Books, Works & Articles

C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James’s intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the “imperial Britishness” he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anti-colonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Høgsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James’s examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Høgsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.

Reviews:

”One of the most impressively researched biographies of a prominent radical to appear in recent memory … Anyone with an interest in black protest, literary London, and/or left politics in the 1930s will enjoy this smart, factually grounded yet thematically rich biographical study”.
Kent Worcester, ‘Renegades and Castaways’, New Politics (Summer 2014)

”Høgsbjerg has made a major contribution through his reconstruction of James’s life and times in imperial Britain. Recovering James’s ventures into radical bookshops such as Lahr’s, his time spent in Nelson and Bloomsbury, his touring Britain as a cricket reporter, and much more, Høgsbjerg does a supreme job of reconstructing the historical geography of a distinct, and distinctly radical, life. In this sense, his book is an example to geographers, historians or other radical intellectuals pursuing the study of previously neglected biographies.”
Daniel Whittall, Antipode (August 2014)

“Høgsbjerg discusses [James’s] publications in various ways but it is the intellectual and social movement context the author brings to these works, which continue to animate critical minds today, that makes the reader pause and delight”
Matthew Quest, Insurgent Notes

Contents:

Introduction. Revolutionaries, Artists, and Wicket-Keepers: C. L. R. James’s Place in History
1. We Lived According to the Tenets of Matthew Arnold: Colonial Victorianism and the Creative Realism of the Young C. L. R. James
2. Red Nelson: The English Working Class and the Making of C. L. R. James
3. Imperialism Must Be Destroyed: C. L. R. James, Race, and Revolutionary Politics
4. The Humbler Type of Cricket Scribe: C. L. R. James on Sport, Culture, and Society
5. There Is No Drama Like the Drama of History: The Black Jacobins, Toussaint Louverture, and the Haitian Revolution
Conclusion. To Exploit a Larger World to Conquer: C. L. R. James’s Intellectual Conquest of Imperial Britain

Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian and teacher based in the UK. He is one of the most prominent active scholars of CLR James and has been of great assistance to WORLDwrite’s project.

Buy it here.