Yann Béliard

Katherine Connelly

Sylvia Pankhurst

Socialist Scourge Suffragette

Barbara Castle

Christabel Pankhurst

Patricia Romero

E Sylvia Pankhurst

) Shirley Harrison

Mary Davis

the secretary of the Social-Democratic Party (SDP) of Dunedin, New Zealand, stating that it was 'the most advanced of any labour paper in the Empire'. 1 Mark Silverstone's and Arthur McCarthy's flattering judgement is hardly reflected by the discrete place allocated to the weekly, and more generally to Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst, by historians of British anticolonialism

is sometimes presented as a succession of episodes with little sense of continuity. 6 But if there is one period when she was able to constructively 'put together the different strands of her interests', it is during the Dreadnought era. 7 Examining the particular type of anti-imperialism defended in the columns of the Dreadnought between its creation in 1917 and its demise in 1924, this chapter is meant as a contribution to the rediscovery of the weekly founded and directed by 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 offered its readers 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 (CP-GB) 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 Late Victorian and Edwardian era, and so did the varied angles from which British imperialism was denounced. It presented more than a moral or philanthropic variety of anti-colonialism. 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 regarding women's conditions -a focus that owed a lot to Pankhurst's persistent feminist engagement -and its criticism of bourgeois nationalism in the colonies -a theme that she would later abandon in her move from communism to Pan-

6

The Wikipedia page about Pankhurst, which considers in turn 'Suffragism', 'Communism' and 'Support for Ethiopia', is typical of that segmentation. The WSF combined a series of welfare activities -the running of nurseries, schools and clinics, of cooperative shops and workshops, of cultural and recreational associations -with anti-war propaganda, all the while retaining a predominantly female leadership. See Sylvia Pankhurst, The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England During the First World War (London, 1932).

12

The biggest socialist organisation in Britain was the Independent Labour Party (ILP), with 35,000 members. It favoured a regeneration of the Second International over the foundation of a Third, so took no part in the construction of the CP-GB, though hundreds of its members joined it. On the birth of the CP-GB, see recognised by the Comintern, and what would become of the Dreadnought if unification took place? Those issues were complicated by Pankhurst's arrest on 20 October 1920, after the paper published an article approving of a revolt on a British battleship. 13 Her imprisonment was a blow. 14 The Dreadnought, now run by her partner, Italian anarchist Silvio Corio, and her friend Nora Smythe, was on the verge of financial collapse. As for the CP-BSTI, it kept losing members to the Moscow-supported CP-GB, until its provisional leaders decided it was time for the BSTI to join the CP-GB, to adopt its official organ, The Communist, as their own, and give up the Dreadnought, or place it under CP-GB control. None of those moves was acceptable for Pankhurst: on 22 January 1921, one week before the CP-BSTI officially joined the CP-GB, the Dreadnought ceased to call itself the official organ of the CP. After her release from jail on 30 May 1921, Pankhurst adhered to the CP-GB but was expelled from the unified party on 10 September, for her refusal to hand over the Dreadnought to the party.

Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (London, 1977) and Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-21 (London, 1969). Pankhurst's risky voyage to Russia in July 1920 allowed her to discuss matters directly with Lenin, but not to change his views. She was one of the targets of his " Left-Wing" Communism. An Infantile Disorder (1920). For her tale of the encounter, see Sylvia Pankhurst, Soviet Russia as I Saw It (London, 1921). See also Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920-43 (Manchester, 2000).

13

Based on the report of an anonymous British sailor, the article called for solidarity with the Soviet On 17 September 1921, Pankhurst announced to her readers that the weekly was about to close down. But instead of dropping it, she reshaped it one last time, as 'an independent Communist paper untrammelled by party bias'. Once the Dreadnought broke up with the Third International, it adopted a new subtitle: 'For International Communism'. In February 1922, the paper announced its alignment with the German KAPD. The reproduction of speeches by Bolshevik leaders was supplanted by letters from leftist activists, who described the Soviet Union as state capitalism and called for the creation of a Fourth International. 15 In June 1924, the Dreadnought came to a halt and, for about a decade, Pankhurst retired from politics, devoting time to her family and literary activities. 16 All in all, the 1923 and 1924

Dreadnoughts are not as rich as far as imperial questions are concerned, so this chapter only makes cursory reference to the Dreadnought's twilight years.

