Saint-Domingue and Cuba were two immensely lucrative colonies, each in their day the world's largest producer of sugar, each built on systematic exploitation and cruelty. In the 1790s, Saint-Domingue exported almost as much sugar as all the islands of the British West Indies combined; by the 1820s Cuba had displaced its neighbour to occupy that prime position. Saint-Domingue was the first Caribbean territory to break free of colonial power and slavery, becoming the Republic of Haiti in 1804; Cuba was the last of Spain's colonies to win independence, becoming a republic compromised by US neo-colonialism nearly a century later, in 1902. From 1804 onwards Haiti stood as ‘a profound challenge’ to the slave-based colonial order that still prevailed in the rest of the Caribbean (p. 4); in colonial Cuba slavery was not finally ended until the 1880s. The premise of Ferrer's book is that there were multiple connections between all these events. She argues that such connections existed far beyond the notorious claim, made in the 1820s and often reiterated in the later historiography, that Cuban planters resisted independence from Spain so staunchly because of their terror of ‘another Haiti’. More accurately, Cuban planters took ruthless economic advantage of the disruption to sugar production caused by Revolution in Haiti; the steep increase in Cuba's prosperity during the first two decades of the nineteenth century was directly the result of the sharp decline in Haiti's. Thus there was a direct causal relationship between the overthrow of slavery in Haiti and its entrenchment in Cuba, one which was made manifest not only in the high politics of the ruling elite, but also in the social and political experiences of everyone else.

Ferrer covers the period of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, roughly from the 1780s to the 1820s. The author ranges easily over economic, social, cultural, intellectual, political and diplomatic questions, bringing in whatever she deems germane to understanding her topic. Thus social exchanges between Cuban soldiers stationed in Spanish Santo Domingo and Haitian rebel slaves are given their due alongside the ramifications of Napoleon's ousting of Fernando VII in 1808 or the power struggles within elites. How news travelled in a slave society is a central concern, the focus of one specific chapter but also a theme that is treated particularly well throughout the book. In shaping her argument from archival and newspaper sources from Cuba, Haiti, Spain and France, the author is gloriously unafraid of uncertainty and gutsily undaunted by unknowability. She is as socially inclusive as possible, teasing out the utmost that can be gleaned from often sketchy accounts of day-to-day events on the plantations, illustrating that even if they cannot be fully verified they can nonetheless be interpreted to tell us something worth knowing, at least about the boundaries of possibility of the ideas and actions of all those affected by slavery. The archives are vividly evoked in this book, their eerie peace wafting gently off the page, and yes, they are of course institutions of power, but Ferrer gives her readers a welcome reminder that there are asymmetries here, too, and in places of scant resources, such as Santiago de Cuba or Port-au-Prince, archives can ‘project insubstantiality as much as power’ (footnote 14, p. 7). The documents themselves are made manifest before our eyes, as Ferrer describes the neat handwriting, the richly glowing leather binding or the mildewed paper that crumbled away. The reader is left with a vivid sense of the traces left by thousands of mainly undocumented lives.

Ferrer's work makes a contribution to several historiographical debates, the main two of which should be mentioned here. First, Freedom's Mirror explores the relationship between the ‘first slavery’ (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sugar production in British and French Caribbean colonies) and the ‘second slavery’ (nineteenth-century large-scale production of tropical commodities in previously marginal economic areas, notably Cuba, Brazil and the southern United States). Second, her findings lead her to question whether the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was the turning point that it has been claimed to be. In the Anglophone world, the number of captives indeed declined rapidly after 1807, but it was not so in Spanish, Portuguese and French territories, where the trade continued to flourish even after the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1820. In this wider context, the Republic of Haiti's active anti-slavery policy takes on significance beyond the fact that it operated on a relatively small scale. The epilogue to Freedom's Mirror shows that Haiti's 1816 Constitution, with its articles prohibiting slavery in the republic's territory, granting the right of asylum and conferring Haitian nationality on all blacks and Indians who set foot on Haitian soil, enabled admiralty courts in Port-au-Prince to grant freedom on the same basis as their counterparts in Britain did after 1807. Ferrer documents several occasions when slaves from Jamaica or Cuba took their own steps to get to Haiti and claim these rights. Thus Haiti was both participant and model in the prominent debates of the Age of Revolution relating to slavery, freedom, property, nationality and citizenship.

This is a handsomely produced volume. Trouble has been taken to include some attractive illustrations, such as the engravings of Toussaint Louverture negotiating with the British or the coronation of Christophe as King of Haiti in 1811. Gracing the epilogue is a reproduction (sadly not in colour) of the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam's painting Haitian Jungle (1945), which the author refers to as an ‘emblem of the vibrant and historic link’ between Cuba and Haiti (p. 340). As Ferrer carefully illustrates in her textual version of Lam's canvas, there were multiple images of ‘Haiti’, with varying connotations that were invoked and deployed strategically in support of a variety of changing arguments. In exploring the ‘quotidian links’ between what happened in Haiti and what happened in Cuba, Ferrer has given us a rich and subtle account of both of these interwoven histories, in a depiction which is as finely wrought as the paintings and engravings that enhance her profoundly impressive book.