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The First World War has often suffered from comparison to the Second, in terms of both public interest and the significance ascribed to it by scholars in the shaping of modern Britain. This is especially so for the relationship between the Left and these two wars. For the Left, the Second World War can be seen as a time of triumph: a united stand against fascism followed by a landslide election win and a radical, reforming Labour government. The First World War is more complex. Given the gratuitous cost in lives, the failure of a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ to materialise, the deep recessions and unemployment of the inter-war years, and the botched peace settlements which served only to precipitate another war, the Left has tended to view the conflict as an unmitigated disaster and unpardonable waste. This has led to a tendency on the Left to see the later conflict as the ‘good’ war, fought against an obvious evil, and the earlier conflict as an imperialist blunder; the result of backroom scheming, secret pacts and a thirst for colonies. This book to moves away from a concentration on machinations at the elite levels of the labour movement, on events inside Parliament and intellectual developments; there is a focus on less well-visited material. This book argues that labour patriotism characterised the left’s stance on the First World War, the anti-war stance was marginalised, and this patriotism both held the labour movement together and ensured greater electoral success after 1918.

This book explores the general development of transnational radicalism between the 1850s and 1940s. This is achieved by means of a new and original study of the connected transnational lives and wider radical worlds of two important socialists, British-born Tom Mann (1856-1941) and Australian-born Robert Samuel Ross (1873-1941). Mann and Ross were very active, as labour organisers, editors and educators, in socialist and labour movements in the Anglophone world and beyond. They met in Australia in 1903, worked individually and together in trans-Tasman radical circles in Australia and New Zealand, and developed strong connections with radicals in the wider world. They kept in close touch after Mann’s departure for Britain, via South Africa, in 1910. They helped to build radical transnational movements and networks that sought to create a socialist alternative to capitalism and capitalist globalisation. These have been largely neglected in the literature. Based upon extensive primary- and secondary-based research, this book seeks to recapture this partly hidden world of transnational radicalism. In so doing it also makes a case in favour of transnational history against the ‘methodological nationalism’ which has dominated the subject of history for so long. It attempts to make a new and useful contribution to the literature on transnationalism, globalisation and social movements. It will appeal not only to historians but social scientists in general and all those interested in radical politics, especially those seeking radical alternatives to today’s neo-liberal globalisation and capitalism.

The Knights of Labor became the first national movement of American workers between 1869 and 1917. They also established branches of their movement across the world. This book explores the history of the Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland, where between 1883 and the end of the century they organised upwards of 50 individual assemblies (branches) and 10,000 members across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It treats the Knights as an important but under-recognised part of the great changes taking place within the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth century, whether in terms of the growth of labour politics (and ultimately the Labour Party) or the transformation of the trade unions from the movement of a minority of wage earners to a majority of them. This book looks at the approaches that British and Irish Knights took to politics, industrial relations, race, culture and gender, drawing on and making comparisons with the well-established historiography of the Knights in Canada and the United States, and shows how British and Irish Knights tried and ultimately failed to make their American movement a permanent part of the British and Irish industrial landscape.

The political diaspora played a major part in the history of the international anarchist movement. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of militants, escaping from domestic persecution and following their internationalist ideals, took the path of exile and established colonies in European and non-European countries. This book unveils the intriguing world of anarchist refugees in London from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. It combines an investigation of anarchist political organisations and activities with a study of the everyday life of militants by identifying the hitherto largely anonymous anarchist exiles from Italy who settled in London. Central to the book is an examination of the processes and associations through which these Italian anarchist exiles created an international revolutionary network which European and American governments and police forces esteemed to be an extremely dangerous threat. By investigating the political, social and cultural aspects of the colony of Italian anarchist refugees in London, the nature of the transnational anarchist diaspora and its relevance in the history of anarchy are made evident.