"Jamaica and , the centerpieces of the eighteenth century British and French colonial systems, respectively, were societies driven by conflict. Built on the dazzling expansion of sugar wealth, these societies reduced 90 percent of their populations to perpetual slavery and consumed the lives of thousands of imported Africans each year. The tiny white minorities that aimed to govern them lived in proximity to, but also in fear of, the African majority that they sought to dominate and profit from. White authorities were particularly frightened by African's use of esoteric spiritual knowledge. In the middle years of the century, these white fears crystallized in each society when heightened activity by enslaved people seemed to threaten the slave system during the events culminating in 1757-58 that became known as Makandal's conspiracy in Saint Domingue, and during Tacky's Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760. Makandal inspired a network of Maroons and plantation slaves whose secret spiritual medicine, understood by slaveholders as poison, was used in religious ceremonies. The combatants involved in Tacky's Rebellion used oaths and spiritually protective rituals to sustain the most substantial armed rebellion in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. These two events, very close to each other in time and in colonies only a couple of hundred miles apart, both involved the ritual use of spiritually powerful substances to strengthen attacks on the plantocracy. They have, however, generally been considered separately by historians. Tacky's Rebellion has been investigated within the category of slave rebellions and in particular as an example of an "ethnic" African rebellion, due to its organization through networks of Akan speakers. The spiritual and religious aspect of the rebellion has been an important element of the story of obeah's development in the Anglophone Caribbean."