Almost nothing survives in the insurgents' own hand from the first years of the Saint-Domingue uprising; what exists was written by planters, officials and soldiers with reasons to misrepresent it. Dubois treats those hostile sources as the only available route to the political thinking behind the revolt, and argues that this thinking deserves the attention lavished on Paris or the North American capitals.

That culture, he proposes, was made on the plantations and in the towns they supplied, out of African, European and Atlantic materials, through daily accommodation and refusal. His second claim concerns the puzzle of insurgents who invoked kings while allying with a republic: royalism and republicanism, read for what they meant in the colony rather than in Europe, were not opposites but coexisted. What held the successive appeals together — to the French crown, to the Spanish king, finally to the French Republic — was the search for an outside ally against the colony's slaveholders.