Completed as a Duke dissertation in 1986 and passed hand to hand among historians for three decades before Verso printed it, Scott's study reconstructs how information moved through the revolutionary Caribbean. Sailors, deserters, runaways, market traders, smugglers and free people of colour travelled constantly between ports, and rumour travelled with them. Scott argues that this traffic worked as a genuine political network, carrying expectations of emancipation across imperial and linguistic borders before 1791 and far more intensely afterwards. Officials grasped the danger and tried to close it down by censoring slogans, restricting black seamen and cutting contact between colonies; their own anxious correspondence supplies much of the evidence, alongside admiralty papers, Spanish colonial records, runaway advertisements and planter letters gathered in Seville, London, Kingston, Providence and Port-au-Prince. Enslaved people appear throughout as attentive readers of distant events who weighed the news and acted on it.