These essays weigh political explanations of Haitian poverty against economic ones, and generally find markets working better than their critics allow. The Duvalier state was authoritarian, but calling it totalitarian goes too far; the claim that merchants bent the nineteenth-century state at will is judged poorly evidenced; and Haitian landholding is held to bear little resemblance to Spanish America's, with sharecropping among near-equals easing access to land rather than blocking it.

On erosion, what decides the outcome is the number of hands on a plot and the intensity of their labour, not whether the crop is eaten or sold; perennial coffee, in fact, holds soil better than food crops do.

Later chapters survey the decline of sugar and sisal, cocoa and coffee, bauxite and essential oils, and reopen the quarrel over coffee marketing, re-examining Girault's case for exploitative middlemen and finding that the figures point the other way. A further chapter reviews Haitian classics from Price-Mars and Bellegarde onward.