Geggus opens from a mismatch: the revolt that wrecked France's wealthiest colony and produced Haiti — the only slave uprising in world history to succeed — has generated an enormous literature but very little foundational research.

Much of what exists, he observes, is popular or polemical writing drawn to the spectacle of Saint Domingue's collapse and to Toussaint Louverture's career. At the level of primary sources, by contrast, the field has advanced hardly at all since the Études Ardouin published in 1853 and Pauléus Sannon's Histoire from the 1920s. Geggus's own contribution is to point toward primary material that has gone unused.