Once Toussaint Louverture became a character in books rather than a figure in politics, Pierrot argues, it grew easy to set aside what the Haitian Revolution meant for the global fight against slavery and for the rise of scientific racism. That sidelining happened despite the revolution having stood at the center of European political and philosophical argument while it was still unfolding.

Scholars in Atlantic history, working in literature and philosophy as well as history proper, have since turned to the question of how much Haitian independence contributed to the modern European idea of the nation, a concept usually credited to the French Revolution instead.

British writing about Louverture is Pierrot's evidence. Modern Europe held incompatible commitments at once, to freedom, to nationhood, and to slavery, and the British portraits show how that contradiction was made to disappear through the work of literature and representation.