King reconstructs the social world of free people of colour in Saint-Domingue up to 1791, the year his notarial sources give out. They made up a substantial share of the colony's free men, filled the ranks of the rural constabulary almost entirely after mid-century, and carried much of the burden of defence once it was clear that whites would not serve in the militia.

Military service is the central thread. The Chasseurs-Volontaires who fought at Savannah in 1779 supplied nearly a third of that expedition's ground strength, and officials and community spokesmen alike urged enlistment as a way to claim equal standing and to give the lie to white assumptions about them — a claim soured when the survivors were scattered as Caribbean garrisons for years afterwards. King is deliberately cautious about the link to the revolution: he can identify only a handful of Chasseurs who certainly fought in it, and offers parallels rather than causes.