Mayes and Jayaram introduce a collection built around a single proposition: Haiti and the Dominican Republic should be studied as one interconnected island rather than as two national cases. They trace how research shifted after the 1990s, as both economies moved from agriculture toward export processing and tourism, both saw poverty fall hardest on women, and both came to depend on money sent home from abroad.

Their framework revises transnationalism in three ways. It insists that those who stay are as much part of the story as those who leave, and asks what keeps particular people in place. It denies that cross-border movement is recent, following Trouillot in dating Caribbean entanglement with global capital to 1492.

And it argues that Hispaniola exemplifies the transnational distinctively, through the spread of republicanism, nineteenth-century antillanismo, and a shared twentieth-century history of American occupation and economic dependence.