Historians from Thornton to Dubois have suggested that Saint-Domingue's late-century influx of West Central African captives, many of them soldiers taken in the Kongo civil wars, helped make the 1791 insurrection possible. Davis tests that claim comparatively rather than restating it.

Working from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, he charts the regional origins of captives landed across the French Caribbean — Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana and the smaller colonies alongside Saint-Domingue — and finds that only in Saint-Domingue did West Central Africans come to outnumber every other group by a wide margin, and only after mid-century, as Senegambia stabilized and the Kongo did not. Since Saint-Domingue was also the one French colony to produce a general slave revolt, he treats the overlap as strengthening the case. He is candid about the limit: the database records where captives were bought, not where they came from, so the argument leans on other evidence to close that gap.