Field workers are tied to the estates and export crops subsidised

Louverture issued agricultural regulations that reorganised the colony around exports. Planters were pushed to grow cotton, sugar, indigo, ginger, coffee and cocoa, and were offered government subsidies and land concessions to do it. New industries were welcomed and the customs barrier between the eastern and western parts of the island was removed. The mechanism that made the scheme work was coercive. Agricultural labourers were forbidden to leave the plantations, and the police force was given the job of enforcing the labour rules and keeping order among the workers rather than ordinary policing. Woodward pairs this with the road building programme that improved transport, presenting the whole package as recovery rather than as a return to servitude. He does note that Louverture also encouraged the return of white planters and appointed wealthy men of colour and whites as judges and administrators to run the machinery.

Dupuy offers two arguments against the view that the indemnity was the main reason Haiti could not develop its economy. The first is that the dominant classes were unable to turn the peasantry into a proletariat and so revive the sugar plantations that had produced the colony's wealth. Failing that, they had to accommodate a class structure made up mostly of landowning peasants, tenant farmers and sharecroppers producing the coffee, cotton, indigo, cacao and lumber Haiti exported. The landed bourgeoisie therefore drew its wealth from rents extracted from tenants and sharecroppers, from buying and selling the farmers' cash crops on the world market, and from importing and reselling goods at home. Haiti stayed fully integrated into the capitalist world economy all the same, because the surplus value contained in what it produced entered the circuits of industrial and financial capital abroad. Where this account departs from the standard one: Denies that the indemnity was a major cause of nineteenth-century Haitian underdevelopment, pointing instead to the ruling class's failure to proletarianise the peasantry.

In July 1802 the French general Antoine Richepance began deporting the people he had captured while retaking Guadeloupe for Napoleon Bonaparte. About three thousand were shipped out in all. Eighteen hundred of them sailed in a single flotilla bound for Cartagena and Caracas, the two best slave markets within reach. French officers took away their clothes and put them in loincloths so that they would pass for Africans just landed from a slaving vessel. Many had been born in the Caribbean and had served as soldiers in the French army during the revolution. One had owned six coffee plantations and a hundred slaves of his own. Bonaparte had made a point of taking rank and uniforms away from officers of colour, and this was that policy carried to its conclusion. Spanish officials at both ports understood what was being offered and would not let anyone come ashore. They then sent warnings to other governors along the coast.

When war resumed between France and England, the authorities in Jamaica expelled the French refugees on the island who had never been naturalised. Many of them had fled Saint-Domingue a decade earlier and were now moving a second time. At least a thousand reached the territory the United States had just bought from France, and the true figure may be higher. On 26 February 1804 Governor William Claiborne wrote that several hundred French emigrants from Jamaica were on the Mississippi River and that two or three more vessels full of passengers were expected daily. On 13 April he recorded a boat on the river with a hundred and fifty French passengers from Jamaica. Some arrived with enslaved people who were probably never counted as refugees. Baptismal records at the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans show children born there in 1804 and 1805 whose older brothers and sisters had been born in Jamaica between 1798 and 1803, which is the shape of a family that fled twice.