Haiti's bad roads did the work of government. Landon Yarrington builds that case from administrative paper: Moreau de Saint-Méry's parish-by-parish account of who owed corvée duty in the colony, the 1826 Code Rural with its licence system and vagrancy articles, a memo in which Boyer scolds rural commanders for putting conscripted gangs to work in their own gardens, Schoelcher and the missionary Bird on chained crews rebuilding log causeways when stone lay beside them, ministry budgets from the 1890s, a United States consular agent's report of villages springing up along the logwood line, and occupation road mileage. Together they show governments preferring labour-hungry repair to better roads, because quicker transport would have released a workforce the plantation and later the coffee economy needed to keep in place. Yarrington reads the pattern through liberté and mouvman, the claim on movement that separated moun lavil from moun deyo. Once the Marines paved the country, the timing advantage in the produce trade passed to urban buyers.