One thing survived every upheaval in Saint-Domingue, Stein contends: the conviction among those in charge that the colony must keep producing. White governors in 1789 and black commanders in 1803 agreed on almost nothing else, yet each treated a functioning plantation economy as the precondition of whatever they hoped to build.

The labourers did not share that view, and after emancipation in late 1793 they were free to say so. What the leadership called order the cultivators experienced as the discipline they had just escaped, and the two understandings of the plantation could not be reconciled by decree, incentive or force. Stein follows successive attempts to square them and reads each failure as evidence that no settlement was available. Only when Pétion and Boyer allowed the estates to be broken up, in the years after independence, did most Haitians get what they had actually wanted.