Janvier's polemic appears here in English translation, framed by an introduction that reconstructs the world it was answering. Byrd and Stieber trace the long aftermath of independence: Boyer's Rural Code of 1826, which placed country people under a legal regime of their own and kept them from active citizenship; the treaty that bought French recognition for 150 million francs and left a debt that compounded across generations; and the continuing refusal of the United States to recognise the republic at all.

They also recover Janvier's argument about the island's territory, setting it against the Dominican nationalist story of Haitian invasion and alongside evidence of cross-border peasant solidarity in the nineteenth century.

Janvier's own case is against foreign concessions. Egypt, he writes, let outsiders build its docks, canals and railways and woke up under British rule; Haitians have more capital of their own than they realise, and should not be urged to repeat the lesson.