Rizzo examines how lawyers represent their clients in the twilight years of the Old Regime France. During this period, lawyers always depict their clients as more metropolitan than their opponent in order to render colonial "others" both more exotic and more accessible to readers and judges.;
Suggests that racism was a strategic military liability in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars between Britain and France in the Caribbean. The French Revolution provoked slave uprisings on many of the Caribbean islands. Both the British and French underestimated the black rebels' capabilities and routinely executed black prisoners of war rather than ransoming or imprisoning them. These tendencies made Caribbean campaigns longer and bloodier than they might otherwise have been.
