* That tainted his fencer-composer Saint-Georges who, accompanying the duke, backed the revolution and joined a black unit, La
Légion Nationale des Américains et du Midi, funded by the richest free black planter of Saint-Domingue, Julien Raymond, who owned hundreds of slaves but had become an abolitionist. Here he met another mixed-race officer who became famous. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was born in Saint-Domingue; his father was a French planter and slave owner, the Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, while his mother was the enslaved Marie Cessette Dumas, so that he was born a slave. His father was the elder but useless brother of the successful planter Charles, for whom Antoine worked until they argued at which Antoine bought Marie Cessette, then left the white plantations and vanished for thirty years, running a small cacao estate, where Marie Cessette gave birth to Alexandre in 1762. Returning to France to claim his title and estates, Antoine sold Marie Cessette and the children to a baron, then rebought Alexandre, enrolled him in the army and funded his lavish lifestyle. Dumas was a titanic swashbuckler who rose fast in the revolutionary army. Saint-Georges served as colonel of his own Saint-Georges Legion, under Dumas. At the height of the Terror, Saint-Georges, accused of peculation, denounced Dumas. The composer was jailed, and Dumas was about to be arrested when Robespierre fell. Both were lucky to avoid the guillotine. Afterwards Dumas was promoted to général-en-chef – the first general of colour since the Russian general, Abram Gannibal, a protégé of Peter I. Saint-Georges travelled to Saint-Domingue, hoping to find a peaceful revolution of colour. Instead he found Saint-Domingue in a vicious civil war and escaped back to Paris, where he consoled himself with music. ‘I was particularly devoted to my violin,’ wrote this swordsman, violinist, soldier and friend of princes before he died of cancer aged fifty-one. ‘Never before did I play it so well!’
* Women were missing from Robespierre’s vision: the Jacobins associated them with intrigue and the vice and luxury of courts. Olympe de Gouges, one of the first French abolitionists, one of the few revolutionaries to back the Haitian revolution and one of the first feminists, did not live to see the abolition of slavery. Her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne had challenged the patriarchy of the revolution: ‘A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.’ Robespierre sent her to the guillotine where her ‘courage and beauty were unparalleled’.
* One of them was a minor aristocrat, Jean-Baptiste de Gaulle, great-grandfather of the twentieth-century president.
* Among those who joined the EIC’s forces during Wellesley’s rule were two brothers, William and Christopher Biden, who became captains of Indiamen. While William died in Rangoon in 1843 aged fifty-one, Christopher retired to Madras (Chennai), settling with his wife to become a marine storekeeper. A son, Horatio, rose to become colonel of the Madras Artillery, and there were other Bidens out there. One of them, George Biden, was an EIC captain who married an Indian woman, most probably the founder of the Indian Bidens. They are likely to be related to Joe Biden, US president, who called George his ‘great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’.
* The Ming had ruled 1.2 million square miles; by 1790, the Qing ruled 5.7 million – nearly five times larger. The Qing territory was an empire, mainly consisting of ethnically Han Chinese with some non-Chinese attached to its periphery. Since the Shang, Chinese kingdoms had faced the threat of nomadic war bands from the north. Now the threat had vanished, and the triumph of Chinese empire fostered self-congratulatory complacency.
* Phillip was formally in charge of Aotearoa (New Zealand), which was not yet under British control. While a few convicts escaped there and whalers regularly stopped there, Aotearoa was home to the Maori iwi (tribes), descendants of the waves of Polynesians who had settled there as late as 1300, ruled by their rangatiras (chiefs) and often at war with one another.
