Fox studies a mid-twentieth-century turn among Caribbean writers toward Tragedy as a way of thinking about revolution and independence, following Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier and Aimé Césaire as they enlist Henry Christophe (1767-1820) into a usable past. Where the inherited habit was to narrate the Haitian Revolution as Romance, these writers experimented with tragic form to imagine new philosophies of resistance.

The argument extends David Scott's reading of C.L.R. James's 1963 revision of The Black Jacobins, where James trades his epic register for meditation on Tragedy. Fox holds that the revolution's emplotment is tragic regardless, but that Tragedy works as analysis rather than surrender: it can lay bare the colonial subject's dilemma and prompt theories of radical action.

Archival work unsettles the received Christophe, whose reputation as a black tyrant became a racialist palimpsest serving neocolonial ends, though a tragic version surfaces as early as 1823. Walcott and Césaire, Fox argues, saw in him a visionary asserting black humanity.

Swedish readers followed the Haitian Revolution closely. Thomasson notes that Stockholms Posten reported on it twice a week, that Toussaint Louverture's name appeared in its pages 178 times between 1802 and 1804, and that opinion in the capital ran mostly against colonialism.

Commerce followed the coverage. During the 1810s Stockholm sent men out to sell weapons to independent Haiti, and what they wrote adds to the record of those years. An account from 1821 describes the collapse of Henri Christophe's kingdom in the north; a tract from 1819 argues fiercely for decolonizing the Caribbean. Swedish and French merchants alike worked around the French blockade by trading under Sweden's flag through its Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy.

By that decade Sweden had set aside territorial ambition in favor of trade with the new American states. Thomasson reads the whole record, up to recognition in 1825, as further evidence that Haiti's isolation after independence has been overstated.