On 20 June 1793 men ran through the streets of Cap Français calling out that the commissioners had freed everyone. Popkin builds a close political narrative around that day, when Sonthonax and Polverel, losing a fight against a rebellious general and the sailors in the harbour, offered liberty to the city's enslaved majority in return for their support. Three days of fighting killed somewhere between three and ten thousand people and burned the richest port in the French colonies to the ground. Emancipation, he argues, came out of contingent decisions taken by a handful of men under pressure, and he explains in the preface why he returned to narrative political history after a training that taught him to explain large events by structures and discourses. The consequences run outward: colonists inviting in Britain and Spain, refugees landing in American ports, and the Convention's decree of February 1794.