This chapter tracks Haitian currency through the decades after independence and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: by the 1840s, every additional sack of coffee Haitians grew and shipped was enriching the private holders of their country's sovereign debt.

The hinge is France's demand that the 1825 indemnity be settled in francs rather than in gourdes. Instead of treating Boyer's 1827 paper issue as a doomed expedient and the currency's collapse as the natural consequence of deficits, the author asks who engineered that collapse, and recasts the paper experiment as an attempt to make coffee serve as money.

The argument runs from the silver that colonial Saint-Domingue exported alongside sugar, through Christophe's and Boyer's use of coffee as an international currency, to a forged-banknote scandal of the 1840s. Consuls, merchants, bankers and counterfeiters together kept a cash crop from being spent as cash.

The ordinance Charles X signed in 1825 is remembered for its second article, the 150-million-franc indemnity. Kwass turns to the first: the demi droit, a halving of duties on French goods intended to restore the commerce France had enjoyed when the colony was the richest in the Atlantic world.

Where the indemnity succeeded in extracting money, this commercial privilege failed. Haitian customs officers obstructed it from the outset through a series of deliberate tactics, and the government eventually abolished it; a French consul, casting Haiti as a duplicitous woman, compared the resistance to Penelope weaving by day and unpicking her work by night. Kwass reads this as statecraft rather than mere evasion, driven by fiscal need, revolutionary principle, and a rural population unwilling to purchase an independence already won by arms.

Set against French mercantilism and recent work on sovereignty, the affair shows a young Black republic acting effectively against an informal empire that nonetheless did it lasting harm.

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.