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Workers of the Empire Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s–1960s

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-10948986

1558-1454

Aniruddha Bose,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

This is an important book. Editors Yann Béliard and Neville Kirk have laid out the groundwork for a complete reworking of the collapse of modern imperialism. Focused on the fall of the British Empire, this book is situated at the crossroads of two sets of historiographies: an older historiography, dating back to the nineteenth century, on the British Empire; and a more recently resurgent historiography on labor. The former largely ignored the latter, engaged instead with great debates on the merits and demerits of the empire, on the flows of power within that empire, and the role of these factors in the empire's rise and fall. Labor historians, on the other hand, have found the empire more central to their writing for several decades now. This book builds on the fruitful labor of these historians, acknowledging Antoinette Burton, E. P. Thompson, the Subaltern Studies Collective, Frederick Cooper, and the more recent transnational histories emerging out of the International Institute of Social History to make an important claim: that it is now possible to write "a People's History of British Decolonization" (3–21, 287).This book provides us with the outlines of just what such a history might look like. Three women play important parts: Annie Besant, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Ellen Wilkinson. Besant is probably the best-known, with an illustrious political career in India that made her a name that virtually every Indian is familiar with, even today. All three socialists identified anti-imperialism as critical to the emancipation of workers in Britain and across the British Empire. Pankhurst and Wilkinson made the additional claim that anti-imperialism was imperative for the emancipation of women, especially in Britain's colonies. Besant and Wilkinson traveled to India, while Pankhurst tried to bring the empire down through her work for the Workers' Dreadnought (47–80, 115–32, 25–46).Other individuals emerge as well. They include the brilliant M. N. Roy, founder of the Communist Party of India and indefatigable organizer of expatriate Indians in Europe against the British Empire; the British Communist Fenner Brockway, who forged connections with the Frenchman Marceau Pivert in an Anglo-French alliance to bring down their respective empires; and, finally, Albert Fava, whose activism proved too much for British authorities in his native Gibraltar and led to his deportation in 1948. All these individuals played important roles in inspiring and organizing political opposition to the power of British imperialism (81–114, 133–63, 197–216).This "people's history of British decolonization" also includes collective action by vast swaths of organized working-class labor and Communist Parties across the British Empire. Some of the strongest chapters in the book discuss heroic struggles in British Africa, specifically in Sudan, where organized civil servants, dockworkers, and railway workers struck repeatedly through the 1940s and 1950s in an inspiring struggle to bring down the British Empire. Their bravery, in the face of brutal repression from the British Imperial machinery, was matched by comrades in Kenya's tea plantations. Collective action turned the colony's profitable plantation economy into a significant pressure point on the bourgeois section of the Kenyan nationalist project. Their action in the form of a series of crippling strikes threatened a smooth transition from British colonial rule to an independence dominated by a new comprador Kenyan ruling class. Finally, Communist Parties in Australia and South Africa resisted the imperialist project by an honorable and refreshing commitment to antiracism in the otherwise virulently racist politics of white settler colonies (167–96, 217–72).Neville Kirk, in his conclusion, lays out an eight-point theory on the role of labor and the end of the British Empire. The essays in this book lead Kirk to correctly identify the inspiring internationalism and unequivocal commitment to anti-imperialism and antiracism of individual actors as well as organized labor. They also lead to the more dispiriting conclusion of the limitations and failures of both individual as well as collective action (273–86). Some of this, however, is a function of the geographical focus of the essays in the book. A "people's history of British decolonization" must necessarily be written with geographical focal points located in the empire's colonies, in India, Nigeria, and South Africa. This is imperative, as the research in the book demonstrates that imperialism was far too entrenched, and capitalism far too developed in the metropole, for socialists and communists to successfully challenge. Success was more likely in the colonies, where imperialism was contested and capitalism still weak. A "people's history of British decolonization" can provide a much more meaningful focus on the achievements of the British Empire's subjects in its colonies than on the limited successes of its citizens in the metropole.These chapters are critical starting points necessary to writing such a history. Collective action, especially in the colonies, played a far more important part in the unraveling of the British Empire than has been chronicled. Their decisive intervention was downplayed in favor of the national bourgeoisie that eventually came to power across the Third World. Historians, therefore, must rework the history of the fall of the British Empire by placing labor in its correct, central place in this project. My own forthcoming work on the million-strong organized railway workers in British India outlines their important part in this history. Béliard and Kirk, through this timely book, have laid out an architecture that points out the possibilities of a "people's history of British decolonization."Indeed, the timeliness of this book lies not only in its rescue of labor and imperial history, as suggested by Paul Pickering in his foreword, but also in the return of labor politically around the world. In 2022, two hundred million laborers struck in India, the culmination of two decades of mobilization against the ugliness of neoliberal capitalism. Their collective action mirrors on a larger scale repeated industrial action by NHS workers in Britain. Indeed, a resurgent organized working class was on full display across continental Europe on May Day 2023. A people's history of anti-imperialism is imperative as a source of inspiration for millions of workers the world over today.