Boyer's first act in Santo Domingo is to abolish slavery

In 1822 Haitian troops occupied Santo Domingo, beginning the period Dominicans call the Haitian Domination, which lasted until 1844. The principle behind it went back to Toussaint Louverture, who had held that the freedom of the Haitian masses could not be secure while slavery survived on the other side of the island. The first official act of President Jean Pierre Boyer after taking over the government in Santo Domingo was to abolish slavery there. He followed it with a programme distributing smallholdings to freed people and peasants, and then went after the interests of the cattle ranchers and the Catholic Church. Hundreds of Dominicans left the country. Those twenty two years shaped how the Dominican elite would talk about Haiti for the next century and a half, and the writers who later built an anti Haitian national story had this occupation in mind whenever they described their neighbours as a threat.

Boyer answered the Paris committee on 15 January 1822, dating the letter also by the nineteenth year of Haitian independence. He wrote that Haitians could not be indifferent to a people who had likewise endured long bondage and had broken the head of tyranny with their own chains, and said he had intended to send money for weapons since troops and ammunition were out of reach. He then explained why no money would come. Financial obligations imposed on the country had consumed the budget, and the incorporation of the eastern part of the island into his republic had added an impoverished territory whose costs were now a further drain. The rest of the letter is a display of classical learning, invoking Leonidas, Miltiades, Marathon and Salamis, which the authors read as Boyer placing both revolutions in a single lineage of citizen soldiers fighting hereditary despotism.

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.

Yingling's book is built to explain a moment usually described as a Haitian occupation. In February 1822 Jean-Pierre Boyer unified Hispaniola, and he did so to acclaim from many of his new fellow citizens across classes and regions. Communities had asked for it: the people of Neiba requested that Haiti accept them among its children, and those of Samana said Boyer would embrace them like a tender father, exchanging a distant white king for a present leader of colour. San Juan de la Maguana's residents said the whole island had only one family. Enslaved and oppressed Dominicans, whose families had been broken up systematically, acquired rights in the first universally emancipated state in the Americas. Haitian officials called all Dominicans siblings of soil, people born of similarly damaged colonial pasts. Yingling adds that the harmony proved brief. Where this account departs from the standard one: Presents the 1822 unification as a popularly requested and broadly welcomed act of anti-imperial kinship rather than a Haitian conquest of Dominican territory.