Seven essays reconstruct five turbulent years on a Dutch Caribbean island, starting with the rising of August 1795 in which some two thousand of Curaçao's roughly twelve thousand enslaved people took part. Oostindie opens by arguing that the traffic of ships, sailors and news through Willemstad made the island permeable to revolutionary ideas, though the lasting consequences of its upheaval were modest. Geggus, drawing on a database of about 180 American slave revolts, finds that Curaçao produced two of the eight largest of the era, and credits the French Revolution with wider influence than the Haitian, whose divided leaders declined to export it. Klooster examines rumours that a king had already granted freedom which local owners suppressed; Rupert and Aizpurua follow smuggling and conspiracy along the Venezuelan coast; Fatah-Black analyses the coup of 1796; Jordaan concludes that privateering and great-power rivalry, not ideology, settled the island's fate.