French law abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1793 and 1794, yet Girard shows that captives kept moving through the Caribbean for the whole of the following decade under other descriptions. Working from colonial archives in France, Spain and Britain, including a Guadeloupe register that priced supposedly free cultivators one by one across 186 pages, he tracks deportations, refugee flights, privateering seizures, kidnappings across the border into Santo Domingo, and sales of demobilised colonial soldiers in Central America and the United States. To decide which of these counted as slave trading he applies three tests: whether the movement was voluntary, whether unpaid forced labour awaited at the other end, and whether profit was the motive. The vocabulary of the moment, from citizen to brigand to shipwreck, did political work, masking practice while signalling to planters that little had changed. Restoration of the trade in 1802 therefore built on habits already in place.