A small revolt by free men of color in the Grande Anse in 1791 gives Geggus the material for a microhistory, built on archival sources barely used before and set within a wider argument about class relations during the revolution.

The rising itself is obscure, though an atrocity story attached to it has echoed through discussion of the revolution ever since. Working outward from it, Geggus reaches the questions it touches: how rumor moved, how slaves came to be armed, how the races dealt with one another, and where the free colored population's wealth and origins lay. That group, long the least understood part of Caribbean society, is on his account central, since its position in Saint-Domingue was anomalous and its activism began the colony's unraveling.

The Grande Anse held to slavery and white supremacy longer than anywhere else in the colony. Geggus takes the case as evidence that a regional approach is the most promising way forward.

Hardly anyone among the colony's free people of color was richer than Oge, which makes his conduct in 1790 hard to explain. Men of his standing were cautious, backing Julien Raimond's slow campaign in Paris for rights grounded in property rather than color, a program built to leave slavery intact. Oge instead returned home, took the head of armed militiamen demanding the vote, and four months later was broken on the wheel.

Reading the record of his interrogation, Garrigus finds a man undone by his own earlier success. A broker who had grown rich drafting contracts with white colonists and then lost the fortune, he was used to being dealt with as an equal and underestimated how far planters' fear of Parisian abolitionists had hardened.

The testimony also unsettles the military story: no battle crushed the movement, its members dispersed. What counted was the execution, which drew poorer men of mixed ancestry into arms and toward civil war.

When the British leased out the estates of absentee planters in the districts they still held in 1796, they generated something historians of Saint-Domingue rarely have: 197 plantation inventories compiled on a common model within a single six-month window. Geggus uses them to describe a slave society at one moment, across roughly fifteen thousand people.

The tabulations cut in several directions. Ethnic origins varied sharply by region and by crop, which complicates any single estimate of the colony's African composition, and the traces of contraband imports suggest that common figures for illicit slave trading are too high. Sugar and coffee estates differed in structure, and the population looks more creolized and more evenly balanced by sex than had been supposed. What the columns show most starkly is physical ruin: nearly two-fifths under sixteen or over sixty, a tenth recorded as of no value, one adult man in six sick, disabled or dying.

A documentary collection built around a long introductory history of the French Caribbean between 1789 and 1804. The introduction sets the ground: buccaneers who became planters, a colony the size of Maryland producing two-fifths of Europe's sugar and three-fifths of its coffee, and a labour regime so lethal that a third to a half of those who survived the Atlantic crossing died within a few years of arrival.

The narrative runs from the insurrection of August 1791, launched by a coalition of African-born and island-born plantation workers, through the emancipation decrees of 1793 and 1794, to Bonaparte's attempt at reconquest, which succeeded in Guadeloupe and failed in Saint-Domingue.

The documents gathered afterwards come from every side: planters and free men of colour, French officials and generals, Toussaint Louverture's colonial constitution, Delgres's last proclamation, American reactions, and Vodou songs about Dessalines. Maps, a chronology and questions for discussion accompany them.