The Black Jacobins has been characterized as demonstrating that "the French Revolution was not an insurrectionary experience limited to Europe".[7] Given his origins as a slave in a colonized land, and the unmistakable current of French Revolutionary ideology that he imbibed and upheld, Toussaint L'Ouverture becomes, according to one reading of James, not merely the extraordinary leader of an island revolt, but "the apogee of the revolutionary doctrines that underpinned the French Revolution."[7]