Rachel Douglas treats The Black Jacobins not as a fixed text but as one C. L. R. James kept reopening. Following it from the 1930s forward, she compares the 1938 and 1963 editions, the stage version of 1967, and the earlier Toussaint Louverture play of 1936, drawing as well on manuscripts, notes, and interviews.

What the revisions register, in her account, is James's own movement — his shifting politics and his changing engagement with Marxism, each rewriting of the Haitian Revolution's history marked by where he stood at the time. Douglas also argues that theatre was no sideline for him: it shaped how he understood history itself.

The figure she settles on is the palimpsest. Layer written over layer, the book keeps renewing itself, and keeps issuing its call to readers who were not there for the earlier versions. It remains, she holds, both a major work of the last century and the foundation of Haitian revolutionary studies.

By 1789 two-thirds of France's overseas trade came out of a single Caribbean possession, San Domingo, and the whole of that wealth — arguably the most profitable colony anywhere — was generated by half a million people held in slavery.

When the unrest set off by the French Revolution crossed the Atlantic in 1791, it split the loyalties of the island's white population. The enslaved, who had been treated with great brutality, took the opening and rose against their owners. James follows that rebellion, the one slave revolt in history to succeed, and gives an unsparing portrait of the man who led it.

Toussaint L'Ouverture emerges from the account as, in James's phrase, one of the most remarkable men of an age already full of them — a judgment the book earns rather than assumes.