Shannon sets Price-Mars's formation against the conditions that brought American marines ashore in 1915. Haiti entered the century cut off from the world economy, its elite French in language, religion and schooling, its debt held in Paris, its commerce passing into German and Levantine hands, with foreign businessmen financing the coups that kept turning the presidency over.

The turn in Price-Mars's own thinking came from reading Gustave Le Bon, who sorted human races by psychological traits held to be fixed by heredity and beyond the reach of education. That a people could be written off in advance struck him as an insolence refuted by fourteen years of revolutionary war, and he resolved to answer it.

The occupation supplied the occasion. Shannon follows Caperton's landing and his assumption of governing authority over a country with no institution able to refuse him, then turns to Price-Mars's early efforts to organize Haitians in response.