Anglade treats Haitian territory as something produced rather than given. Two processes, he argues, made the society and its space together: the formation of a market with its catchments, crossroads and connections, and the exercise of power through the carving up of territory and the planting of a graded set of institutions for control and conditioning.

He periodises this in three moments. Colonial fragmentation extended Europe overseas under a trade pact; the nineteenth century regionalised the Americas around strongmen, landowners and provincial wars; the twentieth welded regional markets into national ones and produced a capital that operates as a republic inside the republic. Emigration, he adds, now obliges anyone thinking about national space to include the diaspora in the hierarchy of centres.

The regional chapters take the argument into detail, counting sugar works, indigo works, cotton and coffee estates plain by plain and reading density against irrigation, wind and altitude.