Abstract
George Padmore was an unlikely presence in the Press Office of Britain’s Ministry of Information in 1942. A notorious anti-colonial organizer, Padmore had been under surveillance by London’s Metropolitan Police Special Branch for almost a decade, and his comrades in the Independent Labour Party speculated that his job at the office was a way for the government to keep an eye on him.1 In fact, he was working there as a correspondent for several African American newspapers. On this particular morning in 1942, Padmore sat down at a desk, pulled out a piece of headed paper from International African Opinion (his by then defunct collaboration with C.L.R. James), and scribbled a message to the infamous shipping heiress, Nancy Cunard. He was working on a book with Cunard designed to provide a colonial perspective on the 1941 Atlantic Charter, and he wished to discuss some edits since, he wrote, ‘One has to be careful what we put in black and white. They live forever and may be turned against us if we play into the hands of the reactionaries.’2
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Notes
Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Christopher Lee, Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment And Its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010); Michael Adas, ‘Contested Hegemonies: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology’, Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004), pp. 31–63.
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p 147.
Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, eds. Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p 17. They claim that ‘the seeds of transnationalism are imperial, rather than post-colonial.’
Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), p ix.
The literature on each side of this debate is considerable. For the most influential work arguing against the relevance of the Empire to metropolitan opinion, see Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonization, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For arguments that modern Britain was a product of the processes of empire, see, for example, John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Mackenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, in The New Imperial Histories Reader, ed. S. Howe (London: Routledge, 2010); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002); Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a useful summary of this debate, see Stuart Ward, ‘Introduction’, in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. S. Ward (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2001), pp. 1–20.
See especially Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 30–31.
Stephen Howe, Anti-Colonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 1–2.
Joanna Lewis, ‘The British Empire and World History: Welfare Imperialism and “Soft” Power in the Rise and Fall of Colonial Rule’, in Colonialism and Welfare: Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy, eds James Midgley and David Piachaud (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 17–35.
Quoted in William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p 979.
Padmore, ‘The British Empire Is the Worst Racket Yet Invented by Man’, New Leader, 15 December 1939.
Andrew Thompson argues this point with regard to counter-insurgency operations both before and after World War II. Andrew Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, ed. A. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p 17.
For a review of the debate on violence, see Robert Aldrich and Stuart Ward, ‘Ends of Empire: Decolonizing the Nation in British and French Historiography’, in Nationalising the Past, eds Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 270–279; Joanna Lewis, ‘Nasty, Brutish and in Shorts? British Colonial Rule, Violence and the Historians of Mau Mau’, The Roundtable: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 96: 389 (2007), pp. 201–223.
Quoted in Richard Davis, ‘Perspectives on the End of the British Empire: The Historiographical Debate’, Cercles 28 (2013), p 17.
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression, Revolt (London: Verso, 2011).
Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E. B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and African, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Jason Parker, Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ryan Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
John Marriott, ‘Modernity’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories, eds P. Levine and J. Marriott (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p 586.
Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonization, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 38–41.
See, for example, the arguments made in Lara Putnam, ‘Provincializing Harlem: The “Negro Metropolis” as Northern Frontier of an Interconnected Greater Caribbean’ Modernism/modernity 20, no. 3 (2013), pp. 469–484. Stuart Hall has encouraged scholarship that has worked over the past two decades to be more specific about the differences as well as the similarities of the black experience. See Hall, ‘What is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ quoted in Michelle Ann Stephens, ‘What is this Black in Black Diaspora?’ Small Axe 13, no. 2 (June 2009), pp. 26–38.
For discussion of tradition as contentious, and of the productive capacity of black/radical/tradition, see D. Scott, ‘On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition’, Small Axe 40 (March 2013), pp. 1–6.
Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p 32.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983), p 313; Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (London: Routledge, 2003), p 13.
Frank Guridy, ‘From Solidarity to Cross-Fertilization: Afro-Cuban/African American Interaction during the 1930s and 1940s’, Radical History Review 87 (Fall 2003), p 24.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn. Quoted in Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p 2.
For more on this generation in the British West Indies, see H. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p 19.
Sam Morris, ‘My Tribute to the Late George Padmore’, Accra Evening News, 3 October 1959. Marika Sherwood argues that Padmore’s kitchen table’should have become a museum exhibit’ on the basis of Wright’s claim that ‘almost all the present day leaders of Black Africa’ sat around it. Marika Sherwood, ‘George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah: A Tentative Outline of Their Relationship’, in Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis, George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2009), p 164.
Anthony Bogues, ‘C.L.R. James, Pan-Africanism and the Black Radical Tradition’, Critical Arts 25, no. 4 (December 2011), p 494.
Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, p 197; W.M. Warren, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’ in George Padmore, Africa and World Peace (London: Frank Cass, 1972), p xi.
Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, p 7; A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and transl. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 5–23.
K. King, ‘Introduction’, in R. Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p xv.
R.D.G. Kelley, ‘“But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950’, Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999), pp. 1045–1077; p 1047.
Christopher J. Lee, ‘Decolonization of a Special Type: Rethinking Cold War History in Southern Africa’, Kronos: Southern African Histories 37, no. 1 (2011), p 7. For African American examples, see Plummer, Rising Wind; Sterling Johnson, Black Globalism: The International Politics of a Non-state Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, eds, Introduction to Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 2–3.
The similarities between Norman Manley’s strategy in Jamaica and that of Padmore’s bears further exploration. See A. Bogues, ‘Politics, Nation and Postcolony: Caribbean Inflections’, Small Axe 6, no. 1 (2002), p 5.
Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’, in Refiguring the Archive, eds Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), p 20. For one of the most important analyses of archives and power, see Michel- Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995). See also Antoinette Burton, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). I would like to thank Caroline Elkins for suggesting Mbembe’s work, and for encouraging me to think through the implications of my use of archives and what the archive or its absence says about my subject.
Stuart Hall and Les Back, ‘At Home and Not At Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back’, Cultural Studies 23, no. 4 (2000), p 674.
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James, L. (2015). Introduction: The Artful Anti-colonialist. In: George Padmore and Decolonization from Below. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352026_1
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