The revolutions that remade the Atlantic between 1776 and 1825 are best read as a chain, Blackburn argues, each radicalizing the next — and the Haitian link is the one habitually dropped. R. R. Palmer's celebrated survey of the democratic revolutions passed over Saint-Domingue entirely, an omission that flattered the others by removing the episode in which emancipatory and reactionary forces collided hardest.

Neither the French assembly nor its successor moved against slavery on its own initiative; the first real breach came from Jacobins acting under pressure from slave revolt and British invasion. Blackburn holds British and French leaders responsible for the bloodshed that attended their attempts to restore the plantation regime, and notes what the Haitian constitutions did afterwards: offering asylum to Africans and their descendants, renouncing war on neighbours, and grounding citizenship in a state too weak to trouble the peasantry much.