Joseph Bunel sailed to Philadelphia in 1798 as Toussaint Louverture's envoy and dined with John Adams, an episode American writers have repeatedly cited as a black diplomat at a president's table. Working through archives in Kew, College Park, Paris and Philadelphia, Girard establishes that Bunel was a white Frenchman, and that his wife Marie was a free black merchant with close ties to successive Haitian rulers. The pairing is what makes the case instructive. Bunel served a run of black regimes while feuding with Paris, and his diplomacy with Jamaica sought trade rather than the spread of the revolt. Marie prospered in societies that should have penalised her colour, class and sex, living wherever business was best until she returned to Haiti in 1810. Girard concludes that commercial interest outweighed racial loyalty for many people caught up in the revolution, and that its history is better built upward from individual lives.