Geggus weighs how much the age of revolution actually changed the Caribbean, and finds the answer uneven. Only one colony, Saint-Domingue, became independent before the 1840s; elsewhere imperial rule held, and the number of enslaved people in the region in 1840 was barely below what it had been in 1760, with Cuba and Puerto Rico still importing Africans illegally and expanding fast.

Emancipation, he notes, owed at least as much to metropolitan abolitionism as to revolt: the British act of 1833 freed more people than the Haitian Revolution had, and the ending of legal racial discrimination across most colonies between 1828 and 1832 came through reform rather than rising. The region's economic eclipse had more to do with Brazil, Mauritius and European beet sugar than with political violence.

Recent scholarship's stress on Caribbean agency, including claims that slave resistance drove European antislavery, receives a sympathetic but sceptical hearing.