Boyer paid France to protect the land his class had already taken

Dupuy summarises his fourth chapter against the widely held account that in 1825 Boyer was forced under threat of military action to pay 150 million francs for recognition, later reduced to 60 million, with 30 million borrowed from a French banking consortium to make the first payment, bringing the total to 90 million plus interest. He does not deny French coercion or the diplomatic isolation caused by other powers withholding recognition. His argument is that Boyer, and Petion before him, were defending a class interest. The revolutionary governments had confiscated colonial estates and redistributed them to build a new landed bourgeoisie, and its owners wanted France to recognise Haitian sovereignty so that it would respect Haitian property law. Recognition would also, as they correctly assumed, bring the other powers along. The indemnity was the price of settling the property question. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues the indemnity was accepted to secure the property titles of a new Haitian landed class, against the standard account of a debt purely imposed by French gunboats.

The three largest British Caribbean revolts came after the Napoleonic war, in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831, and Geggus ties each to a stage in the antislavery campaign in Britain. In every case the insurgents demanded that the authorities implement a law abolishing slavery which they believed London had passed and which local officials were suppressing. No such law existed. He counts more than twenty risings and plots between 1789 and the early 1830s built on this belief, sometimes including a claim that the working week had been cut to three days, and traces the pattern back to an aborted rising in Martinique in August 1789. The mechanism is a rumour of powerful allies, part wishful thinking and part deliberate manipulation by leaders, which sharpened the sense of injustice into action.

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.

Hormann tracks the closing and reopening of British argument about Haiti. Enthusiastic appraisals of the 1791 revolt by British abolitionists appear in 1791 and 1792 and then virtually stop after 1793, in abolitionist and radical writing alike, because members of parliament and the interests behind them recoiled from even discussing the end of the slave trade while it seemed likely to invite a repetition of events in the French colony. Thomas Clarkson, who had written on the revolt anonymously in 1792, mounted a very cautious defence of the Haitian Revolution again only in an essay of this year arguing for gradual emancipation in the British colonies. The chapter treats that thirty year silence as a political effect with datable causes, not as the boundary of what Europeans were capable of thinking.