Smith follows the people who crossed between Haiti and Jamaica from British emancipation in 1838 to the United States occupation of 1915, and works the two national histories into a single account. Refugees, exiled presidents and their households, merchants, labourers, abolitionists, diplomats and families such as the Espeuts carry the narrative; British consular papers, the Jamaican press, and the writings of travellers and Haitian intellectuals carry the evidence. Kingston emerges as the principal site of the Haitian diaspora, and crises in one island are shown being read through the other, most sharply in 1865, when risings in northern Haiti and the Morant Bay rebellion were linked in the minds of officials and local elites. Late nineteenth-century British writers who contrasted a rescued Jamaica with a doomed republic are set against the Haitian and Jamaican replies they provoked. Caribbean history here is made in the traffic between colonies as much as in imperial policy.