The ransom France imposed on Haiti in 1825 as the price of recognition is usually treated as a story that starts in the 1820s. Ghachem pushes it back a century, to John Law's debt-financing experiment of 1719–20 and the collapse that followed.

That, he argues, was when France first bent its Caribbean colony to the borrowing needs of the metropolitan economy. The indemnity is a decisive episode in a much longer subordination rather than its origin, and the repeated devaluation of Haitian currency at the urging of North Atlantic financial interests belongs to the same lineage.

The practical conclusion follows from the historical one. If the dependence is structural, restoring Haiti's monetary sovereignty will take more than settling one debt: it requires confronting an international financial order that has narrowed the country's chances of building durable democratic institutions. The bicentenary of 1825, he suggests, is the moment to attempt it.