Cheney follows one Breton noble family, the Ferron de la Ferronnays, and the sugar estate they owned on a fertile plain near Port-au-Prince, working from estate correspondence, accounts and the reports of their manager Jean-Baptiste Corbier. The property was efficient, heavily capitalised and chronically fragile, exposed to hurricanes, wartime blockades, merchant credit and the deaths of the people it enslaved. The argument is that Saint-Domingue's wealth grew from a partnership between an aristocratic French state and merchant capital, and that this arrangement locked planters into a system they could reform but never leave. Corbier saw the cruelty and waste around him clearly, yet his criticisms stopped short of questioning bondage itself; reforms meant to make slavery gentler were also meant to make it pay. Carrying the family's story to 1838, through revolution, evacuation and the French indemnity, Cheney shows how stubbornly the old arrangements survived Haitian independence.