Garrigus revives a comparative approach that historians largely abandoned decades ago, once the field settled on economics and demography as the forces shaping the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent more than European religious or legal traditions. That consensus cannot explain why colonies with matching economies and populations produced unlike racial orders.

He asks why Jamaica's racial rules stayed looser than Saint-Domingue's. Wealthy free families of color in Jamaica could obtain privileges setting them above other free people of color; in Saint-Domingue after 1770, law filed even rich freeborn families under the label affranchis, ex-slaves.

Three causes carry the explanation. Quarrels with Versailles over military service and colonial loyalty after 1763 produced a crisis of imperial identity with no Jamaican counterpart; friction among whites ran higher in the French colony; and the two elites worked through different legal institutions, which shaped whether class or racial labeling prevailed in dealings with the richest free colored planters.