Accounts of the Age of Revolution have long centered on France and the thirteen colonies. Gaffield's volume joins a growing case for treating what happened in Haiti as the third of the era's world-shaping events.

That revolution was the only slave uprising ever to succeed, and the declaration it produced in 1804 marks a break in how social, economic and political life would afterward be arranged. It brought a second independent country into being in the Americas, and it established a new kind of political text.

For all the weight now given to Haiti internationally, the declaration itself has only recently begun to receive close attention: the circumstances of its making, its actual wording, and what followed from it.