My reading group discussed this book yesterday, and it came up that it's now considered outdated. The one detail that was brought up on that subject was the omission of the fact--possibly known even at the time of writing--that Toussaint was himself a slaveowner. I knew nothing about the the man or the revolution he helped lead before reading this book, so I'd like to know how the current understanding of him and the conflict differs from James's.
A year or so ago I finished Touissaint Louverture A Revolutionary Life (2016) by Philippe Girard and highly recommend it. His brilliant qualities and some bad stuff is all covered; this is not a hagiography.
Long story short, lots of documents have come to light since the 1980's that were sorta known before this but not available to scholars. Digital scans and photocopies do wonders for a subject like this where hand-written original documents are far away, not in English, and in a poor country.
L'Ouverture is fascinating because he fits so poorly in the usual narratives of colonial history or slavery. He DOES fit neatly into that 98% of world history where no one wanted to be a slave, but hardly anyone questioned the ordinariness of the institution. It is like objecting to the season of winter. It just makes no sense in that time and place.
The man himself was descended from a slave-owning aristocratic family in Africa, though the details are disputed in the fog of history. At one point, he aspired to and made substantial progress to join the land-owning and slave-owning plantation elite. A growing portion of the African and mixed population was free; some owned their farm land; some of them owned slaves, of course in much smaller ratios than the French.
France/Britain/Spain had no qualms about freeing their enemies' slaves once they conquered this or that island, but this is something very different than abolitionist motives.