What do we know about the Dreadnought's influence? Its core readership was formed by the members and sympathisers of the ELSF turned WSF, even though the paper was not its official organ. That East End milieu, comprising a strong proportion of women and foreign workers, could find in the columns of the paper a reflection of its activities. 17 The WSF held weekly meetings in the area, indoor or outdoor fixtures where the paper was on sale, as well 15 See H. Görter's first editorial on 17 Apr. 1920 and his letters to Lenin in the following issues. See also A. Kollontai's series 'News from Soviet Russia', published from 22 Apr. to 19 Aug. 1921. Their Fourth International never took off and should not be confused with the one founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. As time went by, anarchist militants or thinkers were referred to more and more frequently. The paper now adopted a different subtitle every week, and more and more often an apolitical one. In a period when working-class struggles were ebbing, Pankhurst now focused on humanitarian and societal subjects, such as the promotion of Esperanto, the Montessori approach to education, etc.

16

When the paper stopped, Pankhurst and Corio opened a café, then moved to Essex where in 1927 Pankhurst, aged 45, gave birth to Richard, her only son.

17

The paper occasionally published announcements in Yiddish. See WD, 17 Feb. 1923. as annual festivals, such as the Old Cockney Fair. 18 The price made the publication accessible. 19 But the readership was not confined within the boundaries of the East End. Subscribers could also be found in the provinces, more particularly in the mining communities of South Wales and Scotland, due to Pankhurst's long-time relationship with Keir Hardie. Judging by the letters received from the Dominions, Ireland or India, it is also clear that the Dreadnought appealed to labour circles overseas. Edited in the capital, read in the heart of working-class London, circulated across the British Empire, the Dreadnought was a paper that mattered, which explains why the authorities kept it under close surveillance and raided its offices, at 152 Fleet Street, over and over again. 20 The following analysis of the weekly's coverage of imperial questions, based on the consultation of the complete collection, i.e. about 5,000 pages published over a period of more than 350 weeks, is therefore also an answer to Chandrika Kaul's and John Callaghan's calls for research into how the press framed the discussion of empire. 21

Defying British militarism

The Dreadnought presented a critique of British imperialism that went beyond the call for a reformed Empire that was so common among pre-1914 socialists, a critique that combined the denunciations of militarism, political oppression and economic exploitation. The most visible component of the Dreadnought's anti-imperialism lay in its systematic opposition to Britain's 18 WD, 15 Nov. 1919. 19 When it was founded, the weekly cost no more than one penny. Its price rose to two pence after a couple of months and was brought back down to one penny in 1922. (Basingstoke, 2014). John Callaghan, 'Editorial', Socialist History, 31 (2007). military interventions, whether abroad or within the remits of the British Empire. The weekly's militaristic title may seem a paradoxical choice. Built in the armament race with Germany, dreadnoughts were immense battleships, presumably unsinkable cruisers, the first of which was used by the Royal Navy in 1906. The choice of the title indicates that, far from advocating pacifism in the Quaker sense, Pankhurst in 1917 shared Lenin's idea that the imperialist world war could only be brought to halt by a worldwide class war against capitalism. That refusal to turn the other cheek was coherent with her political choices as a feminist, the Woman's Dreadnought having always backed the idea that women, in their fightback, should 'dread nought' and that the enemy's force should be met with force.

Founded to protest the patriotic truce advocated by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the Dreadnought printed page upon page denouncing the Great War. A 1922 cartoon placed the words 'Germany, 1914-1918' at the top of a funeral crown made of Britain's 'righteous wars': 'America, 1814;France, 1815;China, 1842;Russia, 1854-56;New Zealand, 1865;Afghanistan, 1878-80;Transvaal, 1880;Egypt, 1882-89;South Africa, 1890-1902;Sudan, 1896;East Central Africa, 1897-99;Natal, 1906'. 22 The world war, that 'ignoble and mercenary battle of thieves', was interpreted not as an accident but as the logical continuation of Britain's struggle for global supremacy. 23 While a majority of labour publications had frankly embraced the war in August-September 1914, while the dissenting minority often remained tepid in its pacifism, the weekly launched a remarkable series entitled 'From the Trenches', to voice the suffering and anger of the Tommies, a series presenting the British army in a most unflattering light. That audacity explains why the Dreadnought was so frequently in trouble with the authorities, its immediate support for the October Revolution only making things worse. Pankhurst and her comrades could only welcome the Bolsheviks' call for an immediate and general ceasefire. Because they shared the same condemnation of the ongoing war and the same conviction that their own empire was their first enemy; but also, more fundamentally, because Lenin's party embodied the fight for workers' power that the WSF claimed to be leading on British soil. Significantly, it was just above the Dreadnought's office on Fleet Street that the People's Russia Information Bureau (PRIB), founded by Pankhurst in September 1918, had its headquarters. 24 In late 1917 -early 1918, photos and speeches of Bolshevik leaders occupied half the pages of the paper, which turned itself into the main British vehicle for Soviet views. 25 In particular it informed its readers of the Bolsheviks' antiimperialist decrees: the one on peace and the one on the rights of the peoples of Russia, both reproduced extensively. In exchange for that political support, the Soviet government provided the Dreadnought and the RPIB with financial support, and the Comintern sent a delegate to London in 1919 for the WSF's annual conference. 26 That loyalty to the new 'workers' fatherland' and the weekly's explicit disloyalty towards the Crown were two sides of the same unacceptable coin in the eyes of the Home Office.

