Sutton and Quinn introduce a volume built around David Nicholls's work, picking out the arguments of his that have drawn the most comment and the most criticism.

The best known concerns colour. Nicholls read much of nineteenth-century Haitian politics as a contest between an urban, commercial, largely mulatto elite and a rural, military, largely black one, and identified the two rival versions of the national past each side used to justify itself. But he insisted that colour was the badge of class rather than its substance, that blacks could hold the mulatto legend and mulattoes the black, that the politique de doublure muddied the picture further, and that colour usually counted only where other divisions reinforced it.

They also take up his refusal to call Duvalierism fascist or totalitarian, treating it instead as a further growth of post-colonial patterns already visible in the previous century, and his insistence that Caribbean politics be read historically and on its own terms.