Books

First edition, first impression, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to a fellow radical, "For Gerry Bradley from C. L. R. James. With revolutionary greetings, and personal good wishes, August 26th 1938". The presentation precedes the book's publication in September. Gerry Bradley was active in the Irish Republican movement, a founder member of the British Communist Party, and one of the early full-time organizers of the Unemployed Workers' Movement. He had a reputation for causing trouble and was often arrested, but he was well established in his Chelsea base (Bornstein, pp. 114-15). He and James were friends and political allies. Both were Trotskyists in the 1930s and publicly fought with the Stalinist majority at Communist Party meetings. The party expelled Bradley in 1933, and he was a founder of the alternative Communist League, members from which subsequently split off to join the Marxist Group which James led from 1935 to 1938. The Black Jacobins is a seminal historical study of the Haitian Revolution and a cornerstone of Caribbean studies. "James fused classical and Marxist scholarship to resurrect a vivid panorama of the Haitian Revolution, stressing that it was not simply the greatest event in the history of the West Indies, but took its place alongside the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution as one of the great world-historical revolutions in its own right, a revolution which had forever transformed the world and laid the foundation for the continuing struggle for universal human rights" (Høgsbjerg). READ MORE Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With supplied dust jacket. Housed in grey cloth solander box. With 8 half-tone plates including frontispiece, folding map at rear. A little rubbed at extremities, endpapers toned, contents slightly foxed; unclipped jacket a little soiled, spine panel slightly sunned, short closed tear at head of rear panel, minor nicking at extremities: a very good copy in a very good jacket. Sam Bornstein, Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-38, 1986; Christian Høgsbjerg, "CLR James and the Black Jacobins," in International Socialism, Issue 126, 2010.