Trouillot takes apart a story Haitian intellectuals and foreign observers have told in chorus for well over a century: that the country has simply been unlucky in its rulers. Treat the state as a free-standing thing acting on society, he argues, and nothing is left but to trust whichever clique looks most promising. States are conditioned instead by where they came from, where they sit in the world order, and what productive base they tax.

Reading colonial Saint-Domingue for those conditions, he finds the pattern that outlasted it: slavery, dependence, export crops, the plantation - and against them a peasant way of working that the enslaved built inside the estate system and afterward defended. The elites who took power inherited the colonists' divided sense of belonging, proud of a black nation and oriented elsewhere at once.

Hence the title: state and nation were pointed away from each other from the outset, and Duvalierism follows from that divergence rather than interrupting it.