OC Phonology: A Sketch 1. Background Broadly speaking, Old Chinese phonology (shànggǔyīn 上古音) is the sound system of Old Chinese, the language of the early first millennium BCE that underlies the rhymes of the Shījīng 詩經 (the Book of Odes) and the system of phonetic elements in the early Chinese script. An early stage of this language can be assumed to be the ancestor of all later attested forms of Chinese.

Scientific investigations into the phonology of Old Chinese began in China as early as the Sòng 宋 period (960-1279), undergoing brilliant developments in the Qīng 清 dynasty : major figures include Duàn Yùcái 段玉裁 , Wáng Niànsūn 王念孫 (1744-1832), and Jiāng Yǒugào 江有誥 (d. 1851).

These scholars classified the Shījīng rhymes into some 30 rhyme categories and observed that these rhyme distinctions corresponded to distinctions among the phonetic elements in the script. Qīng scholars also made important observations about tones and initial consonants, such as the absence in Old Chinese of labiodentals, of retroflex stops, and of anything corresponding to the departing tone (see lemma on traditional Chinese phonology). They established traditional names for rhymes, initial consonants, and various relations among them, but used no systematic phonetic notation.

Bernhard Karlgren (1889Karlgren ( -1978) ) produced the first full reconstruction of Old Chinese, which he called "Archaic Chinese" (1940). He had previously reconstructed "Ancient Chinese" (i.e. Middle Chinese, zhōnggǔ yīn 中古音) by assigning phonetic values to the categories of the rhyming dictionary Qièyùn 切韻 (preface of 601 CE), based on his survey of modern Chinese dialects and Sino-Xenic (Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese) pronunciations. His Archaic Chinese reconstruction built on the results of his Qīng predecessors, but he innovated by using phonetic notation and requiring that his Archaic Chinese reconstruction should include enough distinctions to account for the distinctions of Middle Chinese, without assuming unconditioned phonological splits. His method was to project the phonological distinctions of Middle Chinese back onto Old Chinese, modifying them when rhyming or evidence from the phonetic elements in the script forced him to do so. Karlgren . As a result of these developments, our picture of Old Chinese has changed considerably. While a vision of Old Chinese as strictly monosyllabic and tonal, with little morphology, is still defended by some, recent research suggests that Old Chinese was a non-tonal language, in which certain unanalyzable words were disyllables, and it had a significant amount of affixal morphology (see lemmas on morphology and word families).

Phonology

Old Chinese phonology will be discussed from the point of view of the recent Baxter-Sagart reconstruction [START_REF] Baxter | Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstruction[END_REF]to appear). Unless otherwise mentioned, Old Chinese forms are given in the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction, and Middle Chinese forms in the conventional transcription introduced in Baxter (1992:27-85).

Consonants

Old Chinese is reconstructed with a complex array of initial consonants (Table XX), which include features of labialization and pharyngealization, as well as contrasts between velars and uvulars and between voiced and voiceless resonants. Of these consonants, *kʷ-had an allophone written as -wk in coda position;

similarly, the coda *-w may be regarded as an allophone of initial *ɢʷ-. One of the nasals, either *n or *ŋ, had an allophone written as *N in preinitial position.

Initial consonants could occur in clusters with a following *-r-. This medial *r (first reconstructed as *l in [START_REF] Jaxontov | Shànggǔ Hànyǔ zhōng de fùfǔyīn 上古汉语中的复辅音[END_REF][START_REF] Jaxontov | Shànggǔ Hànyǔ zhōng de fùfǔyīn 上古汉语中的复辅音[END_REF]) affected the development of both the initial and the main vowel in predictable ways. Compare 濟 *tsˤəjʔ > MC tsejX > jǐ 'stately' with 齋 *tsˤrəj > MC tsrɛj > zhāi 'purify oneself' (where MC tsrcan be interpreted as [tʂ]); and 卑 *pe > MC pjie > bēi 'low, humble' with 碑 *pre > MC pje > bēi 'pillar' (an example of the chóngniǔ distinction). Authors disagree on whether other elements (*-j-, *-l-, *-w-) could also appear in the medial slot.

In the coda position, current systems reconstruct at least *-j, *-w, *-m, *-n, *-ŋ, *-p, *-t, and *-k for Old Chinese (Zhèngzhāng reconstructs *-b, *-d, *-g in place of *-p, *-t, *-k). But [START_REF] Karlgren | Analytic dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese[END_REF][START_REF] Karlgren | Grammata serica (script and phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese)[END_REF] [START_REF] Jaxontov | Shànggǔ Hànyǔ zhōng de fùfǔyīn 上古汉语中的复辅音[END_REF][START_REF] Jaxontov | Shànggǔ Hànyǔ zhōng de fùfǔyīn 上古汉语中的复辅音[END_REF]), [START_REF] Starostin | Rekonstrukcija drevnekitajskoj fonologičeskoj sistemy [Reconstruction of the phonological system of Old Chinese[END_REF], [START_REF] Mei | The causative and denominative functions of the *s-prefix in Old Chinese[END_REF] [START_REF] Shàngfāng | Shànggǔ yùnmǔ xìtǒng hé sìděng, jièyīn, shēngdiào de fāyuán wèntí 上古韵母系统和四等、介音、声调的发源问题" [The Old Chinese rhyme system and the question of the origin of the four divisions, medials and tones], Wēnzhōu Shīfàn Xuéyuàn Xuébào[END_REF], [START_REF] Starostin | Rekonstrukcija drevnekitajskoj fonologičeskoj sistemy [Reconstruction of the phonological system of Old Chinese[END_REF] and [START_REF] Baxter | A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology[END_REF], elaborating on observations by Jaxontov, independently arrived at a still simpler system, reconstructing only six vowels: *i, *e, *ə, *a, *u, *o (with minor notational variantions), resulting in over fifty distinct Old Chinese rhymes. This reconstruction suggests that the traditional analysis of Shījīng rhymes was not sufficiently fine-grained: for example, in the six-vowel reconstruction, the finals reconstructed by Li as *-an, *-uan, and *-ian (all traditionally assigned to the single rhyme category 元 Yuán) are replaced by *-an, *-on, and *-en respectively, suggesting that they should not regularly rhyme with each other. [START_REF] Baxter | A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology[END_REF] showed that the rhyme evidence does indeed support this and other predictions of the six-vowel reconstruction, and that the traditional rhyme analysis must therefore be refined.

Tones

The dominant view today is that Old Chinese had no tones, and that tones arose before Middle Chinese from final *-ʔ and *-s, a suffix (Haudricourt 1954a[START_REF] Pulleyblank | The consonantal system of Old Chinese[END_REF][START_REF] Mei | Tones and prosody in Middle Chinese and the origin of the Rising tone[END_REF]. See lemma on tonogenesis.

Complex onsets

Onsets with two consecutive stops separated by a vowel are sometimes seen in early Chinese loans to Vietic languages like Rục: in such cases the equivalent loans into Vietnamese have lenited initials [START_REF] Ferlus | Spirantisation des obstruantes médiales et formation du système consonantique du vietnamien[END_REF]. Thus 紙 zhǐ < MC tsyeX

  's Archaic Chinese was typologically similar to Middle Chinese and to modern dialects: words were tonal and strictly monosyllabic, with occasional initial consonant clusters like *kl-, *pl-, *χm-, or *k's-, and consonant endings like *-b, *-d, *-g and *-r that do not occur in modern dialects. Since Karlgren's work, further insights have been achieved through advances in a number of areas: (1) a better understanding of Middle Chinese phonology̶such as the recognition of the chóngniǔ 重紐 distinction; (2) more precise analysis of Old Chinese rhyming distinctions; (3) an improved understanding of Old Chinese morphology, based on internal reconstruction; (4) the study of foreign words in Chinese transcription and of early Chinese loanwords into neighboring languages; (5) the discovery in modern Chinese dialects (especially those of the Mǐn 閩 group) of phonological distinctions predating Middle Chinese; and (6) more sophisticated paleographic research, especially with the discovery in recent decades of texts on bamboo slips and other writing materials dating from the Warring States period (Zhànguó shídài 戰國時代, 475-221 BCE), written before the standardization of the Chinese script under Qín 秦 (221-206 BCE) and

