One sugar plantation on the plain outside Port-au-Prince, and the aristocratic family that owned it, carry Cheney's account of what French colonial capitalism actually was. The Ferronnays papers, seized when family members emigrated after 1789, contain 220 letters from Jean-Baptiste Corbier, the manager on the ground, and an unusually reflective correspondent for this kind of source.

Saint-Domingue was the most advanced experiment mercantile capitalism had yet managed, but Cheney shows it growing out of Old Regime France rather than away from it: crown, nobility and merchants working together, privileges reshuffled rather than markets freed, sugar barons crowding out planters of modest origins until the coffee boom opened a cheaper door for petits blancs and gens de couleur.

Corbier's misgivings about cruelty and its waste can be stitched into something resembling abolitionism, but Cheney calls that an optical illusion. The story runs to 1838, since for the family the place remained Saint-Domingue.

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.