The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
In The Black Jacobins, CLR James chronicles the only successful slave revolt in history and provides a critical portrait of their leader. Toussaint L’Ouverture is ‘one of the most remarkable men of a period rich in remarkable men’.
In 1789 the West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France. The entire structure of what was arguably the most profitable colony in the world rested on the labour of half a million slaves. In 1791 the waves of unrest inspired by the French Revolution reached across the Atlantic dividing the loyalties of the white population of the island. The brutally treated slaves of Saint Domingo seized at this confusion and rose up in rebellion against masters.
A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World.
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of masters toward slaves was commonplace and ingeniously refined.
It is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean. –This text refers to an out-of-print or unavailable edition of this title.
