The Labour and Empire Working Group has held conferences and other events for nearly ten years as part of the European Labour History Network (ELHN). In 2023, the Group held a one-day conference titled ‘Working-class Anti-imperialism and the Global Left: New Directions of Study’ at the University of Bristol, which we were able to attend thanks to travel bursaries made possible by the Society for the Study of Labour History and several other bodies.

The conference brought together scholars based on three continents, each in their own way dedicated to advancing the study of labour history in various imperial contexts, including those – such as imperial formations in Central Europe, or the Portuguese world, and diasporas of people from the Global South in metropolitan countries – not always considered central to the study of imperial labour history. That was thanks to the work of the Group’s organisers, Yann Béliard, Lorenzo Costaguta and Gareth Curless, and the wide remit they set for papers to the conference.

The proceedings were divided into four panels.

The first considered ‘Global Marxisms’, from socialists dealing in the early twentieth century with national questions arising out of Polish, Ukranian and various Jewish demands for self-determination to Indian Naxalites active in the 1960s and 1970s, and the women’s organisations of the early Communist International.

The second concerned African affairs, from the role of labour at home and abroad in the Algerian independence movement to the activities of Italian communists in Egypt in the 1930s, and the men and women behind the outgrowth of an American movement, the Knights of Labor, on the South African Diamond Fields in the 1890s.

The third combined discussion of anarcho-syndicalism and pan-Africanism in Portugal and the wider Portuguese imperial world in the early twentieth century with the historical connections between the Spanish CNT and revolutionary Mexico, especially in the decades leading up to and including the 1930s. It also addressed the struggles of Turkish migrant workers in France in the 1970s and 1980s, and their ties to political struggles back in Turkey and to other diasporic communities.

The fourth panel specifically addressed the role of those most crucial of workers to international trade and international movements, the dockers and sailors, including their leading role in international movements such as opposition to South African apartheid, and the organising work of Lascars, non-white sailors essential to world shipping but often excluded or discriminated against in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century by white sailors’ organisations.

Discussion naturally continued after the conference, at drinks and then at an excellent conference dinner. This was, in short, another highly successful meeting of the Labour and Empire Working Group, building up to next year’s full meeting in Uppsala of the ELHN and its seventeen working groups.

We would like to thank again the Society for the Study of Labour History for making possible this conference, and our participation in it, as well as the University of Bristol and Sorbonne Nouvelle for their additional support.

Justine Cousin, Fatma Cingi Kocadost and Steven Parfitt

Further information

The one-day conference ‘Working-class Anti-imperialism and the Global Left: New Directions of Study’, took place at the University of Bristol on 30 June 2023. Supported by the Society for the Study of Labour History, the University of Bristol, and Sorbonne Nouvelle, the event was organised by the Labour & Empire working group within the European Labour History Network (ELHN).

The programme is set out below.

9.00 Registration

9.15 Welcome

Panel 1 – Global Marxisms (9.30-10.50)

• Natalie Berhends (Harvard University): For Your Freedom and Ours: Diasporic Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian Anti-Imperial Socialism, 1870-1919
• Daria Dyakonova (International Institute, Geneva): ‘If you, working women, want to destroy slavery in colonial countries your place is in the ranks of the Communist International’: the International Communist Women’s Movement’s Anti-colonialism and Anti-imperialism in the 1920s
• Vanessa Corrado (independent scholar): De-institutionalizing politics: activists’ agency and activists’ work in a Marxist-Leninist movement of India (1967-1975)

10.50-11.10: Break

Panel 2 – Anti-colonialism and the African Left (11.10-12.30)

• Steven Parfitt (Independent scholar): White ‘Workers’ on the South African Diamond Fields (1888-1893)
• Giulio Fugazzotto (University of Urbino), The ‘mission’ of Velio Spano in Egypt between anti-colonialism and antifascism (1935-1936)
• Fatima Chorfi (University Oran2, Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Algeria): The Role of the Trade Unions in the Decolonisation of Algeria

12.30-13.30: Lunch

Panel 3 – Projected Revolutions (13.30-14.50)

• Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds): Pan-Africanism, anarcho-syndicalism and the colonial question in Portugal (1910-1933)
• Joshua Newmark (University of Leeds): The Mexican Model: Spanish Anarchist Idealisation of Revolutionary Mexico, 1910-1939
• Fatma Çingi Kocadost (EHESS-Centre Maurice Halbwachs) and Camille Fauroux (Université Toulouse 2): Revolutionaries in Diaspora: Contributing to the anti-imperialist Struggle in Turkey and organising Migrant Workers in Europe

14.50-15.10: Break

Panel 4 – On the Global Waterfront (15.10-16.30)

• Peter Cole (Western Illinois University): Dockers, anti-imperialism, and left internationalism
• Justine Cousin (independent scholar): Lascar activism in Britain and international movements (1925-1944)
• Mae Miller-Likhethe (University of California at Berkeley): The International and the Waterfront: Revisiting Otto Huiswoud’s Political Work in Hamburg, Cape Town, and Antwerp

Wrap Up Session – The EHLN Labour and Empire Working Group: Current and Future Plans (16.30-17.30)

19.00: Dinner (location TBA)

For further information, please contact the conference organisers, Yann Béliard, Lorenzo Costaguta and Gareth Curless, at labourempire.elhn@gmail.com.

The full text of the call for papers can be found here.

More about the European Labour History Network Labour & Empire group and its activities.