"[1] James examines the brutal conditions of slavery as well as the social and political status of the slave-owners, poor or "small" whites, and "free" blacks and mulattoes leading up to the Revolution.

The impending world war was recognized and alluded to in the text by James, who had been living in England since 1932; in his Preface, he places the writing of the history in the context of "the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Joseph Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence.

The power of God or the weakness of man, Christianity or the divine right of kings to govern wrong, can easily be made responsible for the downfall of states and the birth of new societies.

Such elementary conceptions lend themselves willingly to narrative treatment and from Tacitus to Macaulay, from Thuycidides to Green, the traditionally famous historians have been more artist than scientist: they wrote so well because they saw so little.

"[6] "The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism", according to James, and, as the workers and peasants of France stiffened in their resistance to local tyranny, they also became passionate abolitionists despite their geographical remove from the French slave enterprise in the Western hemisphere.

While Toussaint L'Ouverture set out to defend and maintain the dignity of man as he garnered it from French revolutionary literature, and particularly Raynal, according to James, "Feuillants and Jacobins in France, Whites and Mulattoes in San Domingo (Saint-Domingue), were still looking upon the slave revolt as a huge riot which would be put down in time, once the division between the slave-owners was closed.

[10] Toussaint joined the revolution after its onset and was immediately regarded as a leader, organizing the Haitian people into a force capable of breaking the French hold on the colony of San Domingo.

He emerged both as a powerful, unifying symbol of the march of enslaved Africans toward liberty, and as an extraordinary politician: "superbly gifted, he incarnated the determination of his people never, never to be slaves again.

James believes that Toussaint's own words best convey his personality and genius, which was all the more remarkable given its unlikely origins: Pericles, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Marx and Engels, were men of a liberal education, formed in the traditions of ethics, philosophy and history.

Toussaint was a slave, not six years out of slavery, bearing alone the unaccustomed burden of war and government, dictating his thoughts in the crude words of a broken dialect, written and rewritten by his secretaries until their devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape.

My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.In the 1980 foreword to the British edition published by Allison & Busby,[11] James explains that he was "specially prepared to write The Black Jacobins", having grown up in Trinidad and having researched the Russian revolution in depth while studying Marxism in England.

In a 1940 review, Ludwell Lee Montague asserts that James "finds his way with skill through kaleidoscopic sequences of events in both Haiti and France, achieving clarity where complexities of class, color, and section have reduced others to vague confusion".

First in Cuba, Haiti (1927), then in Brazil, Surinam and Trinidad (1931), other small groups faced the challenge of coming to terms with events which disrupted their understanding and connectedness to the wider world by revealing the relations of force.

In 1934, James wrote a play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, which was performed in 1936 at London's Westminster Theatre, with Paul Robeson in the title role.

[26] In 1986, The Black Jacobins play was performed in London at the Riverside Studios, in the first production from Talawa Theatre Company, with an all-black cast including Norman Beaton as Toussaint L'Ouverture, directed by Yvonne Brewster.