The Black Jacobins
C.L.R. James
The Haitian Revolution told as the only slave revolt to build a nation.
A Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution and its leader Toussaint Louverture, the only slave revolt to found an independent nation. James placed enslaved Africans at the center of world history rather than treating them as passive victims, linking Caribbean emancipation to the French Revolution and to later anticolonial struggle. Written as African independence stirred, it became a model for reading revolution from below.
Its legacy. A touchstone for anticolonial and Black radical thought.
- Author
- C.L.R. James
- First published
- 1938
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- Pan-Africanism, Race and the Diaspora
More from Pan-Africanism, Race and the Diaspora
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"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."
- The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality — Cheikh Anta Diop
A claim that the pharaohs were Black, and that Greece borrowed from Africa.
- The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness — Paul Gilroy
Black identity as a ship in motion, not a flag over one homeland.
- Pan-Africanism or Communism — George Padmore
Two roads out of empire, and a case for the African one.