Sepinwall asks what place C. L. R. James's 1938 study still holds among specialists in the Haitian Revolution, at a moment when the book is being rediscovered by Caribbean theorists, British readers on the left, and even American venture capitalists. Its long dominance, she suggests, was less a compliment to James than an indictment of a field Anglophone historians had largely abandoned.

Tracing the book's early reception and then setting it against work published since the 1990s, she finds a mixed inheritance. Scholars still credit James with insisting that the enslaved freed themselves, and one of them was pushed toward the study of ordinary insurgents by James himself. But newer research in notarial and court records has complicated his portraits of free people of color, his weighting of class over race, and his near-silence on women. The field, on her account, no longer needs a single book to stand in for it.