Johnson writes the American Revolution as a story with two theatres, setting rebellion in the thirteen colonies alongside acts of resistance by free and enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue. The method is contextual rather than causal: events five hundred miles apart, with no documented connection between them, are read together to reveal a shared Atlantic situation after the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

Newspapers do much of the work. Reports from Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français are placed in conversation with those from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah, whose editors and correspondents told readers about escapes from slavery and about colonial defiance of imperial power alike.

The result folds free and enslaved Afro-Caribbean life into the history of early United States foreign relations, and rereads founding documents against the diplomacy surrounding them. Johnson disclaims any exhaustive treatment, offering the book as an invitation to keep connecting the early republic to its Caribbean neighbours.