Joseph Bunel served Toussaint Louverture and then Dessalines as a diplomatic and commercial envoy; Marie Bunel, born Fanchette Estève, spent her adult life trading in Cap Français and later Philadelphia. Girard reconstructs both careers from French, British and American archives.

He was a white Frenchman, she a free black Creole, but the argument is that ambition and money shaped their paths more than race did. After years there as a merchant and plantation manager, Joseph took an administrative role under Louverture from 1798, negotiating terms of trade and non-aggression with Britain and the Americans while the Quasi-War ran, before serving as paymaster. That proximity to the regime got him deported when the Leclerc expedition arrived.

Marie, already prosperous before 1791, kept trading straight through the revolution; closeness to Louverture and Henri Christophe never became political engagement. Persecuted with her husband, she rebuilt her business in Philadelphia and returned to Haiti only in 1810, after which the record thins out.