Gaffield reconstructs Haiti's first years of independence through its dealings with Britain, France, the United States, Denmark and the Batavian Republic, and finds far more contact than the familiar picture of total isolation allows. The Atlantic wars of the period structured those dealings: belligerent powers and neutral ones operated under different customary rules, which gave Britain a latitude in approaching Haitian leaders that Washington, Copenhagen and Amsterdam did not have.

Much of the argument concerns evidence. Haitian repositories hold little from these years, having suffered disaster, underfunding, political upheaval and theft, and scholars have read that silence as proof of abandonment. Following one document to the next from Paris to Jamaica, London, Washington, the Netherlands and Denmark, Gaffield assembles parliamentary and congressional debate, diplomatic and merchant letters, and court records instead.

What emerges is local agents improvising policy toward Dessalines, Petion and Christophe with little direction from home, and merchants shaping decisions that racism alone cannot explain.

Salt examines how American politicians and diplomats late in the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass among them, worked to talk Haiti into the Atlantic world as a full member. A country the century had opened by disavowing, fearing and refusing to recognize was, in the form of its pavilion at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, to be presented as an example of political, social and economic advancement — modern rather than a problem for modernity.

What Salt calls the Haitian Question is not a single query but a cluster of suppositions about the country, only some of which imply deficiency. Colin Dayan's account of Haiti's stigmatization holds, Salt argues, but does not cover the whole.

Rhetorics of trade reciprocity, political equality and racial inclusion share space with the stories of degeneracy. Geography underlies them: Haiti sits between the Windward and Mona Passages, and American designs on those lanes produced conflicting impulses to denounce, isolate, protect, possess and control it.