Marking a hundred years since United States marines landed in 1915, Sommers and Delices examine the economic interests, racial assumptions, and hard-power calculations that ran through American dealings with Haiti before the occupation began.

Rather than asking whether the United States as a whole profited from empire, a framing they set aside as exhausted, the study asks who in particular gained and how much power those people had to shape policy. It also presses on what the state actually is when foreign policy is made.

Two figures get close attention: Woodrow Wilson, whose racial thinking is dissected alongside his decision to intervene, and Admiral William Caperton, whose conduct reveals the attitudes that let military commanders carry out an occupation. The lens then widens to the American press, read here as a promoter of commercial opportunity. Taken together, the chapters answer why, by whom, and how empire was pursued in this case.