Three ships carry emigrants from New York and Baltimore to Haiti

American newspapers tracked the emigration to Haiti vessel by vessel through the autumn of 1824. In September the Christian Secretary reported that the De Witt Clinton had left New York bound for Hayti carrying a full load, a hundred and twenty emigrants aboard. In October The Circular, published in Delaware, reported the Concordia out of New York with about a hundred and sixty colored emigrants, male and female. In November the Genius of Universal Emancipation, published in Baltimore, reported the ship Armata leaving that port with two hundred and eighty. Organisations existed in several cities to arrange the passages, among them the Haytien Emigration Society, based in Baltimore, and a New York body called the Society for African Colonization, and they printed reports of what was called the removal of the colored population. The papers carried letters from emigrants who were pleased and from emigrants who were ruined, according to which side of the argument the paper took.

Within fifteen years of Waterloo the British islands produced three risings that rank among the biggest anywhere in the Americas: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831. Geggus points out that the timing of each tracked a development in the antislavery movement in Britain, and that each set of rebels called for the enforcement of a freedom law they wrongly took to have passed at home and to be hidden by officials on the spot. He counts over twenty such episodes between 1789 and the early 1830s where the enslaved insisted that a law had already freed them, or had cut their week down to three days of work. He traces the syndrome back to an aborted rising on Martinique in August 1789 and connects it to reform efforts in England, France and Spain that slaveholders publicly resisted.

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.

Girard treats emigration from the United States as one of Haiti's missed opportunities. Boyer spent considerable state money on American organisations offering free passage, hoping to bring as many as four thousand settlers. He also made an arrangement with the American consul at Les Cayes allowing southern planters to buy Haitian plantations and bring some of their slaves to work them under nine year indentures, in flat contradiction of the bans on slavery and on foreign land ownership still on the books. The campaign continued after Boyer, faltered under Soulouque, and revived in the 1860s when Geffrard sponsored Redpath's emigration bureau. In 1863 five hundred black Americans went to Ile-a-Vache and came back within a year. In total only a few thousand ever came, deterred by cost, language and Haiti's reputation for poverty, epidemics and revolutions.