Tutelage, of course, had been enshrined as a core principle in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations:
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant. The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.97
The League against Imperialism, in name and in conception, offered itself as a conscious counterpoint to the League of Nations and its complicity in revitalized structures of post-war imperialism – in particular through the Mandates system that gave various European ‘mandatory powers’ continued control of overseas territories without the appearance of direct annexation.98 Colonialism, in other words, was made more legitimate and ‘humane’ for the twentieth century, or, as Bridgeman described the Mandatory system, ‘an imperialist system exercised collectively … without any previous consultation of the opinion of the mandated people’.99 As one LAI document described it, the word ‘mandates’ was arrived at because ‘the Great War had been fought by the Allies on specific pledges against all annexations’.100 The pretence now was that ‘the “trustees” [were] seeking only the welfare of backward peoples’. Whatever purpose the Mandates system served, ‘extending the right of national self-determination was not one of them’, Susan Pedersen observes, and, as a result, populations placed under it ‘responded by resisting its imposition’.101 If the Mandates system was ‘the site and stake of a great international argument over imperialism’s claims’, as Pedersen has it, the LAI sought to become the terrain on which anticolonialism would coalesce and challenge those claims.102 In the years to come, both tutelage and the idea that it could underpin a more gently paternal and ‘humane’ form of colonial rule would be fiercely challenged both within the colonies and by exilic intellectuals in imperial metropolises, with self-emancipation placed at the ideological centre. The LAI and its offshoots can be seen as a preliminary attempt to make an an international anticolonial field of sorts; within it, the colonized did not just ‘stand by themselves’, but seized the initiative.
The league itself had been initiated by a German communist by the name of Willi Münzenberg, along with the peripatetic Indian communist Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (‘Chatto’), initially as the ‘League against Colonial Oppression’ (Liga gegen koloniale Unterdrückung). The actual organization of the first conference in the Palais Egmont, Brussels, which took place on 10–15 February 1927, involved the efforts of a vast number of individuals and organizations belonging to the broader left, including, from Britain, the Labour Party, the CPGB, the Workers Welfare League and the ILP. A truly astonishing range of politicians, intellectuals and campaigners from the colonial world also attended the conference, including, most famously, Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Lamine Senghor (Senegal), James La Guma (South Africa), Sukarno (Indonesia) and Diego Rivera (Mexico). The league’s own statistics recorded nearly 200 delegates representing 134 organizations from thirty-seven countries. To give just a small sampling, affiliated organizations included the San Francisco–based revolutionary Hindustan Ghadar Party, the Indian National Congress, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Punjab, the Persian Socialist Party, the Egyptian National Party, the National Radical Party of Egypt, the African National Congress, the Arab Workers’ Union, the Jewish Workers’ Party, the Étoile Nordafricaine, the All-America Anti-Imperialist League, the Anti-Imperialist Federation of Ireland and the All-Russia Federation of Trade Unions. The LAI ‘was a network which, in turn, twirled around a complex set of other networks’, its principal constituents sharing a belief in the struggle against imperialism, with many (though not all) also committed to communism.103 Other global luminaries associated with the LAI included Romain Rolland, Albert Einstein and Madame Sun Yat-sen. The idea was to bring together ‘the friends and sympathisers of the oppressed peoples’ with the delegates of mass organizations involved in anticolonial struggles, some numbering several thousand members.104 It was not a communist, but the Labour politician George Lansbury, who was elected the league’s first international chairman, and when he resigned, he was succeeded by the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton. When a British Section was formed at a meeting in the House of Commons a few weeks later, Brockway was elected to the chair and Bridgeman made secretary, while Saklatvala was one of the Executive Committee members, along with fellow communist Harry Pollitt. In 1930, the National Meerut Prisoners’ Defence Committee transferred its work to the LAI, and asked local Meerut committees to form league branches.105
Members of the British Section of the League against Imperialism. Middle row (left to right), James Maxton (second left) and Shapurji Saklatvala (third), Reginald Bridgeman (sixth). It is not clear who the two women are.
