The government spends more than it takes in and blames France

The book tracks the shortfall through two years. In 1825 the government took in 2,820,196 gourdes and spent 3,115,295. By 1831 it received 2,336,549 and spent 2,543,039. Contemporary opinion laid the blame on the customs concessions in both directions and on the indemnity itself. Haiti stopped paying. Boyer negotiated relentlessly and in 1838 obtained French recognition of independence purely and simply, a reduction of the indemnity to sixty million francs, and the removal of the preferential duties in both directions. None of this produced accumulation fast enough to rebuild the sugar estates. A weak domestic capital market, laws prohibiting foreign ownership that kept investment out, and military spending absorbing more than half the budget under Christophe, Petion and Boyer alike, all prevented the bourgeoisie from forming capital. The bourgeoisie was left weak against foreign capital and able to deal with it only from below.

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.

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.

Garcia V died in 1830 and a Capuchin went up to Sao Salvador one last time to conduct the funeral. In the disorder that followed he could not crown a successor. He came back to Loanda with a Kongolese lay brother and found his last European colleague dead. The kingdom and the mission were ending together. Garcia's priest son left the Kongo for work in Angola, where there was no bishop between 1826 and 1852 and fewer than twenty priests. Italian diocesan clergy from Milan and a group of Swiss Benedictines both offered to go and revive the church there, and both offers were killed by Capuchin and Portuguese obstruction. In 1834 an anticlerical government in Lisbon ordered every convent closed and the Capuchin property was sold. Bernardo da Burgio sailed for Palermo in May 1835 with the mission archives and one companion, the Kongolese brother Bernardo of Sao Salvador.