Trouillot begins from a fact he thinks has been passed over: between 1767 and 1789 coffee exports from Saint-Domingue quadrupled in volume and rose almost sixfold in value, approaching the returns from sugar. The familiar picture of a sugar colony converted into a coffee-growing nation by wartime destruction therefore needs revising, since the shift was well advanced before 1791.

The boom is read at two scales at once. Set inside the world-economy, it shows a crop pulled into territory under direct European control as European consumption grew. Set on the ground, it produced a rural population of small planters, many of them gens de couleur, many of them whites outside the plantocracy with no metropolitan alliances, whose rise the sugar planters answered with ethnic entries in parish records and tightening restrictions.

The argument is also methodological. World-system analysis and close local study each fail alone, and the coffee estate is where the two levels meet.