  reconstructed voiced stop codas *-b, *-d, and *-g in contrast with *-p, *-t, and *-k. These final voiced stops, lost in Middle Chinese, were reconstructed in words with MC non-nasal endings other than -p, -t and -k that show graphic or etymological connections with words in MC final -p, -t and -k: thus because of its etymological connection with the verb 度 duó < MC dak 'measure (v.)', which he reconstructed as *d'âk, Karlgren reconstructed the noun 度 dù < MC duH 'measure (n.), degree' as *d'âg. Karlgren's final voiced stops, still maintained by[START_REF] 李方桂 | Shànggǔ yīn yánjiū 上古音研究[END_REF], are dispensed with inHaudricourt (1954b) and Wáng[START_REF] Lì | Hànyǔ shǐ gǎo 汉语史稿 [Draft history of the Chinese language[END_REF], where such alternations are ascribed to the effect of an OC *-s suffix or, in Wáng's case, of vowel length: thus for Karlgren's *d'âk and *d'âg, Haudricourt has *dâk and *dâks, and Wáng Lì has *dak and *daːk. In this the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction follows Haudricourt.Karlgren also reconstructed a coda *-r in his Archaic Chinese, to account for cases of MC -j (also zero coda from earlier *-j) alternating with MC -n: for example, Karlgren reconstructed 洗 xǐ < MC sejX as *siər, and its phonetic element 先 xiān < MC sen 'first' as *siən.[START_REF] Starostin | Rekonstrukcija drevnekitajskoj fonologičeskoj sistemy [Reconstruction of the phonological system of Old Chinese[END_REF] modified Karlgren's idea, proposing that OC *-r evolved to *-j in some dialects and to *-n in others; thus he reconstructed *-r in both xǐ 洗 'wash' and xiān 先 'first', attributing the presence of both -n and -j reflexes in Middle Chinese to dialect mixture; and this is accepted in the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction.The Old Chinese distinction reconstructed (following Norman 1994) as pharyngealization (e.g. *pˤ-versus *p-) underlies the Middle Chinese distinction between nonpalatalized syllables ("divisions I, II and IV" in traditional terminology, also known as "type A syllables") and palatalized ones ("division III", or "type B") respectively[START_REF] Norman | Pharyngealization in early Chinese[END_REF]. Norman regarded this pharyngealization as a feature of syllables; Baxter and Sagart treat it as a feature of syllable onsets, because it did not affect rhyming. In the evolution to Middle Chinese, pharyngealization caused high vowels to be lowered, and prevented low vowels from rising; it also prevented alveolars, laterals and velars from palatalizing. Compare 亶 *tˤanʔ > MC tanX > dǎn 'sincere, truly' with 氈 *tan > MC tsyen > zhān 'felt (n.)'; and 稽 *kʰˤijʔ > MC khejX > 'bow the head to the ground' with 脂 *kij > tsyij > zhī 'fat, grease'. This distinction had previously been treated as absence vs. presence of a medial yod (i.e. a palatal glide) by Karlgren; as a vowel length distinction (long in type B, short in type A inPulleyblank (1962:99), but long in type A and short in type B in[START_REF] Shàngfāng | Shànggǔ yùnmǔ xìtǒng hé sìděng, jièyīn, shēngdiào de fāyuán wèntí 上古韵母系统和四等、介音、声调的发源问题" [The Old Chinese rhyme system and the question of the origin of the four divisions, medials and tones], Wēnzhōu Shīfàn Xuéyuàn Xuébào[END_REF] and[START_REF] Starostin | Rekonstrukcija drevnekitajskoj fonologičeskoj sistemy [Reconstruction of the phonological system of Old Chinese[END_REF]); as reflecting different stress conditions[START_REF] Pulleyblank | Some new hypotheses concerning word families in Chinese[END_REF]; and recently as tense voice (type A) vs. lax voice (type B)[START_REF] Ferlus | What were the four Divisions of Middle Chinese?[END_REF].There is broad agreement that the three-way distinction of manners of articulation in Middle Chinese stops and affricates (voiceless plain, voiceless aspirated and voiced) is inherited from Old Chinese: for instance 箕 *kə > MC ki > jī 'winnowing basket', 欺 *kʰə > MC khi > qī 'to cheat', 其 *gə > MC gi > qí 'this'. Karlgren had reconstructed two voiced series, plain and aspirated, in addition to the two voiceless ones: but his plain voiced initials, which yielded Middle Chinese hjand y-(Yù sān 喻三 and Yù sì 喻四 in traditional terminology), now appear to have disparate Old Chinese origins, including sonorants *l-and *r-and the voiced uvular stops *ɢ-and *ɢʷ-. For example, Baxter and Sagart reconstruct 易 yì < MC yek < *lek where Karlgren reconstructed *di̯ ĕk, and 異 yì < MC yiH < *ɢək-s where Karlgren reconstructed *gi̭ əg. Karlgren's initial plain voiced stops are now generally abandoned, and his aspirated voiced stops are regarded as unaspirated. Although Middle and Old Chinese both had a three-way manner distinction among stops and affricates, some words changed categories. Sagart and Baxter (2010) argue that nasal prefixes voiced Old Chinese voiceless stops, e.g. *N-p-> MC b-, accounting for Middle Chinese alternations between voiced and voiceless initials in related words, e.g. 敗 bài < MC paejH < *pˤrat-s 'defeat (v.t.)' and 敗 bài < MC baejH < *N-pˤrat-s 'suffer defeat'. Conrady (1896) and Mei (2008), on the other hand, reconstruct MC b-< *b-and p-< *s-b-in such cases, arguing that original voiced stops were devoiced by a prefixed *s-. (See the lemma on word-families.) All authors reconstruct at least one voiceless fricative, OC *s-, as a source of Middle Chinese s-. A guttural fricative̶Karlgren's *χ, Li's *h, Baxter's *x̶was previously reconstructed as the main source of Middle Chinese x-, but Pān Wùyún 潘悟雲 (1997) showed that most words with MC xare better reconstructed with OC *qʰ-, e.g. 化 huà < MC xwaeH < *qʷʰˤ<r>aj-s 'transform' (cf. the discussion of uvulars below). There has been even less agreement on the reconstruction of voiced fricatives: Karlgren had only *z-, reconstructed as one source of Middle Chinese y-(the Yù sì 喻四 initial); Li (1971) reconstructed no voiced fricatives at all. Baxter (1992) reconstructed two: *z-, the source of MC z-, the traditional Xié 邪 initial; and *ɦ-, the source of MC h-(phonetically [ɦ] or [ɣ]) and hj-([ɦj] or [ɣj]), the traditional Xiá 匣 and Yù sān 喻三 initials respectively. The Baxter-Sagart reconstruction has no voiced fricatives: it derives MC hfrom pharyngealized voiced stops *gˤ-, *gʷˤ-, *ɢˤ-, and *ɢʷˤ-, e.g. 紅 hóng < MC huwng < *gˤoŋ 'pink', 畫 huà < MC hwɛk < *gʷˤrek 'draw (v.)'. In most cases, MC hjreflects OC *ɢʷ-, e.g. 為 wéi < MC hjwe < *ɢʷ(r)aj 'make, do, act as', 王 wáng < MC hjwang < *ɢʷaŋ 'king'. In the Baxter-Sagart system, MC zresults from the assimilation of Old Chinese pre-initial *s-(often a prefix) to a following voiced obstruent: 祥 xiáng < MC zjang < *zɢaŋ < *s.ɢaŋ 'auspicious', 紃 xún < MC zwin < *zdun < *s-du[n] 'silk cord'. While Karlgren had reconstructed *l-as the source of MC l-, recent reconstructions generally follow Jaxontov (1986) in reconstructing OC *l-as a source of MC dor y-, and deriving MC linstead from OC *r-(sometimes with preinitial material). This reconstruction is supported by early Chinese loanwords into neighboring languages; also, thus reconstructed, *l-and *r-correspond to Proto-Tibeto-Burman *l-and *r-respectively. Examples with *l: 田 tián < MC den < *lˤiŋ 'field', Proto-Hmong-Mien *ljiŋ (Ratliff 2010:254), Written Tibetan zying < *lying, Proto-Tibeto-Burman *b-liŋ (Matisoff 2003:280); 枼 yè < MC yep < *lap 'leaf', Jingpo lap, Proto-Tibeto-Burman *lap (Matisoff 2003:336). Examples with *r: 龍 lóng < MC ljowng < *[mə]-roŋ 'dragon', Proto-Hmong-Mien *-roŋ (Ratliff 2010:252), Siamese măroŋ, Vietnamese rồng. Jaxontov argued that the change of *l-to d-/ytook place in the first century CE, and that *r-subsequently changed to lto fill the gap. Certain words with Middle Chinese sonorant initials, like 六 liù < MC ljuwk < *k.ruk 'six', have unexpected high-register tones in southern dialects (Hakka liuk 7 'six') due to loss of a voiceless preinitial consonant: cf. Proto-Hmong-Mien *kruk (Ratliff 2010:266), Proto-Tai *krok (Pittayaporn 2009:144), Proto-Tibeto-Burman *d-kruk (Matisoff 2003:71). Thus some plain sonorants in Middle Chinese come from Old Chinese clusters of a voiceless stop plus a liquid (Norman 1991). The reconstruction of voiceless sonorants like *m̥ -goes back to Dǒng (1948). These consonants are reconstructed to explain why certain words with Middle Chinese initials like x-, th-, trh-, or syhave graphical or etymological contacts with words having sonorant initials, e.g. 漢 hàn < MC xanH < *n̥ ˤar-s '(river name)', with the same phonetic as 難 nán < MC nan < *nˤar 'difficulty'; or 埶 shì < MC syejH < *ŋet-s 'setting', whose other reading, in the related meaning 'to plant', is yì < MC ngjiejH < *ŋet-s.

