Fiehrer sets out to give substance to a phrase often invoked and seldom examined: Louisiana's connection to the Caribbean. He follows French settlement of northwestern Hispaniola from the buccaneering decades through the Treaty of Ryswick to a colony whose enslaved population grew steadily until 1803, and traces the move from indigo to the sugar and coffee that made planters rich enough to resent the Crown's monopolists and the Nantes slavers.

Much of the essay is corrective. Refugee families of the lower Mississippi cherish a story of narrow escape from butchery, and the antebellum press supplied the imagery: a docile bondswoman on one side, a cannibal insurgent on the other. Measured against correspondence, census returns and the numbers who reached Cuba, France and the eastern seaboard over fourteen years of movement, the tale of mass killing has thin support.

Through the eighteenth century the two colonies depended on one another, and many south Louisianians descend from those who left.