Slave revolt was never more frequent in the Americas than between the 1770s and the 1840s, and Geggus places Curacao's insurrection of 1795, and its strange sequel five years later, inside that wave. He begins by admitting how slippery the counting is: no complete census of revolts and conspiracies exists, and even the threshold for calling an act a rebellion is contested.

What emerges is a picture of causes that are more tangled than the obvious one. Insurgents in the French colonies rarely spoke of the rights of man; they said instead that freedom had already been granted them, whether by the king or by the deputies in Paris, and comparable rumours of a concealed emancipation law drove more than twenty revolts through to the 1830s.

Geggus weighs the French Revolution's disruption of colonial authority, the example of Saint-Domingue becoming Haiti, and an abolitionist movement that predated both and outlasted them.