Blackburn's survey of four centuries of New World slavery earns admiration here and a long list of corrections. Geggus lays out its three-phase scheme, from a household economy built on precious metals, through a mercantilist era of sugar and tobacco, to a nineteenth-century industrial phase resting on cotton and coffee, along with the parallel three stages by which slavery was challenged. He accepts the weight placed on political crisis, resistance and class struggle over explanations crediting Protestantism or capitalism, and finds it most convincing for the French emancipations of 1793 and 1794, while thinking the outbreak of war and Sonthonax's part are undervalued. The hundred pages on Haiti he judges hastily written, cataloguing confused identities, inflated British casualty figures and misdated events. He also holds that the revolution radicalised the rights of man only in the limited sense of emancipation and racial equality, since the governments that followed rested on forced labour.