My research into the vast world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionary print culture reveals that literary texts dealing with the Haitian Revolution from 1789 to 1865, whether published as fiction or nonfiction, had a broad influence on not only early understandings of the events, but on later popular historiographies like C.L.R James's widely consulted The Black Jacobins (1938). James's highly influential text, which explicitly references the writings of some of the most infamous promoters of taxonomic thinking with respect to “race” in Saint-Domingue, such as Moreau de Saint-Méry, Baron de Wimpffen, Hilliard D'Auberteuil, and Pamphile de Lacroix, also bears the uncanny influence of the British naval officer Marcus Rainsford's An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805). Even though James refers to Rainsford's history as a ‘panegyric’ and a ‘propaganda pamphlet,’ like Rainsford long before him, James famously promulgated the idea that Toussaint Louverture's ascent to leadership depended in great part on the act of literacy, and specifically, on the act of Louverture's reading and interpretation of the famous ‘Black Spartacus’ passage contained in works signed by the abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal.

The most salient and widely utilized example of the ‘Black Spartacus’ comes from Raynal's celebrated compilation, Histoire des deux Indes (1770–1780), wherein he foreshadowed that a ‘grand homme’ would liberate the slaves and lead them towards revenge. Raynal writes: