Salt examines how American politicians and diplomats late in the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass among them, worked to talk Haiti into the Atlantic world as a full member. A country the century had opened by disavowing, fearing and refusing to recognize was, in the form of its pavilion at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, to be presented as an example of political, social and economic advancement — modern rather than a problem for modernity.

What Salt calls the Haitian Question is not a single query but a cluster of suppositions about the country, only some of which imply deficiency. Colin Dayan's account of Haiti's stigmatization holds, Salt argues, but does not cover the whole.

Rhetorics of trade reciprocity, political equality and racial inclusion share space with the stories of degeneracy. Geography underlies them: Haiti sits between the Windward and Mona Passages, and American designs on those lanes produced conflicting impulses to denounce, isolate, protect, possess and control it.