James tells the San Domingo revolution as the work of the enslaved themselves, moving in step with the economic forces that built the colony and with the crowds in Paris. He opens with Columbus, Las Casas and the buccaneers of Tortuga, then shows a colony carrying two thirds of France's overseas trade on the labour of half a million people. From 1791 those people defeated in turn the local whites, the troops of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of sixty thousand men and finally Bonaparte's army. Toussaint L'Ouverture dominates the book, though James insists that the upheaval produced the leader rather than the reverse, and that great men can make only such history as their circumstances permit. Written in 1938 and lightly revised for this edition, it keeps its closing prediction of African independence and adds an appendix reading the Caribbean from L'Ouverture to Castro.