Meadows argues that the planter elite of Saint-Domingue cannot be studied inside the colony's borders. The families that mattered most were tied to France by property, kinship and association, so any account of their rise and collapse has to be written across the ocean.

When revolution in France and slave insurrection in the colony broke that world apart, more than thirty thousand people were set moving between Jamaica, Cuba, the southern United States, France and the eastern Caribbean. The largest single wave reached American ports in the late summer of 1793, after Le Cap Francais burned.

The study reconstructs these households through record linkage and a relational database, first as a demographic group portrait shaped by inheritance law and by movement over the life course, then as refugees whose displacement proceeded in stages. Its closing chapters read petitions and legislative debates from the Terror to the Consulate for what exile did to families and to their claims on the state.

Scholars have long tied the rise of Saint-Domingue's wealthy free people of color to the coffee boom that began in the late 1760s. Garrigus tests that chronology in the southern parish of Aquin, working from notarial records, estate inventories and colonial censuses, and finds that the fortunes of families such as the Raimonds, Ploys and Depas-Medinas rested instead on indigo, on three generations of accumulated technical skill, and on a brisk contraband trade that their distance from official ports made possible.

Prosperity of this kind, he argues, began early in the eighteenth century and was merely accelerated after 1760. What changed abruptly was race. Men addressed as Sieur in official papers, their ancestry unremarked, were by the 1780s labelled by colour in the same documents, and apparent surges in the free colored population may register a hardening of that line rather than actual growth. Planters losing civic standing as they gained wealth pressed their claim to citizenship after 1789.