The Black Jacobins

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. -- Colin Grant * 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