Suspicion grew even stronger when the Dreadnought became involved in the Hands Off Russia campaign, a campaign that brought together members from the WSF, the BSP and the De Leonite SLP (Socialist Labour Party), united by their opposition to the sending of British troops against Soviet Russia. The paper, not content with a special Hands Off Russia issue on 28 December 1918, attacked British cruelty to Russian prisoners, championed 'red

24

The RPIB, to which the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the British Socialist Party (BSP) were affiliated, employed only four people. Its main task was to publish Bolshevik pamphlets.

25

The Dreadnought published a series entitled 'News from Moscow' to keep the British reader updated with the forward march of the Russian Revolution.

propaganda among the Tommies' and called for an anti-military strike. 27 The circulation of pamphlets by WSF member Harry Pollitt and others was at the origin of the boycott of the Jolly George, a ship the London dockers refused to load when they learnt it was about to transport weapons to Poland. The positive report on the operation in the Dreadnought was one of the reasons for Pankhurst's arrest and longest imprisonment. The paper's support for the Bolshevik revolution extended to its European replicas in Germany and Hungary, and news of the counter-revolution in the Central Empires and of 'white terror' in Russia and its periphery also received plentiful coverage. 28 All in all, the Dreadnought's choice to systematically side with foreign revolutions against Britain's geopolitical and diplomatic interests made it, for the authorities, a publication to be watched.

At the same moment, British troops were intervening on another front, much closer to home, in a 'domestic' war against Ireland. In Easter 1916, the Woman's Dreadnought had been one of the only British labour periodicals to applaud the rising, with the publication of reports by WSF correspondent Patricia Lynch. A few years on, the editorial team did not flinch in its approval of Irish emancipation. A cartoon printed on 17 January 1920 showed a semi-naked man embodying the Irish nation tortured on a rack by a politician and a general, under the ironical heading 'self-determination of small states'. This was a reference to the British excuse for declaring war on Germany -the defence of defenceless Belgium -and to Wilson's Fourteen Points, the essence of which the British government claimed to share while doing its utmost to preserve its imperial belongings. 29 The Dreadnought's views on 27 WD, 4 Jan. 1919, 21 July 1919 and 28 Feb. 1920. 28 WD, 25 Jan. 1919 and 8 Feb. 1919. 29 As opposed to Ireland, the Dreadnought did not treat Wales and Scotland as colonies. Its 'Welsh notes', 'South Wales Notes' and 'Scottish Mining Notes' made no mention of national oppression, which makes Pankhurst's leftism different from John MacLean's. However, in an article imagining what would happen 'If Wales Went red', the paper anticipated that it would 'light a fire in Britain that could never be extinguished' imperialism were often expressed through cartoons. A common feature in the press of the time, they never occupied in the pages of the Dreadnought the same special space as Will Dyson's cartoons in the early Daily Herald (1912-1914). Yet their relative abundance can be related to Pankhurst's artistic sensibility, even though she did not sign any of them 30 .

'All the world does not want to be English!'

