Foundations of Despotism show that Rafael Trujillo’s regime created a critical position for the peasantry in the Dominican Republic by implementing policies that generated ways to integrate peasants into commercial markets, the national state, and a shared national community as never before in Dominican history. It established the foundations for Trujillo’s hegemony. By doing research through oral interviews, it became apparent to Turits that it was peasant involvement with the state that helped maintain Trujillo’s credibility throughout the nation, and when the peasantry withdrew their support, it allowed the regime’s fall.

By looking at Trujillo’s despotism while exploring the paradoxical social base and the critical role of government figures other than the despot, Turits separates himself from other authors in the field. He argues that the transformation of the state was feasible and fruitful because of the regime's approach to peasants. By focusing on how the peasantry sustained the social foundations of Trujillo’s regime, Turits takes a different path than most of the literature, which has focused on coercion and fear as an explanation for Trujillo’s long rule.

Turits examines the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolves from a European colony to a modern nation under Trujillo to investigate the social foundations of Trujillo’s enduring regime and, more broadly, the power sustained in non-democratic systems. By beginning with the Dominican Republic as a colony, Turits can look at the societal foundations of the Dominican Republic and how it was ripe for the ideology of Trujillo and other Dominican elites.

Looking at the dialectic narratives, readers will be able to see the transformation in peasant-state relations. The first narrative in the text commences in the late 16th century with the demise of early sugar plantations. The second narrative takes place in the narrow timeframe of the Trujillo regime. With these two narratives in the text, Turits shows how the peasants were flexible and receptive to Trujillo’s rhetoric. Trujillo’s policies illuminate processes of state formation. The state brought the peasantry within its range of vision and effective control by distributing plots of land, providing aid, irrigation, and infrastructure upon which the sedentary agriculturalists came to depend.

Turits says extreme depictions of Trujillo’s dictatorship “reproduces a long European tradition of projecting the most extreme forms of political despotism and otherness onto non-Western societies and imagining beyond the edges of the European universe oddly passive or irrational people who mysteriously accept intolerable regimes.” I find this quote fascinating enough to include in full within this paper because this is a theme seen time and time again in tropical regions. The narrative of otherness or naïve native is pushed on to those who live in the tropics. Somehow tropical people need European saviours. This will be seen in the text with the US’s intervention in the Dominican Republic. White intervention is seen as noble and paternalistic in nature.

Turits’ sources took him all over the Dominican Republic. Archival sources show local and daily operations of the state, public policies and their implementation, and testimony from pertinent social groups. However, the bulk of Foundations of Despotism comes from thousands of daily interstate documents, letters by peasants written to the state, and interviews with elderly peasants across the country. Oral interviews play an essential role in Turits’ thesis and methodology throughout the text. Using sources from peasants’ perspectives, Turits shows why there was widespread support for Trujillo in light of his regime's repressive character.

While Richard Turits’ book is dense in its style, the information was fascinating. Shifting to look at rural Dominicans, Turits shows how a regime like Trujillo’s could sustain itself until it could not. Ending the text with the assassination of Trujillo shows how the public’s shifting position and the US’s shifting support helped bring about the end of Trujillo’s regime. Foundations of Despotism was a great read.