Recent work on the Age of Revolutions has taken African actors seriously; indigenous ones, Kim argues, are still missing from it. Her case is St. Vincent, where the Caribs fought Britain in the Second Carib War of 1795-96 and came close to breaking its hold on the island.

British chroniclers called them Black Caribs, a label meant to present them as African newcomers with no aboriginal claim. Kim shows that Amerindians had lived on St. Vincent long before Britain claimed it in 1763, and that they had turned the island into a refuge, absorbing Africans who fled nearby colonies and dealing with French administrators who supplied them once war began.

The defeat was total: starvation, surrender, deportation to Balliceaux where roughly half died, then removal to Roatan. Kim reads the war not as futile resistance but as a rare attempt by a mixed force under Amerindian leadership to exploit imperial crisis and hold its own territory.