Moreau de Saint-Mery, jurist and chronicler of French Saint-Domingue, built an elaborate scheme for sorting the colony's population by ancestry. Garraway reads that scheme as a story about families and about sex.

Set out in tables, the gradations of mixed descent carry a sexual allegory, and Garraway argues that what presents itself as natural science is closer to wish fulfilment on the part of white colonists whose own libertinism was unsettling the colony's demographic arithmetic.

Enlightenment writers had held that racial mixture led to degeneration and infertility. Moreau reworks those assumptions into something new: an account of how colonial humanity might biologically reproduce itself, with white men holding the controls. The classification system, on this reading, describes less the society Moreau lived in than a fantasy about who would be permitted to make it.