Historians from Thornton to Dubois have linked the military skill of the 1791 insurgents to the war-hardened captives shipped out of West Central Africa. Davis tests that link comparatively. Using the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, he charts the regional origins of Africans landed in Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana across the eighteenth century and finds that only Saint-Domingue took a clear West Central African majority in the decades before the rising. Since it was also the only French colony where a mass revolt succeeded, the demographic outlier and the political outlier coincide. Colonial shipping reports and planter treatises are read alongside the statistics to show that French buyers distinguished carefully among African regions. Davis is candid about the limits of his instrument, which records arrivals and not the resident population, omits births and deaths, and loses thousands of captives to unrecorded destinations.