Haitian merchants form a trading circle against the foreign houses

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.

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.

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.

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.