A narrative history running from Columbus to the mid-1990s, first written to carry the story as far as François Duvalier's death in 1971 and extended here to the return of American forces alongside Aristide in 1994. The authors present it as a corrective to the Haitian chronicles they judge poorly documented — Madiou, Ardouin, Léger, Bellegarde — and restrict themselves to what credible sources will support, noting how much has been lost: the palace explosion of 1869, ministry fires, and the archives destroyed during the bloody week of 1883.

Their introduction describes a country of two interlocking worlds, an urban, literate, French-speaking, largely Catholic minority against a rural, Creole-speaking, Vodou-practising majority, while conceding the correlations are approximate. It dwells at length on what the authors take to be an exceptional violence in the Haitian past, on Rotberg's account of paranoia among peasants and elite alike, and on what they call national incompetence.