Following the merchant, slave trader and planter Zephaniah Kingsley through Bristol, loyalist Charleston, the revolutionary Caribbean, Spanish East Florida and a late colonisation scheme in Haiti, Fleszar reconstructs the mental equipment such a life demanded. He calls it an Atlantic mind: a capacity to reinvent nationality, religion and racial position as markets and empires shifted, which Enlightenment writers had already feared in their complaints about men who belonged nowhere. Kingsley made that adaptability pay, yet the competing influences he absorbed left him unable to assemble a coherent moral position, and his published defences of slavery conceal more than they disclose. The thesis is equally an argument about how Kingsley has been remembered, since Florida legend has fused with the historical record to produce a benign patriarch and, with him, a misleadingly mild picture of slavery in the territory. Fleszar uses archival material previously unknown to Kingsley research to dismantle that portrait.