Eight decades after publication, C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins still anchors English-language teaching on the Haitian Revolution, a longevity Sepinwall treats as a symptom rather than a compliment. Surveying reviews from 1938 onward and the scholarship that has appeared since the 1990s, she shows the book held the field so long largely because Anglophone academics ignored Haiti, not because later research confirmed it. Specialists now working from far wider archives have corrected errors James inherited from earlier writers, questioned his use of proletarian categories for eighteenth-century slavery, and moved from his focus on Toussaint Louverture toward the enslaved majority, a shift James himself endorsed in later lectures. Gender, free people of colour, and colonial law have opened lines of inquiry the book never took up. Sepinwall argues that James remains foundational for the field's existence and its anticolonial framing, while the field has grown past his account on most empirical questions.