Dubois narrates the thirteen years from the uprising of August 1791 to the declaration signed on 1 January 1804, and treats the result as the work of the insurgents themselves. He stresses that the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue was mostly African-born and drawn from many regions, so that African political and religious thinking shaped the revolution from within. Toussaint Louverture occupies the centre of the book, caught in a bind Dubois sets out plainly: to hold on to emancipation he held on to the plantations, and to hold the plantations he coerced the people he had freed, which set him against their own understanding of what freedom meant. Racial labels are handled as social artefacts that themselves need explaining, and the violence of every party is placed in the context of revolutionary and imperial war. Saint-Domingue emerges as the first postemancipation society in the Americas.