Johnson tells the history of the American Revolution as one that includes Saint-Domingue, reading the two decades between the Paris treaties of 1763 and 1783 as a single connected story. The first treaty left Britain and France with enormous war debts, and both turned to their western colonies to pay them, Britain through new taxes and France by accelerating its traffic in enslaved Africans. Unrest followed in both places. Colonists in Port-au-Prince, Black and white, free and enslaved, took to violent protest before blood was spilled in Boston, and rebels in each territory helped the other along. Diplomatic records, newspapers and colonial correspondence support an argument about how racial hierarchy shaped competing claims to freedom. A long prologue on Makandal, the maroon leader executed in 1758, establishes that people of African descent were organising for dignity decades before European philosophers began denouncing slavery in print.