Trouillot's case is the Commonwealth of Dominica, a marginal banana exporter, and his first claim is historical. Caribbean peasantries did not precede capitalism and were not disrupted by it. They came after the plantation, made up of people carried across the Atlantic by merchant capital, working crops brought from other continents. Tradition arrived after modernity; the rupture other theories treat as their endpoint is where analysis has to begin.

His second claim is conceptual. Political economy has dissolved the peasantry into simple commodity production, but what people actually do matters — whether they work on land or at sea, what they can grow, how a household divides its tasks. Banana growers, fishermen and seamstresses may all sell commodities while living differently, not least in how gender inequality takes shape among them.

He is wary too of the unit itself. Columbus named Dominica from a passing ship; the island as an object of study still has to be discovered, not assumed.