Scott reconstructs the webs of communication that linked enslaved and free people across the eighteenth-century New World. Working through obscure official records in three imperial languages, Spanish, English and French, he writes history from the vantage point of those at the bottom.

The book follows talk of coming freedom as it moved, and the people who carried it: sailors and military deserters, buccaneers, runaways living in maroon settlements, from Venezuela up to Virginia. Out of these traced routes Scott builds a detailed account of how mutiny and revolt spread, and in effect a history of thought among the enslaved.

Its own history is unusual. The manuscript went unpublished for thirty-two years, gathering a reputation among historians of slavery for having opened the study of the Black Atlantic to serious work, before Verso finally issued it with a foreword by Marcus Rediker.