Eller opens with a felled palm: the Tree of Liberty planted in Santo Domingo under Boyer and toppled by unknown hands one night in 1864. From it she works outward into a history that refuses to treat the island's two halves as separate stories.

Her subject is the Dominican war against Spanish reannexation after 1861 and the rural people who fought it. A tiny lettered elite, contemptuous of a peasantry descended partly from maroons, left them almost undocumented; they lived by woodcutting, hunting, livestock and honey, largely outside the reach of any state, and held to a rough equality, to decision-making in their own communities, and above all to land and subsistence. Fear of re-enslavement raced through the territory, and whole families abandoned and burned their towns rather than submit.

Haitians helped them repeatedly, their own survival being at stake. That solidarity, Eller argues, later national narratives worked hard to erase.