Thirteen papers written since 1992, gathered behind a long opening essay on the January 2010 earthquake, press a single explanation for Haitian poverty: a population growing against a fixed and eroding stock of soil, governed throughout by rulers who treated the state as a source of private revenue. Lundahl works with regression estimates of disaster damage, census returns on farm size, and a Leviathan model of predatory rule applied to the nineteenth-century state. One chapter takes apart the income and land-distribution figures most often quoted for Haiti and finds them too weak to carry any redistribution programme. Another applies migration theory to Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic, tying their departure to the same cycle of erosion and falling rural incomes. Closing chapters weigh reconstruction after the quake, and judge the prospects for sustained growth to be poor.