C. L. R. James, the Mass Strike of 1919 in Colonial Trinidad and The Case for West Indian Self-Government

In colonial Trinidad in 1919 rising industrial turmoil culminated in a rolling mass strike that would shake this outpost of the British Empire to its foundations. Though often located as an important part of Trinidadian or at best Caribbean labour history—a precursor to the powerful wave of labour rebellions that swept the Anglophone colonial Caribbean in the 1930s—Christian Hogsbjerg’s chapter situates the strike through the prism of colonial, transnational and global labour history. In the strike's aftermath, the social democratic Trinidad Workingmen’s Association grew into a mass organization led by the charismatic Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani. Hogsbjerg explores how this mass nationalist working-class movement attracted the attention of the young writer and teacher C.L.R. James, who would become a leading anti-colonialist thinker, writing a biography of Cipriani, later abridged and published as The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933). Yet this text strangely overlooked the strike of 1919, being only with James's turn to Marxism in the 1930s that he came to appreciate the strike’s full historical significance. In 1937, James would publish his pioneering socialist history of the Communist International, World Revolution, which articulates James's evolving understanding of 1919 as a global year of revolutionary contestation.