Haiti: State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism

A systematic account of how the Haitian state came to stand against the Haitian nation — not as an accident or moral failure but as the structural outcome of a political economy set in motion at independence, tracing the arc from 1697 to 1988. Trouillot's central argument is that Duvalierism was not a rupture with Haitian history but its most extreme formalization, built on a state-nation split in which the governing class extracted from the peasant majority while noirisme, color politics, and U.S. support successively enabled and insulated authoritarian rule.