Steven Parfitt reports from a conference at which he and other labour historians addressed issues of race and empire facing the seafarers’ union and outposts of the US Knights of Labor in Britain and elsewhere.

Report on the Conference ‘Fragmented Powers: Confrontation and Cooperation in the English-speaking World’

From 23 to 25 June 2022, Yann Béliard, Joe Redmayne and I took part in the ‘Fragmented Powers’ conference, organised by the Center for Research on the English-speaking World (CREW) and held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. The conference ranged widely across the disciplines of History, Political Studies and International Relations, and on topics ranging from Brexit and European security co-operation to feminist activism and housing policy. Our SSLH-funded session was the only one to deal specifically with labour history, but other panels overlapped to a significant degree with that subject: talks on the memory of conflicts in Northern Ireland, discussions of labour markets and their disruption, gender and early British socialism, and on the post-war British New Left all intersected in various ways with the concerns of our panel and occasioned lively discussion in the Q and A.

Our contributions, presented in a three-person roundtable, titled ‘The fragmentation of labour over imperial and racial issues, 1870s-1920s’, concerned racial and imperial questions, mainly in Britain but also the United States and other parts of the English-speaking world. Yann Béliard spoke on the working-class occupation most intricately connected with international, imperial and racial questions by the nature of their job – seamen – and the British leaders of their unions. By focusing on the biographies of some of those leaders (notably on John R. Bell, the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union leader in Hull from 1910 to 1923), he drew a distinction between what we might call socialist internationalism and white labourism: between an understanding of the social and political contexts of the early twentieth century that encouraged a rejection of racist practices by shipowners and seamen’s union leaders, and one informed by a sense of British nationalism and imperial pride that went with erecting barriers to foreign seamen rather than challenging them.

Joe Redmayne similarly dealt with seafarers, this time based in County Durham, in the first half of the twentieth century, and how workers in the county dealt with what some scholars now call ‘intersubjectivity’: that is, divisions based on race, gender, skill, disability, and so on. In this talk, he focused on racial questions, especially in the context of race riots in South Shields and the small but stubborn settlement of non-white sailors and other workers in the area. He explained how a white labourist position became dominant during and after the First World War and Russian Revolutions within the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union, and especially its long-time leader, John Havelock Wilson, but that minority currents existed that sought to promote anti-imperial and interracial trade unionism on Tyneside and Wearside from at least the 1920s onwards.

Steven Parfitt spoke on the Knights of Labor, the American labour movement of the late nineteenth century, and especially its outposts in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Branches of Knights in each of these countries had a distinctive approach and practice on racial questions that differed from the others and from the American parent organisation. He discussed the ways in which local workers took a foreign model and adapted it to their own purposes, often discarding in the process (especially in Australia and South Africa) some of the most consistent positions taken by American Knights: first, their willingness and ability to organise black workers in large numbers as equal members, and second, their at least putative anti-imperialism, especially directed against British rule over Ireland and not limited to those of Irish origin or ancestry. Imperial connections, he argued, tended to buttress a white labourist approach to racial and imperial questions as the Knights expanded into British imperial territory.

Our contributions each occasioned numerous questions and lead to a great discussion in the question-and-answer segment that took place, even though our panel was ostensibly a roundtable discussion. Although specific questions of the kind that you would expect at a meeting sponsored by the Society for the Study of Labour History were lacking, the questions that were asked tended to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, with many of them coming from political studies’ scholars and in some way connecting our historical narratives to the present – a skill which is enormously helpful, along with the need to explain historical events clearly so as to engage with an interested but nonspecialist audience. We thank the Society for the Study of Labour History for their help with travel costs and other expenses, and believe that the money was well spent in order to bring labour history research to other audiences, for the mutual benefit of speakers and audience alike.

Steven Parfitt is the author of Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2017) and numerous other works on labour history, including upcoming books on Emma Paterson, Leonora Barry, and the Knights of Labor in South Africa.