Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History

A revisionist account of the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961) arguing that the regime achieved genuine popular support among Dominican peasants through a 'peasant-state compromise' — distributing land, protecting squatter rights, and styling Trujillo as the friend of working people — while simultaneously subjecting them to surveillance, vagrancy laws, and coerced sedentarization. Turits's second major argument concerns the 1937 massacre of approximately fifteen thousand ethnic Haitians: that virulent Dominican anti-Haitianism was largely a product of the massacre rather than its cause, manufactured to legitimate the destruction of a vibrantly bicultural Haitian-Dominican border world.