C.L.R. James

C. L. R. James wrote The Black Jacobins, the history that put the Haitian revolution at the centre of the age of revolutions, and Beyond a Boundary, generally called the best book written about cricket and not really about cricket. He was born in Trinidad, taught at Queen's Royal College - Eric Williams, later the country's first prime minister, was his pupil - and came to England in 1932. The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, treats Toussaint Louverture's slave revolt as a revolution in its own right rather than an echo of the French one, with the enslaved of Saint-Domingue as historical actors and the sugar plantation as a modern industrial system. It was written explicitly with African independence in mind, and he said so. He was a Trotskyist, broke with Trotsky over the Black question in a documented argument in Mexico, spent fifteen years in the United States organising and was deported in 1953 under the McCarran Act while interned on Ellis Island, where he wrote a book about Melville. He returned to Trinidad, edited the party paper for Williams, and broke with him over the American naval base. Beyond a Boundary asks what they know of cricket who only cricket know, and answers it with colonial education, class and race. He died in Brixton at eighty-eight. He also wrote a play about Toussaint in which Paul Robeson took the lead in London in 1936, the first time a Black actor had played a lead in a British theatre with a white supporting cast. The Black Jacobins was reissued in 1963 with an appendix connecting Haiti to Castro's Cuba. Its argument that the enslaved were the revolution's agents rather than its beneficiaries is now orthodoxy and was not then.

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