Guadeloupe, small and economically marginal, is the vantage point Dubois uses to argue that the language of universal rights was remade in the Caribbean rather than carried out to it. He works from notarial registers, civil registers, plantation censuses and colonial and military correspondence held in Basse-Terre, Aix-en-Provence and Paris. The 1793 rising at Trois-Rivieres, where insurgents killed royalist planters and then presented themselves to officials as defenders of the Republic, sets the pattern he follows through the emancipation proclaimed under Victor Hugues. Freed people who claimed citizenship found their new rights tied to compulsory plantation labour and to a racial hierarchy that administrators justified by calling them unready for liberty. Dubois names this Republican racism and traces its afterlife in later French imperial governance, where the promise of rights was extended and endlessly deferred. The account closes with Richepance's expedition of 1802, the deaths of Delgres and his followers at Matouba, and the restoration of slavery.