Oblate sisters nurse cholera patients at the Baltimore almshouse

In 1832 Archibald Stirling, a trustee of the Office of the Poor in Baltimore, asked for four Oblate sisters to care for cholera patients at the almshouse. They went. Stirling wrote to their chaplain about it on 25 September that year. The convent by then was also a school whose pupils were mostly children of Haitian families: fifteen day students who went home in the afternoon, twelve boarders who stayed until the end of term, and orphans described as children of the house. Two of the day pupils, Marie Jacques and a girl recorded only as Henriette, had their expenses paid by a seminary priest and by the wife of a refugee pharmacist. The sisters also took in older women. Betsy Duchemin, the mother of one of them, eventually became a sister herself, and Annette Lange came from Matanzas in 1836 and spent her last year as a boarder.

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.

Perry shows the analogy between aboriginal and African enslavement acquiring legal force. Both Alexandre Pétion's 1816 constitution and the post-Boyer constitution of 1843 allowed the immigration and naturalisation of individuals of either African or Indian descent. In this vision, she argues, Afro-diasporic Haitians and the descendants of the Taino could be indigenous at the same time, because the label above all designates a relation to Europeans as usurpers, a position that ought normatively to produce anticolonial alliance. She sets this beside Dessalines's address to the people after a failed expedition against French troops in the Spanish half of Hispaniola, in which he presumed that the indigènes espagnols, descendants of the Indians destroyed by the first usurpers of the island, would seize the chance to sacrifice to the spirits of their ancestors. That expectation was disappointed.

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.