Labour Movements and Movements of Labour in Britain and its Empire

Book Launch

The nineteenth century saw dramatic transformations in discussions about labour - both in terms of the movement and organisation of labour following the abolition of slavery, and for workers and their advocates seeking to revolutionise their relationship to capital. This politics of labour prompted the development of transnational radical and socialist political movements, and produced vast debates, disagreements, and investigations into new forms of indentured and coercive labour practices. Together, they shaped the negotiation of subjecthood, the development of labour rights, and the revolutionary formulations that would transform the modern world.

Join us for a joint launch event for two recent books by historians at the University of York: Laura Forster’s The Paris Commune in Britain and Purba Hossain's Voices from Calcutta: Indian Indenture in the Age of Abolition.

The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries follows the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged. It argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement - and these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain.

Voices from Calcutta locates in India the voices of protest that fundamentally defined the contours of post-slavery labouring across the British Empire. Between 1837 and 1920, 1.3 million indentured labourers migrated from India to sugar plantation colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. This book shows how spokesmen from Calcutta – the capital of British India – disrupted this trade and influenced the lives of these migrants. It follows Calcuttans in their journey of debating, investigating and defending indenture, unfolding a complex web of letters, petitions, interviews and investigative-reports. Instead of simply emanating from Britain, to be dutifully followed in the colonies, labour legislation was informed by voices from those very colonies.

Together, both books disrupt the idea of British exceptionalism in the 19th century, and explore the ways in which the politics of labour in Britain and its empire were produced in transnational spaces.

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