Landers follows a connected set of African and African-descended lives across the southern mainland of North America and in the Caribbean, roughly 1760 to 1850. Her opening figure is Francisco Menéndez, a Mandinga who passed from British captivity into Spanish service, commanded the Black militia of St. Augustine, led the free town of Mose, petitioned the Spanish king for a captaincy, sailed as a corsair when no answer came, and took his people into Cuban exile when Florida changed hands.

Lives like his, she argues, show enslaved and free people reading the politics around them and acting on what they read. Several empires and many Native nations competed in this arena, and its conflicts kept opening chances to change the course of a life.

Drawing on Spanish-language records not used before, she adds names to a story long carried by a handful of famous voices, and puts flight, marronage and shifting allegiance near the centre of the age of revolutions.