Trouillot builds the book on a concept of the peasant labour process: household agricultural work on land and tools that the household controls, where living labour counts for more than the equipment. The move sidesteps the long search for a typology of peasant types. Dominica supplies the test. Colonial records, tax and licence schedules, estate papers and fieldwork in the village of Wesley show former slaves after 1838 keeping provision grounds and buying plots while refusing permanent estate contracts. Planters and legislators answered with the longest list of trade licences in the British Caribbean and with export duties weighted against arrowroot, coffee and cocoa, the crops cultivators actually grew. The cultivators won that fight, and the estates decayed. Trouillot then turns the telescope around. Reading the 1959 Banana Act and the 1977 contract with Geest, he argues that no sale takes place where there is only one legal buyer, and that Dominican growers are paid for labour power, exploited inside a British conglomerate while appearing independent.