Daut opens with Trouillot's first book, a history of Haiti written in Haitian Creole and published in Brooklyn exile in 1977, and uses its neglect to make a point about citation. Scholars who invoke the silencing of the past routinely name Marx as Trouillot's decisive influence while passing over the nineteenth-century Haitian historians he actually cites, repeating the exclusion his work described. Against this, the book reconstructs a Haitian archive of Vastey, Nau, Madiou, Ardouin, Saint-Rémy, Firmin and others, read as theorists rather than as local witnesses. Their volumes, along with Haiti's declaration of independence and early constitutions, circulated across the nineteenth-century Atlantic, and Michelet and Lamartine corresponded with their authors. Organised in parts on colonialism, independence and sovereignty, the chapters argue that anti-colonial, antislavery and anti-racist thought was worked out in Haitian print before it became North Atlantic vocabulary. The epilogue carries the story to the United States occupation of 1915.