Proceedings of a round table convened in Port-au-Prince in December 1997 under the UNESCO Slave Route project, bringing together historians from Haiti, France, Senegal, Britain, Canada, the United States and the wider Caribbean. Hurbon's foreword sets the occasion against the French commemorations planned for 1998 of the abolition of 1848, and insists that the rising of 22 and 23 August 1791 began the chain of abolitions that ran to Brazil in 1888. One group of papers works on the relation to events in Paris: how news of the insurrection was received in France, what the colonial clergy did, whether revolutionary law admitted a right of insurrection, and how gradual abolition lost its defenders. A second group puts the Bois Caiman ceremony under scrutiny, with David Geggus finding the legend larger than the record and Robin Law comparing Dahomean blood pacts. Closing papers treat museums, archives and a projected dictionary of the revolution.