  prefer to reconstruct *s-+ sonorants, a move inspired by Tibeto-Burman parallels (see Sagart and Baxter 2012 for arguments against this proposal). The Middle Chinese palatals and retroflexes were not part of Old Chinese: the palatals are regarded as arising out of alveolars (祝 zhù < MC tsyuwH < *tuk-s 'to curse'), and, in front vowel contexts only, velars (支 zhī < MC tsye < *ke 'branch') in type-B syllables; retroflexes are due to the effect of medial *r on alveolar initials (展 zhǎn < MC trjenX < *trenʔ 'roll over', 榛 zhēn < MC tsrin < *tsrin 'hazel'; MC trand tsrcan be interpreted as retroflexes [ʈ], [tʂ]). Uvulars *q-, *qʰ-, and *ɢ-were first reconstructed by Pān (1997) as the Old Chinese precursors of Middle Chinese '-(glottal stop, the Yǐng 影 initial), x-(a voiceless guttural fricative, the Xiǎo 曉 initial), h-(a voiced guttural fricative, the Xiá 匣 initial), and hj-(the Yù sān 喻三 initial), which had until then been treated as inherited unchanged from Old Chinese. Pān's proposal makes better sense of mutual contacts among these initials in phonetic series and in word families. Sagart and Baxter (2009) adopted Pān's proposal, with some modifications. 2.2. Vowels Karlgren's nonphonologized inventory of Old Chinese vowels (*i, *u, *ŭ, *ô, *ộ , *e, *ĕ, *ə, *o, *ọ , *ɛ, *å, *a, *ă, *â) was replaced in the seventies by Li's more elegant system with seven vowels or diphthongs: *i, *ə, *u, *a, *iə, *ia, *ua (1971). More recently,

'

  paper', a Chinese invention of the early Hàn period, appears in Rục as kəcáy and in Vietnamese as giấy [zʌi B1]. Similarly, 賊 zéi < MC dzok 'bandit' appears in Rục as kəcʌḱ and in Vietnamese as giặc [zak D2]. Vietnamese orthographic giis a voiced fricative [z], the result of lenition of the affricate which one would normally expect to correspond to the Middle Chinese initials of 'paper' and 'bandit'. By coincidence, these two words were independently borrowed by Lakkia, a Tai-Kadai language, as khjei 3 'paper' and kjak 8 'bandit'. In these two words, Lakkia shows a velar onset, paralleling the kə-preinitial in Rục. In consideration of this evidence, Baxter and Sagart reconstruct Old Chinese *k.teʔ for 'paper' and *k.dzˤək for 'bandit', where *k.t and *k.dzˤ are tightly attached heterosyllabic clusters. In Lakkia, *k.dzˤ first evolved to *g.dz through voicing assimilation; these clusters then simplified through loss of the second consonant ̶a behavior already known to have occurred in Lakkia, cf. L-Thongkum (1992), Ostapirat (2006:1092, fn. 16)̶ ultimately resulting in kwith high and low register tones respectively. (The use of a period <.> instead of a hyphen <-> after a preinitial in the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction indicates that no morphological function has been identified for the preinitial consonant *k; this opens the possibility that Old Chinese had some nonmonosyllabic word stems.) While Rục and Lakkia provide direct and converging evidence for complex initials, the distinctions uncovered in Proto-Mǐn 閩 by Norman (1973 and subsequent work) point to the existence in Old Chinese of different kinds of complex onsets. Norman reconstructed six series of stops: plain voiceless, voiceless aspirated, voiceless softened, plain voiced, voiced aspirated and voiced softened, written (using labials as an example) as *p, *ph, *-p, *b, *bh, and *-b. Norman (1986) observed that his Proto-Mǐn softened initials (*-p, *-t, *-ts, *-tš, *-k, *-b, *-d, *-dz, *-dž, *-g), which lenite to sounds like v-, l-, and Øin certain northern Mǐn dialects, often correspond to prenasalized stops in Proto-Hmong-Mien, e.g. 步 bù < MC buH 'step', Proto-Mǐn *-b, and Mien bia 6 from earlier *mb-. He proposed that these initials originated in Old Chinese prenasalized consonants. However, Hmong-Mien prenasalized onsets correspond not only to softened initials like *-p and *-b, but also to the plain and aspirated voiced initial types like *b and *bh. For example, Proto-Hmong-Mien *ndzr-corresponds to Proto-Mǐn *d-in 直 zhí < MC drik 'straight', and Proto-Hmong-Mien *ɲɟ-corresponds to Proto-Mǐn *dh-in 柱 zhù < MC drjuX 'pillar'. Prenasalization therefore cannot be what distinguishes Norman's softened voiced stops from his other kinds of voiced stops. The Baxter-Sagart system instead accounts for the proto-Mǐn initial types as follows: (1) Proto-Mǐn voiceless unaspirates and aspirates are inherited from Old Chinese (possibly with preinitial material), e.g. OC *p-, *C.p-> Proto-Mǐn *p-, OC *pʰ-, *C.pʰ-> Proto-Mǐn *ph-. (2) Norman's plain voiced stops come from Old Chinese plain voiced stops, and from stops with the stative-intransitive nasal prefix *N-(see lemma on word families): e.g. OC *b-and *N-p-> Proto-Mǐn *b-. Examples: 飯 OC *bonʔ-s > MC bjonH > fàn 'cooked grain', Proto-Mǐn *b-; 直 OC *N-t<r>ək > MC drik > zhí 'straight', pMǐn *d-. (3) Norman's voiced aspirates come from Old Chinese stops with the *m-prefix, or from voiced stops or affricates with voiceless preinitials, e.g. OC *m-p-, *k.b-> Proto-Mǐn *bh-. Examples: 柱 *m-t<r>oʔ > MC drjuX > zhù 'pillar', Proto-Mǐn *dh-; 賊 *k.dzˤək > MC dzok > zéi 'bandit', Proto-Mǐn *dzh-(cf. Rục kəcʌḱ 'bandit', cited above). (4) Norman's softened stops, both voiceless and voiced, reflect Old Chinese voiced and voiceless stops with loosely attached preinitials̶preinitials having a central vowel after the preinitial consonant, e.g. OC *Cə.p-> Proto-Mǐn *-p, OC *Cə.b-> Proto-Mǐn *-b. Examples: 字 OC *mə-dzə-s > MC dziH > zì 'character', Proto-Mǐn *-dz-(Proto-Mienic *ndzaŋ C); 擔 OC *mə-tˤam > MC tam > dān 'carry on the shoulder', Proto-Mǐn *-t-(Proto-Hmong-Mien *ntam A); 脰 OC *kə.dˤok-s > MC duwH > dòu 'neck', Proto-Mǐn *-d-(Rục kadɔḱ 'nape'). Thus softening in Northern Mǐn occurs intervocalic position̶a process similar to that observable synchronically in nearby Fúzhōu 福州.Thus on the basis of Northern Mǐn, Baxter and Sagart distinguish between complex onsets without an intervening central vowel (e.g. 賊 *k.dzˤək > MC dzok > zéi 'bandit') and onsets with a central vowel (e.g.脰 *kə.dˤok-s > MC duwH > dòu 'neck'). This distinction is independent of whether the preinitial is a prefix or part of the root. (The distinction corresponds to that in Sagart 1999 between tightly attached or "fusing" preinitials and loosely attached or "iambic" ones, except that all preinitial consonants were treated there as morphological prefixes.) In the Baxter-Sagart system, with some exceptions, loosely attached onsets are still for the most part lost in Middle Chinese. The evolution of tightly attached onsets is more complex: whether the preinitial consonant is reflected in Middle Chinese or lost depends both on the identity of the consonants involved and on dialectal developments. INDEX ITEMS: Old Chinese, Archaic Chinese, Middle Chinese, Ancient Chinese, chóngniǔ 重紐 distinction, Sino-Xenic pronunciations, Sino-Korean pronunciation, Sino-Japanese pronunciation, Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation, Old Chinese morphology, word families, Qièyùn 切韻, Duàn Yùcái 段玉裁 (1735-1815), Wáng Niànsūn 王念孫 (1744-1832), Jiāng Yǒugào 江有誥 (d. 1851), Bernhard Karlgren


Kirk Neville

Yann Béliard

Khudai Kk

Khidmatgars

Kenya Kpawu

KADU Kenya African Democratic Union KANU Kenya African National Union KAPD Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands

Keywords:

Introduction

Labour, empire and decolonisation: historiographical landmarks 1 Yann Béliard

Sorbonne Nouvelle University

As mentioned by Paul Pickering in his foreword, the origin of this book lies in a one-day conference held in Paris on 8 November 2013 at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. The primary aim of the conference was to help post-graduate students taking the 'agrégation d'anglais', a competitive examination in which the British civilisation question was that of 'British Decolonisation, 1919-1984'. 2 The event was a sequel to conferences organised at other French universities which had focused on subjects as varied as the decolonisation of India, the mutations of the Commonwealth and the Falklands War. 3 Our call for papers read: Specialists of the British Empire and researchers in British labour history can no longer afford to ignore each other, and historians such as Andrew Thompson and collection of six of the talks given on that day (by Yann Béliard, Nicholas Owen, Matt Perry, Gareth Curless, Dave Hyde and Tom Sibley) that Neville Kirk and I have chosen to edit, together with three complementary chapters (by Marie Terrier, Quentin Gasteuil and Evan Smith), to form a volume largely concentrated on transnational actors and colonial workers.

In the introductory remarks that follow I will outline how the paths of imperial and labour histories, though they originally developed in separate spheres, have come to converge, before examining more precisely how that tendency has affected the understanding of British decolonisation per se. Highlighting the achievements and also the lacunae in the relevant historiography, I then sketch what makes this collection an original contribution to the collective efforts of historians so far.

