American papers advertise Vastey's books from Baltimore to Boston

Against the assumption that early Haitian authors were marginal, the essay lists dated notices for Vastey's works in the Baltimore Patriot in May 1815, the Boston Daily Advertiser that September, the Alexandria Gazette later the same month, the Christian Observer in December 1817, the Essex Register and the City of Washington Gazette in May 1818, the Vermont Gazette that June, the Daily National Intelligencer in February 1820, the American Beacon in December 1820, the North American Review and the Rhode Island American in February 1821, and the Essex Patriot in August 1821. Two German newspapers reprinted him in 1820 and 1825. The point of the catalogue is evidentiary. It establishes that the works of Vastey and Boisrond-Tonnerre remained part of the circulating historiography of the revolution in the Atlantic world at least until the end of the American Civil War.

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.

Driven out of New Granada by the royalists in May and sheltered for eight months in Jamaica under the patronage of Maxwell Hyslop, Bolivar was introduced by Hyslop to Sutherland, who guaranteed him substantial assistance from Haiti. He accepted, sailed, and was met at the quayside by Sutherland. He said he wanted to fit out a force and return to the mainland as soon as possible. A meeting with Petion was arranged for the following day and the president, pleased to have him on the island, promised full support. Within a matter of days Bolivar had arms, ships and men. Lewis notes that he also asked the naval commander Luis Aury, then coming back from royalist held Cartagena, for his vessels, and that Aury refused and went to Galveston to prepare his own Mexican venture instead. Where this account departs from the standard one: Some historians hold that Bolivar was bound for Cartagena and turned to Haiti only on hearing it had fallen; Lewis argues his letters show he meant to go to Haiti from the start.

When the monarchy was restored in France in 1815, the gains made during the Revolution were reversed for almost everybody. The peasantry was the exception. What the countryside had seized or bought stayed in its hands, which is why some historians describe the French Revolution as the first successful peasant revolution of modern times. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie pushes the reading further. Peasants in the last years of the old regime were attacking the enclosers, the drainers and the improvers, so their revolt was aimed at capitalism rather than at feudalism, and where no improving landlord had appeared, as in Brittany, the peasants stayed quiet. Volker Hunecke makes a parallel case for the towns, where the end of controlled bread prices produced a defensive fury against free trade. A revolution described for a century as the arrival of a new economic order had its most durable effect in slowing that order down.