Foreign merchants re-enter the trade the bourgeoisie lived on

Unable to sustain the plantation system, to expropriate the immediate producers or to build an industrial infrastructure, the Haitian bourgeoisie turned to commerce and to control of the state. It made its wealth from circulation rather than production, which tied its fortunes entirely to a world market it could not influence. When foreign merchants began competing for the import and export sector, even that monopoly stopped being secure. The state, with its power to intervene and regulate, then became the decisive prize and a lucrative source of accumulation in its own right. The book's larger claim follows from this: Haiti, as the first underdeveloped postcolonial society in the New World, was also the first to produce the authoritarian state form later associated with peripheral capitalist societies, with an export-oriented and unintegrated economy and no liberal democratic institutions.

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 1850s despair at the Fugitive Slave Law and at tightening restrictions across the northern states pushed black leaders to reopen a question many had closed. Boyd quotes Frederick Douglass, a firm opponent of African colonisation, telling Americans in 1853 that the continent and the nearby islands already held more than twelve million people of African descent who needed only organisation to become one powerful nation. The emigration convention held at Cleveland in 1854 sent James Theodore Holly to Haiti to open discussions with the government of Faustin Soulouque, but the regime fell before anything was settled and a new republic under Fabre Geffrard took its place. Geffrard also wanted colonists from the United States, and several hundred people sailed from New Orleans for Port-au-Prince in 1859. What was still missing, in Boyd's account, was a definite programme.

In March 1841 Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, sent to Haiti on a mission that nearly worked, that he could not die easy without seeing this poor abandoned country become Christian again. He died in 1846 without it. The obstruction was not theological. Haiti had a functioning religious life and did not need Rome's permission to have one. The blockage was that recognizing Haiti ecclesiastically meant recognizing Haiti, and the Vatican was not going to move ahead of the Catholic monarchies. The Concordat finally signed in 1860 mattered for a reason that is usually skipped: it handed the entire education system to French religious orders. So the schooling of the Haitian elite for the next century was designed abroad, taught in French, and structurally hostile to the language and religion of the majority. The 1860 signature is why the 1980 language debate was still being fought.