West Indian-born cultural historian, cricket writer, and political activist who was a leading figure in the Pan-African movement.

James was certified as a teacher at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, Trinidad (1918). In 1932 he moved to England, where he published The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932; revised as The Case for West-Indian Self-Government, 1933) with the personal and financial support of the West Indian cricketer (cricket) and politician Learie (later Lord) Constantine. During the 1930s James was a cricket correspondent for The Guardian (Manchester) and became increasingly involved in Marxist politics and the African and West Indian independence movements. His most notable work was The Black Jacobins (1938), a Marxist study of the Haitian slave revolution of the 1790s, which won him widespread acclaim.

James left England to live in the United States (1939–53), but he was expelled for political reasons. He was interned at Ellis Island in New York City, where he wrote an analysis of Herman Melville's Moby Dick called Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953). Thereafter he moved between London and Trinidad, where he was secretary of the West Indies Federal Labour Party (1958–60). In Beyond a Boundary (1963) James discussed the importance of cricket to the British character and to the development of the West Indies. His other books included the novel Minty Alley (1936), World Revolution (1937), Notes on Dialectics (1971), Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), and Cricket (1986), a collection of articles spanning the period 1935 to 1985.