Lundahl collects and extends work written across three decades to explain why the 2010 earthquake was so lethal and why reconstruction stalled afterwards. Two mechanisms carry the argument. When the plantations were broken up after 1809, a smallholding peasantry took shape that could absorb population growth only while uncleared land remained; once that frontier closed, families subdivided plots, farmed steep slopes, stripped the topsoil and watched income per head fall decade after decade. Running alongside this, nineteenth century politics produced a state built for extraction, a device for moving peasant surplus toward whoever held power, and it outlived every change of regime. Vulnerability to catastrophe follows from both. Chapters take up failed reform programmes, collapsed community enterprise schemes, formal and informal rural credit, the years from Aristide to the quake, and the aid effort that followed. The disaster is treated as the visible moment of a very long emergency.