Zephaniah Kingsley — merchant, slaveowner, slave trader — spent the revolutionary decades in motion around the Atlantic. Fleszar uses that itinerary to track a worldview taking shape and then breaking apart.

Enlightenment thinkers had worried about what happened when boundaries were crossed, real or imagined, picturing the ocean as a brutal space full of shape-shifters who answered to nothing but profit. Kingsley's life supplies the case. The process began, Fleszar argues, with what he paid for staying loyal to the British Crown as an idea, and was then worked on by the violence, mobility, anxiety and constant adaptation of booming Caribbean markets during the Haitian Revolution.

Following how he manipulated identity and race does more than catalogue the masks of his self-invention; it brings into view how deeply power was structured across the Atlantic.