Jean Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843, and Baur treats that quarter century as a sustained exercise in political calculation. Working from British and French travel narratives, diplomatic state papers, parliamentary debates and the periodical press, he follows Boyer from the republican armies of the 1790s through his absorption of the Spanish east of the island, his long manoeuvring with Paris, and the 1825 bargain that purchased French recognition at the cost of an indemnity Haiti could not carry. The price of survival shows throughout: plantation agriculture stayed broken under a coercive rural labour regime, the clergy became an instrument of the presidency, and a rising educated generation turned against him. Baur credits Boyer with holding an isolated and distrusted republic together and winning it standing abroad. The disorder that followed his overthrow, including the secession of Santo Domingo in 1844, is offered as the measure of what he had kept in place.