Vastey, who lived from 1781 to 1820, served as the most important secretary to Haiti's King Henry Christophe and wrote prolifically. Daut reads that body of work as the founding instance of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a mode of argument aimed squarely at the Enlightenment premises underwriting colonial rule.

The claim is one of priority. Taking apart colonial racism and the justifications for slavery is a project usually credited to the twentieth century, to W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, and Daut places Vastey at the head of that line rather than outside it. She reads him alongside those later figures and also among black Atlantic writers nearer his own time, including Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs.

The conclusion follows from the connections she draws: no account of how Afro-diasporic thought began holds together without him.