When imperial and labour histories were separate continents

The connection between imperial and labour histories was not always on the agenda. It is still a work in progress, resulting from relatively recent and converging evolutions, as old habits and disciplinary silos die hard. 'Old' imperial history on the one hand, 'old' labour history on the other, were indeed for a long time indifferent to each other, to say the least. The most evident reason for this is of course that imperial history as an academic discipline grew long before labour history, the former developing at Oxford and Cambridge during the inter-war years, while labour history's breakthrough had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s. Be that as it may, it is remarkable that the classical accounts of Britain's imperial expansion should have made so few references to working-class organisations. Though Charles Dilke published his first Greater Britain in 1869, the year following the foundation of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and his second version in 1907, the year following that of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the growth of the labour movement was evidently not at the heart of his concerns. 6 John Seeley's Expansion of England, published just before that remarkable year, 1884, when both the Fabian Society and the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF) were formed, paid no greater attention to working-men's efforts to organise. 7 Anthony Froude's Oceana, though released in 1887, the year of the Bloody Sunday at Trafalgar Square, shared the same indifference towards the labour question. 8 The three authors mentioned above did write of the English or British 'people', but it was in a racial, not a social sense. The Cambridge history of the British Empire, published between 1929 and 1959, written by academics who tended to see the imperial experience with an indulgent eye and rarely leant towards the left, did not correct that omission. 9 And even the more recent best-sellers on imperial history leave class issues in the background. 10 The fact seems unescapable: most of the literature on the history of the British Empire has traditionally focussed, in a top-down manner, upon the views and actions of the establishment and elite groups and individuals who held the reins of power and control throughout the empire. 11 These were predominantly white, male and British. In many 6 Charles Dilke, Greater Britain. A Record of Travel in English-speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867 (London, 1869).

7

John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883).

8

Anthony Froude, Oceana or England and her Colonies (London, 1886). Though Froude claimed to have met all classes of people during his tour of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, he was interested in the governors' opinion on his projected imperial federation, not in the servants' or the miners'. 9 J. Holland Rose, A.P. Newton and E.A. Benians (eds), The Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1929-1959).

10 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003). Jeremy Paxman, Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British (London, 2011).

11

Neville Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire. Britain and Australia, 1900 to the Present (Manchester, 2014; 1 st ed. 2011), 5-7. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 2 vols. (London, 1993); Ferguson, Empire.

instances their traditional portrayal as being the 'great and good' who adhered mainly to the assumed British peculiarity of enlightened and beneficent imperial rule is misleading. Along with their French, German, Belgian, Russian and other imperialist counterparts they often showed a capacity for arrogant, patronising, cruel, rapacious and coercive behaviour, notwithstanding their claims to the contrary, rather than being in practice fair-minded, tolerant, understanding, restrained and given to compromise. This top-down and idealised approach has also often been accompanied by a particular interest in these men and groups in the metropole, although the actions of the white male Britons who ran the formal colonies and their relations with indigenous colonial elites have also constituted important objects of study.

In contrast, the views and actions of the labouring and producing people -factory-and non-factory-based men, women, white and non-white, the skilled and non-skilled, the organised and unorganised, the more and less secure and the employed and unemployed in urban and rural areas -in relation to questions of empire, imperialism and colonialism, have traditionally been of little or no concern. That is apart from their neglected and shadowy existence as supporters or opponents of the elite practitioners of imperialism and nationalism in both metropole and colony.

Alongside their top-down focus most traditionalists mainly assumed that ideas, practices and influences flowed in relatively simple and one-dimensional ways from a superior metropolitan core to a subordinate periphery. Yet, as Wendy Webster has perceptively observed, this approach neglects and in the majority of cases completely ignores the ways and extent to which the formal colonies of dependence in particular, but also the increasingly self-governing 'white' dominions, shaped the nature and development of British society itself, for example in relations to questions of race, 'whiteness' and ethnicity. 12 12 It was not until the British Empire reached its zenith, in the inter-war years, that a couple of foreign historians underlined the interest one might find in studying the destinies of Labour and of Empire in relation to each other. One was a French Liberal, Elie Halévy, in his History of the English People. 13 The other was a Chinese nationalist named Tingfu Tsiang (Jiang), with his thesis on 'Labor and Empire: A Study of the Reaction of British Labor, Mainly as Represented in Parliament, to British Imperialism since 1880'. 14 In post-war Britain, even a prominent Marxist historian like Victor Kiernan tended to cling to the traditional top-down approach of imperialism, and it was not until the end of the twentieth century that more systematic efforts were made to bridge the gap between imperial history and labour history. 15 Similarly, in the field of British labour history, the imperial dimension was long overlooked. In the Webbs' and in Pelling's famous histories of British trade unionism, the indexes show no entry for the words 'empire' or 'imperialism'. 16 The same goes for the more recent studies published by Hamish Fraser in 1999 and Alastair Reid in 2004. 17 Admittedly, the general histories of the labour movement produced by G.D.H. Cole in the 1930s-1940s 13 Elie Halévy, Histoire du peuple anglais au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1932). His six volumes were published in English between 1949 and 1952 under the title: A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1949-1952), including volume 5 on Imperialism and the Rise of Labour, 1895-1905 (London, 1951).

16

Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London, 1920; 1 st ed. 1894). Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Harmondsworth, 1963). 17 Hamish Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism, 1700-1998 (Basingstoke, 1999). Alastair Reid, United We Stand. A History of Britain's Trade Unions (London, 2004). and by A.L. Morton and George Tate in the following decade did bring the question of imperialism into the picture, but they were exceptions and did not lead to a thematic shift for labour historians. 18 E.P. Thompson was conscious that empire and imperialism should not be left out, but that statement did not reflect so much in his historical writings as in his political activism. In the end, apart from E.J. Hobsbawm, it has to be admitted that on the whole, the pioneers of British labour history tended to be rather insular in the scope of their research. 19 This does not mean that, in the heyday of the British Empire, thinkers and politicians did not make connections between social questions in Britain and imperial expansion, on the contrary. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the Second World War, the consolidation of the Empire was seen in most quarters as beneficial for the British people and intrinsically positive for social cohesion. Encouraging the poor to emigrate to the White Dominions was considered as a remedy against the ill effects of the industrial revolution, while the possession of exploitation colonies was seen as fundamental to the provision of cheap food for the domestic labour force. 20 Even among those who contested the established order, for example radicals and republicans like Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke himself, the building of the Empire was deemed to be a panacea. Other liberals, such as Richard Cobden and later John A. Hobson, came to see imperialism as a threat to the wellbeing of the British people, since it meant a colossal waste of capital in colonial wars and foreign investments. They considered all the money was needed at home for welfare reforms.

18

Neville Kirk, 'Challenge, crisis and renewal? Themes in the Labour History of Britain, 1960-2010', Labour History Review, 75.2 (2010), 162-80. 19 E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. An Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London, 1968); The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London, 1987).

20

Froude, disgusted by the 'dreary routine of soulless, mechanical labour' he had witnessed in Birmingham and Glasgow (Oceana, 332), hoped migration towards the colonies of his imagined Commonwealth might help the British people regenerate through contact with natural beauty.

One way or the other, links were drawn between imperial and social questions by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century intellectuals. But they tended to think of the labouring masses as Britons in need of salvation rather than as autonomous agents, seeing industrial disputes as sowing the seeds of anarchy, not of an emancipated future. It is therefore hardly surprising that, in academia, imperial history and labour history should have developed as two separate fields. The mutation and rapprochement did take place at the end of the twentieth century can be interpreted as the result of three different developments: the rise of New Imperial History, of post-colonial studies and of global labour history.

Connecting labour and empire

The 'social turn' of imperial history Imperial history is no longer the preserve of military or diplomacy historians, but has undergone an impressive renewal over the past thirty years, what one might call a sociological turn, thanks to historians such as John MacKenzie and Bernard Porter, who were among the first to tackle the question of the impact of Empire on British society. How did the possession of the biggest empire ever in the history of mankind affect Britain? MacKenzie and Porter came up with different answers, the former arguing that public opinion was manipulated into adhering to the ideology of imperialism (and that the labour movement's advocacy of an ethical imperialism led to class conciliation), the latter claiming that, in spite of propaganda, the masses, contrary to the upper and middle classes, remained largely indifferent to it. 21 What they had in common -an effort this book would like to pursue -is that both sought to look 21 John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire. The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester, 1984). Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004). See also Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: a Reader. Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 2000).

beyond the official attitudes of labour organisations, and attempt to grasp the feelings of the men and women in the street. Largely under their influence growing numbers of historians since the 1980s have addressed the very important issue of whether the British people largely embraced or were indifferent towards the vast mass of imperial literature, values, practices, iconography and propaganda to which they were routinely exposed and subjected.

