Hispaniola is treated here as a single arena between 1789 and 1809, and Nessler follows how freedom was claimed, restricted and revoked on both sides of a border that people crossed constantly. Much of the evidence is legal: notarised freedom acts drawn up in Santo Domingo, more than three quarters of them protecting women, together with letters from freed officers who fought for Spain in the early 1790s. Louverture's occupation of the Spanish colony in 1801 confirmed abolition there and at the same time tied freed people to plantations. After 1804 the French general Ferrand ran a slaveholding regime in the east for five years while traffickers moved thousands of people through it. Reading the two colonies together, the book argues that Santo Domingo's reputation as a neglected backwater is what made it decisive, and it sets modern Haitian and Dominican estrangement against a revolutionary past of shared flight and joint fighting.