Sovereignty is the unfinished Haitian project, and Casimir dates the struggle for it to 1790. He opens with the electoral dispute of November 2010, where every meaningful exchange in the public sphere happened in Creole while the international community issued its statements in French, and reads that split as the cultural and linguistic bottleneck preventing Haitians from expressing a modernity of their own. His account of the founding is deliberate: captives brought in mass at the end of the eighteenth century held onto inherited identity and locally accumulated know-how, built an autonomous space inside the European system, and drove the colony into a crisis it could not manage. After 1804 former slaves and former slaveholders slowly narrowed the distance between them, until the United States occupation of 1915 restored the oligarchy, hardened colour as a social marker, eliminated rural political leadership and licensed persecution of Vodou. Recovery means linking Haitian self-definition to comparable struggles worldwide.