Meadows argues that the planter elite of Saint-Domingue cannot be studied inside the colony's borders. The families that mattered most were tied to France by property, kinship and association, so any account of their rise and collapse has to be written across the ocean.

When revolution in France and slave insurrection in the colony broke that world apart, more than thirty thousand people were set moving between Jamaica, Cuba, the southern United States, France and the eastern Caribbean. The largest single wave reached American ports in the late summer of 1793, after Le Cap Francais burned.

The study reconstructs these households through record linkage and a relational database, first as a demographic group portrait shaped by inheritance law and by movement over the life course, then as refugees whose displacement proceeded in stages. Its closing chapters read petitions and legislative debates from the Terror to the Consulate for what exile did to families and to their claims on the state.