Spurred by these new insights, the British Section of the LAI drew them out in several magnificently trenchant analyses of imperialism itself, some produced and distributed as pamphlets and tracts. One of the most brilliantly pithy and powerful, probably written in 1931, was authored by the ‘Red Vicar’, Father Conrad Noel (1869–1942), a Christian socialist who was chairman of the LAI for some time, and ‘whose place has always been in the thickest of the fray’.136 Noel’s elegantly written fifteen-page tract, The Meaning of Imperialism, is a brilliantly pithy yet concrete but far from abstract distillation of the workings of empire, specifically Britain’s.137 As his damning account sweeps across various geographical and historical moments, Noel proffers a forensic analysis of ‘humanitarian cant’ or the mythology that an empire of this magnitude can be ‘based not on force but on goodwill’.138 To Noel, the clergyman, the development of British self-regard based on the notion that the nation held paternal sway over humanitarian empire was a form of ‘collective pharisaism’; just as the biblical Pharisee thanks God he is not like the others, imperialists of every political persuasion insist ‘that our Empire exists not for the purposes of conquest or exploitation or power’ but with liberty as ‘its binding principle’.139 Noel was only too happy to remind his readers that, from the Roman to the German, and from the American to the League of Nations–sanctioned Belgian one, all empires declared themselves for ‘humane and benevolent purposes’; such ‘moral apologies are as old as the hills’.140 Indeed, the bullish vicar headed straight for the mother lode of humanitarian myth-making, the story told on each Empire Day, that ‘the British Empire has the proud distinction of being the first to abolish slavery’, a story that has much to say about abolition and a lot less to say about slavery:
You would hardly gather from that that till almost within living memory the British Empire was the largest slaving association in the world; that the cities of Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool were built upon the colossal profit of the trade in the human flesh; that from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century not thousands, but millions, of people have been torn from their homes, transported under conditions of unspeakable devilry to other parts of the Empire, there to provide cheap labour for the dominant race.141
In fact, Noel asserts, the facts are against the British abolition myth: Denmark abolished slavery in 1792, and the Northern States of America in 1794, while in 1807 only the trade was abolished by Britain, and not slavery itself. Nor, when compensation made abolition effectual after 1833, were the slaves themselves compensated in ways that might have given them some ‘economic freedom’, so as to avoid ‘the meshes of slavery of another kind’.142 The latter was a fate, as we have seen, that the Morant Bay rebels were determined to avoid.
The other noteworthy emphasis in Noel’s tract – one very much of the LAI moment – is on the relationship between imperial exploitation in the colonies and the condition of working people at home. If the celebrations of the much-vaunted British abolition of slavery took no cognizance of ‘English slavery’, or the pauperized conditions in which many worked in the mines and factories of England, it took still less interest in how much worse were ‘the conditions of the coloured people whom we own and exploit’ in the colonies.143 While evoking the land-grabbing and forced labour in regions like Southern Rhodesia and Kenya – which, he notes, even some of the least Bolshevik and most imperialist of figures have themselves deprecated – Noel returns to the question of how exploitation in the colonies is inextricably entangled with the undermining of British labour. In ways that are evocative of Saklatvala’s speeches and writings, Noel (drawing on the work of the communist Rajani Palme Dutt) observes that the half-starved and ill-paid workers of the Bombay textile and Calcutta jute mills are wretched on their own terms, but also that ‘when labour can be had for next to nothing’, it ‘will drive down the British workers to increasing slavery and starvation’.144 He then makes a compelling observation: ‘You cannot be a patriot and a capitalist imperialist. You must either love Scotland and hate the Empire which is ruining it, or fight imperialism for the love of England or Scotland, and put an end to the Empire which is ruining the home people body and soul’.145 The argument that ‘without her Empire, Britain is nothing’, which an Empire Day pamphlet propagated, is in fact the most unpatriotic of claims.146 Noel also takes heart from the fact that Britain is heir to a tradition of truth-telling about empire, pointing, among other texts, to Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal and Justin McCarthy’s History of Our Own Times, in addition to those criticizing Britain’s depredations in Ireland, such as G. K. Chesterton, and even Gladstone in his time. At the heart of British anticolonialism, as Noel delineates it, is the demolition of self-regarding cant. He cites the Indian historian Professor Panniker, as cited by Noel’s fellow churchman, C. F. Andrews: ‘Great Britain … certainly does not stand for freedom and national life for the great majority of non-European people. What it stands for is a white oligarchy exploiting coloured nations.’147 The failure to recognize this is puts Great Britain in danger of becoming ‘a kind of riviera [sic] for the plutocrats’, where ‘such English workers as are lucky enough to find any work at all [will be] engaged in parasitic employments, tending the rich masters as “slaves of the palace” ’, while the ‘extortion’ of workers in the colonies continues apace.148
