Deadlocked ministers pick a figurehead and get a ruler instead

President Jean-Baptiste Riche died after less than a year in office and the ministers split between two rival candidates. Unable to break the deadlock they turned to the commander of the presidential guard. Brandon says the appointment astonished Soulouque himself and that the ministers plainly intended to use him as a figurehead, given that he had no political following and no record of public service. The calculation failed quickly. She reports that he kept Riche's ministers for the first five months because they were useful, then remembered every slight, including one minister's boast that he could make and unmake heads of state. The country he inherited had no diplomatic recognition anywhere, faced foreign claims for payment, had lost the Spanish part of the island, and had run through three presidents in three years.

Geggus ends with the only two cases where he thinks slave rebellion demonstrably changed the emancipation timetable. In May 1848 a mass entry into the town of Saint Pierre and the fighting that followed in northern Martinique led the governor to declare slavery abolished at once, roughly three months before the decree issued by the new revolutionary government in Paris would have taken effect. He is careful about causation, noting that the decision to abolish had already been taken and was itself what provoked the risings, so the rebellions fixed the date rather than the outcome. The Martinique declaration had immediate effects in the other French colonies and in the Danish islands, where a large rising on Saint Croix in July 1848 cut eleven years off a plan the Danish government had announced the previous year to end slavery in 1859.

The crisis that ended Boyer's rule opened into peasant insurrection. Jean-Jacques Acaau and Jeannot Moline led risings from 1843 to 1848 known as the war of the Piquets. Their demands were land, better prices for produce and a black man in the presidency. The scale of the fighting pushed the governing groups into alliance against the peasantry. The device they used has a name in Haitian political language, the politique de doublure, the understudy policy. Black men drawn from the ruling strata were placed in the presidency while the mulatto oligarchy governed from behind, smothering the political claims of the men it had installed along with the movements in the countryside. Men handled this way were called kongo, a word still used in Haiti for a black man who has sold himself and collaborates without pride. Acaau is credited with the saying that a rich black is a mulatto and a poor mulatto is a black.

Gaffield lists the sequence in which the powers eventually granted official diplomatic recognition: France in 1825, the British empire, the Netherlands and Denmark in 1826, Spain in 1855, and the United States in 1862. Her argument is that these dates have been made to carry far too much weight. Because historians have measured Haiti's standing by them, the intervening decades get described as isolation, and Haitian history becomes a straight line from a failed experiment in independence to the poorest country in the hemisphere. What the archives in Haiti, France, Jamaica, England, the United States, the Netherlands and Denmark show instead is a long period in which policies shifted constantly, local officials improvised without instruction, merchants traded legally and illegally, and courts made law. Recognition, she argues, had already happened in pieces long before it was announced. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield rejects the isolation thesis, arguing that the conventional recognition dates conceal decades of diplomatic, economic and legal connection between Haiti and the Atlantic world.