Influenced by many African-American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved.

[2] Robinson develops this term to correct what he thinks led Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to mistakenly believe that European bourgeois society would rationalize social relations.

Robinson recounts several acts of resistance, from seventeenth-century maroon communities in the Americas to twentieth-century national liberation struggles, looking to scholars W. E. B.

[4] A third edition was published in 2020, again by University of North Carolina Press with a new preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

[9][10] The Black radical tradition provides a rich resource for future challenges of Africana studies and it acts as a bridge, helping academics to “understand the conceptual vocabulary used by ... activist-intellectuals who research and teach about the relationship between race and class … [and] to identify the concepts needed to transform the conditions under which the radical tradition now operates.