Claire Antone Payton proposes a middle timescale for explaining the January 2010 earthquake, sitting between the seconds of the shaking and the five centuries of structural violence. Her subject is how Port-au-Prince was physically made, and above all the building boom of the 1970s, when returning migrants and a rebranded Duvalier dictatorship produced double-digit annual growth in construction. Concrete carried meanings of modernity, security and distance from rural poverty, so demand for it outran any capacity to use it well. Meanwhile the state monopoly office taxed every bag of cement and routed the proceeds into family accounts; Payton calculates that the Duvaliers took the equivalent of about thirty-nine million 2019 dollars from cement alone between 1968 and 1978. Builders economised on the one ingredient that made concrete strong. Archival research on the material history of the city, post-quake engineering samples and builders' own testimony support a claim that weak buildings recorded a political relationship.