These essays place Haiti alongside its neighbours rather than treating it as a case apart. Nicholls opens with the region's twentieth-century subordination to Washington, including the occupation-era dogma that what these countries lacked was a middle class, a policy whose beneficiaries included François Duvalier, and the professionalising of local armies that eventually delivered Trujillo and Somoza.

The organising theme is ethnicity. Caste, class and colour in Haiti interlock so intricately that appeals to race usually stand in for economic, regional or personal quarrels: in the peasant risings of the nineteenth century, in the protests of black middle-class Haitians in the 1930s, and in Trinidad's black power movement of 1970, which faltered partly because its leaders never did the slow work of reaching East Indian villagers.

A study of President Salomon tests the noiriste legend of a proletarian black leader against the surviving evidence and finds it largely unsupported.