In terms of its contents, Le système colonial dévoilé can be readily summarized. For two centuries, indeed, a summarizing, content-oriented approach to all of Vastey's publications has been so dominant that it might well appear the only way to read him. From the very first mention of Colonial System in print, in his colleague Baron de Dupuy's Deuxième lettre… à M. H. Henry, we get a sense of how this dominant reading works. In December 1814, Dupuy published two epistolary refutations of a pamphlet entitled Considérations offertes aux habitans d'Hayti sur leur situation actuelle et sur le sort présumé qui les attend: supposedly authored by a Monsieur ‘H. Henry’, the pamphlet had been drawn up in Jamaica upon Dauxion Lavaysse's arrival there, and then circulated in Haiti, according to Vastey, ‘with the intention of preparing the ground’ for the French mission (1819, 206). Disputing the pseudonymous Henry's irenic portrait of colonial Saint-Domingue, Dupuy notes that he has no room in the context of a mere letter ‘to enlarge upon the types of cruelty [les genres de cruautés] that were practised upon agricultural workers during the ten-year period allotted for their existence’, and so refers his proslavery correspondent ‘to a work that has just come out, entitled The Colonial System Unveiled, by Monsieur the Baron de Vastey, where you will find an extremely detailed account [où vous puiserez des détails très-cironstanciés] of the atrocious and inhuman manner in which the ex-colonists treated my fellow citizens at that time’ (1814a, 7). Vastey's book is, for Dupuy, essentially a resource to be drawn upon, a place where one can go to get detailed evidence of humanitarian abuses under colonial rule.

Dupuy's instrumental account of his fellow scribe's book epitomizes the content-oriented approach to which Vastey's work so ‘naturally’ lends itself—an approach that, not surprisingly, also dominates the few reviews of Colonial System published in his lifetime. In an 1816 review in The Scots Magazine, and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, for instance, we are told that: ‘The object of the author throughout this volume is to prove the injustice and inhumanity of the colonial system as practised by Europeans; to expose the atrocities of negro slavery; to vindicate the intellectual and moral character of the native of Africa, and confute the doctrine, by which they are represented as an inferior race to the European’ (‘Specimens’, 809).