, Mimi reflected, ‘If I were his wife, I’d hang myself on a tree in Schönbrunn,’ but even their mother conceded that Josepha was ‘not agreeable’. Within two years, Josepha too was dead of smallpox, that relentless killer.

As Frederick manoeuvred and negotiated desperately, William Pitt, the new prime minister, grandson of John ‘Diamond’ Pitt and son of Robert who had smuggled the jewel out of India, orchestrated a multifront war that delivered an astonishing array of victories from America and Africa to India.

* Nader’s Georgian ally King Hercules II, who had accompanied him to Delhi, united Kartli and Kakheti to create the first united Georgia for many centuries.

* The Omanis were Ibadites, followers of an eighth-century scholar who rejected certain Sunni and Shia doctrines, and were ruled by elected imams from a single family who had expelled the Portuguese and returned to their traditional trade on the Swahili coast of Africa.

* Voltaire was even ruder about Jews, whom he described as ‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition’.

* More outrageous was Julius Soubise, a manumitted slave originally named Othello who became the fencing teacher of an ageing society beauty, Catherine Hyde, duchess of Queensberry. Treated as her adopted son, renamed after a French duke, he became a fop, seducer and rake among the society dandies known as the Macaronis for their European style (Soubise was called the ‘Mungo Macaroni’ by the news-sheets), and probably her lover But when he was accused of raping a housemaid, the duchess sent him to India, where he founded a Calcutta riding school, dying after a riding accident.

* A typical French plantation owner, Gaspard Tascher, bought estates in Martinique and La Pagerie in Saint-Domingue, providing him with an aristocratic surname and funding a lifestyle that allowed his son to serve as a page at Louis XVI’s court. His granddaughter, Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, brought up by slaves, ruined her teeth eating sugar, so that when the creole arrived in Paris to marry an aristocrat her mouth was just full of black stumps; she was barely educated, yet she possessed conquering charm. Later known as Empress Josephine, she and Toussaint would cross paths.

* As in Virginia, female house slaves, often teenagers, were the prey of their proprietors. In Guadeloupe, on his Saint-Georges plantation, a French planter called George de Bologne had a son with a maid, Nanon, aged seventeen. The son Joseph could not inherit nobility but, indulged by his father, he was educated in music, classics and philosophy and was later sent to boarding school, where it turned out he was a musical prodigy, virtuoso violinist and composer.

* A month later when the French counter-attacked and captured Washington, he was lucky not to get a tomahawk in the head himself.

* Elizaveta, a dashing blonde amazon wearing a breastplate and riding a sleigh, had seized power in a coup. She had inherited her father’s ruthlessness and proved a capable if inconsistent and whimsical autocratrix, while enjoying many simultaneous affairs with young lovers. Chief of these was the handsome Ukrainian Cossack chorister Alexei Razumovsky, whose brother Kyril she appointed as the grand hetman of the Cossacks: he was the last semi-independent hetman before 1918.