A letter to Virginia's governor says Haiti offers asylum

Shortly after the Southampton revolt, Governor James Floyd received a letter which he read in part to the Virginia legislature, signed with the name Nero, saying that Haiti offered asylum to those who survived the coming carnage. A pamphlet of the same year told readers that in General Nat they might find a man no less disposed to shed innocent blood than the perfidious Dessalines. Jackson groups Turner's rising with those of Gabriel and Denmark Vesey as three conspiracies planned by charismatic and literate leaders drawing on the Haitian example, all involving men who worked near the water or in skilled trades and who carried revolutionary ideas along with them, and all undone by weather and by betrayal from within the enslaved community. Jackson adds that letters, newspaper reports and refugees carried news of the island through the Atlantic world, where it inspired some readers and appalled others.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843 and reunified the whole island under his presidency in 1820. Contemporaries and later historians called his rule obscurantist, since it opposed the instruction of the mass of the population, and also military, autocratic and racially exclusive. Black officials were pushed out of administrative work and out of power. Schooling stayed with the light-skinned families of the elite. Under him the mainly mulatto fraction of the old free population consolidated itself as the ruling group and as the local relay of foreign commerce, taking hold of the port trade, specialising in ground rent and urban property, and leaving agriculture to blacks of every class. When the crisis came the sides failed to line up by colour. Against Boyer stood mulatto liberals speaking for landowners and merchants, black domaniers attacking mulatto hegemony as such, northern separatists, old followers of Christophe, and disappointed Boyerists inside the civil service.

Algeria was conquered by the Ottomans shortly after the Spanish reconquest of Granada in 1492, and Ottoman rule lasted until about 1830, when the country fell into French hands. The change was larger than a change of rulers. Under the French, Algeria entered the imperial domain of western capitalism, which the Ottoman sultanate had never belonged to, and it was governed by the same machinery of racial classification and economic extraction that had been assembled in the Americas. Settlers took the land. The people already there became a category to be administered. Haiti had been independent for twenty six years when this happened, and the French army that crossed to Algiers belonged to the state that was at that moment collecting the indemnity it had imposed on Haiti in 1825. The war that ended French rule in Algeria ran from 1954 to 1962.

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.