C L R James

James Walvin

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The Black Jacobins

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The black Plato of our generation ... the founding father of African emancipation.

The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it is a masterpiece in story-telling and analysis.

Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing against slavery and racism ever to be published.

The Black Jacobins is one of the great books of the twentieth century ... one that wrote the history of a people supposedly without history.

James is, quite simply, the outstanding West Indian of the twentieth century.

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ...  a classic of masterly historical writing.

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.

Dr Liam J. Liburd, Assistant Professor of Black British History, Durham University

Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

'James is a titan of twentieth-century politics and culture' Sunday Times 
 
'The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it is a masterpiece in storytelling and analysis' Gary Younge 
 
The iconic study of the Haitian revolution, by one of the most important historians of the twentieth century 
 
C. L. R. James's pioneering account of the 1791 San Domingo slave revolt and the creation of the republic of Haiti changed the way colonial history was written. By putting the experiences of the slave rebels, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, centre stage, James made them agents of their own story. His work, written as part of the fight to end colonialism in Africa, helped inspire radical liberation movements worldwide, from Black Power to Castro's revolution in the Caribbean. 
 
With an Introduction by Christienna Fryar

C. L. R. James was born in Trinidad in 1901 and was one of the prominent figures in the West Indian diaspora. He wrote extensively on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilisation, African politics, cricket and popular culture. He died in 1989.

In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade. 
 
In this outstanding example of vivid, committed and empathetic historical analysis, C. L. R. James illuminates these epoch-making events. He explores the appalling economic realities of the Caribbean economy, the roots of the world's only successful slave revolt and the utterly extraordinary former slave - Toussaint L'Ouverture - who led them. Explicitly written as part of the fight to end colonialism in Africa, The Black Jacobins put the slaves themselves centre stage, boldly forging their own destiny against nearly impossible odds. It remains one of the essential texts for understanding the Caribbean - and the region's inextricable links with Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Black Jacobins

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