This paper examines how the empire’s hysteria against militant trade unionism and its anti-colonial essence lay at the root of the colonial state’s proliferation of surveillance apparatus in late colonial Bengal. It primarily focuses on how the state censored, proscribed, and surveilled the literary output of trade unionists and other working-class propaganda materials to establish that it was a systematic effort to curb indigenous anti-colonial epistemologies. The article explores the legal provisions implemented to constrain the import, production, and dissemination of these materials as an ideological onslaught against the growing threat from militant and leftist nationalism. Through a thorough review of newspapers, proscribed journals, pamphlets, banners, and slogans produced between 1920 and 1940 within the urban working-class movement of Calcutta, this paper highlights how surveillance transcended being a mere tool of colonial oppression and became an integral part of the empire’s political rhetoric in the subcontinent. The study further evaluates the varying scales of spatiality in imperial surveillance and its policies to comprehend the transforming nature of governance and ordering in the closing decades of British rule in India.

This article examines how Corsican nationalism reshaped trade union practice through the Sindicatu di i Travagliadori Corsi (Corsican Workers’ Union, STC), founded in 1984 after local activists broke with mainstream French confederations. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it traces the STC’s evolving stance toward immigration and non-Corsican workers during the turbulent 1980s. The union initially pursued an openly ethnic agenda – ‘Corsicanization of jobs’ – that framed mainland French migration as settler colonialism and sought to reserve employment for native islanders. By the decade’s end, however, the STC had reframed this demand as a call for equal opportunity for all workers living in Corsica, formally abandoning ethnic membership rules and admitting to its ranks workers from mainland France and North Africa. Despite this rhetorical shift, North African migrants remained marginal: they joined in small numbers and never reached leadership positions, highlighting persistent racial segmentation in Corsica’s labour market. The case of the STC illustrates a form of ‘conditional universalism’, in which formal inclusion depends on alignment with nationalist goals, offering new insight into the coexistence of class solidarity and minority-nationalist politics on Europe’s periphery.

In the 1970s, young activists of the Turkish revolutionary left found themselves in France as refugees, students, or workers. Amongst them, members of Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), galvanized by the intensity of the struggles in Turkey, decided to do their bit by organizing migrant workers from Turkey. So they organized the struggle of undocumented garment workers in Paris in 1980. At the end of a mobilization involving hunger strike, occupation, marches, and public demonstrations, several thousand workers obtained victory. During this episode, Devrimci Yol militants combined in a singular way the anti-imperialist discourse with an analysis of the conditions of exploitation of foreign labour in Europe. However, when the September 1980 coup d’état led to massive repression and arrests in Turkey, activists in France were forced to abandon their effort towards immigrant workers to concentrate on supporting their imprisoned comrades or those forced into exile. Based on archival material and interviews in Turkish and French, the study of this episode allows us to reflect on the possibilities of politics inscribed in the multiple temporalities of a transnational space between the global North and South. Moreover, it explores the tensions between anti-imperialist and immigration labour movements.

Centring Dutch leftist expressions of solidarity with two anti-colonial revolts – the 1926 Indonesian revolt and an attempted 1929 Curaçaoan revolution – this article examines how leftists in the European metropole sold solidarity with anti-colonialism across different political arenas and organizational levels. Relating their efforts specifically to the communist–social-democratic divisions that shaped various leftist political arenas in the period studied, we posit that an expression or practice of solidarity hinges not only upon agreements over ‘mutual interests’ among those directly involved in said relations of solidarity. As interwar left-wing groups depended on diverse coalitions and organized on different geographical scales, their claimed ‘mutual interests’ with anti-colonial causes had to be legitimized, or sold, across these scales. Using newspaper and archival sources, we first argue that solidarity represented a ‘flare signal’ through which colonial causes invited solidarity and support from abroad. Second, we argue that expressions and practices of anti-colonial solidarity, to Dutch interwar leftists, represented a tactic to forge alliances and discredit opponents on a scale of domestic politics, and to cultivate support and status in international networks. Dutch interwar leftist positions on anti-colonial solidarity, we propose, were profoundly shaped by the efforts of leftists from both the metropole and the colony to ‘sell’ claims of mutual interest across scales.

This essay introduces the key themes of the special issue Anti-Imperialism and the Global Left: New Appraisals , edited by Lorenzo Costaguta, Justine Cousin, Camille Fauroux, and Thomas van Gaalen. The authors review existing scholarship on left-wing anti-imperialism and detail the interventions of the five articles published in the issue. Arguing that left-wing anti-imperialism is a fruitful lens to pursue the decolonization of the history of the left, they conclude by suggesting avenues for further research.

The Labour Party in Britain achieved its first ever absolute parliamentary majority in the 1945 general election, at the tail end of the Second World War. Historically a socialist and internationalist party founded with the aim of providing parliamentary representation to trade unionists and the working class, Labour formed its first ever majority government in 1945 with a promise to accompany Britain’s colonies toward higher living standards, social fairness, economic development, and political empowerment. As part of a multifaceted set of policies towards eventual colonial self-rule, the Labour government and Britain’s Trades Union Congress aimed to foster the development of trade unions, on the British model, in all the colonies.

Although there are relatively large bodies of interrelated literature concerning trade unions, industrial politics, workers’ education and leisure in post-war Britain, little has been written about the importance of Wortley Hall (also known as ‘The Workers’ Stately Home’ or ‘Labour’s Home’) as a popular educational and holiday centre for the British labour movement and organized working-class. Drawing on previously unpublished archival and oral-history materials, this article is principally concerned with documenting Wortley’s founding ethos as a proletarian venue and the pioneering efforts by local rank-and-file leaders to raise sufficient finances to secure the hall’s future as a little ‘oasis of socialism’. It also considers Wortley’s wider significance apropos of post-war debates concerning adult education and how the hall related to similar institutions; the considerable increase in country house sales and enthusiasm for finding alternative uses for them in the immediate post-war years; like examples of non-profit holiday centres aimed at working-class people; how Wortley was born out of and contributed to the political culture of the labour movement in South Yorkshire; and, finally, to what extent support for the hall was the product of wider currents and tensions within the labour movement, including both the role of the Communist Party and the prevalence of post-war concerns over communist influence. The article is structured to deal with these issues via an empirical, chronological narrative approach to Wortley’s early years. As such, it represents a modest contribution to the current resurgence of interest in post-war labour institutions and the British left.

Eric Heffer, who rose to the top of the Labour Party’s left-wing hierarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, spent much of his early political career in the Communist Party of Great Britain and, after being expelled in 1948, in the Socialist Workers’ Federation, an anti-Communist Party Marxist organization. Heffer relinquished his Marxism in the late 1950s but continued to support the hard-left section of the Labour Party and the Trotskyist Militant organization in Liverpool in the 1980s. Yet whilst much is known about his work within the Labour Party and his left-wing campaigns for the Labour Party Leadership and Deputy Leadership, little is understood about his Marxist years, beyond his own brief comments and writings. By examining both his personal papers and his extensive writings and speeches, this article attempts to reveal his experiences in Marxism and its impact on his political attitudes and actions. What it reveals is that Marxism shaped Heffer’s thinking towards the need for genuine, participatory, industrial and political democracy by the working class in the creation of a socialist Britain. It was only when he realized that the bureaucratic nature of the Communist leadership, dominated by Stalinism and the use of democratic centralism, restricted freedom of expression and dissent and abandoned revolutionary change that he made a seismic move to the Labour Party to pursue his goals in a non-revolutionary manner.