Carolyn Fick writes the Saint Domingue revolution from the position of the enslaved majority rather than its celebrated generals. Earlier accounts, from the nineteenth-century Haitian historians Madiou and Ardouin through C. L. R. James, either subordinated the masses to questions of leadership or reduced them to an anonymous force; Fick makes their initiatives, motives and organisation the subject. Working from French colonial archives, judicial interrogations and administrative correspondence, she reconstructs the world of marronage, poisoning, nocturnal gatherings and plantation authority that preceded 1791, and disputes the claim that the colony lacked significant precedents for revolt. Resistance there took quieter and more corrosive forms than open uprising, and it put real power in enslaved hands. The southern peninsula receives sustained attention, where cultivators pressed their own understanding of freedom against successive leaderships, from emancipation through civil war to independence. Appendices print interrogations and declarations so that readers can weigh the evidence themselves.