What did it take for early modern Europeans to settle successfully in the Americas? Historians seeking to answer this question have unearthed social and family networks that were key to survival, just like these networks were for those who stayed behind. Pierre Force adds new insights in his eye-opening book by meticulously reconstructing the transatlantic emigration of members of two families – one noble, one commoner – from the same French town to the same town in rural Saint-Domingue. The place of departure was the Pyrenean town of La Bastide Clairence, located in the French part of Navarra, which had been home to many Huguenots in the past. Force suggests that their religious affiliation might have been a factor in spurring emigration, as it was for Pierre Lamerenx. This member of a noble family embarked for the Dutch Republic in 1684, where he signed up with the Dutch East India Company, which soon sent him to Batavia.

If religion was one reason to move, ending up without an inheritance is sometimes cited as another motive. Since the eldest son would inherit the family's property, younger sons were forced to pursue other options, such as joining the army or clergy. Emigration to the colonies was a new option, but, as Force shows, it was not necessarily a path taken by destitute siblings. The case of Pierre Lamerenx's nephew Marc-Antoine illustrates this point. His eldest brother was the sole heir of the family's possessions, while another brother became a priest, a third entered the army, and a fourth worked as a government official. Ideally, Marc-Antoine would have married a noble heiress, but he preferred emigration, and not because the inheritance left him empty-handed. On the contrary, his father paid for his voyage, which was after all cheaper for the father than providing the dowry for a noble wife.

Marc-Antoine moved to an area near the border with Santo Domingo, where coffee production soon took off, making this emigrant a prosperous slaveholder. But his story is not simply one of colonial entrepreneurship. Marc-Antoine benefited undeniably from the support he received from the father of the colony's governor, a man his own father knew from the judicial world of Béarn near Navarra. Such networks were indispensable. In addition, Force argues that the dowry of Marc-Antoine's wife might have enabled him to finance the outlay of a coffee plantation.

As a settler in Saint-Domingue, Marc-Antoine was a pioneer in both his own family and his birth region. It was his success story that must have seduced many inhabitants – noble or not – of La Bastide Clairence to try their luck in Saint-Domingue, including the commoner Jean Mouscardy, who became the owner of two coffee plantations, likely enjoying Marc-Antoine's patronage. Marc-Antoine also patronized his nephew Jean-Pierre Lamerenx, another man who used his own wife's dowry to commence the planting life.

The migrants who were still alive in 1791 were all affected by the Haitian Revolution. Jean Mouscardy barely survived the catastrophic fire of Cap Français in 1793 before returning to France; Jean-Pierre Lamerenx became Toussaint Louverture's aide-de-camp; and many others made their way to Cuba, with some eventually moving on to New Orleans. Familial ties to France were not severed, at least not in the early nineteenth century. “For two or three generations,” Force writes, “the Lamerenxes functioned as a transnational family” (154), pursuing agriculture or trade in France, Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and New Orleans.

Force puts the careers of these families within the framework of mercantilism, stressing an aspect he considers underemphasized in the literature: the military enforcement of exclusive imperial trading zones, which, he contends, guaranteed the profitability of cash-crop plantations such as those run by Mouscardy and Lamerenx. Force also chides historians who attach great importance to smuggling for creating the misguided impression that mercantilism did not function. That judgment seems a little unfair. To some degree, as most historians would agree, mercantilism certainly did function, but it depends where you look. Planters in the chief British and French plantation islands, as well as mining entrepreneurs in Mexico and Peru, could count on regular shipments of their products to metropolitan markets. But the situation was vastly different in colonies whose main produce was less profitable and which therefore suffered from neglect by the metropole, such as large parts of Spanish America. Contraband trade thrived precisely there. Foreign wars or revolutions – the disasters to which the book's title alludes – were therefore not the sole threats to mercantilist systems.