The text was first published by Secker & Warburg in London in 1938, who had recently published James's "Minty Alley" in 1936 and "World Revolution" in 1937. The impending world war was recognized and alluded to in the text by James, who had been living in England since 1932; in his Preface he places the writing of the history in the context of "the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Joseph Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence." In a later passage, James writes of the slaves in the early days of French revolutionary violence, the "slaves only watched their masters destroy one another, as Africans watched them in 1914–1918, and will watch them again before long." Of his text, James suggests, "had it been written under different circumstances it would have been a different but not necessarily a better book." He met Alfred Auguste Nemours in Paris while researching the book. Nemours, a Haitian diplomat, had written "Histoire militaire de la guerre d'independance de Saint-Domingue" in 1925 while Haiti was under US occupation.