In a 1980 interview, C. L. R. James stated that he wanted to be remembered above all for his serious contributions to Marxism. In Making the Black Jacobins: C. L. R. James and the Drama of History, Rachel Douglas explores the many facets of the Trinidadian author and offers a fresh interpretation of his unique brand of Marxism.

Douglas’s book traces the development of James’s thought over more than thirty years, from his intellectual activities as a Pan-Africanist in London and Paris in the 1930s to his political militancy as one of the founders in the 1940s of the Johnson–Forest Tendency (born from a split with the American Trotskyist organization, the Workers Party). Douglas also revisits James’s engagement with the Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and gives special consideration to his work as a playwright. James’s constantly transforming thought is fruitfully explored through Douglas’s masterly use of archival sources — his main works, manuscripts, notes, as well as interviews and secondary sources are all woven into the author’s rich intellectual portrait.

At the center of Douglas’s book is James’s most renowned work, The Black Jacobins. As the author shows, the evolution of James’s political thought and militancy is deeply bound up with a six-decade-long process of writing and rewriting that classic work of Marxist historical analysis. In tracing the book’s evolution, Douglas also highlights the connections between James’s texts and the emancipatory history of the West Indies and Africa.