In June 1803 Dessalines wrote to the lieutenant governor of Jamaica offering open ports to British merchants in exchange for arms and manufactures. Gaffield reconstructs what followed, from Jamaican and British archives, to explain why no trade agreement was ever reached.

The obstacle was not simple revulsion at a state governed by former slaves. Officials in Kingston and London were more pragmatic than the literature assumes, floating treaties and weighing commercial gain against the danger to colonial slavery elsewhere; theirs was a calculated mix of isolation, containment and selective engagement. Reports of the massacres of French residents in early 1804 made open dealings awkward, and Nugent came to think a treaty might obstruct imperial aims outright. Meanwhile Curaçao, Saint Thomas and finally Jefferson's United States closed their own trade. The episode, Gaffield argues, is where Haiti entered the international system and was denied a place in it.