The property; the owners; parliament and property; the San Domingo masses begin; and the Paris masses complete; the rise of Toussaint; the Mulattoes try and fail; the white slave-owners again; the expulsion of the British; Toussaint seizes the power; the black consul; the bourgeoisie prepares to restore slavery; the War of Independence.
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.
The black Plato of our generation ... the founding father of
African emancipation.
*The Times*
The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it
is a masterpiece in story-telling and analysis.
*Gary Younge*
Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing
against slavery and racism ever to be published.
*Time Out*
The Black Jacobins is one of the great books of the twentieth
century ... one that wrote the history of a people supposedly
without history.
*Catherine Hall*
James is, quite simply, the outstanding West Indian of the
twentieth century.
*Caryl Phillips*
A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ... a classic of
masterly historical writing.
*James Walvin*
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.
*New York Times*
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.
*Prospect*
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.
*Akala's Great Reads*
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*
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