This chapter tracks Haitian currency through the decades after independence and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: by the 1840s, every additional sack of coffee Haitians grew and shipped was enriching the private holders of their country's sovereign debt.

The hinge is France's demand that the 1825 indemnity be settled in francs rather than in gourdes. Instead of treating Boyer's 1827 paper issue as a doomed expedient and the currency's collapse as the natural consequence of deficits, the author asks who engineered that collapse, and recasts the paper experiment as an attempt to make coffee serve as money.

The argument runs from the silver that colonial Saint-Domingue exported alongside sugar, through Christophe's and Boyer's use of coffee as an international currency, to a forged-banknote scandal of the 1840s. Consuls, merchants, bankers and counterfeiters together kept a cash crop from being spent as cash.