Peppered throughout the LAI’s documents are insights that would gain traction in the run-up to the Second World War. Introducing a resolution on war and imperialism during the British Section’s conference in 1934, the communist J. R. Campbell noted that only two things were considered ‘above party’ in Britain, seen as unquestionably good: the monarchy and the British Empire.149 Out in the Empire, meanwhile, great mass movements were being met with fierce repression of the kind – and here is a nod to Meerut – that would have made ordinary trade union activity illegal. The existence of such mass resistance to colonial exploitation would be a running theme in league discussions. In 1931, another league document (issued by the International Secretariat and influenced at this point by the Comintern line) would speak of its own development as contingent on ‘the tremendous wave of struggle for national freedom in the colonies … gradually reaching its culmination and shaking the foundations of imperialist dominance’.150 Citing insurrections taking place in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, China, India, Indo-China, Morocco, Africa and Latin America, a resolution passed at a meeting of the LAI’s Executive Committee in Berlin in June 1931 noted that repression in the British Empire – now, ironically, under Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour rule – was ferocious and bloody:
The so-called ‘Labour’ Government under the leadership of MacDonald uses every possible method of oppression against the Indian national-revolutionary struggle for freedom. It bombs Indian villages slaughtering men, women and children, it arrests and hangs Indian revolutionary leaders, it sends punitive expeditions to Burma to exterminate the native revolutionaries, it sends British warships up the Chinese rivers to bombard the Chinese revolutionary forces. MacDonald’s government is doing its best to drown the revolutionary struggle of the Egyptian and Arabian peoples in blood. Slavery in South Africa finds a powerful supporter in Macdonald and his friends.151
The resolution records struggles by Indian workers and peasants ‘in spite of bombing, machine-guns, police violence, shooting, floggings and innumerable imprisonments’; ‘shooting down of Nigerian peasant women’, strike-breaking in the Gambia and armed attacks on miners on the Gold Coast, as well as peasant revolt in the Tharawaddy district of Burma.152 In 1932, the British Section’s annual conference passed a resolution describing the Scottsboro case as an exemplar of the desire ‘to crush the growing spirit of revolt among the Negro toilers’, but once again the emphasis was on the ‘fighting spirit’ of black Americans, to which the league would offer its fullest support, as also to ‘the struggles of the Negro workers in Africa, and the West Indies for complete freedom and self-determination’.153 It would also contribute to d
omestic struggles against racial discrimination, such as ‘the alien registration scheme which deprived coloured British-born seamen of the right of British nationality’.154
While the LAI did not ultimately make the transition from a sympathizing organization into the centre of a mass global movement – ultimately becoming a victim of its own central fracture corresponding to that between the Comintern’s changing imperatives and those of various non-communist anticolonial and socialist organizations – it nonetheless symbolized a decisive shift in how anticolonial organizing was conceptualized as necessarily transnational.155 It is possible to regard the LAI as a ‘failure’, but it is important to acknowledge that it was a symptomatic embodiment of both the possibilities and difficulties inherent in the attempt to forge internationalism within a crucible of diverse political affiliations.156 Despite the promising coalitional beginnings, it would not be long before both the ILP and the Labour Party expressed hostility towards and refused to affiliate with the LAI, on the grounds that it was a communist front organization. In turn, the LAI’s British Section expelled Maxton, and Lansbury would also resign eventually. The ‘harsh radicalism’ of the Comintern’s ‘new line’ was, of course, detrimental to wider international and internationalist linkages, advocating as it did the ‘class-against-class’ doctrine instead of ‘collaboration outside the communist movement’.157 In November 1933, the league’s international headquarters moved from Berlin, where the Nazis were now in power, via Paris, to London. Bridgeman became its international secretary, and its chief guiding force. The league itself would fold within the decade; Bridgeman proved unable to carry on without sufficient resources, and the organization was plagued by internal Comintern politics, policy vacillations and attempts to make ideological ‘corrections’ to the course of anti-imperialism – an impossible task given the diversity of actors. Many of its prime movers – not least Münzenberg, who was found dead in France in 1940 – would also fall victim to Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937. For all its failures and tragically short life, the LAI, particularly the Brussels conference, would remain a key symbolic point of reference for anticolonial campaigners and Third World leaders in the years to come and following decolonization. From this point, however, linked-up agitation, networks and alliance would be the hallmark of anticolonialism in Britain and beyond.
7
Black Voices Matter:
Race, Resistance and Reverse
Pedagogy in the Metropole
When viewed through the lens of race, the thesis – advanced by many labour and socialist historians – that this period marked some kind of universalist class awakening that had brought Britain to the ‘brink of revolution’ requires considerable revision. A more nuanced explanation is required that can help us understand both the rising tide of working-class industrial and political struggles, and working-class deployment of racism, including violence and discrimination against Jewish migrants, as well as those from the British colonies.
Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider
If the League against Imperialism was a metonym for the making of international anticolonial coalitions based in the metropole but fuelled by resistance in the colonies, the idea of transnational opposition led by the colonized had in fact arrived on the global stage in a modest but significant way nearly thirty years before. In 1900, the initiative was taken by a group of campaigners describing themselves as ‘men and women of African blood’.1 The first of several pan-African conferences then took place in London at the instigation of the African Association – an organization founded by Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer who was determined that ‘the association would act on its own, draft its own rules, and not be led by Europeans’.2 The British Anti-Slavery Society expressed its good wishes but, despite explicit requests from the association, refused further involvement, leading one historian to remark trenchantly: ‘Perhaps the humanitarians found a world conference of blacks too frightening a project as the time got nearer for the delegates to meet.’3 In the wake of the division of spoils by colonial powers, the notorious ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late nineteenth century, pan-Africanism had emerged first ‘not as an organised movement but as a widespread sentiment of solidarity among Africans, West Indians and African Americans’.4 The idea behind the conference of 1900 was that, without rejecting the assistance of white allies, people of African blood were capable of and ought to be standing up – and speaking – for their own interests with ‘our own chroniclers’ and ‘our own libraries and organizations’.5 The succinct ‘Address to the Nations of the World’ on behalf of ‘the darker races of mankind’ is worth pausing on, for its role in laying out some of the rhetorical terms for twentieth-century black anticolonialism.
A Habit of Democracy: The African Background to Internationalism
Issuing from ‘we, the men and women of Africa in world congress assembled’, the address, famously drafted and delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois, and co-signed by Williams, Henry B. Brown and Alexander Walters, opens with two preliminary gestures which, at first glance, draw on the language of mendicancy.6 There is an appeal to shared Christian values as the basis for extending ‘the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization’ to all, regardless of colour.7 This is followed by a call for the work of white champions of ‘Negro Freedom’ such as Wilberforce, Clarkson and Buxton to be ‘crowned’ by Britain, an act which would include giving ‘the rights of responsible self-government to the black colonies of Africa and the West Indies’.8 Beneath the appeals to European decency, however, the address contains uncompromising notes of black self-assertion, putting into play themes that would be reprised and amplified in the decades to come. It begins by noting that much-vaunted differences of race are based on the most superficial markers, showing themselves ‘chiefly in the colour of the skin and the texture of the hair’.9 While the ‘darker races’ may at present be ‘the least advanced in culture according to European standards’, this ‘has not, however, always been the case in the past’; both ancient and modern history provides many instances of African ability and capacity.10 Then, in a more implacable tone, the address reminds the world that, in the century to come, great influence will be inevitably exercised by ‘the millions of black men in Africa, America, and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere’.11 Human progress itself will suffer if, instead of being given ‘the largest and broadest opportunity for education and self-development’, the black world is further exploited and degraded. Even as it appeals to the followers of ‘the Prince of Peace’ to take the black cause seriously, the address calls uncompromisingly for the removal of the ‘cloak of the Christian missionary enterprise’, which hides ‘the ruthless economic exploitation and political downfall of less developed nations’.12 The concept of self-emancipation surfaces gently but distinctly in this text, which, while saluting both white and black abolitionists from Wilberforce and Garrison to Sharpe and Douglass, also insists on the need generously to recognize and honour the ordinary ‘American Negro’ and ‘the great work he has accomplished in a generation toward raising nine millions of human beings from slavery to manhood’.13 And in a final determined gesture which would turn out to be a prescient warning, the address calls for the sovereignty of black nation-states to remain inviolate:
Let the nations of the World respect the integrity and independence of the first Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, and the rest, and then let the inhabitants of these States, the independent tribes of Africa, the Negroes of the West Indies and America, and the black subjects of all nations take courage, strive ceaselessly, and fight bravely, that they may prove to the world their incontestible [sic] right to be counted among the great brotherhood of mankind.14
As the century progressed, so did the strength of black challenges to empire.
Manifestos were among the genres which proffered a platform for such challenges and self-assertion, expressing as they did ‘a structure of feeling of an e
mpire in crisis’; they produced narratives of modernity which often made ‘central the racial margin’.15 By the time of the London Manifesto, produced twenty years later by the second Pan-African Congress, held in 1921, black self-emancipation was an idea that had gathered heft. The first Congress, under W. E. B. Du Bois’s leadership, had taken place in 1919, and had issued a set of demands on behalf of the ‘Negroes of the world’ calling for the Allied and Associated ‘trustee’ powers to ensure that the land, capital, labour, education and political rights of ‘the natives of Africa and peoples of African descent were safeguarded. What is striking about the 1921 text, particularly in comparison to the more reformist resolutions contained in its predecessor, is a determined insistence that self-government involves not the concession of a new right but the ‘recognition’ of an existing one. It is a right already inscribed in history and made manifest by resistance and struggle: ‘The independence of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti and San Domingo is absolutely necessary to any sustained belief of the black folk in the sincerity and honesty of the white. These nations have earned the right to be free, they deserve the recognition of the world.’16 Indeed, the document goes so far as to suggest that these nations, for all their faults and mistakes, ‘compare favourably with the past and even recent history of most European nations and America’, which continue to invade and overthrow free institutions.17 It then issues a robust challenge to the idea that some nations had to be looked after by others – an idea that would find its apotheosis in notions of ‘trusteeship’:
Insurgent Empire Page 35
