James, C. L. R. (1901–1989)

Abstract

Life of a Revolutionary The black Trinidadian historian and writer Cyril Lionel Robert James was one of the most eloquent and critical anti-imperialist figures of the twentieth century. It is easier, as James noted at one point in The Black Jacobins (1938), his masterful history of the Haitian Revolution, 'to find decency, gratitude, justice, and humanity in a cage of starving tigers than in the councils of imperialism' (James 2001: 229). The Black Jacobins analysed the transformation of colonised Saint-Domingue into the world's first independent black republic outside Africa from 1791 to 1804, and its publication on the eve of decolonisation established James as 'a thinker who posed questions about "postcoloniality" well before his contemporaries realized that all empires must fall' (Scott McLemee, dustjacket of Worcester 1996). As