The Haitian army of 1822 eats two thirds of the national budget

In 1822 the Haitian line army numbered one hundred thousand effective soldiers of all arms, with a national guard of about forty thousand more. Two thirds of the national budget went on keeping them. The priority is intelligible. The state expected the French to come back for their plantations and for slavery. The habit outlived the fear. Around 1837 an observer wrote that the size of the army was very high relative to the population, that the country was entirely military, and that maintaining the army absorbed almost all public revenue. Effective strength then stood near fifty thousand men for a population estimated at under nine hundred and forty thousand. Zachary Macaulay, defending the arrangement by pointing at the conditions in which the Haitian state came into being, still conceded that this numerous army lived at the expense of the other classes and had held the country back in the career of improvement. Military men controlled political power for the whole century.

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.

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.

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.