Eighteen essays and a prologue by Jean Casimir came out of a conference held at the John Carter Brown Library in 2004 to mark two centuries of Haitian independence. The arrangement moves from causes to consequences to representations. Opening chapters reconstruct the colony before 1789: its society on the eve of revolt, the surviving built landscape, the tools available to free people of colour, their routes towards integration in the two capitals, and everyday appeals to a distant king. A second group follows the insurrection itself, taking up the insurgents of 1791 and their idea of independence, the politics of revolutionary violence, marriage and manhood under emancipation, and counter-revolutionary regions. Later chapters trace reverberations in Cuban slave testimony, freedom suits in United States courts, and Brazil, then turn to French literature, American commentary and neoclassical art. Fiering's preface notes how long standard histories of the age of democratic revolution ignored Haiti entirely.