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.