This dissertation investigates the origins, structures, and global significance of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, the debt imposed by France on Haiti as a condition for recognizing its sovereignty. Drawing on archival sources from over thirty repositories across seven countries, the study situates Haiti’s debt within the broader context of nineteenth-century transformations in sovereignty, finance, and empire. It explores how the indemnity was not merely a bilateral financial arrangement but a complex process that intertwined the economic, political, and social histories of Haiti, France, and the wider Atlantic world. By examining Haiti’s financial debt as a material process, this dissertation ultimately argues that it was not the debt in and of itself that led Haiti down the path of global impoverishment. Rather, it was how Haiti’s particular debt was structured in the first half of the nineteenth century that made the 1825 Haitian Indemnity particularly damaging.The research reveals that the Haitian Indemnity benefited French interests through a combination of indemnity payments and preferential trade terms. The dissertation examines the divergent legal and political interpretations of the debt, highlighting how these shaped national policies, international commerce, and the experiences of various actors of different national stripes, including merchant bankers, former planters, middle-class bondholders, consular agents, Catholic bishops, Quaker whalers, Haitian market women, and vodou practitioners, among others. By analyzing the financial instruments, payment mechanisms, and speculative practices that developed around the indemnity, this dissertation uncovers the ways in which sovereign debt became a tool of imperial reconstruction and global capital formation. It also situates Haiti’s experience within the era’s wider proliferation of sovereign debts, financial crises, and shifting notions of political and monetary sovereignty, as well as debates over gradual and immediate abolition. In sum, this dissertation shows how the Haitian Indemnity was both a product and a driver of major nineteenth-century developments: the rise of financial capitalism, the transformation of European imperialism, and the contested meanings of freedom and sovereignty in the post-emancipation world.