Escape from slavery, marronnage, ran across centuries in Haiti, and Eddins treats it as an answer to the plantation, a system built, in Sylvia Wynter's terms, to deny people their humanity, cut their social and cultural bonds, and turn them and their labour into goods.

Alongside arguments by Cedric Robinson, Wynter, and Jean Casimir, the article makes marronnage a form of anti-capitalist resistance, political criticism, and organizing from below. In fleeing, enslaved people repossessed themselves and what enslavers had taken: their hours, relationships, knowledge, and skills. Reclaiming those things undercut colonial structures and helped bring down first Spanish and then French slaveries on the island.

Africa-born rebels and maroons stood at the center of the mobilizing that abolished slavery and ended colonial rule between 1791 and 1804. Afterward, as the new government copied parts of colonial administration, the formerly enslaved built communal arrangements around subsistence and kin and kept using marronnage to protest, exposing the limits of Haiti's own states.