Haiti was already poor by Caribbean standards in the 1820s

The reviewer's central criticism of Dubois's book is that it tells the reader little about why or when Haiti became so poor. Geggus concedes that in the nineteenth century Haitian peasants may have been materially better off than enslaved people elsewhere in the region, but insists that does not make them agriculturally productive. His own timeline is precise: Haiti was already poor by Caribbean standards in the 1820s and extraordinarily poor by 1914. Since the economy depended almost entirely on exporting coffee, he treats it as a major omission to overlook the way Brazil's development shrank Haitian national income and state revenues by driving down world coffee prices. He extends the point to the occupation, noting that roads, bridges, sewers, clinics and hospitals were paid for from Haitian tax revenue rather than American largesse.

On 1 August 1838 the abolition of slavery took full effect on the British island of Dominica and roughly fourteen thousand people stopped being property. An interim period of apprenticeship had run from 1834 and was supposed to ease owners and slaves into the new arrangement. It settled nothing. Dominica registered one of the lowest ratios of enslaved people to land anywhere in the British Caribbean, and for ecological and historical reasons the plantation had never dominated the island the way it dominated the older sugar colonies. Planters and officials could see what abundant land would mean, and from 1834 they had already brought in severe measures to keep apprentices on the estates. Once apprenticeship ended they used every method available to stop cultivators establishing holdings of their own. Most of the freed people could not read, and they spoke a French based creole rather than English, a survival from the period before Britain took the island in 1763. The fight over land and labour ran on for a century.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

The federal census of 1820 counted twenty seven thousand one hundred and seventy six people in New Orleans, of whom thirteen thousand five hundred and eighty four were white and six thousand two hundred and thirty seven were free people of colour. Perhaps eight to nine thousand of the whites and four and a half to five thousand of the free people of colour belonged to the French speaking part of the city. Newcomers from Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba made up close to a fifth of the white French speakers and about a third of the French speaking free people of colour. That puts roughly seventeen hundred white and sixteen hundred free coloured arrivals still living in New Orleans eleven years after they landed, which is close to two thirds of the whites and half of the free people of colour the mayor had counted in 1809. The marriage registers of the cathedral point the same way. Most of them stayed.