Naming is treated here as part of the struggle it appears merely to describe. Tracking a century of official and public language in Dominica from emancipation in 1838 to 1928, Trouillot shows planters, local bureaucrats and Colonial Office staff avoiding the word peasant because it conceded what they feared, a class of independent cultivators controlling their own labour process. Stipendiary magistrates' field reports, parliamentary papers, Colonial Office correspondence and local almanacs supply the record. As cultivators won ground against the plantation, usage shifted, until by 1928 a prominent planter held the post of Peasant Adviser and the administration was building institutions around a category it had long refused, institutions designed to curb the very independence the word implied. The methodological lesson for anthropology is that categories such as peasant or middle class are historical products of local and metropolitan argument, and still need historicising by those who use them.