Dessalines is usually read inside a Haitian frame, as founding patriot or as tyrant. Girard puts him back in the Atlantic world he grew up in, drawing on British Colonial Office and Admiralty files together with French and United States records for the years 1802 to 1806. What emerges is a commander who served eight years in the French republican army, encouraged French officers to arrest Louverture, stayed ambivalent about independence long after he had defected, kept white Frenchmen close after the 1804 killings, and pressed Jamaica's governor for a commercial treaty on terms of full sovereignty. He kept the plantations running under officers of color, held cultivators to forced labor, declined to carry revolt abroad, and asked slave traders to land Africans in Haiti to replace a population halved by war. London was ready to treat with him; the governor of Jamaica refused after the massacres.