Two sugar colonies with comparable economies and comparable demography produced very different racial law, and Garrigus asks why. Jamaica's assembly let wealthy families of African descent buy exemption from discriminatory statutes through private bills, yielding a society its legislators described in four parts. Saint-Domingue's magistrates after 1770 folded rich freeborn families into a single legal category, affranchis, a word meaning ex-slaves. Three explanations are offered. Quarrels with Versailles over militia service after 1763 left French colonists with a crisis of imperial identity that Jamaicans never faced. Antagonism between wealthy and poor whites ran deeper in the French colony, and Jamaican speech had no equivalent for the contemptuous term petit blanc. And the two elites worked through different legal institutions. Colonial legislation compiled by Moreau de Saint-Mery, court cases including the brief re-enslavement of the planter Paul Carenan, and laws forbidding white surnames show magistrates teaching wealthy people of colour that their freedom was revocable.