Haiti is the one post-emancipation society where the enslaved freed themselves by arms and took the state along with their freedom. Sheller asks what control and resistance could look like under those conditions, once colour and class still divided former planters from the field labourers who had risen through the revolutionary army.

Her title comes from a peasant retort to anyone enforcing a labour contract: the signature binds nothing if the signer can walk away. Sheller reads it as an embodied tactic, continuous with pre-independence flight from the plantation, and finds its cumulative effect in the collapse of large-scale agriculture across the nineteenth century, as land passed to veterans by military rank and estates broke up.

She frames the inquiry with Trouillot's argument that the revolution was unthinkable to contemporaries and remains marginal to accounts of modernity, then asks how much of the peasantry's own history the archive has silenced.