Boyer suspends state land sales and sends officers to inspect

Petion had let the plantations break up, sold and distributed land to medium and small farmers, and failed to keep labourers on the estates or off remote hill ground. Boyer set out to undo this with the support of the large landowners. Sales of state land were suspended in 1821 and again in 1832, 1835, 1837 and 1838. In their place came conditional concessions. An order of the day directed specially chosen military officers to inspect estates granted to concessionaires, leaving productive holdings with their current occupants and transferring unproductive ones to others. The book reads the policy as the ruling class attempting to preserve the position the colonial economy had occupied in the world market while substituting itself for French planters and merchants as the beneficiary, and traces later capitulation to foreign capital to the failure of that attempt.

Sideris and Konsta set their document against the outbreak of the Greek war of independence, which began in March 1821 and eventually detached Greece from the Ottoman Empire. The rising immediately created a diplomatic problem that shapes the rest of the article. An insurgent movement with no state behind it had to find money, weapons and political cover abroad, and it did so through committees of expatriate Greeks in western Europe. One such committee formed in Paris under the scholar Adamantios Korais, who had settled in France after taking a medical degree at Montpellier in 1788 and who had lived there through the French revolutionary years. Its members had therefore followed news of the Caribbean revolution as it happened. The authors argue that this committee turned to Haiti because it read the Haitian case as a precedent, a population that had thrown off a European power and made itself into a recognised nation.

A rising in the city of Santo Domingo arrested the Spanish governor and hoisted the Colombian flag, because the lawyer leading it intended to attach the new state to Bolivar's Gran Colombia. Baur traces the enthusiasm back to Bolivar's stay in Haiti in 1815 and the Dominican interest it aroused in independence, and notes that Toussaint Louverture had briefly occupied the eastern capital twenty years earlier. Boyer read the situation as Christophe had read it before him, as a matter of defence against European recovery of the island. His justification for marching was constitutional. He invoked the article of the 1806 text declaring the entire island of Santo Domingo to form one indivisible republic, which turned an invasion into the enforcement of Haitian fundamental law. Haitian troops were on the march within a few weeks of the proclamation.

In 1820 Haitian merchants complained in print that a foreigner settles in their country only for his own interest or his nation's, that this called for a response, and that a people whose wealth is being carried off ought to look to keeping it. In April 1821 a commercial circle made up only of Haitian merchants was founded in Port-au-Prince, all of them opposed to the foreign trading houses. Similar circles followed at Cap-Haitien and at Les Cayes. The meetings in the capital turned to politics, with the declared aim of controlling the acts of government through intelligent, capable and firm national action. Thomas Madiou, writing in the 1860s, called the founding of the circle an event and the only serious effort Haitian merchants ever made to throw off the yoke of foreign commerce. He recorded that no comparable attempt had been made since, and that national commerce in his own day was completely subjugated.