In 2005, Andrew Thompson tried to move beyond the schism between 'minimalist Porterans' and 'maximalist MacKenzieites'. In The Empire Strikes Back, he argued that the Empire's impact upon Britain was 'pervasive', but that Britain's embrace of that empire was 'more tentative'. 22 Britons were influenced, whether they liked it or not, by the existence of the British Empire, yet Thompson was cautious about generalisations, if only because of the pluralism of British society. Contending that Empire was not only a concern of the ruling class, he concluded that the workers related to it with neither enthusiasm nor indifference, but with a sort of banal acceptance. He also insisted that the world of British workers should include the millions who migrated around the Empire and in all directions from the 1840s to Imperial Britain. The Empire in British Politics, c.1880-1932 (Harlow, 2000); The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2004);

(ed.) Britain's Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012). movement. 24 Some of the most interesting developments have concerned the study of colonial workers, of their plight as well as of their resistance. As an answer to Niall Ferguson's neoconservative praise of the British Empire and its legacy, many historians have shed new light on how colonial people felt about British presence, offering useful academic counternarratives. Before Ferguson had even embarked on his pro-imperial campaign, Barbara Bush was one of the first to underline the perpetual instability of the imperial order due to colonial agency. 25 Walking in her footsteps, Antoinette Burton too has argued that dissent rather than Pax Britannica was the norm. 26 Among the works that have recently addressed popular reactions to imperial domination, two broad-sweeping and admittedly partisan books stand out as particularly readable by a larger audience: the one by John Newsinger, with its focus on twenty moments of crisis, eruption and conflict; and the one by Priyamvada Gopal, which puts more emphasis on cross-border anti-colonial networks. 27 That growing attention paid to the Empire as perceived and experienced from below has not just been the result of individual efforts but has taken the shape of a truly collective enterprise with solid teams of researchers going down that path. This can be illustrated by two examples among others. The Department of History at the University of Exeter has created an online Imperial and Global Forum with weekly posts that never fail to be thought-provoking. 28 And the University of Bristol convened a conference in June 2010 entitled 'Scribblings from below' which focused on 24 Clarisse Berthezène, Robert Boyce and Marie Scot (eds), 'Nouvelles perspectives historiographiques sur le monde britannique', Histoire@Politique. Politique, Culture, Société. Revue électronique du Centre d'histoire politique de Sciences Po, 11 (2010), (http://histoire-politique.fr/index.php? numero=11&rub=dossier&item=110, last accessed 16 Aug. 2019).

25

Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance. Africa and Britain, 1919-1945 (London, 1999).

26

Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire. Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford, 2015).

27

John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried. A People's History of the British Empire (London, 2006).

Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire. Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London, 2019).

'subaltern groups in empire', on the 'less powerful and less privileged actors', looking for a less hegemonic imperial archive made of everyday writings such as diaries, letters, petitions, folk songs, suicide notes and graffiti -an important episode in the rediscovery of empire from a bottom-up perspective. The momentum given by the rise of New Imperial History at the end of the twentieth century is therefore still bearing its fruits. It is now considered legitimate, indeed indispensable to examine the popular experience of empire, just as it is now deemed legitimate and vital to connect the study of the Empire at home with that of the Empire overseas. 29 The post-colonial effect

The second strand that contributed to the unsettling of traditional imperial history was the rise of post-colonial studies in British and American universities, a development inseparable from the growth of history as a profession in Britain's ex-colonies. The post-colonial questioning of Western hegemony was initiated by Edward Said in the late 1970s, and inspired a whole generation of researchers keen to contest the established vision of the British Empire as a benevolent entity. Mostly it has been among historians living in or coming from Britain's excolonies, who appropriated Marx's materialistic methods to study their people's history, that the most impressive leaps forward were made. The best illustration of this has been offered by the Indian 'Subalternists'. In the 1980s, explicitly embracing E.P. Thompson's 'history from below' philosophy, they produced the first analyses of Indian history giving a central place to workers' struggles, with an original focus on rural workers rather than on urban ones. 30 Their efforts were echoed in the 1990s by the work of Samita Sen, an Indian historian of the 28 See their 'Blog of the Centre for Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter' (https://imperialglobalexeter.com, last accessed 17 Aug. 2019).

29

See the concept of 'imperial societies' used by Christophe Charle in La Crise des sociétés impériales. Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne (1900-1940). Essai d'histoire sociale comparée (Paris, 2001). Marxist school. 31 With time the Subalternists tended to concentrate on cultural and intellectual issues rather than on economic and social ones, somehow limiting their heuristic value for labour history -an evolution aptly summed up by Matt Perry in his chapter. 32 Though many representatives of that current embraced the post-modern 'linguistic turn' in the 1990s and 2000s, their importance cannot be underestimated. By provincialising Britain, they made it impossible for anyone working on labour and empire to focus merely on British labour organisations and forget about the millions exploited in the colonies, be it in mines or on plantations, on the docks or on the railways. 'We give up neither Marx nor "difference"', insisted Dipesh Chakrabarty in 1995. 33 The dynamic character of the Association of Indian Labour Historians since its foundation in 1996 can clearly be linked to the impetus given by the Subalternist push. And the Subalternists played a crucial role in enlarging labour historians' understanding of class, inviting them to look beyond the white and male wageearner, and embrace in their study of the working class both the formal and the informal sector. 34 For limiting the definition of the working class in the colonial and post-colonial world to urbanised and waged factory workers would mean excluding the bulk of the proletariat made up, in turns or simultaneously, of slaves and indentured workers, not to forget rural migrants and the self-employed.

Labour history's transnational move

The third development that encouraged a rapprochement between imperial history and labour history was the growth of global labour history at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century, notably under the tutelage of Marcel van der Linden and his colleagues at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. 35 That 'global turn' in labour history would not have been possible without the rise of global approaches in the historical profession in general, as a means of overcoming the limitations of area studies. 36 Comparative history, as practised in the Cold War years, had been one way of moving forward, through the comparison between wide cultural 'areas'. The advantage was to de-naturalise each of those areas, but the risk remained of considering those areas as self-contained entities, as essentially separate objects. World history as practised later in certain history departments in the United States presented another risk, that of smoothening differences and presenting teleological narratives. Instead global history in its most fruitful form took the shape of transnational and connected history, where the purpose was not so much to paint new frescoes as to explore contacts and exchanges. 37 (Oxford, 2005). generation of scholars strove to produce a more de-centred account of history which, without denying the conquest of the world by European powers between the fifteenth and the twentieth century, attempted to reconstruct the dialectics of relationship and resistance. 38 Many labour historians were all the more content to get on board the transnational ship as their objects, working people and their organisations, were international in essence. The monumental inquiry on dockworkers around the world that the late Sam Davies coordinated in the late 1990s is a brilliant illustration of that trend. 39 That enthusiasm, however, was not unanimously shared. British labour history to a certain extent remained fairly insular at first, though a series of conferences -in Coleraine in 2009, in Huddersfield in 2014 -managed to arouse interest and demonstrate the scientific benefits of transnationalism. 40 It took the efforts of Neville Kirk, whose comparative history of labour in Britain and the United States had shown the way, to put the transnational approach more firmly on the map, and the present book is of course part of that exercise in persistence. Kirk's plea for connected histories of labour, it has to be noted, has also always been a cautious one. Where van der Linden considers that the 'old' (pre-Thompsonian) and 'new' (post-Thompsonian) labour histories should now be subsumed into 'global labour history', Kirk has underlined both the promises and the pitfalls of the global paradigm, insisting on the necessity for labour history to always keep an eye on the local, the regional and the national -a concern expressed in similar terms

38

For an example of that approach, see Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004). Such decentring is defended with vigour by anthropologist Jack Goody in The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006). 1790-1970 (Aldershot, 2000). by Canadian labour historian Bryan D. Palmer. 41 The bias towards the nation-state can indeed also be overcome by micro-studies of the trans-local kind, comparing situations across oceans without attempting to embrace too vast a space. 42 Whatever the caveats, transnational labour history has already produced notable results that can only encourage further explorations. Yes, there are difficulties for academics claiming to write a global history of workers, notably linguistic and practical ones, as underlined by Fabrice Bensimon in his review of the special issue devoted to the topic by the French labour history review Le Mouvement social. 43 But there are also a wealth of potentialities. 44 So called 'old' labour history can be practised in original ways, with a study of working-class organisations on a broader scale than before. Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt have attempted to do this for the syndicalist current. 45 exciting study of the British and Irish offspring of the North American Knights of Labor, is at present writing a global history of the Knights. 46 Worker rebellions are also being revisited through the transnational lens. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have vividly charted the emergence and growth of a radical transatlantic seafaring proletariat during the eighteenth century (a forerunner of the radical artisan and factory-based working class of the early nineteenth century), highlighting both the structural conditions of their proletarian subjects and their agency, i.e. their power to exercise, albeit limited, influence over these conditions and the course of events. 47 Collecting data about strikes from all around the world over the longue durée, the network set up and coordinated by Dutch historian Sjaak van der Velden is providing researchers into labour disputes with an unprecedented tool. 48 Anthony Cox, Empire, Industry and Class. The Imperial Nexus of Jute, 1840-1940 (London, 2013). Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire. 'Juteopolis', 1850-1939 (Edinburgh, 2014). Cox's fascinating study firmly incorporates into its framework of analysis not only employers, governments and the state, but also workers and their transnational and transcontinental connections.

