Nessler treats the Haitian Revolution as an event that covered the whole island of Hispaniola and reached across the Caribbean, rather than one confined to French territory.

The book sets the history of Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti, next to that of Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic, and shows how thoroughly the two were entangled. Neither the line between them nor the question of who governed what was as settled as later maps suggest, and developments on each side shaped the other.