Teaching the French Revolution means choosing what to leave out, and Saint-Domingue has usually been what gets left out. Garrigus argues the separation is artificial. A syllabus confined to the metropole cannot pose the question of who counted as French, which is precisely the question the colony forced.

The essay is deliberately practical. Assuming no instructor will add a book to an existing reading list, it points to accessible sources in English for teachers and students, supplies background, and suggests a lecture or two that could be reworked, with examples of colleagues who have built the Caribbean into the structure of a course rather than bolting it on at the end.

The rationale is that Haiti gives students the clearest case of nation and race being made rather than found: the first population outside Europe to throw off colonial rule, in a society whose divisions came out of the plantation itself.