Geggus points to an oddity in the study of slave resistance: the one revolt that succeeded, destroying the richest colony in the world and producing Haiti, has been largely left out of it. The field concentrated on the English-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, or on forms of resistance short of armed revolt, and knowledge of the Saint-Domingue rising had advanced little since accounts published in 1853 and 1920.

Much of the paper tests the conceptual apparatus that field had built, and finds it unstable. Attempts to sort genuine resistance from mere intransigence, violent from passive, inward from outward, break down under pressure. It is not obvious that a solitary runaway was more political than the killing of a hated master, or that a midwife's infanticide was less so than a workforce downing tools.

Armed revolt, ranked highest in these schemes, was usually futile and self-destructive, its aims frequently muddled and not necessarily the abolition of slavery.