In 1949, the British Labour Party had been in power for four years. Domestically, the British government faced post-war reconstruction; internationally, its imperial grip was loosening. Nonetheless, it still ruled over lands in Africa and Asia and controlled resources such as oil in the Middle East. A contradiction emerged between its people-focused internal politics and its condescension in the conduct of foreign and colonial affairs. Concerns around the emerging Cold War infused British imperial policy. Seeing the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a communist vehicle, the British government treated it with suspicion, especially in view of its influence over two areas of imperial interest: the Iranian oil industry and the British colony of Malaya. An examination of the situations in both countries reveals the WFTU’s influence on trade union movements in those regions and uncovers London’s imperial anxieties about its position in the post-war global order.

This article examines how the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) functioned as a contested arena where divergent projects of labour internationalism and decolonization intersected in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the Indian communist trade union leader Shripad Amrit Dange (1899–1991). Drawing on the concept of subaltern internationalism, it analyses how Dange, as WFTU vice-president and executive committee member, sought to appropriate the federation as a vehicle for anti-colonial projects, and how his scope for action was shaped by colonial and post-colonial repression, structural inequalities, and Cold War ideological conflicts. Using materials from the WFTU and All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) collections, along with contemporary journals, the article reconstructs three key phases: the 1945 founding conferences; the contested development of a WFTU Colonial Department and a Pan-Asian initiative; and the post-1949 period, when the federation reoriented itself towards a more explicit anti-colonial programme after the split. Methodologically, the article employs a biographical lens to trace how Dange’s reflections on colonial capitalism and the social composition of the Indian working class fed into debates on decolonization within the WFTU, challenged dominant Western notions, and articulated a vision of post-colonial labour internationalism that linked workplace struggles “from below” to institutional measures “from above”, culminating in his interventions at the fourth world congress in Leipzig in 1957.

To understand the early modern Caribbean, we must understand the societies that inhabited it. The parameters through which historians approach these societies have changed drastically in the last decade. While recent interventions have proven useful for framing our attitude to how populations in the Caribbean formed, they are less effective when applied to societies whose longevity was uncertain that, in some cases, fractured or collapsed. It is in this context that some historians have identified what they term “sinew populations”: communities whose “off-grid” nature necessitates different ways of thinking about how they functioned. Recent works have discussed how sinew populations ensured the long-term viability of their communities, but this approach also requires attention to the factors that could render a sinew population’s existence unviable.

This article uses an eighteenth-century Caribbean population of pirates as a case study to illustrate the issue of viability within sinew populations. In particular, the article emphasizes the weak social foundations on which this sinew population was built and the lack of interest among the pirates themselves, after 1718, in maintaining a large pirate population. In thinking about how pirates related to one another and what this meant for the long-term survival of the pirate sinew population, this article demonstrates the importance of social maintenance for understanding how Caribbean societies operated.

This article traces the union career of Abdoulaye Diallo, born in French West Africa in 1917, from the united World Federation of Trade Unions’ (WFTU) 1947 Pan-African Trade Union Conference in Dakar to the founding of the Union Générale des Travailleurs d’Afrique Noire (UGTAN) in 1957. The Dakar conference was a turning point: African delegates, including Diallo, compelled the WFTU to address colonial labour exploitation, thereby unsettling representatives of empire. Following the 1949 split, the WFTU increasingly amplified and promoted leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and Diallo was appointed vice-president. Our analysis of Diallo’s publications reveals his fierce anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. It also shows how, following the split, the WFTU provided a platform for Africans to express their anti-colonial views to a wider audience through newspapers and WFTU publications. His interventions at meetings of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in the early 1950s exposed forced labour and repression to representatives of international organizations while offering unwavering, uncritical support for the Soviet Union. At the WFTU’s Third World Congress in Vienna (1953), Diallo stood out as the leading African delegate, urging workers to organize for liberation. Regionally, he mobilized Francophone West African workers against wage discrimination and colonial coercion, navigating tensions between communist internationalism and emerging nationalist priorities. This study reimagines the WFTU as an anti-colonial arena, shaped by African agency during the early Cold War period.

Since the 1920s, the workers’ movement has been crucial in linking international communism with colonial liberation. From the 1950s, communist trade unions and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) played a key role in this process. The WFTU forged ties with Afro-Asian unions to challenge Western powers with an anti-imperialist platform. Decolonization opened new opportunities for European workers in their anti-capitalist struggle, prompting unions such as the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and Italian Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) to build relationships with unions in newly independent African nations. Their focus was mainly on North and West Africa, where socialist movements emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The CGT and the CGIL established solid links with trade unions in Guinea, Mali, and Ghana. Their views, shaped by their affiliations with the French and Italian communist parties, were not consistently aligned. The CGT maintained a Eurocentric approach to African socialism, while the CGIL, aligned with the PCI, supported a “staged” revolution in Africa, where the working class did not occupy a position of leadership. The CGIL and PCI emphasized the role of peasants and workers in building socialism through a “social revolution” that could strengthen the socialist bloc. These differences created tensions in African trade unions and the FSM, leading to the marginalization of the CGIL’s approach. Nonetheless, Italian unionists gained support from African unions and joined the CGT in mediating for workers in Guinea, Mali, and Ghana.

