The people who rose in Saint-Domingue in 1791 left no diaries, letters or memoirs, so their politics has to be recovered from witnesses who feared and despised them. Dubois takes up that problem and argues that the political thinking of the enslaved deserves the attention historians give to revolutionary Paris or Philadelphia. It formed on plantations and in the towns that served them, through daily bargaining and refusal, as African, European and Atlantic practices met in the colony. A second argument concerns the puzzle of royalism. Rebels used royal emblems, invoked a distant monarch, and for a period fought under Spanish colours, but Dubois reads these gestures in colonial rather than European terms. Royal and republican language sat together because both served one strategy, finding an ally in the metropole against the colony's slaveholders. That strategy finally paid off in alliance with French republicans, and abolition followed.