Charlton Yingling reconstructs the decades leading to February 1822, when President Jean-Pierre Boyer joined Spanish Santo Domingo to Haiti at the invitation of many of its residents. Drawing on archives in several countries, he argues that Dominicans and Haitians spent the revolutionary era in practical cooperation rather than the permanent enmity later nationalism describes. Dominican material and military support helped insurgent leaders survive the early 1790s and press France toward abolition, and Dominicans of many social positions welcomed citizenship in an emancipated state. The book also traces where present-day anti-Haitian feeling came from. Elite Dominicans, alarmed by racial equality, secularism and African-derived religion, retreated into an idealised Spanish inheritance and recycled older anti-French and anti-Black tropes into a modern hostility that later licensed the 1937 massacre and the 2013 citizenship revocations. Belief runs through the account as a motive for action, and figures such as Jean-Francois, Biassou, Petion and Christophe appear in cross-island rather than purely national frames.