Contributors to a 2005 UNESCO colloquium in Port-au-Prince here examine how a state was built in Haiti between independence and 1859. The editors' opening chapter sets the terms. The revolution of 1791 to 1804 was at once anti-slavery, anti-colonial and anti-racist, and its rural base also refused the plantation, leaving the new republic with an unusually thin foundation to build on. Its population had been on the territory barely a century, spoke many languages, had no university and no inherited administrative machinery, so that language, religion, kinship and the economy all had to be made through the state itself. Individual chapters take up constitutional drafting and its ruptures, the ambivalence of officials towards vodou alongside a Catholicism enlisted for public purposes, customary law as a rival to legal monism, the schooling policies of Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe and Pétion, and the hold of foreign merchants over external trade.