One thing survived every upheaval in Saint-Domingue, Stein contends: the conviction among those in charge that the colony must keep producing. White governors in 1789 and black commanders in 1803 agreed on almost nothing else, yet each treated a functioning plantation economy as the precondition of whatever they hoped to build.

The labourers did not share that view, and after emancipation in late 1793 they were free to say so. What the leadership called order the cultivators experienced as the discipline they had just escaped, and the two understandings of the plantation could not be reconciled by decree, incentive or force. Stein follows successive attempts to square them and reads each failure as evidence that no settlement was available. Only when Pétion and Boyer allowed the estates to be broken up, in the years after independence, did most Haitians get what they had actually wanted.

Between the rising of 1791 and Christophe's death in 1820, the richest plantation colony in the Americas became a country of small proprietors. Lacerte treats that as the central economic fact of the period and asks how successive governments, French and Haitian alike, tried and failed to prevent it.

Every regime wanted the estates kept whole and worked. Coercion produced desertion and falling revenue instead, and the southern republic ran deficits from 1808 to 1812. Petion raised the cultivator's share of the crop to a half, alarming an elite whose position rested on the old arrangement, and after dissolving the Senate in 1809 he began handing out land outright, first to veterans according to rank, later more widely, sometimes in place of unpaid salaries.

The figures are poor, one nineteenth-century estimate putting it at seventy-six thousand carreaux among some two thousand recipients, but the result is clear: two decades of quiet, and a subsistence economy leaning on a single export.