The discourse surveys the colony's exploitation under plantation agriculture and the transatlantic slave trade, outlines the social divisions among wealthy planters, poor whites, free people of color, and enslaved Africans, and recounts repeated insurrections leading to a revolutionary upheaval. It offers a condensed life of Toussaint Louverture, following his rise from slavery to military and political leadership, the island's brief emancipation and prosperity, renewed warfare with metropolitan forces, and the eventual treachery, defeat, and death of the leader, concluding with the revolution's consequences for the colony.