Renda asks what nineteen years in Haiti did to the United States. The invasion of 1915 installed a puppet president, dispersed the legislature under arms, seized the customs houses, imposed a constitution friendlier to foreign investment and a system of forced labour, and killed Haitians in numbers that may have reached eleven thousand. In Haitian history this is a notorious chapter; in American history, barely a footnote.

Her method is to read the occupation as culture. Marines were not equipment to be positioned but men who had to be enlisted into the business of ruling, and paternalism was the language that enlisted them, from a cartoon marine scolding a childlike Haiti to Smedley Butler telling senators that the country was an estate held in trust for minors.

Renda follows those images home, through Seabrook's bestselling book and the schoolboys who wrote to a Marine sergeant, arguing that empire runs on stories as much as on guns.