After the earthquake of January 2010, the plans drawn up for Haiti's recovery leaned heavily on garment assembly and on expanding the country's export processing zones. Edwards asks whose interests that answer served.

His argument turns on a split inside American business. Textile mills, long protectionist, had used trade preference schemes to keep Haiti as a captive offshore sewing floor supplied with US cloth. Apparel firms organised around global sourcing wanted something looser. Tracing the trade legislation passed in response to a sequence of Haitian disasters, he shows authority moving steadily from the first bloc to the second.

The earthquake, on this reading, functioned as an opening rather than an interruption: a moment when Haiti's place in the apparel commodity chain could be rewritten. What emerged was not development but a redefined position inside a network of low-wage assembly work that can be moved wherever it is cheapest, with the country's poverty as the attraction.