Casimir reads two centuries of Haitian history as a struggle between two sovereignties. Africans brought to the island in the last decades of French rule were never fully controlled by the colonial administration, and out of that opening they built their own institutions, their own language and an autonomous space inside the plantation system, the pressure that finally broke the colony apart.

Independence did not settle the matter. The oligarchy that took over preserved the colonial right to use and abuse property, treated national independence as a substitute for popular freedom, and looked abroad rather than to the habitants for the knowledge to govern. The American occupation of 1915 completed the reversal, and the civilizing tasks the ruling class would not perform itself were handed first to a foreign clergy and later to foreign NGOs.

Recovering that suppressed store of experience, Casimir proposes, means joining Haitians' search for self-expression to comparable efforts elsewhere in the global South.