The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

The classic Marxist account of the Haitian Revolution, arguing that a slave society at the center of Atlantic capitalism produced the only successful slave revolution in history and that this revolution belongs among the great world-historical transformations of the modern era. James holds together structural analysis and biographical narrative in his tragic portrait of Toussaint Louverture — a statesman of rare talent whose execution of Moyse and inability to imagine a future beyond French civilization marked the limits of individual leadership against the forces the revolution itself had set in motion.