Bellegarde-Smith sets Freetown, Monrovia and independent Haiti side by side as products of one nineteenth-century rearrangement of the world: population transfers across four continents, mercantile capitalism giving way to industrial, and ideologies fitted to the new order. His subject is the westernized elites these settlements produced, educated into a position between two worldviews and credentialed as intermediaries.

He divides the century into three overlapping phases: an early one of new nationalities seeking a place in the international system, marked by constitutions and declarations of independence; a second, secular and liberal, shadowed by positivism and by a hardening biological racism; and a third running toward the Pan-African congresses, Garveyism, indigenisme and Negritude. Survival links all three, though the methods shift from assimilation toward self-assertion.

Two questions close the piece, offered as provisional: whether these Creole oligarchies could have developed otherwise under monopoly capitalism, and whether industrial capitalism guaranteed the loss of their domestic hegemony.