Payton approaches the Duvalier decades through what got built. Clearing slums, laying transport infrastructure, and the business and politics of cement in Port-au-Prince supply the evidence for a fresh account of how place was made in a Caribbean capital between 1957 and 1986.

The argument runs both ways. How the city was built lodged the regime's politics, its economy, and its social order in physical form; the changes to that fabric then worked back on the dictatorship's own unstable inner life. Construction figures as part of how the regime operated, not as scenery behind it.

Payton offers the result as a new way of writing the history of place in the Caribbean, and sets its intertwined threads in a longer frame as well: power distributed unevenly across the country's protracted movement from slavery toward freedom.