Morocco borrowed from Britain to pay Spain and lost its independence

Morocco was the one Maghreb state the Ottomans never governed, and it spent the nineteenth century holding Europeans at arm's length. Under Sultan Mawlai Sulaiman early in the century the isolation was near total and European merchants worked under tight restriction. Then the region reached in. Moroccan help for Abd al-Qadir's resistance in Algeria brought a French incursion in 1845. Spain sent an army that inflicted heavy defeats, and in 1860 the sultan agreed to a large indemnity. He borrowed from Britain to pay it, and the loan carried British influence over Moroccan commerce with it. That was the hinge. Between 1873 and 1894 Mawlai al-Hasan extended the state into the Atlas and northern Mauritania and held a striking degree of autonomy, but the debt had already opened the door. In 1912 Morocco passed under European control and was divided between France and Spain. Across the Sahara the answer to a Europeanised Mediterranean was a harder and more militant Islam, which supplied the nationalist movements of the century that followed.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843. He is remembered for two pieces of legislation. The rural code of 1826 tied the Haitian peasant to a marginal existence and went on doing so long after his fall. The penal code of 1835 placed Vodou under the heading of superstitions and made its practice illegal, punishable by fine and imprisonment. One article specifically exacted fines and prison from anyone who made zombies or cast spells, which meant the state had written a belief about the dead into its criminal law and then undertaken to prosecute people under it. Practitioners responded the way people respond to that: they went further into secrecy, and priests surrounded their worship with mystery and with a reputation for power. Both effects outlasted Boyer by more than a century, and the sensational literature about Haiti drew much of its raw material from the court cases the article produced.

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.

Geggus argues that the blacksmith Gabriel's conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia looks very much like a response to the abolitionism of the French Republic rather than to the Haitian Revolution. At that moment an undeclared war ran between France and the United States, and Frenchmen living locally were said to have had a hand in it. Historians routinely link the conspiracy to Saint-Domingue, but contemporary sources show no trace of the conspirators discussing it, and the evidence of the black revolution's impact on Virginian slaves is in his judgement remarkably slight. He makes the same move about the attempt launched from Saint-Domingue in 1799 to raise a slave insurrection in Jamaica: the initiative came from Paris and was organised by the French official Philippe Roume, while Toussaint Louverture secretly revealed the plan to the British because a maritime blockade would have ruined him. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus denies the standard link between Gabriel's conspiracy and the Haitian Revolution, finding no contemporary evidence for it.