Boyer has Felix Darfour shot in a cemetery square in three days

Felix Darfour was born in western Sudan, taken to France by an officer of the Egyptian expedition, educated and married there, and settled in Haiti in 1818, where the constitution granted nationality to any African who came to live in the country. He founded a newspaper, L'Eclaireur, later renamed L'Avertisseur. On 30 August 1822 a message from him was read to the Chamber of Representatives. It said that Jean-Pierre Boyer favoured foreigners with a monopoly of commerce, that Haitian fortunes could not rise under him, and that the president gave advantages only to men of colour while refusing blacks instruction in order to prove them naturally unfit to govern. Boyer ordered him tried by a military commission on the morning of 31 August. He was sentenced the same day and shot on 2 September in front of the people and the army. Darfour was a civilian tried by soldiers, and the petition itself never entered the case file.

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.

In 1818 the king of Dahomey, Adandozan, was deposed. The reason given was military failure, and the consequence of that failure was a shortage of captives for the sacrifices owed to the dead kings. His successor Gezo had seized the throne and needed to look unlike him. Gezo made military success the point of his reign. In 1823 he defeated Oyo, the Yoruba power in the interior that Dahomey had been paying tribute to since 1748, and the payments stopped. He enlarged the standing army, increased the scale of human sacrifice, and turned the armed women of the royal household, whom Europeans called the Amazons, from a bodyguard into a regular part of the field army. Nineteenth century British visitors found Dahomey more militarised than eighteenth century accounts had described. Gezo is a large part of the reason.

Hormann tracks the closing and reopening of British argument about Haiti. Enthusiastic appraisals of the 1791 revolt by British abolitionists appear in 1791 and 1792 and then virtually stop after 1793, in abolitionist and radical writing alike, because members of parliament and the interests behind them recoiled from even discussing the end of the slave trade while it seemed likely to invite a repetition of events in the French colony. Thomas Clarkson, who had written on the revolt anonymously in 1792, mounted a very cautious defence of the Haitian Revolution again only in an essay of this year arguing for gradual emancipation in the British colonies. The chapter treats that thirty year silence as a political effect with datable causes, not as the boundary of what Europeans were capable of thinking.