Dupuy traces Haiti's poverty to the terms on which the territory entered the capitalist world-economy at the end of the seventeenth century, as a peripheral producer of export crops and, later, of assembled goods, with no capital-goods or consumer-goods sector of its own. Class, colour and political structures formed under slavery deepened that dependence after 1804. The account runs from French merchant capital and the slave plantation through Toussaint Louverture's attempt to hold the export economy together, then the nineteenth-century deadlock between a landholding peasantry and a bourgeoisie living on rents, commerce and control of the state, and on to the Duvalier dictatorship and its partnership with United States capital. Along the way Dupuy faults the two dominant plantation-economy models, one placing causation wholly outside the Caribbean and the other wholly inside it, for lacking any account of class conflict or of the state.