Casimir writes a history not of Haiti but of Haitians — of the political imagination of the population rather than the machinery that governed it. His organising distinction is between a state that expresses a people's sovereignty and a public administration that governs from outside on behalf of outsiders. Saint-Domingue had only the second, and independence, he argues, did not dissolve it.

The generals who defeated France took over the conqueror's claim instead of refusing it, treating the land as spoils and trying to keep plantation agriculture running. What they ran into was the counter-plantation system built by people who had been captives and never conceded the legitimacy of their captivity: their own arrangements for land, markets, family, language, worship and movement.

Moving back and forth between the arrival of Columbus and the American occupation, Casimir reads the country through Kreyòl, rural insurgencies and the sovereignty the majority built without a state.