Britain regulates trade with Haiti, which is recognition of a kind

Gaffield's central conceptual move is to break recognition into layers. Britain never issued a statement on Haiti's diplomatic status, but from this point it explicitly permitted and regulated the trade, which amounted to economic recognition of the country's independence from France. Her further claim is that the Admiralty courts went beyond what the government had authorised, extending some measure of diplomatic recognition to Haiti in their rulings between 1806 and 1826. Since legal trade with Haiti sustained the political break from France, and any trade at all violated French claims over the island, the commercial and the diplomatic questions could not be kept apart. She borrows Lauren Benton's idea of layered sovereignty and applies it outward, arguing that just as sovereignty was divisible, so was recognition, and that Haiti's survival depended on the divisibility. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield argues that withholding diplomatic recognition did not amount to isolation, and that Britain extended economic and, through its courts, partial diplomatic recognition to Haiti decades before 1826.

People fleeing the war in Saint-Domingue landed in the Spanish province of Santiago de Cuba and brought a crop with them. In 1800 the whole island of Cuba carried about sixty coffee plantations. In 1803 the province had eight worth listing. During 1804 alone another 54 were established, holding more than half a million plants. The district of Dos Bocas went from 73,000 plants before 1803 to 305,000 in 1804, then 362,000, 289,000 and 162,000 over the following three years. Guanian rose from 10,000 plants in 1803 to 538,000 in 1807. Before the refugees arrived the provincial harvest had never reached 8,000 arrobes. By 1805 it was 80,000, and 300,000 in the years after. Governor Kindelan reckoned the province harvested 10,000 quintals in 1807, twice that the next year, at least 30,000 by 1809, and looked for 40,000 in 1810. Land, houses and enslaved people were advertised for sale payable in coffee.

The earliest known written use of the word Candomble comes from a police raid in 1807 near Santo Amaro in Bahia. The charge had nothing to do with healing or with causing harm. The accusation was that the house sheltered runaways and held gunpowder and arms. That is the shape repression took in these decades. Police looked at houses of worship and saw gatherings of people of African descent that might become a rising, and after the revolts of the early nineteenth century they treated any African associated object as a threat in itself. In another raid in 1830 they charged a Candomble leader with being partly responsible for four hundred runaways in his district. Poison accusations had meanwhile nearly vanished from the record. Of eighty two usable police investigations from Cachoeira between 1820 and 1839, four concerned poison, and three of those were enslaved people who killed themselves with arsenic.

With the white population abandoning the sick and the army's own remedies useless, women of Saint-Domingue nursed the French through the yellow fever epidemic using what they knew themselves. They climbed into the mountains to gather the herbs they thought would check the disease and brewed them as infusions. One of them, known as the widow Cotin, did so much that she was called the benefactress of the human race. Her treatment was three glasses of red wine holding a nutmeg and an egg yolk, both baked under ashes and powdered, which brought on heavy sweating. When patients died anyway the women paid for proper funerals and walked behind the coffins, in a season when bodies were being thrown into the sea. The army lost seven hundred of its own doctors. General Leclerc was obliged to thank these women publicly and to print his admiration in the official gazette of Saint-Domingue. Most of them had been enslaved a year or two earlier.