Between 1789 and 1809 France held rich Caribbean colonies with small garrisons that fever thinned and British warships could not resupply. Girard argues that French military reach in the region depended on whether Paris would free and arm the people already there. After emancipation in 1794, with black and free colored soldiers enlisted, French forces held every major colony except Martinique, absorbed Santo Domingo, and drew up plans against Jamaica, Louisiana and Cuba, one general imagining Saint-Domingue as a barracks that would alarm the United States. The Jamaica scheme collapsed when Toussaint Louverture warned the British. Bonaparte's restoration of slavery reversed all of it: the Leclerc expedition was destroyed, reinforcements stopped, Louisiana was sold, and officers who had once planned invasions went to Cuba and Jamaica asking for loans and slave-hunting dogs. Drawing on French, British and Spanish archives, Girard describes an empire that worked only by collaboration.