Geggus presents Saint-Domingue as an unusually well connected colony, exporting more than the United States, buying its livestock and currency from Spanish neighbours and its captives from four different slave trading nations, and he uses that setting to argue that the fifteen years after 1789 produced more change than any other Atlantic revolution. Whites, free people of colour and slaves each pursued a separate struggle, and their mutual suspicion drove events forward in ways the mainland independence movements never matched. Weighing the results, he finds the achievements unique in combining independence, racial equality and emancipation, and the costs correspondingly high, with a population down by a third and a refugee flow proportionally twice that of the American loyalists. He also asks why Palmer and Godechot left Haiti out of their accounts of the age of democratic revolution, and suggests the black revolution simply would not sit inside a story about liberal republican democracy.