Bellegarde-Smith writes the history of his country through one family member: Dantès Bellegarde, his grandfather, a diplomat and thinker who spent his career representing Haiti abroad. The book first appeared in 1985 and answered a long silence, since scholarship had rarely taken Haitian intellectual and political life seriously as a subject.

The setting is a nation made by enslaved people who overthrew their masters, and then punished for it. Governments on both shores of the Atlantic saw a threat and set about draining Haiti's wealth: trade barriers, fines heavy enough to cripple it, and finally occupation by the United States. Haitians endured this, and some of them became figures of consequence in world affairs.

Byrd's foreword to the reissue describes Bellegarde as pushing a racially inclusive idea of progress and arguing that Haiti, black people, and colonized nations generally should be able to exist outside the reach of the great powers.