Dessalines was probably owned by Toussaint's own son-in-law

Girard and Donnadieu assemble a chain of testimony connecting Haiti's two founding figures before the revolution. A white planter and naturalist recorded that Jean-Jacques Dessalines had been the slave of a free black of the same name who served as doorkeeper of the government house at Cap-Francais, and a military file identifies that doorkeeper as Janvier Dessalines. A French diplomat's account adds that Jean-Jacques had earlier belonged to Philippe Jasmin Désir and passed on his death to the woman who married Janvier. That woman was Toussaint's daughter Marie-Marthe. Since Toussaint leased Désir's Cormier plantation and its thirteen slaves at the end of the seventeen seventies, he may have directly supervised the man who would later succeed him. The authors use this to explain the close but sharply unequal relationship between the two, and Dessalines's own bitter description of himself as Toussaint's workhorse. Where this account departs from the standard one: Standard biographies have Dessalines owned by a white man named Duclos and then by an unrelated free black; the article ties him instead into Toussaint's own family network.

Ottobah Cugoano was captured and enslaved, worked on Caribbean plantations, and came to London in the middle of the eighteenth century with the man who owned him. There he wrote a critique of slavery that starts from a different place than the abolitionist argument around him. In the late eighteenth century he described the imperial organisation of the slave trade and the triangular Atlantic economy it belonged to. His conception of sovereignty considers people first and institutions afterwards. No human being has the right to enslave another, and therefore the task is to build institutions that cannot do it, rather than to reform the state so that it complies on paper while surviving intact. He named the Atlantic nations whose internal quarrels set the rules of that trade, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, and observed that Africans and the peoples of the Americas were not consulted about any of it.

The Dominicans who drafted a slave code in 1784 attached to it an account of what the colony actually produced. Apart from tobacco grown around Santiago in the north, they judged sugar to be the only export worth naming, and they counted 760 black and brown workers on nineteen sugar mills. That was the whole plantation sector of Spanish Santo Domingo. Across the mountains, the French colony of Saint Domingue was working several hundred thousand people on cane and coffee and was the richest European possession in the Americas. The Spanish side lived instead on cattle. Ranching estates called hatos sold meat and hides, much of it across the border, where French planters needed meat to feed their labour force and leather to make the whips used on it. Most of the manufactured goods reaching Dominican households came in through smuggling, which was cheaper and better than anything the official Spanish channels supplied.

Perry notes that the insurgent army in Saint-Domingue was for a short time called the Army of the Inca. Geggus attributes the name to a mistaken belief that the Taino descended from the Inca. Sinclair Thomson offers an alternative that Perry prefers to leave open: the Tupac Amaru rebellion against the Spanish received extensive coverage in the Saint-Domingue press, so the name may register a sense of solidarity with aboriginal peoples that reaches beyond the Taino as local predecessors. She uses the ambiguity to develop her central distinction. The relationship the revolutionaries built with the Taino was not filiation, which would require biological descent, but affiliation, secured by an analogy between two historical situations involving two entirely different sets of actors, Taino against Spanish and African-descended against French.