The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Description

This powerful and impassioned book has long been hailed as the classic account of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 – 1803, the largest successful revolt by enslaved people in history. The uprising began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France but became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe. And it is the story of a charismatic and barely literate enslaved person named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who successfully led the Black people of San Domingo against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces-and in the process helped form the first independent postcolonial nation in the Caribbean.

C. L. R. JAMES (1901-1989) was a Trinidadian-born historian, literary critic, and philosopher, and a leader of the pan-African movement.

In addition to his works of history and his political activism, he was known for sports writing, playwriting, and fiction; his novel Minty Alley, written in 1927, was the first by a Black person from the West Indies to be published in Britain, and his 1963 book, Beyond a Boundary, has been hailed as the best book on cricket ever written.