Toussaint extracts an order from Roume to take the Spanish side

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.

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.

Between 1799 and 1800 the general Andre Rigaud, backed by the mulatto officers and proprietors of the southern peninsula, fought Toussaint Louverture, who by then governed the rest of the colony in fact. French agents on the ground worked both sides in the interest of the metropolis. The fighting ended with Rigaud in exile in France. The episode became the founding text for a way of reading Haitian politics in which every alliance and every betrayal is explained by the skin of the man who made it. The actual line-ups were untidy. Toussaint suppressed maroon settlement and the radicalism of large sections of the black field population with the help of powerful mulattoes and whites. His administration protected large estates, kept manufacturing on the plantation model and tied cultivators to the land by military coercion. In 1803 Alexandre Petion, who had come back from France in Leclerc's army, worked out the strategy of the independence war with Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Jeanne Mathusine Droibillan Volunbrun had left Saint Domingue five years earlier for New York. In August 1801 she prepared to move the people she held to Norfolk, sell them there and use the money to return to the island, where she still had a plantation. Black Saint Domingans living in New York gathered outside her house, and the police seized a number of them. The Manumission Society had writs served on her, resting the claim on the French decree of 5 February 1794 that had abolished slavery in all French territory; she posted bond of 5,390 dollars, and on 14 August the society's lawyers obtained the freedom of everyone she held. The men who had gathered waited in jail until October because the court sat quarterly. All the defendants in the resulting case were black and many were Haitian. They were given sixty days in the county prison.