Girard opens with a traveller's notebook from Port-au-Prince in 2001 and then works backwards through five centuries to ask why the richest colony in the Americas became the poorest country in its hemisphere. Haitian poverty, he argues, is recent, dating from the ruin of the independence war and deepening under Francois Duvalier, so nothing about it was fated. Beneath the rapid turnover of presidents he finds three constants. The first is racial and colour antagonism, running from the destruction of the Taino through the mutual killings of 1802 to the standing rivalry between lighter and darker Haitians. The second is a governing class that trades in nationalist rhetoric while stocking foreign bank accounts. The third is a settled national expectation that roads, schools and clinics will be paid for by outsiders. The chapters that follow carry this argument from Columbus to Aristide's third term, using the author's own fieldwork, American military records and Haitian political writing.