A king crowned eleven years into his reign, by the only priest who could reach him

Garcia V was king of the Kongo from 1803 to 1830 and wanted a priest for the same reason his predecessors had, to perform the coronation and bless his marriage and so confirm his authority. He waited eleven years. In 1814 Luigi-Maria d'Assisi, the Capuchin prefect at Loanda, managed to spend eight months in the country, baptised twenty five thousand people, heard five thousand confessions, and on 17 March crowned and married Garcia and Queen Isabella. There had been no priest at Sao Salvador for twenty years. The delighted king wrote to his brother the King of Portugal, as Afonso I had learned to do three centuries earlier, and suggested the Pope make Luigi-Maria a cardinal. Garcia had sent a nephew to be educated in Loanda in 1803 and a son in 1809, insisting he must have a priest in the family; that son, Dom Pedro, was ordained in 1824.

The expansion of the world economy that began in the first half of the eighteenth century and accelerated after 1750 ended, in Wallerstein's account, in the Franco British wars of 1792 to 1815, a stretch he describes as profitable turbulence. The turbulence was profitable because war on that scale redistributed markets and destroyed competitors while demand for supplies stayed high. The base for the expansion had been laid in the previous century, when the core countries pulled the most valuable activities inside their own frontiers, drove marginal producers out and redistributed just enough revenue at home to lift demand. What the wars settled was which of the two contenders would hold the advantage afterwards. They also emptied the Caribbean of French naval protection for years at a time, which is one of the conditions under which the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue fought and won.

Until the British landing of December 1814, France and the United States argued over whether French citizens living in Louisiana had to serve in the militia. The French consul in New Orleans drew up two lists of men entitled to exemption, seventy five names in all, most of them people who had come from Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba. When Andrew Jackson called the city to arms the lists proved worthless. By the consul's own account every Frenchman marched and one man claimed exemption. Of the white veterans of the Battalion of New Orleans whose birthplaces have been established, twenty eight in every hundred had come from Saint-Domingue. The battalion of free men of colour was made up of non white newcomers, commanded by a white refugee named Daquin with Savary as a captain under him. Two days before the battle the consul wrote that nationalities no longer counted and that they were all Americans now.

Manigat opens by naming the historiographical obstacle. Haiti's first national historians, Madiou and Ardouin, agreed with different degrees of vehemence in stigmatising Christophe's regime as ferocious tyranny, painting it for posterity as a reign of arbitrariness and cruelty. Against that he proposes a category from European history: not a Haitian Ivan the Terrible but an enlightened despot, a ruler for whom progress is imposed from above by strong personal power because the mass of the governed is judged insufficiently educated to demand it. Christophe's education policy of 1806 to 1820 is presented in this frame, alongside Petion's agrarian policy of 1807 to 1818, as a school textbook exercise in seeing two contemporaries whole. Manigat insists that moving from legend to history is uncomfortable work and that the historian's job is to track the quarry rather than to please either camp. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects the portrait of Christophe as an arbitrary tyrant handed down by Madiou and Ardouin, reclassifying him as an enlightened despot.