Greek exiles in Paris write to Port-au-Prince asking Haiti for help

The Paris committee sent Boyer a request dated 20 August 1821, the letter that his reply answers. Its four signatories were Korais, Polychroniades, Bogorides and Klonaris, all Greeks living in France and all seeking international support for the rising at home. Klonaris later became the first president of the supreme court of the new Greek state. The authors treat the approach as evidence of how the Haitian revolution circulated as a usable model far outside the Atlantic world. Men in Paris with no connection to the Caribbean identified a black republic in the Antilles as the natural addressee for a plea from one anti imperial insurgency to another. Boyer's answer records that reports of the Greek rising had already reached Haiti before the letter arrived, which indicates that the traffic in revolutionary news ran in both directions rather than only outward from Europe.

Within fifteen years of Waterloo the British islands produced three risings that rank among the biggest anywhere in the Americas: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831. Geggus points out that the timing of each tracked a development in the antislavery movement in Britain, and that each set of rebels called for the enforcement of a freedom law they wrongly took to have passed at home and to be hidden by officials on the spot. He counts over twenty such episodes between 1789 and the early 1830s where the enslaved insisted that a law had already freed them, or had cut their week down to three days of work. He traces the syndrome back to an aborted rising on Martinique in August 1789 and connects it to reform efforts in England, France and Spain that slaveholders publicly resisted.

Against the standard account of Haiti as a target of foreign predation, Girard sets out its own record on the eastern side of the island. Louverture invaded in 1801 and withdrew when Leclerc arrived. Dessalines invaded in 1805, a campaign remembered chiefly for rape, torture, plunder and the enslavement of prisoners as his troops retreated. Boyer succeeded in 1821 and the occupation lasted twenty three years. When the Dominicans declared independence in 1844 the Haitians launched a failed campaign to recover them, followed by three more invasions under Soulouque in 1849, 1850 and 1855 that pushed the border out along the central plateau but never delivered the whole island. After that Haiti financed rebellions in the east in 1861 and 1870 and then stopped. Girard argues the retreat from empire tracked the collapse of Haitian military power rather than any change of principle. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reframes nineteenth century Haiti as an imperial power in its own right rather than a consistent victim of imperialism.

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.