The place of Black people in British histories has attracted significant attention regarding precisely what being British means in this contemporary historical moment—marked by the Hostile Environment Policy first initiated by Theresa May in 2012 that denaturalized, deported, and allowed Afro-Caribbean Britons to die and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union following a national referendum in 2016. How Britons of diverse backgrounds understand themselves with respect to various categories of differentiation after Brexit—race, class, national origin, religion, language, and political orientation—remains a fertile ground for exploring the particularized historical experiences of life in Britain. Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation, Theo Williams's considered exploration of the contributions of Caribbean and African radicals—historical personae occupying multiple conditions of exclusion—to the British Left and the socialist movement is a welcome addition to scholarship on the ways that racialized and colonial perspectives shaped metropolitan British radical politics.
Williams demonstrates that extensive engagements and correspondences between African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals and British socialists informed debates within British Left circles during the interwar years, especially because Black radicals were adamant that international socialism required colonial liberation. The narrative detail of Trinidadian George Padmore's political thought and his affiliations to C. L. R. James, Johnstone Kenyatta, and white British Communists and Labour Party MPs is thoroughly developed. The internecine squabbles between Black radical agitators are captivating, and Williams clearly has read the extant scholarship closely and identifies nuances among his radical subjects.
Analyzing the International African Service Bureau within the context of British socialism, according to Williams, “allows us to see with new depth and clarity how the relationship between Black radicalism and European socialism involved far more than a simple Black importation of European ideas” (6). Williams's treatment of the nuances of Padmore's political development, strategizing, and engagements with the Comintern, the Independent Labour Party, Labour, and the Communist Party of Great Britain is robust. There are moments that despite Williams's claims to the contrary, Black radical thought and action seem ancillary in the context of narratives that shaped the white radical Left in Britain. Because scholarship on Black radicalism has recently refreshingly operated beyond statist configurations, one wonders the need to credit British socialism with incorporating the ideologies and strategies of Black people who inhabited a political reality outside the British nation-state as colonial subjects.
Williams's assertion of the dynamic exchange between Pan-Africanism and socialism within British leftist organizing at points veers toward potentially overstating the willingness and impact of white British radicals. After the Italian capture of Addis Ababa in May 1936, Williams reminds readers that Black radicals, including Kenyatta, “continued to work with Sylvia Pankhurst, the most tenacious pro-Ethiopian voice in Britain, to promote the cause of Ethiopian liberation” (119). If the goals of Kenyatta and others were to radicalize white British allies, this point would be salient, but as Williams illustrates, the campaigns headed by the International African Service Bureau stretched beyond convincing British Leftist sympathizers.
Williams argues that Padmore innovated a hybridized politics combining Black intellectual radicalism and Western Marxist thought. The various camps of radicals in Britain—West Indian proto-nationalists, Bolsheviks, Fabians, and others—all have some role in this detailed narrative. The personalities of some of the important cast—mainly the African and Caribbean contributors other than Padmore—are offered in glimpses that will inspire further research. Williams emphasizes the declining activism of the International African Service Bureau during the Second World War, largely because of the dispersal of many of the organization's major figures away from London. James departed for the United States in autumn 1938, immersing himself into the Trotskyite movement there; T. Ras Makonnen left London for Manchester at the close of 1939. Makonnen's “small empire of clubs and restaurants” coincided with his “practical Pan-Africanism,” and it is in these descriptions that the fascinating nature of Williams's subjects shine brightest (183). Further exploration of Amy Ashwood Garvey might also complicate the many threads of radicalism Williams investigates.
Williams informs us that Dorothy Pizer, the British antiracist activist and Padmore's romantic partner and secretary, requested that Richard Wright pen a forward to a new edition of Padmore's Pan-Africanism or Communism? because his name would “lend it prestige” while hers had “no selling value,” an unfortunate, “melancholic epilogue to a story of one woman's sacrifice for the cause of African liberation” (162). Pizer forewent significant personal recognition in her decades of work. However, the notion that her individual loss of credit was notable relative to the cause of African colonial freedom seems a contentious point. Williams ends by revisiting collaborative efforts between Black radicals and white allies such as Fenner Brockway that exemplified “truly internationalist socialism” (264). Did socialism within Britain reflect internationalism or did Black radicals force their way into these settings? The tensions around decolonization, global communism, and anti-fascism Williams highlights suggested that radical visions among the British Left and its Black interlocutors were, at times, incompatible.
In Making the Revolution Global, Williams offers important insights into how nativist assumptions about British radical politics need to be questioned—and he successfully details how contributions from Black colonial subjects informed the politics of the British socialist movement. Britain's place in the world is an area scholars will be inspired to investigate—the limits of British socialism might be read differently when examining Black radicals who operated within Britain and the British Empire yet whose goals, as Williams suggests, were not solely oriented toward politics within the metropole.
British socialism should be examined through the anti-nativist perspective Williams recommends, toward a more thoroughgoing understanding of how contributors from Africa and the Caribbean informed the most radical aspects of the metropolitan Left. This also merits consideration of whether British socialist traditions were as significant as the anti-imperial and Black radical nationalist, internationalist, and pan-Africanist movements erupting and intensifying across the globe, which, Williams contends, constituted part of the radicalization of British sensibilities. Did Padmore and James imagine that engagement with the British Left was the most purposeful recourse for the problems of racist colonial foreign-dominated capitalist exploitation they resisted? Do we continue to privilege the institutions of the metropole even for movements and ideologies framed around significantly different parameters? These are questions that Williams's useful study will surely encourage historians to examine further.
