Debien builds his account of slavery in the French Antilles out of paper: notarial minutes, estate inventories, plantation accounts and the private family archives of absentee owners scattered across France and the islands. A long opening survey maps where those documents sit, and notes how thin the French literature of planter manuals is beside its English equivalent.

From that base the study turns to who the enslaved actually were. Working through plantation rolls that record each person's "nation", Debien tracks the shifting African origins of the workforce, and the reputations colonists attached to Senegalese, Bambara, Mandingue, Ibo, Congo and other groups, while cautioning that such labels often described language or port of embarkation rather than descent.

He then follows the newly landed into the estate itself: the branding with an owner's mark that was routine in Saint-Domingue and unusual in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the disorienting entry into a work routine for which nothing had prepared them.