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.

Joseph Bunel served Toussaint Louverture and then Dessalines as a diplomatic and commercial envoy; Marie Bunel, born Fanchette Estève, spent her adult life trading in Cap Français and later Philadelphia. Girard reconstructs both careers from French, British and American archives.

He was a white Frenchman, she a free black Creole, but the argument is that ambition and money shaped their paths more than race did. After years there as a merchant and plantation manager, Joseph took an administrative role under Louverture from 1798, negotiating terms of trade and non-aggression with Britain and the Americans while the Quasi-War ran, before serving as paymaster. That proximity to the regime got him deported when the Leclerc expedition arrived.

Marie, already prosperous before 1791, kept trading straight through the revolution; closeness to Louverture and Henri Christophe never became political engagement. Persecuted with her husband, she rebuilt her business in Philadelphia and returned to Haiti only in 1810, after which the record thins out.