Literary critics have esteemed "The Black Jacobins" since its first publication in 1938. In a 1940 review, Ludwell Lee Montague asserts that James "finds his way with skill through kaleidoscopic sequences of events in both Haiti and France, achieving clarity where complexities of class, color, and section have reduced others to vague confusion". Another reviewer, W. G. Seabrook, heralds James's work as "a public service for which he merits the attention due a scholar who blazes the way in an all but neglected field". Seabrook proceeds to predict the importance of the work to Caribbean history, and the probable extensive circulation of the book. Decades after the first publication of the work, "The Black Jacobins" remained a prominent artifact of Caribbean cultural history.