It would be easy to dismiss the LAI – and most histories of the period do give it relatively short shrift – as an organization of little consequence that died a swift death as a result of internecine left-wing battles and the Comintern’s own vacillating colonial policies. While that is certainly one aspect of the story, and a tragic one, the league’s emergence internationally, as well as its British operations over the next decade, nonetheless remains a ‘significant event in the history of anti-colonialism’.106 At its best, the league functioned in its early years and for nearly a decade after, albeit mainly in Britain, as a terrain of debate on the question of how to organize more effectively against empire. It was terrain on which the Comintern sometimes prevailed, but at other times was more marginal. Michele Louro, for whom the emergence of the league and the Meerut campaigns were deeply intertwined, has argued that the league ‘attracted a robust and equally balanced membership of communists and noncommunists who sought alliances to challenge imperialism’; indeed, Münzenberg ‘failed to garner much attention or financial support from Moscow until after the Meerut case began, while noncommunists took up the lead in the formative years of the LAI’s existence worldwide’.107 The league’s establishment was widely reported in Indian newspapers, and the British Indian government was quick to proscribe its literature; its documents were also produced as evidence of ‘conspiracy’ by the prosecutor in the Meerut case.108 The league certainly worried authorities enough for Saklatvala, Bridgeman and James Maxton to be intercepted and detained overnight in Ostend, Belgium, as they were travelling to the league’s Frankfurt conference in 1929; the incident caused a mini-scandal. (When they returned, Bridgeman and Saklatvala addressed a meeting in London at which an effigy of Lawrence of Arabia was burned – another incident reported in the British press.) It is perhaps more helpful to think about the moment and afterlife of the LAI less as a failed or short-lived institutional achievement than as an acknowledgement from within the heart of the metropole that, in the wake of the last war, something had shifted globally in relation to the imperial project, and demanded networked action. The centre of gravity had shifted to the colonies, and the agency of the ‘darker races’ would henceforth be integral to conceptualizing the end of empire; freedom would be the result of pressures from below, and not freely bestowed from above.
The most important aspect of the LAI’s early congresses and constitution was the extent to which it showcased nationalist and left-wing leaders from Asia and Africa; in doing so, the LAI put both resistance movements in the colonies and international networks of solidarity at the heart of its vision of decolonization. Several of the speeches made at the Brussels Congress, which rem
ains a landmark occasion in the history of global anticolonialism, made clear that the era of paternalism was definitively over. The fiery Senegalese campaigner and intellectual Lamine Senghor, who had previously set up the Comité de défense de la race nègre (CDRN) on explicitly self-emancipating grounds, spoke of it as ‘not a minstrel show managed by some humanitarian white politician, but a universal race movement’.109 At the first LAI Congress, where Senghor represented the CDRN, he also warned in a resonant metaphor: ‘The Negroes have slept too long. But beware, Europe! Those who have slept long will not go back to sleep when they wake up.’110 Josiah Tshangana Gumede, the ANC leader and delegate to the congress, hailed the event as a ‘new era for the oppressed peoples’.111 Read as an aspiration rather than an achievement (though it is all too easy to diminish the latter), the LAI embodied the growing understanding in the metropole that colonial subjects should not be seen as a humanitarian ‘problem’ to be rescued from their situation, but as partners in a struggle that was necessarily collective, and the outcome of which would have resonances for ordinary citizens of Europe as well. As the British communist J. R. Campbell would put it some years later, while introducing an anti-war resolution at one of the British Section’s conferences, and noting that repressive legislation was now rife in dealing with great mass movements of resistance,
it is not a question of treating India as a problem or Africa as a problem, it is a question of asking ourselves, what are we, the British working class, going to do in relation to those living movements which are struggling for independence for the colonies at the present moment … The same capitalist class which is holding down India is holding us down here. And the stronger the Indian people’s struggle, the stronger we become in this country … It is not for us to determine whether the Indian people are ripe for self-government. Who are we that we should set ourselves up to judge?112
The Labour MP and chairman of the International League, James Maxton, described the LAI’s view of itself as an organization ‘within which the peoples of the oppressing and of the oppressed nations can meet on common ground and pursue in common the task of emancipation’.113 This call for common ground was also met by an insistence – and there is no reason to believe it was not made in good faith – on cooperation between different political tendencies that shared a belief in anticolonialism. And so, Münzenberg again:
Every Communist or Syndicalist who joins the League today must be prepared to cooperate with the Socialists of the British Independent Labour Party. But every Socialist or bourgeois intellectual who enters the League must remember that he can only do so, if he is seriously prepared to work together with Communists.114
It is fair to say the LAI did indeed briefly succeed as a forum ‘enabling actors holding different political points of view to stand on the same political platform around a common cause’.115 Solidarity rather than charity, and common cause rather than paternalism, would be the order of the day.