Empire and class: the ongoing debate

Interrogating the links between labour and empire is thus no longer an incongruous task, and labour historians have been well placed to bring their own contribution to the MacKenzie-Porter debate over the reality and extent of popular imperialism, all the more so as even New Imperial History has tended to favour histories influenced by the cultural turn and privileging the racial and gendered perspectives over the class one. The debate among labour historians has revolved around a central question: to what extent did the British labour movement and British workers at large act as loyal supporters of, or as staunch opponents to British imperialism? In other words: was British labour internationalist at heart, reasoning on a class basis and guided by the interests of both 'white' and 'coloured' workers around the Empire, or did national identity take precedence and lead it to embrace the racist stereotypes that justified the oppression and exploitation of the 'non-Whites'?

The contrasted, sometimes provocative answers given to the question were summed up in their complexity by Neville Kirk in 2003 and only an oversimplified version of the controversy can be presented here. 50 democratic values across the British world, denouncing whenever necessary the abuses of colonialism in Africa and Asia; their fight for a 'better imperialism' and the sense of responsibility of Labour governments in the twentieth century were crucial in making the transition from Empire to Commonwealth a relatively smooth one. Opposite judgments have of course been expressed, especially by Marxist militants and academics. In their view, because the trade-union and Labour Party leaders were never firmly committed to the cause of international socialism, because they allowed themselves to be corrupted by the crumbs fallen from the British bourgeoisie's imperial banquet, they behaved mostly as auxiliaries of the British ruling classes and of their imperialist system, never lending anti-colonial revolts the support they deserved. Whether one favours one interpretation or the other, what is clear is that the labourist ideology that came to dominate the organised labour movement in Britain did not stand for the dismantling but for the reform of the British Empire. Rather than celebrate or deplore this, the task for historians is to account for and make sense of that moderation in imperial affairs. It is also to ask themselves to what extent the non-organised workers adhered to the pro-or anti-imperialist propaganda they were confronted with. Kirk's overview did not put an end to the discussion, which continued with a vigorous dialogue between Jonathan Hyslop and William Kenefick over the political views of Scottish miners in pre-1914 South Africa, proving that there are no simple, straightforward or unilateral answers to the interrogation. 51 Sweeping generalisations about the British labour movement are always risky, if only because of its fragmented character. Being divided between its cooperative, trade-union and political branches, between right-wing and left-wing tendencies, between its English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish poles, between its metropolitan 51 William Kenefick, 'Confronting White Labourism: Socialism, Syndicalism, and the Role of the Scottish Radical Left in South Africa before 1914 ', International Review of Social History, 55.1 (2010), 29-62. Jonathan Hyslop, 'Scottish Labour, Race, and Southern African Empire c.1880-1922: A Reply to Kenefick', International Review of Social History, 55.1 (2010), 63-81. core and its colonial and post-colonial offshoots, between officialdom and grassroots, there was no way its attitude towards the Empire and imperialism could be monolithic, all the more so as attitudes can change over time. The appeal of 'labour and empire' as a field of study lies precisely in that diversity. Applied to the period when Britain's empire started to crumble, the general questions stated above imply interrogating the attitudes of the British labour movement and of ordinary workers towards popular rebellions in the colonies and the decolonisation process more generally.

Labour and the end of the British Empire

If studying labour and empire in conjunction with each other is now generally accepted, the study of British decolonisation per se has rarely focused on the working-class dimension.

From John Darwin to Ronald Hyam, remarkable studies of the process have been published over the years but, without neglecting the social aspects of decolonisation, they have seldom placed the question of class at their heart. 52 Some authors have examined the part played by class interests in the dissolution of the Empire, but from the point of view of the 'gentlemen capitalists' in the case of Cain and Hopkins, or of business more generally in the case of Nicholas White. 53 Their thorough scrutiny of the complex links between economic actors at the top of the social pyramid and political decisions in Downing Street and Whitehall has enhanced our knowledge greatly. But researchers shining the light on the lower strata of society in the metropole and in the colonies have tended to put the stress on gender and race rather than on class relations whenever they have addressed the decolonisation era. Bush and Burton, for example, have both resurrected forgotten episodes of working-class resistance in 52 John Darwin, The End of the British Empire. The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991). Ronald Hyam, Britain's Declining Empire. The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968 (Cambridge, 2006). the colonies, underlining the breath of the workers' repertoire of action, with their resort to sabotage, desertion, boycotts, strikes… But few books have taken the labour movement as their central focus and the passage below offers a rapid overview of that precious literature.

P.S. Gupta (1975): paving the way

When Indian historian Partha Sarathi Gupta published Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964 in 1975, his book was innovative in more ways than one, as Christopher Bayly underlined in his foreword to the 2002 reedition. 54 This was not only because Gupta was probably the first post-Indian independence historian daring to write on a British topic but quite simply because no one so far had attempted to offer a comprehensive overview of how the metropolitan labour organisations in all their variety had related to imperial affairs. 55 The study was as dense as it was ambitious, since it covered not only the Labour Party but also the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Fabian Society, the trade unions and a myriad of other bodies, and analysed their attitudes over a full half century, whether Labour was in or out of office. At a time when labour history in Britain was prospering and often adopted a broadly Marxist outlook, Gupta explicitly rejected Lenin's analysis of the social and political effects of imperialism on the British 'labour aristocracy' and made critical use of the notion of 'class consciousness', taking his inspiration from Pelling rather than Thompson or Hobsbawm. Yet his overall estimation of Labour's colonial policy was not so different from what left-wing critics of the Labour Party contended: in its 54 Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964(London, 2002, 1 st ed. 1975).

55

A few years earlier David Goldsworthy had laid some foundations with his Colonial Issues in British Politics, 1945-1961. From 'Colonial Development' to 'Wind of Change' (Oxford, 1971). So had Bernard Porter, on an earlier period and in a more circumscribed area, with his Critics of Empire. British Radical attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895-1914 (London, 1968). approach of imperial questions, the Labour Party had never really followed the principles of proletarian internationalism, adhering instead to a form of liberal imperialism inherited from Gladstone. Its criticisms of imperialism had been moral rather than scientific, owing more to Hobson or Edmund D. Morel than to Friedrich Engels or Rosa Luxemburg; the party's objective had always been to improve the situation in the Empire, not to dismantle it. Without attempting to analyse in depth how labouring people to empire, Gupta mostly exonerated the British working class of racism, considering that colonial questions were hardly part of its everyday priorities compared to bread and butter issues. Unexpectedly, one of the strengths of the study was certainly that, taking an object that might have seemed peripheral to the Labour Party's identity -its colonial policy -, it showed how a close study of that policy was revealing as to the essentially non-socialist nature of the party's ideology and practice.

Almost half a century after its publication, Gupta's book can be praised for having stood the test of time. Some of its shortcomings were only due to the constraints weighing on the author at the time, in particular limited access to a number of official archives, others to the fact that his study did not go beyond 1964 -whereas British governments in the following decades, especially Wilson's, would still have much trouble decolonising. However, Gupta's focus being on the decision-making and policy-framing institutions of the movement, namely on the leaders of the Labour Party and the TUC, there were two areas where his book did leave room for other researchers to pull in: the study of the radical left inside and outside Labour on the one hand, that of working-class attitudes towards imperialism, anti-colonialism and decolonisation on the other. A couple of important volumes published since his seminal work have helped, to a certain extent, fill both those gaps.

S. Howe (1993): a focus on the radicals

If there is one work that has been a stepping stone for every contributor to this volume, it is Stephen Howe's Anticolonialism in British Politics. The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-1964, a book that, almost twenty years after Gupta's, moved historical reflection forward in several complementary ways. 56 Howe opened his study with a critique of 'the poverty of historiography' on British decolonisation, which at the time was still analysed essentially as a smooth transition from the Empire to the Commonwealth. Refusing that view, which mirrored most official standpoints, Howe recognised that decolonisation had been decided in high places but stressed that it had been under pressure from below, and occasionally from armed rebellion. Howe was also original in that he refused to treat labour and empire as separate spheres. Whereas Gupta had pursued the indispensable task of mapping out the colonial vision of important metropolitan bodies such as Labour and the TUC, Howe looked in more detail at anti-colonialists in the colonies and at their transnational connections with activists in Britain. He also painted a more complete a picture by scrutinising organisations that Gupta had not placed at the centre of his study, notably the ILP, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), inside which members of those parties and other activists coexisted from 1954 to 1964. In his explanation of Labour's tepid anti-colonialism, Howe, building on the foundations laid by Gupta, highlighted key explanatory factors. One was the considerable influence of non-revolutionary critiques of imperialism upon British labour, in particular liberal radicalism and Christian pacifism. 57 Another factor was the initial moderation of the colonised themselves: whether in India or in South Africa, the first nationalist leaders spoke 56

Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics. The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-1964 (Oxford, 1993).

