When the insurgent commander Macaya told a French commissioner in 1793 that he was subject to the kings of Congo, France and Spain, historians from Madiou onward took it as proof that the rebels were burdened with an African attachment to monarchy, something backward that Louverture had patiently to talk them out of.

Thornton takes the statement seriously instead. Perhaps two-thirds of Saint-Domingue's enslaved population had been born and raised in Africa, many of them in Kongo, and he reconstructs what kingship meant there in order to read their politics as a coherent ideology rather than nostalgia.

His evidence includes insurgents electing kings and queens quarter by quarter as they took territory, a ceremony at L'Acul conducted by a Capuchin, which points to Kongolese Christianity, the conqueror-king manner of certain commanders and the terror they used, and the Kikongo chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery, whose translation scholars have fought over for decades.