The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
A history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803, in which the enslaved people of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, defeated France, Spain, and Britain to found the world's first Black republic. Written by the Trinidadian Marxist historian C. L. R. James, it became a founding text of anticolonial and "history from below" scholarship.
Somewhere around the third undifferentiated colonial faction you start keeping a list of who is who, because the book will not do it for you: "the welter of names and places, too often provided without appropriate context or background, detracted from my ability to really become engrossed," one reader writes. When the narrative does pause, it is so the author can lecture; "The Black Jacobins is undermined by occasionally dipping into bald Marxist polemics." The Toussaint on offer is nearer a saint's life than a portrait, a strange fit for a book with a history-from-below reputation. Each time you get "snapped out of the book to google the eighteenth century French vocabulary," what the lens hands back, one detractor jabs, is "half clichés, half truths examined with rose-tinted glasses."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
