Haiti's standing as the one state produced by a successful revolt of the enslaved is widely known; its first decades are not. Gonzalez fills that gap with a study built on rarely used primary sources and centred on what people grew, who held land, and the unsanctioned rural settlements that former slaves of the plantation system built for themselves.

The transformation he traces runs from the eighteenth century's most profitable and most exploitative slave colony to a comparatively free society of small farmers. Out of that shift came lasting institutions: marketplaces operating in the open air and outside formal regulation, and the lakou, the clustered agrarian compounds of the countryside.

His central claim gives communities of runaways and conflict over land a formative weight equal to the Revolution itself, arguing that Haiti's farming, its commerce and its religious life all carry their imprint.