Integral to the emergence of this understanding was the presence of large numbers of delegates from Asia and Africa, who voiced an uncompromising refutation of paternalism, striking an anticolonial keynote for the decades to come. These numbers certainly made a great impression on British delegates to Brussels; both Lansbury and Brockway came away from the founding LAI conference profoundly impressed, clear not only about the need for a global anticolonial partnership but also that the fulcrum of ‘freedom’ had moved eastwards. As Brockway would enthuse in an editorial he wrote for the New Leader, it was an ‘extraordinary association’ for its potential to ‘lead to a worldwide movement of significance’ which was not dominated by white campaigners. The new leaders were people of colour: ‘I have attended many conferences which have been described as “International,” but only one of them was international, in fact. The white peoples do not represent, I suppose, more than one-fourth of the human race. Yet at most international conferences one looks almost in vain for any but white faces.’ This lamentable situation, however, changed in early 1927: ‘But one international conference, in my experience, placed the whites in their proper place. It was held at Brussels last February. From the platform the conference hall was a remarkable sight. Every race seemed to be there … in proportionately greater numbers, the races of Asia, Africa and America.’116
But beyond the ‘Parliament of Man’ that Brockway excitedly hoped would emerge out of this gathering, the congress had made crystal clear that it was now ‘coloured workers’ who were at the helm of a struggle for political and economic equality, which might unfold as ‘the biggest human event of the next 20 years’.117 No communist himself, he was nonetheless justifiably impatient with anti-communist sectarianism in the organizations he was affiliated to, the Socialist International and the Labour Party, warning strongly later that same year that it would be ‘suicidal’ for socialists to stay away from the LAI on grounds (spurious, in his view) that it was funded by ‘Moscow gold’.118 He urged fellow British socialists in the Independent Labour Party and Labour Party not to lose an opportunity to bring together ‘all sincere anti-Imperialists in Europe with the rising Liberation Movement of the subject races of the world [which] may easily prove to be one of the most significant movements for equality and freedom in human history’.119 In an unsigned editorial, Brockway suggested that the league also provided a forum in which nationalist movements might themselves be radicalized: ‘Some Nationalists are as Capitalist as the Imperialism which they oppose; all they seek is the right freely to exploit their own peoples’; here was a chance to weave nationalisms into ‘a wider Internationalism’.120 Brockway would reiterate the insight that ‘economic emancipation’ was as vital as political freedom, noting too that the league’s twenty-six associated organizations representing national or working-class movements across the globe made for a historic network of ‘rapid international links’.121 He also chided fellow Labour Party members ‘suffering from the Communist complex’ and being ‘careful’ about association with the LAI:
Of course Scotland Yard has its eye upon it. A movement which sets out to unite and strengthen the subject peoples of the world in their struggle against Imperialism is not likely to be overlooked by the Secret Service of the most powerful empire in the world! But we are in a bad way indeed if such attention deters us from sympathy and activity.122
The transformative impact of an organization not driven by white leadership is evident even in the observations of progressive, but not radical, Labourites like George Lansbury MP. To him, the league represented both actual historical resistance and an imaginative political possibility ‘for the final and complete emancipation of all those races in the world which capitalist governments pleasantly label as subject races’.123 In an article titled ‘A Great Weekend at Brussels’, Lansbury, no communist by a long shot (his tenure as international chairman of the LAI would be brief thanks to a Labour whip which debarred members from working with communist organizations), was vociferous about defending what he called the ‘spontaneity’ of the gathering in Brussels against charges of following a Comintern line.124 