Thousands of refugees from revolutionary Saint-Domingue landed in Louisiana, and their descendants have long claimed a large role in shaping New Orleans. Dessens takes the claim seriously enough to test it.

The hard part, she argues, is telling visibility apart from influence. The migrants were numerous and conspicuous, which is not the same as formative, and not every legend that has grown around them will survive scrutiny. She works through the migration itself, the reception the refugees met, the terms on which they settled, and then the mark they left on Louisiana's social, economic, political and cultural life, drawing on ideas of ethnicity, assimilation and creolization but applying them to this case rather than theorising them.

She insists on treating the refugees as one population in three legal conditions — white, free of colour, and enslaved — against a historiography that has tended to study them apart, and expects some of her conclusions to be disputed.