This article examines the emigration of impoverished Azoreans and Madeirans to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and the British West Indies (BWI), especially British Guiana, in the nineteenth century, driven by the demand for labour following the prohibition of the slave trade in Brazil and emancipation in the BWI. It explores the shared causes of these migratory flows, migrants’ living and working conditions, and the efforts of Portuguese authorities to distinguish their labourers from other colonized peoples. Drawing on Brazilian and Portuguese archives, as well as secondary sources on the Portuguese in the British West Indies, this transnational study situates Portuguese islanders within the broader labour experiments of the nineteenth century.

This article critically examines George Woodcock’s travel writings on India between 1961 and 1981, exploring the tensions between his anarchist anti-imperialism and the cultural frameworks inherited from his upbringing in the heart of empire. While Woodcock admired Gandhi and sought to understand India through a lens of philosophical anarchism, his engagement was shaped by elite literary connections and orientalist tropes that complicated his vision. The article traces how Woodcock’s political ideals, literary influences, and charitable efforts intersected with postcolonial realities, revealing the paradoxes of Western radicalism in a decolonizing world. Drawing on archival sources and offering a close reading of his three major texts on India – Faces of India, Kerala: A Portrait of the Malabar Coast, and TheWalls of India – it highlights how Woodcock’s attempts to critique empire often carried unconscious cultural assumptions. Ultimately, it argues that Woodcock’s India writings offer a valuable case study in the complexities of cross-cultural intellectual encounter in the enduring shadows of imperial discourse.

The urban authorities of early modern Dutch cities employed a broad variety of public servants to manage the urban administration and provide public services relating to health, security, education, and entertainment. Neither part of the governing elite nor members of the guilds, these urban officials are of interest to historians of both work and governance. This article demonstrates that studying these public servants might yield valuable insights into premodern attitudes to work, especially public work. Using applications for employment in public office as well as petitions for improved remuneration, we analyse the value public servants of early modern Dutch cities attached to their professional activities. The town of Zwolle (c.1550–1700) serves as a case study, shedding light on the conditions under which people decided to work in urban public services. In their competition for the town’s salaried offices, candidates demonstrated considerable individual initiative, ranging from unsolicited applications to proposals concerning their personal value for the civic community. Similarly, officeholders demanded proper remuneration befitting the value of their work and their services for the town’s common good.

This article examines the relationship of the Argentine Socialist Party (PS) with international socialist organizations between 1889 and 1940. During this period, the PS emerged as the leading Latin American social-democratic organization and one of the few non-European members of both the Second International and the Labour and Socialist International. The article argues that the PS’s unique trajectory is best understood through the concept of “peripheral inter-nationalism”. This framework analyses how a socialist party in a non-colonial state built by mass European immigration engaged in a competitive nation-building project. The PS sought to construct its own version of the nation for a largely immigrant working class while simultaneously confronting the official nationalism being forged by the Argentine state. By analysing this dual challenge, the article complicates existing understandings of socialist “inter-nationalism”, revealing a distinct path to reconciling national and international loyalties. Drawing on archival research on the PS and the Internationals, the article shows how Argentine socialists actively translated and contested European norms, ultimately contributing to the historiography of international socialism by addressing the underexplored role of non-European parties.

This article reassesses the history of reparations after World War I from the perspective of organized labour in early Weimar Germany. It does so by investigating trade union proposals to send German construction workers to Northern France in an effort to rebuild French villages damaged or destroyed in the war. The article argues that organized workers in early Weimar Germany rallied behind these proposals not only because they hoped that sending fellow workers abroad would contribute to international reconciliation, ease the overall reparations burden, and create employment opportunities, as previous research has suggested. Rather, it shows that Weimar’s “free” (that is, socialist) trade union movement supported the idea of “reparation through labour power” because its members were convinced that it would prevent the rebuilding of Northern France from becoming a playground for private builders. Analysing various German trade union sources, the article suggests that, by involving the country’s nascent Bauhütten movement, a network of building companies owned and controlled by organized labour, trade union functionaries hoped to turn Northern France into a laboratory for non-profit construction. In doing so, they sought to advance a broader transformation of the building sector from a profit-seeking industry benefiting a few wealthy builders into a public service that promoted the interests of workers and the wider community alike. By exploring these trade union proposals for the reconstruction of Northern France, the article also sheds light on a neglected episode in transnational labour history that witnessed the first timid attempts at trade union representation across borders.

This article examines the role of travel in the practice of Cold War politics, focusing particularly on the experiences of Indonesian trade unionists who travelled between Indonesia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. During the Sukarno era (1949–1966), Indonesians from the country's largest trade union federation SOBSI held leading positions in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). In 1965–1966, the army-directed purges against the Indonesian Left destroyed independent trade unionism as the country transitioned to the Suharto New Order regime. As leftist trade unionists were killed, imprisoned, or detained without trial, memories of travelling to the Communist bloc became denied, repressed, and submerged from history. The prison notebooks of Indonesian trade unionist Adam Soepardjan represent a unique set of underground writings produced after the army coup. An analysis of these notebooks reveals the ambivalences of Cold War political travel and the complex subjectivities of the traveller who appraises and reappraises the experiences of travel in a radically changed set of circumstances.