Geggus assesses Blackburn's synthesis of his own two earlier volumes on the rise and fall of American slavery, now carried past 1850 to take in Cuban, Brazilian and North American emancipation, and linked in an epilogue to the emergence of human rights. Blackburn divides New World slavery into three eras, argues that it both fed on and fueled European industrial growth, and credits abolition chiefly to political crisis, slave resistance and class conflict rather than to Protestantism, patriotism or capitalism.

The review admires the scope and doubts the Haitian material. Geggus lists a run of factual errors across the hundred pages on the revolution, thinks the outbreak of war in 1793 and the role of Sonthonax undervalued beside Toussaint Louverture, and notes that regimes resting on forced labor, dictatorship and the banning of Vodou make a poor case for radicalized rights. On Haiti, he judges, the book tilts toward celebration.