Garrigus begins with a puzzle. Across the eighteenth-century Americas, wealthy planters of African descent were rare, and where they existed — Jamaica, Brazil — money and connections could buy a working version of white status. Saint-Domingue had the largest such class anywhere and refused it that recognition. Julien Raimond, an indigo planter, would have counted as white almost anywhere else.

The explanation offered here runs through the Seven Years' War. Defeat in 1763 brought imperial restructuring and colonial resentment, and island-born whites answered by insisting on their Frenchness. Colonists and administrators together built a public sphere organised around a shared white identity, and borrowed Enlightenment claims about biology and gender to cast free people of colour as corrupt, effeminate and unfit for civic life — a line that also soothed the envy poorer European arrivals felt toward wealthy mixed-race neighbours.

Those families replied with liberal and patriotic argument, and after 1789 with a rival account of colonial society.