Dupuy blames failed proletarianisation for Haiti's stagnation

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.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.

Louverture issued agricultural regulations that reorganised the colony around exports. Planters were pushed to grow cotton, sugar, indigo, ginger, coffee and cocoa, and were offered government subsidies and land concessions to do it. New industries were welcomed and the customs barrier between the eastern and western parts of the island was removed. The mechanism that made the scheme work was coercive. Agricultural labourers were forbidden to leave the plantations, and the police force was given the job of enforcing the labour rules and keeping order among the workers rather than ordinary policing. Woodward pairs this with the road building programme that improved transport, presenting the whole package as recovery rather than as a return to servitude. He does note that Louverture also encouraged the return of white planters and appointed wealthy men of colour and whites as judges and administrators to run the machinery.

Geggus argues that the blacksmith Gabriel's conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia looks very much like a response to the abolitionism of the French Republic rather than to the Haitian Revolution. At that moment an undeclared war ran between France and the United States, and Frenchmen living locally were said to have had a hand in it. Historians routinely link the conspiracy to Saint-Domingue, but contemporary sources show no trace of the conspirators discussing it, and the evidence of the black revolution's impact on Virginian slaves is in his judgement remarkably slight. He makes the same move about the attempt launched from Saint-Domingue in 1799 to raise a slave insurrection in Jamaica: the initiative came from Paris and was organised by the French official Philippe Roume, while Toussaint Louverture secretly revealed the plan to the British because a maritime blockade would have ruined him. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus denies the standard link between Gabriel's conspiracy and the Haitian Revolution, finding no contemporary evidence for it.