The revolution in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804 remains the one slave rebellion in which enslaved and formerly enslaved people ended slavery and founded an independent state, which is why Ferrer describes it as possibly modernity's most radical upheaval. Fifty miles away in Spanish Cuba, its effect ran the other way.

Cuban planters and authorities watched the neighboring colony come apart and moved to ensure nothing similar happened to them, reinforcing slavery and colonial rule instead. Slave society in Cuba was thus violently entrenched at exactly the moment when a nearby example of enslaved people destroying slavery was impossible to ignore.

Ferrer's method is to refuse the usual separation between these two histories. Told as one linked sequence rather than two national stories, the Haitian Revolution and the rise of Cuban slave society each cast fresh light on the other, and on Caribbean and Atlantic history in the period.