The American and French revolutions generated a flood of celebratory objects: printed ceramics and textiles, cockades, medallions, engravings of heroes. Almost nothing comparable was made for the Haitian Revolution, and White takes that absence as her starting point.

Part of the explanation is structural. A colony organized around plantation labour had neither market nor workshops for such goods, and most images circulating in the Atlantic world were produced by white observers rather than by the people who made the revolution. What those observers fixed on was violence, and violence read in racial terms, which gave the Saint-Domingue war a charge that prints of the guillotine never carried.

White examines how that violence was rendered in objects, alongside a few works imagining something else, including a painting Rush proposed and a wax tableau by Davenport and Bishop. Both proved too much for white audiences. Material culture, she argues, narrowed the revolution more sharply than texts did.