Vastey published this book in 1814 as chief publicist for Christophe's kingdom. It was the one major work of his that went untranslated in his lifetime, while three others were hurried into English for a media campaign conducted on the regime's behalf in Britain. The edition presents it as the earliest systematic account of colonialism as a system rather than a catalogue of abuses, anticipating by well over a century what Césaire, Sartre and Fanon would argue.

In ninety-seven pages Vastey sets out nearly everything he would later develop: an assertion of African origins for civilisation, close readings of European racial science and colonial law, and an unusual alertness to the way European writing itself governs the colonies. Its most extraordinary passage is an inventory of more than a hundred named former colonists and the crimes they committed against the people they owned, his own white grandfather included.