The years from 1789 to 1804 in Saint-Domingue roused enslaved people and alarmed planters across the Atlantic world. Ghachem resists reading the period only as a clean break with slavery, presenting emancipation in Haiti instead as something that grew out of the colony's legal history over a long span.

The study works beneath the letter of the law into how it was actually used, and stages particular episodes at length, among them the extraordinary case in which a master was prosecuted for torturing and killing the people he owned.

Old Regime law turns out to have been invoked from several directions at once during the revolutionary years. Administrators reached for it hoping to hold the colony steady; free people of color and enslaved people reached for it to claim citizenship and demand an end to brutality. What emerges is a portrait of colonial governance as a field of strategy in the land that became Haiti.