Chris Braithwaite Mariner, Renegade, and Castaway

Chris Braithwaite (aka “Chris Jones”) was a black Barbadian seafarer who became a leading organiser of colonial seafarers in inter-war Britain. He played a critical role in the Pan-Africanist and wider anti-colonial movement alongside figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. Christian Høgsbjerg recovers Braithwaite’s long overlooked life as a black radical and political trade-unionist, and suggests his determined struggle for working class unity in the face of racism and austerity retains relevance for us today.

 Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian based in the United Kingdom. He is the author of C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Duke University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto, 2017). He is the editor of a special edition of C.L.R. James’s 1934 play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (Duke University Press, 2013) and a new edition of James’s pioneering anti-Stalinist history World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Duke University Press, 2017). He has also co-edited two volumes, The Black Jacobins Reader (Duke University Press, 2017) and Celebrating C.L.R. James in Hackney, London (Redwords, 2015). He is a member of the Socialist History Society, the Society for Caribbean Studies, and the editorial board of International Socialism.