Names that colonizers attach to colonized people are never simply descriptive. Trouillot treats such labels as the product of several forces working at once: the everyday social relations of a given colony, the assumptions colonists carried with them, rivalries between empires, and pressures arriving from the metropole.

The case examined here is Dominica, where British colonists took roughly a century, from 1838 to 1928, to settle on calling the island's cultivators peasants. Trouillot follows that slow shift in vocabulary and shows that the term carried the same weight for both sides of the quarrel over it. Those who welcomed the label and those who resisted it agreed on what it signified: an admission that production on the island had changed, and that cultivators had won firmer command over how their own work was organized.