Whites held prisoner during the Saint-Domingue rebellion left accounts written in their own voice, and Popkin reads them as evidence for how race was being thought about in the revolutionary era. No whites before them had met black insurgents who both defied their rule and set up armies and governing bodies of their own.

A few prisoners, Gros and Descourtilz among them, were brought to accept a lower rank inside those bodies; the narratives they published are the fullest to survive. Speaking as themselves let the authors get past the stock images that shaped nearly all European writing about the rebels.

Popkin places the texts in the years when the modern form of autobiography was still being worked out, and draws a conclusion about the genre. Writing in the first person could do more than assert the self-sufficient white male subject. Here it registers that subject dissolving.