Soulouque puts the crown on his own head and invents a nobility

The ceremony that made Soulouque emperor was, by Brandon's account, deliberately spare. Priests attended in numbers but there was no sermon and no oration, only chanting and music, and the expense was kept down. What followed was not spare at all. Soulouque had not forgotten that his generals wanted a share of the trappings, so he created a nobility and raised four princes and fifty-nine dukes along with counts, barons and chevaliers. Elaborate rules were written for court receptions and procedure. Brandon reads the whole exercise as a response to the earlier defeat in the east rather than as vanity alone, since a court gave the men who had fought in Santo Domingo something to hold. She notes that the emperor and empress were crowned in a separate and far more expensive ceremony nearly three years later.

Dahomey had no writing system in ordinary use and kept its history in the mouths of paid professionals called ahanjito. At the annual customs of 1850 the British official Frederick Forbes counted fifty six of them, performing in pairs and competing with each other for the approval of the crowd. Some were travelling men. The most important held office at court, the post was hereditary, and specialists were attached to particular dead kings so that every reign kept its own troupe. Archibald Dalzel had written in the previous century that on solemn occasions the bards sat at the king's gate and recited the whole history of the country, a recital taking several days and attended by young men with good memories who were training to replace them. One chanter was said to recite the names and praise names of every previous king each morning before the king woke. Forbes called these performances the only form of public education the country had.

Asiatic cholera reached Jamaica through Port Royal in September 1850. The first reports blamed a steamer from the isthmus of Panama, where the disease had been killing miners on their way to the California gold fields. It crossed the harbour into Kingston within days and moved fast through the crowded streets of the city. By November travellers had carried it into the other parishes. Kingston counted between four and six thousand deaths in the first year alone. A medical officer sent out from England reported that mortality in Jamaica ran at thirty three times the European rate, and that no part of the world had recorded a higher ratio of deaths to population. The epidemic faded late in 1850 and returned briefly in 1854. It was reckoned to have killed forty to fifty thousand people, a tenth to an eighth of the island. Haiti escaped it, because Soulouque kept watch on the ports.

In the first volume of his Histoire d'Haïti, Thomas Madiou argues for the disappearance of the Taino on grounds of absorption rather than complete extermination: until the middle of the eighteenth century certain families kept unmixed descent and used the title of cacique, but by his own day no Haitian belonged directly to that race. Perry notes that Madiou's narration collapses racial purity into the survival of social structures, leaving the reader to assume Taino social practice ended with intermarriage, which was convenient for the new state since he had described Taino families as exercising a limited legal autonomy. His contemporary Émile Nau made a stronger case for continuity, stressing partial descent and the survival of Taino words and songs, but still denied that nineteenth-century Haitians were direct heirs. Where this account departs from the standard one: Perry argues that if one drops the requirement that aboriginal people be racially pure to count as such, the habitual claim that the Taino were eliminated on Hispaniola becomes an overstatement, and she notes that Moreau de Saint-Méry's own account, which records people with special legal status, unduly minimises their presence.