More than an empirical study, this book is a reimagining or reinterpretation of Haitian history, visualized “from below.” Jean Casimir offers a panoramic view of the history of the Haitians from 1791 to the 1915 US invasion, and his far-reaching narrative challenges assumptions regarding Haiti's state and society. The author critically analyzes Haiti's colonization, its slave system (he prefers the term “captives” for those abducted from Africa), its colonial plantation economy, its anticolonial war of independence, its changing social structure and emerging nation, and the development of its postrevolutionary state and society. The author refuses to accept official histories or the language of the imperial colonizers. He insists on giving voice to those who have been silenced, emphasizing their refusal to accept bondage and their gradual building of autonomous communities and an alternative socioeconomic system. In short, he aims to excavate the hidden history of the Haitians.

A central argument of the book is that after the war that defeated French colonialism, the new Haitian leaders did not see through a radical social change, but instead “appropriated the rights or privileges of the French state” (36). The author argues that Toussaint Louverture, who Casimir characterizes as despotic, was himself firmly opposed to popular participation (140-141, 148). The new government of 1804 accepted many of the Eurocentric precepts of the French and moved into their elite positions. “The racial consciousness and pride of the Haitian oligarchs of the nineteenth century were built on a disdain for Africa. In order to protect the social order offered by the Christian, racist West, they took on the project of rendering local culture invisible” (20).

The end of slavery did not end the class or racial hierarchies in society. The new oligarchy, made up of free people of color and free urban blacks, “set themselves up in opposition to the laboring classes. In the process, they carried colonial despotism into independent Haiti” (47). The Haitian oligarchs tried, but failed, to perpetuate the plantation system. They were unable to do so because the newly independent African-born majorities refused to accept it, stubbornly preserving and expanding their sovereignty as they went about building what Casimir calls “the counter-plantation system.”

Another of the book's arguments is that the formerly captive working classes of the plantations transformed themselves into a relatively autonomous peasantry and succeeded in throwing off oligarchic control for some years (97, 122, 131, and others). These Haitians built agricultural communities and communal economic structures that served their own interests, despite the dictates of the new Haitian state. The population was motivated, Casimir argues, by “the memories of Amerindian and African agricultural work . . . and its innovative organization of the territory that combined . . . settlements organized around productive gardens—and rural markets” (132). The large-scale plantation disappeared.

The book is not an introductory text. It is rather dense, and the author seems to assume prior knowledge of Haitian history. There are sometimes unclarified historical references that may create difficulties for non-specialists. Casimir also tends to return to his key themes and arguments again and again in each chapter, from different angles, giving the narrative a repetitive quality. He is to be commended, however, for his passionate commitment to illuminating the lives of a people made invisible, his insistence on remembering their “suffering, rage, blood and the experience of pitiless extermination” (xvii), and his thought-provoking observations of the Haitian people's continual resistance to brutal domination and oppression.