Six essays, written across three decades and revised here, follow Haiti from the slave colony of Saint-Domingue to the reconstruction industry that arrived after the 2010 earthquake. Dupuy reads the revolution of 1791 to 1804 as the first to extend liberty and self-rule to everyone, then asks why the citizens it created ended up with so little power. His answer joins two long processes: former slaves won land and blocked their own proletarianisation, while the bourgeoisie, unable to command labour, fell back on rents, trade and control of the state. Colour ideology, he argues, expressed a quarrel between factions of that dominant class, and it lost its force once democratic politics after 1986 made legitimacy the question instead. Later chapters follow World Bank and other lending into Haitian agriculture and industry, tracing how loan conditions held wages down, opened the market to United States food, and narrowed democracy to elections.