Going so far as to call it the only conference he had attended that was not dominated by a ‘machine-made cast-iron set of resolutions pushed down the throats of delegates’, Lansbury, like Brockway, apostrophized the enormous diversity of the ‘anti-imperialist international’, listing not only the multifarious nationalities present – ‘men and women speaking in various languages and divers tongues’ – but also describing a wide political spectrum, from nationalists and communists to trade unionists and socialists: ‘Negroes and Riffis, Indians and Japanese, Chinese and Egyptians, Italians and French, Russians and Germans, British and Irish, Mexicans and Dutch, Belgians and Scandinavians’.125 For Lansbury, the LAI was distinguished from all prior organizations by being the first ‘specifically and without qualifications [to challenge] the right of the white races to dominate, control and exploit the races which are described as backward’.126 The organization’s constitutive repudiation of paternalism was clearly pivotal
here – with a remarkable degree of self-reflexivity, Lansbury acknowledges that, even among socialists, the historical tendency had been to go along with the claim that ‘white men organise and control coloured people for the good of those controlled’.127 This unexamined belief shored up the idea that imperialists were ultimately ‘philanthropists, bringing the blessings of civilisation and religion to the uncultured, uncivilised heathen’.128 The league, on the other hand, ‘does without reservation challenge that whole doctrine’.129 That so self-reflexive an insight had something to do with the influence of Asian and African anticolonialists is made clear by Lansbury’s reference to the prominent presence of China, Japan and India at the conference, which had the effect of ‘making every one understand that these great nations were determined to throw off the yoke of Imperialism and band themselves together in defence, not merely of Nationalism, but Internationalism’.130 The dawn, he pronounced, citing Edward Carpenter, regarded by many as a critic of empire, was rising in the East. Europe would not, could not, lead a global movement towards freedom.
Lansbury’s and Brockway’s acknowledgement of the importance of non-European and non-white voices and leadership is especially significant against the backdrop of the League of Nations’ elision of those very voices. We know, for instance, that there were ‘very few black delegates at the League Assemblies between the wars’, and that this was a time when only Liberia and Abyssinia were free of white rule in sub-Saharan Africa.131 The haphazard petition process which had ‘brought the voices of the system’s subjects – albeit muted, ventriloquized, and distorted – into the rooms in which their fates were determined’ and allowed for claims to be made, ultimately foundered on the paradox that these had to be made through government channels; complainants had to ‘communicate their grievances to the very persons of whom they complain’.132 The LAI, in complete contrast, attempted to level racial hierarchies, putting resistance at its core and calling for engagement rather than petitioning. As Pedersen notes, the League of Nations’ petitioning process failed partly because the founding assumption of the Mandate system was that the petitioning parties could not ‘stand by themselves’, which meant that nationalist claims or those based on self-determination were not sustainable under its terms.133 Those making the complaints or claims had already been deemed childlike and ‘incapable of knowing their own minds’.134 The LAI, on the other hand, was founded on the fact of the right to equality, and on taking resistance to imperialism as a historical given. The League of Nations sought to preserve the Mandatory powers; the LAI put on the table a vision of the end of empire, signalling the eclipse of an apparent consensus around the durability and legitimacy of European power. If, in decades past, and certainly in the nineteenth century, the episodic metropolitan crises generated by the resistance of the colonized had only hinted at the eventual end of European supremacy, the moment of the League against Imperialism was one that signalled a decisive fracture in the hegemon.135 It was a fracture that would be enlarged and deepened by the decade of actual rebellion – and repression – that would follow.
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