Girard opens on an 1802 Guadeloupe census of hundreds of people described as belonging to the State: legally free under the abolition of 1794, yet catalogued with a price beside each name, called negre while planters were addressed as citizens, and reenslaved within months. The document poses his question. When France had outlawed slavery and the trade in captives, what should one call the traffic that plainly continued?

The traffic persisted in substance while the word was avoided. Ships under French captains supplied Saint Domingue out of Kingston; exiles took the people they owned overseas instead of freeing them; cultivators were kidnapped and sold in Santo Domingo; privateers landed recaptured Africans in Guadeloupe; officials shipped prisoners of war to Central America and the United States.

To sort cases Girard proposes three tests, asking whether a movement was voluntary, whether unpaid forced labour followed, and whether profit was the motive, and reads the era's shifting vocabulary as both cover and evidence.