Dominicans ask to join Haiti and Boyer unifies the island

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.

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.

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.