Narrating Reparatory History and the History of Reparations in the Long 19th Century

In David Scott’s recent monograph, Irreparable Evil (2024), he rethinks the work of CLR James. Scott argues that James’ emphasis on tragic sensibility constituted a “moral (as opposed to revolutionary) history” (43). For Scott, this tragic James wrote The Black Jacobins in 1930s and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways in 1953. Despite the radically different historical contexts in which James found himself – the violence of Franco and Stalin experienced from afar versus the injustices of the state experienced directly during his internment on Ellis Island – Scott revisits both texts as artifacts of a pre-Bandung moment in need of rescue. It is this tragic salvage that shapes Scott’s “reparatory history,” an act that undermines the “liberal legalism” of reparations for slavery articulated solely in terms of monetary compensation. My paper takes seriously the call to use history to expand upon the limiting structures of today’s policy debates about reparations. But it does so through the two subjects that occupied James in his pre-1955 work: the Haitian Revolution and collective action. I use the lens of political economy to show that what united the two James-es was not the tragic sublime but rather constant contestation. As James noted of Melville, the narrator “weave[s] round them tragic graces.” Yet, in Melville, James understood the need to cast the subjects of history in relation to “all other social types,” denying exceptionalist narratives, tragic or otherwise. My paper emphasizes that the financial and social debts incurred by the Haitian Revolution should not be narrated as the inevitable result of slavery. I also take seriously the James of 1975, who said that history should understand different revolutionary movements by paying particular attention to people’s shared and diverse “emotions, activities, and experiences.” This James cautioned against the personification of social forces and the personification of Tragedy.