Nineteenth-century Haiti is usually written up as a chain of coups explained by a defective political culture, and Sheller sets out to show that this reverses cause and effect. Working from Haitian debates of the 1840s, she traces a liberal opposition to President Boyer that widened into something its architects never intended: a movement of black landholders and southern smallholders demanding land reform, cheaper goods, and protection of their constitutional rights, culminating in the armed peasant mobilisation led by Jean-Jacques Acaau and known as the Piquets. Haitians drafted and fought for a constitution more democratic than the one then in force in the United States. What defeated them was the state's inability to place the army under civilian control, itself a product of French refusal to recognise independence, the indemnity of 1825, and the commercial hostility of slaveholding powers. Democratisation, she concludes, is always shaped by international pressure and not by internal class struggle alone.