Popkin credits white sailors with setting emancipation in motion

Joseph gives extended space to Jeremy Popkin's argument, which he calls a departure from traditional scholarship on 1793. Popkin holds that the events at Cap-Francois in that year, including the burning of the city, are conventionally credited to the resistance of the enslaved and to French revolutionary principles of rights and equality, and that this rests on overly determinist narratives. His own claim is that the individuals who set the events of 20 June 1793 in motion were neither Black insurgents fighting for freedom nor white colonists defending privilege, but white sailors from outside the island and a white general who believed he was defending the interests of revolutionary France. On that reading the emancipation proclamations of 1793 and the Convention's decree of 1794 came about through a crisis that had little to do with slavery, and Popkin stresses the difference between urban and rural slavery. Where this account departs from the standard one: Reports Popkin's contention that the 1793 emancipation proclamations resulted from a contingent urban crisis rather than from organised insurgent pressure or abolitionist campaigning.

Reviewing John Garrigus's study of Saint-Domingue's free people of colour, Geggus singles out the parish of Aquin for anticipating post-independence changes in the late 1790s by selling off plantation land in peasant-sized units. He notes that Garrigus's socioeconomic base is nine thousand notarial documents, mostly from three of the colony's fifty-two parishes on the south coast, which lets him measure the rapid ascent of the free coloured elite in the last decades of the old regime. Two findings cut against current assumptions. Modern historians have exaggerated the wealth of the group, which was not made up of the men of immense capital C. L. R. James imagined. And although recent scholarship has popularised a special connection between people of colour and coffee, Garrigus finds indigo and cotton were the main sources of wealth for the people he studied. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus endorses Garrigus's demonstration that the wealth of Saint-Domingue's free coloured elite has been overstated since C. L. R. James, and his scepticism about the recently popular idea that the free coloured population contained a military leadership class.

With almost no navy in the region, the Convention fell back in January 1793 on licensing privateers. Girard reports the results as a bargain for the Republic, with corsairs operating out of Guadeloupe alone taking about eighteen hundred prizes between 1794 and 1798 at minimal cost to the treasury. The practice also advertised the regime's principles, since many crews included black sailors and at least fifteen captains are known to have been black. He sets against this the British counterpoint. The Royal Navy made a policy of selling captured black privateers into slavery and operated under the punitive Articles of War of 1749. The contrast is the mechanism of the whole article in miniature. The side that offered freedom recruited from the majority population, and the side that offered sale into bondage had to import and bury its own men.

In 1792 Benjamin Rush drafted a plan for a peace office in the federal government and specified its decoration, including ploughshares beaten from swords and five life sized paintings. Four showed enemies reconciled, a Native American and a Kentucky settler cooking venison in one pot, Cornwallis and Tipu Sultan sharing a decanter of Madeira, French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm in arm. The fifth proposed a Saint-Domingue planter, a man of colour and a native of Africa legislating together in one colonial assembly. White reads the timing closely. The French law of 4 April 1792 had just granted political rights to free men of colour, which white colonists were obstructing, so the picture endorsed that law, and by seating an African in the chamber it anticipated by nearly two years the decision to free the enslaved and make black men citizens. The plan appeared in Benjamin Banneker's almanac.