C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg 1938 [1963]) is surely one of the twentieth century’s most generative works of critical thought (Hartman 2017). Its audacious scope and theoretical virtuosity offer, alongside texts like Gramsci’s’ Prison Notebooks (1971), a compelling analysis of the forms of political, economic, and cultural domination intrinsic to the rise of capitalism — and the species of insurgency to which it has given rise. But more than this, like Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) or Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1952 [1977]), it is also a passionate account of the integral role of empire, race, and the enslaved – of both their labor and their liberatory spirit — in the shaping of the modern world at large. In it, the French Revolution is rendered unthinkable without its deep entanglement in San Domingo, in its colonial economy and its wider geopolitical theater. The insurrection in what was to become Haiti, moreover, far from being mimetic of its metropolitan counterpart, is shown to have been a bold refiguring of revolutionary struggle well beyond the confines of Europe — or the limits of the bourgeois enlightenment imagination. In interrogating the critical role of Haiti in the history of France, and of colonialism sui generis, The Black Jacobins would become, and has remained, an enduring provocation. As David Geggus (2010:91) was to comment, some seventy years later, “[h]historians have increasingly recognized the colonial revolution as an autonomous force that helped to radicalize the French Revolution, rather than being merely a reflection of it.”