Nicholls builds the book on a single distinction: race has held Haitians together, color has driven them apart. An awareness of shared racial identity, present from the earliest years, gave successive generations a stubborn commitment to national independence; color worked the other way, as rival factions repeatedly preferred foreign intervention to letting their opponents govern, and effective independence was worn away in the process.

He is careful about what the thesis does not claim. Race and color are not offered as the only forces at work, nor as reducible to economics; the chapters that follow tie them instead to class, to international relations, to religious and cultural movements, and to regional and personal loyalty, while granting that their prominence at any given moment tracks the economic conditions of that moment.

The preface carries the account past Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight, through the junta, the handling of former macoutes and Colonel Regala's ascendancy, to conclude that Duvalierism outlived the Duvaliers.