Geggus weighs how much slave resistance actually accomplished in ending Atlantic slavery, and finds it rarely decisive on its own. Across the Americas he identifies only two cases where it was: the 1848 rising in the Danish West Indies, itself touched off by news from the French colonies, and the French Caribbean of the 1790s.

Saint-Domingue is the strong case, and he defends it against both understatement and overstatement. The 1791 insurrection was a necessary cause of the 1793 proclamations and the general decree of February 1794, but not a sufficient one. What shifted the balance was war with Spain and Britain in 1793, which stranded French troops across the Atlantic, let Spain recruit the insurgent leaders, and drove Sonthonax from a narrow proclamation covering men who would fight to general abolition.

Historians who say the commissioners merely ratified a freedom already seized are mistaken: much of the plantation system was still standing that August.