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.

A collection on the people who left Saint-Domingue during its revolution and washed up, by way of Cuba and elsewhere, in Louisiana.

The opening essay makes the largest claim. Louisiana and Saint-Domingue were one colonial world, tied by trade, shipping, kinship and a shared Creole language, and the older colony effectively made the younger one. The refugee waves of the early nineteenth century were therefore not an arrival of strangers but a return within the family — a transfusion that prolonged the life of French Creole Louisiana and left the region opaque to the rest of the country.

An editorial introduction tests this against the 1850 census and church records. The refugees who went to the countryside stayed few, mostly white and poor, farming or working trades, with the great majority holding under five hundred dollars in property. Those who stayed in New Orleans held their identity far longer, sustained by intermarriage and repeated failed attempts to reclaim island estates.