This little book of CLR James has all the characteristics of a hidden treasure: its first edition appeared in 1938, the same year as The Black Jacobins , published by a publisher affiliated with the Independent Labor Party. Largely ignored at the time, eclipsed by the masterpiece devoted to Toussaint Louverture, it only reappeared 31 years later, in the United States, at the initiative of a small publishing house belonging to the black nationalist movement. But this edition, like the following ones, suffered from poor distribution. It was only thanks to a new reissue, in 1995, that it was truly discovered and recognized as one of James's principal works, as a classic on a par with The Black Jacobins.

History of Pan-African Revolts offers, at a time when almost the entire black world was still living under the colonial yoke, a world history of black resistance, from Saint-Domingue to the African colonies, passing of course through the United States and the other islands of the Antilles. The epilogue, written by James in 1969, returns to the decolonization of Africa, the civil rights movement in the United States, the conflicts in the Caribbean, extending, specifying and correcting the positions put forward at the end of the 1930s.

One of the first originalities of the work is to break with the cliché of primitives passively suffering their exploitation. "The only place where blacks have not revolted," wrote James, "is in the pages written by capitalist historians." He also places black workers at the center of world history, including, without hierarchizing them, a very diverse set of rebellions: slave revolts, strikes, millenarian or anti-racist movements. It is the masses who make history, in the conditions and with the beliefs that are theirs; the leaders, Toussaint like Nkrumah, Garvey like Nyerere, have always been carried and produced by collective processes. A way of getting away from both Marxist approaches focused on the industrial worker and hagiographic visions exalting the "great men of history." In its subject and its treatment, James's book has not aged a day; On the contrary, it might even be ahead of our time.