Between the rising of 1791 and Christophe's death in 1820, the richest plantation colony in the Americas became a country of small proprietors. Lacerte treats that as the central economic fact of the period and asks how successive governments, French and Haitian alike, tried and failed to prevent it.

Every regime wanted the estates kept whole and worked. Coercion produced desertion and falling revenue instead, and the southern republic ran deficits from 1808 to 1812. Petion raised the cultivator's share of the crop to a half, alarming an elite whose position rested on the old arrangement, and after dissolving the Senate in 1809 he began handing out land outright, first to veterans according to rank, later more widely, sometimes in place of unpaid salaries.

The figures are poor, one nineteenth-century estimate putting it at seventy-six thousand carreaux among some two thousand recipients, but the result is clear: two decades of quiet, and a subsistence economy leaning on a single export.