57

On that topic, see two important books published after Howe's study: Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack. Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881-1924 (Woodbridge, 1998); Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics. British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920 (Cambridge, 2010). out in favour of Imperial Citizenship and constitutional methods, not of the violent overthrow of British imperialism. Of further importance was the labour leaders' search for respectability and recognition from the British establishment. Why should Henderson, MacDonald, Attlee or Wilson have embraced fundamental anti-colonialism, when neither pressure from the rankand-file nor solicitations from the colonised were strong? To become part of the state apparatus, to be accepted as a government party, Labour had to prove it could be a reliable guardian of imperial interests. 58 What Howe underlined more than Gupta was the activism of the left-wing tendencies inside or outside of Labour. He documented with unprecedented accuracy Labour's reluctance to stand for disengagement from the colonies: the party did not admit the principle of independence for the colonies until 1957, and even then support for nationalist forces was always conditional upon them being on the 'right side' in the Cold War, i.e. on the side of NATO and of the USA. Confirming Gupta's interpretation of Labour's extremely moderate anti-colonialism, Howe broke new ground in his close examination of the CPGB and of why the party, in spite of its initial defence of radical anti-colonialism, put that cause on the backburner from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, with a short and dizzying parenthesis from 1939 to 1941. Though Ben Bradley's devotion to colonial freedom was unflinching, the leaders of the British party mostly adapted to the demands placed on it by a bureaucratised Comintern, which were motivated primarily by the twists and turns in Stalin's foreign policy, and from 1934 onwards by his search for support from the 'democratic empires' of Britain and France. Howe did not deny that the CPGB was a small party with limited resources at the centre of a mighty empire, which in its early days had had to fight against persecution from the state as well as against Indian and African anti-colonialists, even among those who like George Padmore and Chris Braithwaite had been convinced and active communists. In their eyes, not only the Labour Party but also the CPGB was too opportunistic to be trusted. 60 They ended up championing a form of black nationalism which retained a certain socialistic tinge, but placed their hopes in a rising of the oppressed black masses around the world, not in a united action of the international working class which they now deemed highly improbable. 61 The moderation of many colonial nationalists, who identified with the British upper classes far more than with the lower classes in their own country, is of course a key factor in explaining why crosscontinental anti-colonial alliances, when they did take place, remained relatively aloof from socialist and communist influence. This was the case of the Indian-Irish Independence League 59 Smith in his chapter for this volume summarises the historiographical debate. Since Howe's book, significant contributions to the history of the CPGB's anti-imperialism have been published; notably: Neil Redfern, Class or Nation. Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars (London, 2005).

60

This frustration is reminiscent of that of Indian nationalists towards European socialists prior to the First World War at the international congresses of Paris (1900), Amsterdam (1904), Stuttgart (1907) and Copenhagen (1910). See Ole Birk Laursen, 'Anarchist Anti-Imperialism: Guy Aldred and the Indian Revolutionary Movement, 1909-1914', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46.2 (2018), 286-303. 61 Christian Hogsbjerg, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Duke, 2014); Mariner, Renegade and Castaway: Chris Braithwaite. Seamen's Organiser, Socialist and Militant Pan-Africanist (London, 2014). See also Theo Williams, 'George Padmore and the Soviet Model of the British Commonwealth ', Modern Intellectual History, 16.2 (2019), 531-59. decolonisation period for Labour was inescapable. So was the fact that the small groups within the British labour movement who were supportive of popular uprisings in the colonies had little practical help to offer. For the editors, however, this did not mean that the efforts of those who had tried to build bridges should be forgotten. Their collection, which combines economic, social, political and cultural approaches, constitutes an invaluable study of those minorities who attempted to swim against the current.

Labour and decolonisation: a flourishing of inquiries

Since Gutpa and Howe produced their classics, and thanks to the impetus they gave to further research, the historiography on labour and decolonisation has kept expanding. Tributes to Frederick Cooper's Decolonization and African Society: the Labour Question in French and British Africa (1996) abound in the following pages, and for good reason. 66 So has the growing literature on Britain's policing of the colonies, even when, like in Caroline Elkins' or Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon's works, it does not focus on the repression of workingclass movements as such but on that of nationalist rebellion. 69 Their examples paved the way for historians such as Martin Thomas who are now scrutinising the policing of industrial disputes in particular. Like Cooper's, Thomas's work is fundamentally comparative. 70 67 Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India. Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947 (Oxford, 2007).

His chapter in this volume re-examines some of the questions raised in his book using new primary and secondary material. 1917-65 (Manchester, 1992). David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, 2005).

So it seems that the steps forward taken by the practitioners of New Imperial History and global labour history, although mostly taken separately, are now bearing fruit, in particular in the study of decolonisation. In 2015, Spencer Mawby produced the first synthesis on British decolonisation that devotes a whole chapter, and revealingly the final one, to 'Capital and Labour'. 71 This choice reflects the welcome increase in the number of studies concentrating on colonial workers, illustrated, for example, in the contributions of Curless and Hyde to this volume. Are the traditional lacunae apparent in much of the treatment of labour and decolonisation about to be filled? This can only be a cumulative process and the present book has no other aim than to participate in that progress.

***

Our study covers two thirds of the twentieth century, from the days of High Imperialism to the moment when Britain had lost most of its colonies. The volume follows a chronological progression, with a focus in Part One ('Contesting Imperialism, 1910s-1950s') on individual activists who, in distinctive ways, set about to destabilise the imperial status quo when the Empire was at its zenith. Part Two ('Labour, Decolonisation and Independence, 1940s-1960s') presents a series of case studies tackling working-class interventions in the phase of transition from British rule to colonial emancipation.

In terms of chronology, the two parts overlap slightly, as the shaking of Britain's imperial order started long before the end of the Second World War. In terms of themes and 70 Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 (Cambridge, 2012).

71

Spencer Mawby, The Transformation and Decline of the British Empire. Decolonisation after the First World War (London, 2015). 'Capital and Labour', 119-43. See also his chapter on 'Anti-colonialism in the British Empire ', 18-42. objects too, the two parts resonate with each other, as the militants who were active in the inter-war years were part of transnational networks that often played a role in post-war events also. In other words, the two-fold structure adopted here should not be interpreted as a wish to propose a binary vision: the British imperial and Commonwealth experiences examined here are plural. At the same time, placing labour in its widest sense and transnational activists and networks at the heart of our enquiry, we have sought to preserve a coherence of focus throughout the book.

Having said that, our exploration of labour, empire and decolonisation offers no unique interpretation, no single frame of analysis, whatever our common assumptions may be -in particular the rejection of exceptionalism and essentialism, and a preference for comparative and transnational approaches. It should also be added that, as a glance at the table of contents reveals, this collection does not claim to be an encyclopaedia of labour and decolonisation. It is too fragmentary for that, and the case studies it brings together are mere signposts on the road that may lead to the production of such an academic tool. 72 Though the present book is necessarily selective in its subject matter and limited in its scope, it hopes to persuade the reader that it makes a new, original and useful contribution to the task at hand. Further research hopefully will build upon and extend the foundations laid here. Helped by collaborative scholarly endeavours across the world, we will eventually be in a position to offer a truly comprehensive account of the important subject areas of labour, empire and decolonisation.

14

  Tingfu Jiang (Tsiang), 'Labor and Empire. A Study of the Reaction of British Labor, Mainly as Represented in Parliament, to British Imperialism since 1880', PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1923. 15 Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind. European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (Chicago, 2015; 1 st ed. 1969).

  the 1920s. In 2009, Thompson wrote: 'We need to look much more closely at the British labour movement's imperial involvements.' 23 That is precisely what the authors, ten years later, have tried to do. Since the MacKenzie-Porter controversy and the Thompson synthesis, efforts to understand Empire from below have continued and this volume owes a lot to those diverse endeavours, which have developed both in Britain and abroad, in a truly transnational 22 Andrew Thompson,

23

  Andrew Thompson, response to Trevor Harris's review of The Empire Strikes Back?, 11 Dec. 2009 (Reviews in History, https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/531; last accessed 16 Aug. 2019).

39

  Sam Davies et al. (eds), Dock workers. International Explorations in Comparative Labour History,

40

  Most of the papers given in Coleraine were published in Labour HistoryReview, 74.3 (2009) and75.1 (2010), in special issues edited by Neville Kirk, Don MacRaild and Melanie Nolan.

  And Steven Parfitt, after an 41 Bryan Palmer, review of van der Linden's Workers of the World, Labour / Le Travail, 65 (2010), 246-8. For critical evaluations of global labour history, see also: Dorothy Sue Cobble, 'The Promise and Peril of the New Global Labor History', International Labor and Working-Class History, 82 (2012), 99-107; Adrian Grama and Susan Zimmermann, 'The art of link-making in global labour history: subaltern, feminist and Eastern European contributions', European Review of History, 25.1 (2017), 1-20. 42 Sheldon Stromquist, 'Thinking globally, acting locally: municipal Labour and Socialist activism in comparative perspective, 1890-1920', Labour History Review, 74.3 (2009), 233-56. 43 Fabrice Bensimon, 'Pour une histoire transnationale du travail', La Vie des idées (16 Jan. 2014). ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Pour-une-histoire-transnationale.html, last accessed 30 Sep. 2019.44This is illustrated by Bensimon himself in his work on British lace workers in the Victorian age, on their multi-directional travels across the English Channel and their eventual migration to Australia. Fabrice Bensimon,'Calais 1816-2016', History Today, 24 Oct. 2016 (https://www.historytoday.com/calais-1816-2016, last accessed 17 Aug. 2019). See also his article on 'British workers inFrance, 1815-1848', Past and Present, 213 (2011), 147-89. 45 Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in theColonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940. The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden, 2010).

