C.L.R. James and Caribbean Marxism

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989) was born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, then a British colony, and first achieved literary recognition with the 1929 novella Minty Alley, before moving to England in 1932, where he worked as a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian while becoming increasingly active in Trotskyist and Pan-African political circles in London. His most enduring work, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, published in London in 1938, offers a Marxist historical account of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the only successful large-scale slave revolt in modern history to result in the founding of an independent state, presenting the enslaved revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and others, as historical agents comparable in scale and consequence to the Jacobins of the French Revolution rather than as passive beneficiaries of European events.