Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

Sylvia Pankhurst vs. the British Empire: the Workers’ Dreadnought experience, 1917‑1924

Résumé

This chapter examines the particular type of anti-imperialism defended in the columns of the Workers’ Dreadnought between its creation in 1917 and its demise in 1924.1 It answers the invitation formulated by Mary Davis to rediscover the weekly founded and directed by Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst in what were probably her years of most intense political activity. In a period marked by unprecedented levels of labour militancy, Pankhurst’s paper provided its readers with a political vision that distinguished itself from the other working-class publications on offer in Britain at the time, by its commitment to the October Revolution and to the new brand of anti-colonialism advocated by the Bolsheviks via the Communist International. Though Pankhurst broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921, the Dreadnought was informed from beginning to end by a Marxist understanding of imperialism that gave it a distinctive colour. The sheer space devoted to imperial questions in its columns made it different from the labour weeklies printed in the pre-First World War era, and so did the varied angles from which British imperialism was denounced. Traditional attacks on military interventions abroad were complemented with a critique of economic exploitation, of informal imperialism, and integrated within a systemic analysis of imperialism as a world order. The chapter studies two other features that made the Dreadnought’s anti-colonialism original: its attention to what imperial domination implied for women – a focus that owed a lot to Pankhurst’s persistent feminist engagement – and its criticism of bourgeois nationalism in the colonies – a theme that Pankhurst would later abandon in her shift from communism to panafricanism. The final part deals with the coverage of labour revolts in the Dominions and the colonies, and the innovative perception of Asiatic workers as the vanguard of the international socialist revolution.

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hal-03892545 , version 1 (09-12-2022)

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Yann Béliard. Sylvia Pankhurst vs. the British Empire: the Workers’ Dreadnought experience, 1917‑1924. Neville Kirk; Yann Béliard. Workers of the Empire, Unite. Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s-1960s, 15, Liverpool University Press, 2021, Studies in Labour History, ISBN: 9781800859685. ⟨hal-03892545⟩

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