by Molly Groarke, @Molly_Groarke
‘I was tired of reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed in Africa, in the Middle Passage, in the USA and all over the Caribbean. I made up my mind that I would write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other peoples’ exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs.’[1]
This was C. L. R. James’s motivation for writing his most famous work, The Black Jacobins (1938). It was the first history of the Haitian Revolution to foreground the agency of the enslaved people of Haiti, who created a mass movement that expelled the colonial powers before forming their own government, the first independent Caribbean state and the first Black-led republic in the world. The Black Jacobins promoted the Haitian Revolution from being a mere footnote to the French Revolution to a crucial chapter, framing it as a formative moment in abolitionist and anticolonial history.
James’s quote also encapsulates how he thought laterally, connecting geographically and temporally different places, and integrating his influences into one overarching mission. James was a thinker who ‘refused to be compartmentalized’, and so his thought must be approached holistically.[2] His objectives as a historian can only be understood through his political and literary projects.
Born in Trinidad in 1901, James won a scholarship to Queen’s Royal College, which equipped him with a distinctively British education. He moved to Britain in 1932, then to the United States between 1939 and 1953, after which he spent the remainder of his life between Trinidad and London. Early in his career, he became committed to Marxism. Having grown up under British colonial rule, James’s socialist radicalism became enmeshed with anticolonialism, and a dedication to the projects of West-Indian independence and Caribbean community-building. He was further influenced by ideas of Pan-Africanism, which called for the unity of all people of African-descent. His earliest full length non-fiction work, The Life of Captain Cipriani, or The Case for West-Indian Self-Government (1932), uses the biography of Trinidadian political leader, Arthur Cipriani, to state a case for these missions.
In another major work, World Revolution (1937), James developed his Marxism from a profoundly internationalist stance. He believed that he could not write about the Russian Revolution without writing about ‘the revolution everywhere – in China, Germany, France, as well as the history of the internationalist Marxist movement’.[3]
A crucial turning point in James’s intellectual life came when the Soviet Union descended into Stalinism – the nation he hoped would grow into a communist utopia became instead a totalitarian nightmare. In the second edition to The Black Jacobins, published in 1963, he struck a more pessimistic tone, omitted the most stridently Marxist passages, and mediated more on the tragedy of the Haitian Revolution, particularly the death of its foremost leader, Toussaint Louverture, at the hands of the French. Yet, rather than despair completely, James came to see the power of the masses as absolutely integral to successful state-building. This led him to break away from the Trotskyist tradition he had previously belonged to, believing instead there was no need for a vanguard party to lead the people to revolutionary change, but that the people could achieve it on their own.[4]
James was not only an historian. His writing crossed genres and traditions much like his political thought did. Beyond a Boundary (1963) is considered by many one of the greatest works of sports writing ever published. James wrote it partly as an ode to cricket; partly as a memoir of himself and his family; and partly as an exploration into the historical impact cricket had had on British national identity, and how this was transferred to the Caribbean through colonialism. Before The Black Jacobins, James wrote a play, Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (1934) – many of the literary techniques he used to construct the character of L’Ouverture and build the narrative of the Haitian Revolution reappear in his later history. He also wrote a novel, Minty Alley (1936) – the first novel by a Black West Indian to be published in the UK and a vivid portrayal of working-class life in the Trinidadian capital, Port of Spain.
C. L. R. James’s legacy is that of a thinker who transcended boundaries – of genre, geography, and ideology – to offer a profound understanding of history shaped by the struggles and agency of oppressed peoples. James believed that everywhere in history progress was achieved when the masses asserted themselves; it was his ambition as a historian to communicate this universal narrative.
Further Reading (all by C. L. R. James except where stated):
The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, with the pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self Government (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014 [first published 1932]).
Minty Alley (London: Penguin, 2021 [first published 1936]).
World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017 [first published 1937]).
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [first published 1938]).
Beyond a Boundary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013 [first published 1963]).
‘Lectures on The Black Jacobins, 1971’, Small Axe, 8 (2000), pp. 65-112.
Buhle, Paul (ed.), C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (London/New York: Allison & Busby, 1986).
Rosengarten, Frank, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).
[1] C. L. R. James, ‘Foreword [to the 1980 edition]’, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. xv.
[2] Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), p. 4.
[3] C. L. R. James, ‘Lectures on The Black Jacobins, 1971’, Small Axe, 8 (2000), p. 71.
[4] Anna Grimshaw, ‘Notes on the Life and Work of C.L.R. James’, C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, Paul Buhle (ed.) (London and New York: Allison & Busby, 1986), pp. 16-17.
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