Preliminary Programme

This paper explores the intersections between anarchism, national liberation and anti-colonial resistances of Indians in Britain in the early twentieth century. In the wake of Madan Lal Dhingra’s assassination of Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie on 1 July 1909, the British authorities closed down the India House (1905-1910) – a north London hostel for Indian students and centre of Indian anti-colonial activities in Britain. The assassination prompted a plethora of responses from the British authorities, Mohandas Gandhi and Emma Goldman, among others, often describing Dhingra as an anarchist. This paper examines the political activities and ideologies of figures such as Shyamaji Krishnavarma, MPT Acharya, Lala Har Dayal, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madan Lal Dhingra – all affiliated with the India House – and argues that anarchism played a significant role in their struggle for Indian independence. Moreover, it examines the notion of Hind Swaraj, the founding of the India Home Rule Society (1905) and the establishment of The Indian Sociologist (1§905) as examples of intersections between anarchism, Indian independence and anti-colonial resistance in Britain from 1905 to 1910. The paper draws on research from the project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’ and new archival research into letters, intelligence reports and journals, and reveals how the Indian national independence movement in Britain often overlapped with anarchism. (Show less)

In the winter of 1910 the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), based in Los Angeles, California, coordinated the opening of the Mexican Revolution with Francisco Madero by organizing hundreds of ethnic Mexicans, in addition to Native Americans, Anglos, Italians, African Americans, and others into a motley insurgent army that raided and controlled northern Baja California for roughly six months. On May 31, 1911, thirty-five years of rule by Porfirio Díaz ended with his boarding a ship bound for Paris, France. In June, Madero dispatched former PLM members Juan Sarabia and Jesus Flores Magón to Los Angeles to negotiate an end of hostilities with Ricardo Flores Magón and others, but the core anarchist members of the PLM refused the overture. Shortly after this meeting police in Los Angeles arrested Ricardo, Enrique, Librado Rivera, and Anselmo Figueroa for violating neutrality laws. By the end of June federal troops now loyal to Madero recaptured Tijuana from the remaining PLM and radical forces in Baja.
The Baja Raids in and of themselves are a small part of the story of the Mexican Revolution. In a military sense they did not appreciably contribute to the fall of Porfirio Díaz and as the revolution progressed through the 1910s, members of the PLM faced prolonged periods in prison in the United States and moved ever further from the center of events in Mexico. The lasting significance of the Baja Raids, however, rests in the composition and organization of the rebel forces. They marked a significant step forward in international leftist organizing that intersected numerous key themes of historical inquiry: anti-imperialist networks and alliances, agrarian struggles, international labor solidarity, interracial, multiethnic, local/diasporic solidarities, and underground networks and struggle. The racial, ethnic, and geographical diversity of the participants in Baja Raids made clear the extent of the radical networks cultivated by anarchists and other radicals during the period. Participants included dedicated anarchists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and many others. For instance, while Anglo socialists in Los Angeles solicited arms in the People’s Paper, Italian anarchists in West Virginia offered military assistance of their own. It took twenty-five years and the global antifascist organizing of the Spanish Civil War to surpass the level of international, interracial, and multilingual coordination seen during the Baja Raids.
Just as significant, the failure of the Raids devolved into a factional dispute within global anarchist movement. Beyond questioning battlefield decisions or tactics, these groups challenged the validity of the Baja Raids as being part of a larger social and economic revolution in Mexico. They also cast doubts on the anarchism of the PLM. These charges snowballed into a major debate within the global anarchist community in which prominent Italian anarchists dismissed the revolutionary character of the Mexican Revolution as a whole because they viewed Mexican “peasants” as not being truly revolutionary. Another important layer of the Baja Raids is that they marked a moment of imperial contradiction. A significant minority of the participants gained military experience in their travels through the networks of early-twentieth-century empire. Some fought in the Spanish-American War, two fought in South Africa during the Boer War, and others served in the United States military in an epoch when the country increasingly reached beyond its borders. These men gained military experience in imperialist conflicts and then used their skills against the nation-state and empire. This paper will trace the global significance of the Baja Raids by rescuing it from national historical narratives, which obscure its legacy.
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The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (or ICU) emerged in Cape Town, South Africa, but would play a decisive role in black and Coloured politics. It was active not just in South Africa (where it was the largest black African and Coloured mass movement of the 1920s), but in neighbouring colonies as well: South West Africa (now Namibia), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The ICU championed the national and class demands of black and Coloured workers, labour tenants and hard-pressed educated elites, in the region's repressive colonial context, but its ideology and vision was an unstable mixture combining a range of ideological elements. Many of these were drawn from abroad, including black American nationalism in the form of Garveyism, liberalism, transmitted in part via moderate British unionism, and revolutionary labour politics in the form of IWW-style syndicalism. However, these influences were re-framed and reworked, unevenly applied, and also combined in a range of changing ways, creating something new and distinctive. ICU ideas and practices were an unstable mixture, and could take very different forms in different situations and times; not quite nationalist, not quite syndicalist, not quite liberal, not quite a union, not quite a party, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes reformist, and sometimes millenarian, the ICU was a sui generis syncretic regional formation. Earlier accounts have downplayed or ignored the syndicalist elements of the movement; this paper stresses, however, that the vision of emancipatory action by One Big Union through a decisive revolutionary general strike, was often central to ICU ideology, had an important impact on ICU actions, and helped inspire some of the millenarian hopes with which the ICU was so often associated. In this sense, the ICU cannot be understood outside of the larger history of the anarchist/ syndicalist tradition, including its widespread, yet at times diffuse and unexpected, impacts in the colonial and postcolonial world. At the same time, however, it argues for distinguishing anarchism/ syndicalism proper, from the range of movements (like the ICU) in which anarchism/ syndicalism played a key role, but which cannot be neatly or easily placed into the anarchist/ syndicalist category. (Show less)