Gezo beats Oyo and stops paying the tribute Dahomey owed for 75 years

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.

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.

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.

In 1824 a man named Kinsley shipped a colony of enslaved people from Florida to the north coast of Hispaniola. His plan was to free them by a graduated process meant to run over several years. They saw that freedom was already within reach on the ground where they had landed and asserted it themselves shortly after arrival. They then settled on the banks of the Yasica, a small river crossing the well watered plain east of Puerto Plata, and became a quiet and hard working community. Along that stretch of coast they and their descendants were known for the rest of the century as the Kinsley boys. Fifty years later the land they held passed for the best cultivated and most productive on the island, the staple being sugar cane, to which that soil is well suited. Their case sat alongside a separate settlement of American emigrants of 1824 on the Samana peninsula.