Geggus gathers ninety-nine documents on the rising that turned Saint Domingue into Haiti, most of them his own translations from French and Spanish and many previously unavailable in English. Plantation reports, runaway advertisements, an atrocity case file, insurgent letters, parliamentary debates, a British soldier's diary and constitutional texts are grouped in ten sections running from the colony before 1789 to the reactions the revolution provoked from Jamaica to Caracas. The introduction supplies the interpretive spine. Geggus proposes following the period as three goals, freedom, racial equality and independence, pursued by three social groups, the enslaved, free people of colour and whites, in three provinces that each produced a different version of events. He is cautious with received claims, doubting the familiar line that Saint Domingue was the wealthiest colony on earth and leaving open whether marronage nourished rebellion or drained it away.