Santo Domingo throws off Spain and raises the flag of Colombia

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.

Dupuy offers two arguments against the view that the indemnity was the main reason Haiti could not develop its economy. The first is that the dominant classes were unable to turn the peasantry into a proletariat and so revive the sugar plantations that had produced the colony's wealth. Failing that, they had to accommodate a class structure made up mostly of landowning peasants, tenant farmers and sharecroppers producing the coffee, cotton, indigo, cacao and lumber Haiti exported. The landed bourgeoisie therefore drew its wealth from rents extracted from tenants and sharecroppers, from buying and selling the farmers' cash crops on the world market, and from importing and reselling goods at home. Haiti stayed fully integrated into the capitalist world economy all the same, because the surplus value contained in what it produced entered the circuits of industrial and financial capital abroad. Where this account departs from the standard one: Denies that the indemnity was a major cause of nineteenth-century Haitian underdevelopment, pointing instead to the ruling class's failure to proletarianise the peasantry.

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.