  Some of the most stimulating studies have dealt with one particular branch of production involving workers across continents, such as Emma Robertson's work on chocolate, or Anthony Cox's and Jim Tomlinson's books on jute. 49 Connecting York and West Africa in one case, Dundee and Calcutta in the others, they constitute daring and convincing attempts at pulling together the metropole and the imperial hinterland, at studying workers here and there as part of the same 46 Steven Parfitt, 'Constructing the Global History of the Knights of Labor', Labor. Studies in Working-Class History, 14.1 (2017), 13-37. 47 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000). 48 Sjaak van der Velden et al. (eds), Strikes around the World, 1968-2005. Case-Studies of 15 Countries(Amsterdam, 2007). The data gathered in that volume are completed year after year on the group's website, 'Labor Conflicts' (http://laborconflicts.socialhistory.org , last accessed 17 Aug. 2019).49Emma Robertson, Chocolate,Women and Empire. A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009).

  imperial working class shaped by the mechanics of global capitalism, made and unmade by one single process of class formation.

  A flattering vision of labour's relation to the British Empire could be formulated as follows: created by the workers to resist the excesses of capitalism, the trade unions and the Labour Party played their role in the expansion of 50 Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins. Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, 2003). See in particular chapter 3: 'The Rule of Class and the Power of Race: socialist attitudes to class, race and empire during the era of "new imperialism", 1899-1910', 149-218. The discussion is also addressed in Yann Béliard, 'Le mouvement ouvrier britannique et l'Empire (1815-1931) : ennemi intérieur ou loyal serviteur ?', in Sylvie Aprile and Michel Rappoport (eds), Le Mondebritannique, 1815-(1914)-1931 (Neuilly, 2010).

53

  Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism. Nicholas White, Decolonisation. The British Experience since 1945 (London, 2014; 1 st ed. 1999).

  ostracism from the Labour Party and TUC 'officialdom'. But the sincere anti-colonialism of 58 This is well illustrated by a 24-page brochure written by the Labour Party's Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions in 1943: 'The Colonies. The Labour Party's Post-War Policy for the African and Pacific Colonies'. many members and cadres was not enough to counterbalance pressure from the Kremlin to adopt the Popular Front line, which led to the dissolution of both the League Against Imperialism (LAI) in 1937, after merely ten years of existence, and that of the Comintern itself in 1943. 59 Howe's study thus shed new light on the success of Pan-Africanism among West

  Cooper, indeed, was the first historian to explore in great depth the 'aggressive developmentalism' deployed by the Attlee government in Britain's African colonies and its determination to shape colonial trade unions according to the British model imagined by Sidney Webb, then Lord Passfield, in his 1930 memorandum on the question. Cooper was also the first to take strikes waves in and across the colonies as an object of study in their own right, underlining how they become a permanent feature after 1918 and contrasting, in the post-1945 years, the disputes that were kept under control and those that, like in the Gold Coast, turned into emancipatory movements. Anti-colonialism too has been studied more closely, with one work towering over the field: Nicholas Owen's study of the British Left and India until 1947, now also a milestone for all researchers. Owen's book renders more complex the picture offered by 66 Cooper, 'Decolonization and African Society'. For references to Cooper's more recent work, see historiographical overviews offered by Curless and Hyde in this volume.Howe thanks to the consultation of Comintern archives only made accessible after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.67 Two areas that have recently attracted the attention of historians and have, as a side result, shed some light on labour and decolonisation, are the Labour Party's foreign policy on the one hand and British counter-insurgency on the other. Since 2000, Rhiannon Vickers, John Callaghan and Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis have all taken a new look at Labour's discourse and practice in international relations.68 Even though those studies adopt mostly a top-down approach and are not centrally concerned with the British Empire and Commonwealth, they have participated in enriching the conversation, if only by making researchers more sensitive to the wider geopolitical issues examined in Labour headquarters.

68

  Vickers, 'Labour's Foreign Policy'. John Callaghan, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy. A History(London, 2007). Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis (eds), The British Labour Party and the Wider World(London, 2008). 69 Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005). Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endame. Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Basingstoke, 2011). David Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing and Decolonization. Politics, Nationalism and the Police,

  Hull, August 2019 -Angers, September 2019 72 It would be a useful complement to the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (Basingstoke, 2016) edited by Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope.

Chapter 3

 3 Nicholas Owen (University of Oxford) Alliances from above and below: the failures and successes of communist anti-imperialism in India, 1920-1934 Chapter 4 Matt Perry (Newcastle University) 'The Lingua Franca of the Bangle': Ellen Wilkinson, the Indian nationalist movement and British Labour, 1932 Chapter 5 Quentin Gasteuil (Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS) / Sorbonne University) A comparative and transnational approach to socialist anti-colonialism: the Fenner Brockway -Marceau Pivert connection, 1930s-1950s Part 2 -Labour, Decolonisation and Independence (1940s-1960s) Chapter 6 Gareth Curless (University of Exeter) Decolonisation and claim making in the Sudan, c. 1945-1958 Chapter 7 Tom Sibley (International Centre for Trade Union Rights, ICTUR) Class, Cold War and colonialism: the deportation of Albert Fava from Gibraltar to Britain, 1948 Chapter 8 David Hyde (University of East London) Decolonisation and 'Development Untoward': crisis and conflict on Kenya's tea plantations, 1959-1960 Chapter 9 Evan Smith (Flinders University of South Australia) For socialist revolution or national liberation? Anti-colonialism and the Communist Parties of Great Britain, Australia and South Africa in the era of decolonisation Conclusion Neville Kirk (Manchester Metropolitan University) Eight points on labour and the end of the British Empire Afterword Yann Béliard (Sorbonne Nouvelle University)

30

  The series Subaltern Studies. Writings on South Asian History and Society was published by Oxford University Press, except for volume 11 printed by Columbia University Press. Volumes 1 to 6, from 1982 to 1989, were edited by Ranajit Guha, the five following volumes, from 1993 to 2000, by other editors, notably Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty. For an evaluation of their legacy and a rich bibliography: Jacques Pouchepadass, 'Que reste-t-il des Subaltern Studies?', CritiqueInternationale, 24 (2004). Women and Labour in Late Colonial India. The Bengal Jute Industry(Cambridge, 1999).

	32	See chapter by Perry in this volume.
	33	Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
	(Princeton, 2000).

31

Samita Sen, 34 Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Coolies, Capital and Colonialism. Studies in Indian Labour History

(Cambridge, 2006)

. Prabhu Mohapatra and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Labour Matters.

Towards Global Histories: Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

(New Delhi, 2009)

.

  Rejecting Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism, a new 35 Jan Lucassen (ed.), Global Labour History. A State of the Art (Bern, 2006). Marcel van der Linden,

	Transnational Labour History. Explorations (Aldershot, 2003); Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global
	Labor History (Leiden, 2008); (ed.), 'Travail et mondialisation', special issue of Le Mouvement social, 241
	(2012).
	36	For historiographical overviews see: Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard (eds), 'Histoire globale,
	histoires connectées : un changement d'échelle historiographique ?', special issue of Revue d'histoire moderne
	et contemporaine, 54.4 (2007); Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke, 2013).

37

Romain Bertrand, L'histoire à parts égales. Récits d'une rencontre Orient-Occident, XVIe-XVIIe siècle

(Paris, 2011)

. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mughals and Franks. Explorations in Connected History

ILO International Labour Organisation ILP Independent Labour Party INC Indian National Congress IO India Office IPI Indian Political Intelligence IRA Irish Republican Army ISU Indian Seamen's Union IT&GWU Irish Transport and General Workers' Union IWW Industrial Workers of the World

(IIIL) formed in 1932, although colonial authorities saw its founders as Bolsheviks. 62 But the perceived unreliability of the British left could only nourish suspicion among those nationalist or working-class activists in the colonies who did have socialist leanings.

B. Frank, C. Horner and D. Stewart (2010): widening the scope A third book -this one not a monograph but a collection of individual chapters, including one by Neville Kirk -has recently extended Gupta's and Howe's works: The British Labour Movement and Imperialism, edited by Billy Frank, Craig Horner and David Stewart. 63 Based on a conference held at University of Central Lancashire, Preston, in 2008, the volume was path-breaking in its attempt to consider labour in its widest sense and make full use of the tools of transnational history -options that the authors of the present collection have also tried to stick to and exploit for the best. The chapters broadly confirmed three points already established by previous research: not all British workers were indifferent to imperial matters; their attitudes were not determined merely by narrow self-interest or absent-minded imperialism; 64 and the visions of Empire issuing from Labour Party and TUC headquarters were, at least until the late 1950s, suffused with paternalism, 'Kiplingism' and racial prejudice. 65 The conclusion that international class solidarity had not been a priority in the 62 Keith Jeffery, Ireland, India and Empire. Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919-1964 (Manchester, 2008).

63

Frank, Horner and Stewart, British Labour.

64

See Hester Baron, 'Weaving Tales of Empire. Gandhi's Visit to Lancashire, 1931', in Frank, Horner and Stewart, British Labour, 65-88. The editors in their introduction rightly raise the question of the workers' 'limited media access to information about colonial developments' (Frank, Horner and Stewart, British Labour, 3).

65

See for example: Billy Frank, 'Labour's "New Imperialist Attitude": State-Sponsored Colonial Development in Africa, 1940-1951', 107-30