Anthropology, for Trouillot, has always worked inside a wider Western story about difference, and he sets out to excavate the thematic field that handed the discipline its subject in the first place. The postmodernist turn of the 1980s, which asked how ethnographies are written and who speaks in them, gets credit for opening the question and criticism for stopping too soon: it examined the discourse within anthropology rather than the order within which anthropology makes sense, and treated feminism and a historicised Third World as marginal.

Behind that order lies what he calls a geography of imagination, the Elsewhere that Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers needed in order to place themselves as modern. Rousseau's state of nature, Hegel's Africa and Marx's Asiatic mode all mark spaces against which the modern was measured.

The Caribbean, colonised earliest and remade most completely, therefore belongs to modernity from the start, which unsettles North Atlantic claims to having got there first.