The Code Henry bars plantation workers from marrying outsiders

The code described relations among estate holders, farmers and labourers in detail, and a special military corps was charged with enforcing it, supervising the workers and keeping the estates productive. Large estates were granted or leased to the nobility and senior officers. Work ran from dawn to sunset Monday to Friday, wages remained a quarter share of the crop plus family food plots, and labourers could not move to another plantation or another part of the country. The provision the book singles out is marital. Anyone not working on a plantation was forbidden to marry a plantation worker, which held both the labourers and the women who bore their children in place through kinship rather than force. Christophe pursued free trade with Britain, encouraged food self-sufficiency, built foundries and roads by corvee, and tried and failed to introduce the plough.

Geggus treats the conspiracy organised in Havana by the free black carpenter José Antonio Aponte as the most striking instance of Haitian influence on slave resistance elsewhere. He is careful about the general claim. News spread wide and fast, with Jamaican slaves singing about the North Plain rising within a month, but contemporaries and historians have often exaggerated the importance of the factor. His larger irony is economic: by driving up world prices for tropical produce and creating a refugee diaspora that settled new land in Cuba, Jamaica, Louisiana and Trinidad, the revolution spread slavery to new frontiers and revived older plantation economies. Although it freed half a million people directly and more than six hundred thousand across the French colonies, and closed the slave trade's largest market, the overall volume of the Atlantic trade scarcely fell from its peak in the 1780s. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus argues it is difficult to believe fear of rebellion was a major factor in outlawing the slave trade, and holds that Britain abolished its trade in 1807 not from fear of West Indian revolt but because the revolution had destroyed France as a colonial rival, freeing British politicians to vote their consciences.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.

Dupuy describes the post-independence state as divided from the start between the older property-owning and slave-owning affranchis, usually called mulattoes although the group included Black members, and a newer Black property-owning class formed during Louverture's rule and after independence. Their fight for control of the state produced fourteen years of civil war before Boyer reunited the country. Dupuy's argument is about consequences rather than personalities. The factional conflict blocked any developmental project, and the class structure it left behind, a dominant class living off commerce, finance and import and export tied to the world market and the state, and a peasantry growing food and some export crops, made industrialisation impossible in the nineteenth century. That weakness is what let French, English, German and later American capital take a dominant position by the end of the century, in what he calls a neocolonial turn.