How the army came to own Haiti's economy is the question here. Gerlus answers it from the revolution itself: the estates the French left behind were nationalized, and the state that absorbed them was in practice the officer corps, which converted public property into the basis of a class of its own.

The framing draws on debates about the state's role in accumulation, from Marx and Engels through later theorists of development, and is then grounded in the conditions of a new nation cut off diplomatically and governed almost without interruption by soldiers.

The second half explains why military governments failed to revive plantation exports. Coercion could not hold workers on estates they were able to walk away from, and former slaves who fed themselves from their own plots were never made dependent on a wage. Without that dependence, Gerlus argues, no policy of production could take hold, whatever the rulers intended.