France occupied the middle ground in the Atlantic slave trade — in how long it took part, what share it carried, how quickly it withdrew, and in the mortality and sex ratios recorded aboard its ships. Geggus surveys the Du Bois Institute dataset of just over four thousand French slaving voyages, sketching the trade's timing, its African sources and the age and sex of the captives, before turning to the Caribbean colonies that received nine ships in ten.

Those colonies drew on different parts of Africa, according to crop, to when each was settled, and to what merchants found convenient: Saint-Domingue took nearly half its captives from West Central Africa, Martinique nearly half from the Bight of Benin, Guadeloupe an unusual share from Biafra. Geggus uses the pattern to revisit why Ewe-Fon elements dominate Vodou's vocabulary and pantheon despite Kongo numbers, and to argue that Kongo influence has been steadily underrated.