Daut places Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the celebrated alongside the obscure, inside the global history of ideas, treating their frameworks of knowledge and interpretation as central to the Age of Revolutions.

The revolution she describes struck at slavery and colonial rule together, and those who fought and wrote pushed antislavery, anticolonial, and antiracist commitments into the working vocabulary of modern politics. Haiti became the first state in the Americas to end slavery permanently, ban prejudice by color, and prohibit colonization, and it did so surrounded by slaveholding societies and by foreign powers that attacked its sovereignty again and again. Haitian writers and officeholders held the independence they had won and set down ideological foundations for egalitarian statehood.

Where modern freedom and equality are usually traced to the French or United States declarations, Daut names a closer source: the 1804 Principle, the claim that no person should ever again be enslaved or colonized.