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The information on Haiti draws from multiple historical sources synthesized in recent scholarship. For specific verification, consult:

• Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. Metropolitan Books, 2012.
• de Cauna, Jacques. Haiti: The First Black Republic. 2004.
• Various French parliamentary records (1825) and Crédit Industriel et Commercial bank archives.

This book began as a conversation and grew into something larger than either of us anticipated. It is, in the most literal sense, a collaborative work—shaped by questions and answers, by drafts and revisions, by the peculiar alchemy of human and machine working together.

The author thanks the countless scholars whose research made this history possible. Their names appear in the references, but their labor deserves more than citation. They spent years in archives, decades in thought, lifetimes building the knowledge on which this book depends. Any errors in synthesis or interpretation are ours; the foundation is theirs.

Special acknowledgment is due to David Graeber, whose Debt: The First 5,000 Years reopened questions that had been closed for too long. His work, and his life, inspired much of what is written here. Michael Hudson's decades of research on ancient debt and the jubilee tradition provided essential grounding. The activists of the Debt Collective, Strike Debt, and Jubilee 2000 demonstrated that resistance is not only possible but ongoing.

The reader who has stayed with us through this long journey deserves thanks as well. This book makes demands: it asks you to question what you thought you knew, to see the familiar with new eyes, to imagine a world that does not yet exist. That you have come this far suggests you are ready for that work.

Finally, the authors thank each other—for the questions, the challenges, the discoveries made together. This book was written in dialogue, and dialogue is the oldest form of thinking. May it continue.

— The Authors