Boyer takes the Spanish two thirds and rules the whole island

Nicholls sets the ideological quarrel he is studying against the presidency of Jean Pierre Boyer, which ran from 1818 to 1843. Christophe died in 1820, which reunited the country under one government, and two years later Boyer marched into the Spanish-speaking east and held the whole of Hispaniola until his removal in 1843. The mechanism that mattered for the later history writing was the distribution of office. Power and patronage concentrated in a small group of mulatto generals and politicians, and blacks were excluded from almost every important public post except where some odious act of government had to be carried out. Foreign visitors through the 1820s and 1830s remarked almost without exception on the near monopoly of influence enjoyed by the mulattoes, which is the arrangement the historians of the next generation set out to justify.

Boyer's army entered the eastern capital unopposed and took the batteries and the harbour, which completed the conquest. Baur notes that a Dominican voice had pleaded in January for peaceful acceptance of Haitian rule. The occupation lasted twenty two years and shaped everything that followed, including the refusal of later Haitian politicians to recognise Dominican separation and the memory that Spanish speaking leaders would use against Haiti for generations. It also collided with European claims. In 1830 Ferdinand the Seventh of Spain sent the intendant of Cuba to negotiate the return of the eastern territory, arguing that although the area had been ceded to France in 1795 it had been reconquered in 1802 and its return sanctioned in 1814. Boyer's envoys replied that Spain had let the 1806 constitutional clause pass unchallenged and that the moment for objection had gone.

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.

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.