The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932) is the earliest
full-length work of nonfiction by the Trinidadian writer C. L. R.
James, one of the most significant historians and Marxist theorists
of the twentieth century. It is partly based on James's interviews
with Arthur Andrew Cipriani (1875-1945). As a captain with the
British West Indies Regiment during the First World War, Cipriani was
greatly impressed by the service of black West Indian troops and
appalled at their treatment during and after the war. After his
return to the West Indies, he became a Trinidadian political leader
and advocate for West Indian self-government. James's book is as much
polemic as biography. Written in Trinidad and published in England,
it is an early and powerful statement of West Indian nationalism. An
excerpt, The Case for West-Indian Self Government, was issued by
Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933. This volume
includes the biography, the pamphlet, and a new introduction in which
Bridget Brereton considers both texts and the young C. L. R. James in
relation to Trinidadian and West Indian intellectual and social
history. She discusses how James came to write his biography of
Cipriani, how the book was received in the West Indies and Trinidad,
and how, throughout his career, James would use biography to explore
the dynamics of politics and history.