The Black Jacobins

Critics Review

• 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.

  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