Popkin's opening chapter is mostly an argument about what the events of 1791 to 1804 were not. The phrase Haitian Revolution places them beside the American and French revolutions, but it also implies a coherence they lacked: the slave insurrection broke out in one of three provinces and ran alongside a separate rising of free people of colour with quite different aims, frequently in conflict with it.

Toussaint Louverture fits the revolutionary mould no better. Whether he had any hand in starting the 1791 revolt remains unclear, he rejected the first French emancipation decree, and the labour laws he imposed drove many blacks to take up arms against him.

The consequences were nonetheless global, from Britain's prohibition of the slave trade in 1807 to a European turn toward colonies in Africa itself, in a country whose settlement only became legible decades after independence.