Sacchi and Ravano follow what became of plantation labor during the Haitian Revolution and in the years after it, treating that question as central to how revolutionary citizenship was understood on both sides of the Atlantic.

Their method is to track where the regulation of labor changed and where it held, which brings out the durability of the plantation complex. That complex operates in two registers at once: as a bond of dependency tying laborers to masters, and as a systemic arrangement flowing from production aimed at export.

The chapter also asks how modern individual citizenship could be squared with coerced labor at all. The answer it pursues lies in the paired terms autonomy and dependency, put to work by legal doctrine and political economy alike. Citizenship then appears at a crossing point — between juridical breaks such as the abolition of slavery and national independence, and the social relations that plantation production continued to impose.