A code of 139 articles bans the whip and prices every other offence

Stein pairs Polverel's two regulations of early 1794. The first, of 2 February, described the terms of employment in thirty-three articles and added something new: article ten gave each cultivator entitled to a full share of revenue between six hundred and eight hundred pas of land to farm as he wished. Polverel disliked the idea, arguing in his preface that private gardens should no longer be necessary now that workers were free, but he recognised that they had become important and that a revenue share alone would not secure loyalty. The second regulation, of 28 February, ran to some 139 articles on plantation discipline and set two principles against each other: work was necessary and obstruction punishable, but corporal punishment was prohibited, with dismissal and fines replacing the hated system of whippings and even physical mutilation.

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.

The Republic's abolition of slavery in February 1794 joined libertarian politics to antislavery and put the resources of a great power behind black self liberation. Geggus stresses the immediate strategic use to which this was put. For several years emancipation became a tool of war directed mainly at Britain's islands, producing the multi class risings in the British Windward Islands that Victor Hugues supported from Guadeloupe and the commissioner Goyrand from Saint Lucia. He suggests the Coro rebellion in Venezuela the same year belongs in this family, given French privateers offshore and the insurgents' call for a republic and for French law, while noting that other historians read the French connection as an alibi invented by Spanish officials to hide their own conduct. He adds that once the Republic adopted emancipation it pushed the policy abroad far more energetically than the black leadership of Saint-Domingue ever did.

Pierrot dates the first mention of Toussaint in British documents to October 1793, when troops entering the port of Gonaives found a black man commanding the place whom they called the Spanish general and whose name they wrote as Tusan. The mechanism the article traces begins here. British writing about Saint Domingue consistently detached the man from his circumstances, and the detachment started with the simple failure to place him in any command structure. When the Times of London first named him on 7 November 1794 it printed his name in capitals, described him as a former slave commanding a division under Laveaux, and misspelt the first element in a way that turned a name charged with religious meaning into a variant of the French word for powerful. The capitals overpowered the allegiance and typographically isolated him from the French.