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themselves with watching from afar as their Afro-European managers in their rotting haciendas half-heartedly tried to continue operations by growing food to provision European slave ships. Other planters simply transferred their interests to Brazil, walking away from their property in São Tomé. Some former overseers acquired their own land and bought slaves to tend it. So did some former slaves. By the mid-eighteenth century, São Tomé’s colonial masters had been replaced by a new elite of “Creoles” who traced their ancestry (or said they did) to the mixed-race children of the Portuguese and the first emancipated slaves. But the new management changed nothing about the plantations themselves. Even though there was little to sell and few customers, these zombie enterprises struggled on, slaves planting under the lash as the forest overran former sugar fields and colonial buildings crumbled into the harbor.

Resistance was a constant presence. It didn’t matter to slaves whether they were owned by Portuguese, Afro-Portuguese, or Africans; they escaped when they could. Runaways joined together to form armed bands in the forest. To guard against their attacks, landowners built wooden forts staffed by gun-toting slaves. Judging by the frequency of successful assaults, the guards were rarely diligent. In a revolt in 1595 as many as five thousand slaves destroyed thirty sugar mills. The destruction was as understandable as it was pointless; the mills were going silent anyway. In a violent stasis, guerrilla warfare between plantations and runaways continued for almost two hundred years.

São Tomé’s plantations eventually did switch to other crops: cocoa (from Brazil) and coffee (from the other side of Africa). These became profitable enough to lure back several hundred Portuguese, who dispossessed the Creoles, taking their land and slaves. Cocoa and coffee covered almost every square inch of arable land by the beginning of the twentieth century. Slavery had long been abolished legally, but Portugal kept it going as a practical matter by instituting special taxes in its African colonies. People unable to pay the levies were shipped to São Tomé to work off their debts, de facto slaves locked at night into dilapidated barracks on the plantation. As other nations joined the chocolate industry and improved manufacturing methods, the island’s antique cocoa plantations became less and less viable. An independence movement sprang up in the 1950s, its primary goal to end the plantation system. When Portugal left in 1975, the country was one of the poorest on earth. The new government nationalized the plantations. It combined them into fifteen super-plantations, then ran them almost exactly as before.

This was the system that crossed the Atlantic to the Americas.

NEW WORLD BORN

Like Juan Garrido, Hernán Cortés died a disappointed man. After subjugating the Triple Alliance, he was awarded a title—Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca—and given his choice of real estate in the lands he had conquered. He chose six spreads in central and southern Mexico: 7,700 square miles in total, an expanse the size of Israel. The biggest chunk, 2,200 square miles of temperate plains south of Mexico City, was where he built his thick-walled, castle-like home. An opulent place, it had no less than twenty-two tapestries, each at least fifteen feet wide; the conqueror, something of a dandy, liked to roam about his tapestries in brocaded velvet jackets and pearl-studded dressing gowns.

Having acquired his property, Cortés threw himself with characteristic energy into a series of entrepreneurial ventures: digging silver mines; establishing cattle ranches and hog farms; panning for gold; opening a shipyard on the Pacific coast; creating a kind of shopping mall in central Mexico City; growing maize, beans, and Garrido’s wheat; lending money, goods, livestock, and slaves to entrepreneurs and adventurers in return for a share of the profits; importing silkworms (and mulberry trees to feed them); and raising big stone structures as monuments to himself. Sugarcane, which