In one year the colony imports forty-eight thousand people

Girard gives the arithmetic of the sugar economy without softening it. In 1700 there were about nine thousand enslaved people in the whole colony. In 1790, at the height of its prosperity, it imported forty eight thousand in that single year and the enslaved population passed five hundred thousand. He attributes the scale of importation to mortality rather than to growth, since between five and six percent of the enslaved population died every year. His explanation is structural rather than moral. Sugar needed acreage, machinery and hundreds of workers, so estates were large and often owned by absentees in Cap Francais or Paris who hired managers paid on the year's crop, which gave the managers every reason to work people to death for short term profit. He adds that yellow fever and malaria killed newly arrived whites at an even higher rate than newly arrived Africans. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard attributes the high death rate mainly to sugar, climate and absentee management rather than to any special viciousness of French planters.

Beard makes two claims about Toussaint that carry the whole argument of the book. The first is racial: he wants it emphatically marked that Toussaint had no white blood at all, because the point of the biography is to show that everything Toussaint achieved was achieved with faculties common to the African race. The second is biographical: Toussaint lived fifty years of his life in slavery before he emerged as the vindicator of his people. Beard treats the long wait as an advantage, giving the man time to learn both the sufferings and the capacities of the enslaved before he had to act. Modern archival work on the Breda estate papers, including the study by Geggus in this same batch, has since established that Toussaint was legally free and had himself owned a slave well before 1791. Where this account departs from the standard one: Beard presents Toussaint as enslaved until the revolution, which archival research on the Breda papers has since overturned.

Oge and Chavanne spent months imprisoned in Santo Domingo pleading not to be sent back, and both appealed to Carlos IV in religious terms without success. After extended debate Spanish officials extradited them and their associates to Saint-Domingue, hoping to dissipate dissent and calm the French. Yingling records what unsettled the Spanish most: Oge's insistence that gens de couleur were men, citizens and French, and had once been treated like their white neighbours. News reached Santo Domingo that just before the scheduled execution in February 1791 armed sympathisers arrived to help, but they failed to ambush the prison guards. The prisoners were then put through public executions designed as deterrence. Governor Blanchelande approved the sentence, and Yingling notes the irony that within days he too would cross into Santo Domingo seeking refuge.

A week before the burnings began, a group of rebel commanders held a ceremony at Morne Rouge, at the place called Bwa Kayiman, where the oungan and rebel leader Boukman prayed for support. The article stresses that Trouillot situates this within a wider pattern rather than treating it as unique: many guerrilla leaders held ceremonies before fighting, Biassou told the enslaved not to flee death because the spirits would return them to Africa, and three quarters of the leaders named, including Boukman, Biassou, Yasint, Lamour Derance and Romaine-la-Prophetesse, were oungan before they were commanders. Calinda dances were the only gatherings the enslaved were permitted, so a dance was simultaneously a cultural event, a religious event and a political meeting. Vodou supplied conviction and organisation at once, working as an adhesive across people separated by language and origin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects both conventional readings of Bwa Kayiman, that it was merely a political congress and that it was merely a mystical ceremony.