The stigmatising of military aggressions rested on a principled opposition to the very existence of the British Empire, to the control that the Union Jack exerted over one quarter of the planet's surface and population. The indictment of administrative control over foreign territories was thus at the heart of the Dreadnought' s anti-imperialism. An Empire within the Empire, India was, unsurprisingly, the colony that received the largest coverage in the paper, with 'India for the Indians' as a leitmotiv. 31 Presenting its own counter-history of the colonisation of India, the Dreadnought reminded its readers of the 1877-1878 famine, in which 5 million people had died, and of the 30 million pounds 'drained out of India' each year. 32 The political and economic dimensions were always tied together, as in the 'Special Indian Supplement' published by the Dreadnought on 7 September 1917. The first two pages dealt with the Montagu-Chelmsford report, which the weekly repudiated with a resolution calling for its replacement by 'a scheme of genuine democratic self-government for India', while the other two pages, copiously informed by 'Indian comrades', focused on labour (WD, 14 Jan. 1922).

30

She was trained as an artist at the Manchester Art School, at the Accademia of Venice and the Royal College of Art in Kensington, and designed the WSPU's membership card long before the expulsion of the ELFS.

31

Pankhurst's interest in India was long-lasting. See Sylvia Pankhurst, India and the Earthly Paradise (Bombay, 1926).

32

WD, 29 Dec. 1917. conditions. To the readers who might have felt indifferent to those far away matters, the Dreadnought assured: 'British workers, if you do not aid the Indian workers to raise themselves from their state of heavy oppression, you may shortly find their labour power used to oppress you'. The working conditions in the colony and the metropole were perceived as tightly connected, the threat for British jobs coming not from Indian workers, but from their low level of wages. 33 Direct political control over the country was always an important theme, especially after the Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919, to which the paper reserved its first page. Yet in the weeks that followed, the weekly chose to focus on the deeper 'causes of the Indian unrest', identifying 'the repressive Rowlatt legislation' and 'the appalling poverty of the Indian people' as the key factors. 34 Two years after the massacre, the Amritsar story was brought back home by the weekly, with a cartoon entitled 'Amritsar the second'. 35 It showed a stereotypical British boss, smoking a cigar and threatening four trade unionists at his feet with a heavy baton. The message was that, if the authorities were ready to shoot rebellious Indians, they would not refrain from doing the same to labour rebels at home -a shock image to express the idea that workers in Britain and India shared the same enemies. The formation of the first Labour government in 1924 was no turning-point for India according to Pankhurst. In one of the paper's last issues, her editorial criticised MacDonald's 'so-called Indian reforms'. 36 She saw them as a mere excuse to refuse a round table and perpetuate the 'subjection and exploitation of 300 million people' by 'a government supposed to represent 47 million people of another race living on a distant island one-fortieth of its size' 37 Less frequently the weekly evoked the peripheral regions of the Indian Empire, notably Afghanistan, Ceylon and Burma. The use of India as a springboard for British imperialism in the whole of Asia and even East Africa was exposed, the sorry state of the Indian army -in which two thirds of the recruits were unfit for service -being read as a sign that there was 'much to be done in putting the British Imperial House in order'. 38 The geographical scope of the articles dealing with the British Empire was not limited to the Indian peninsula. The paper once covered a strike in the Falklands that had led to the deportation by the authorities of British workers who had protested against the whaling companies employing them, companies they blamed for killing whales in unreasonably vast quantities. 39 This was an original instance of the Dreadnought combining social and ecological preoccupations, as it underlined in a visionary way the dire consequences of the imperialist thirst for profit on the planet's natural resources. Moving from the South Atlantic to the South Pacific, the weekly also incriminated the Colonial Office for its plans to reindenture Chinese labourers on the island of Samoa, for less than 15 shillings a week, a project it equated to slavery. 40 A broad-sweeping article on 'How British Dominions are governed' took a look at the undemocratically chosen bodies governing Nyasaland, South Rhodesia, South Africa, Uganda, Trinidad and Hong Kong, to waspishly conclude: 'So the British Empire civilises the world'. 41 Whatever country it dealt with, the Dreadnought stood for the right of its people to ask for, and if necessary fight for, self-determination. 'Some in the Labour Party want to extend the Empire. We want to destroy it' 42 . The paper's line of thought on colonialism could not have been more bluntly expressed. Beside such tough talk, Pankhurst and her companions occasionally used humour to broadcast their aims. 'All the world does not want to be English!', one journalist joked. 43 And the weekly published a song entitled 'We Love the Empire', ironically praising all the institutions it stood against:

We love the Empire, dear old Empire, We love its sons so brave and true, We love the Army and the Navy, We love the blood that's "royal blue", We love the Church and Constitution, We love the "Lords" and "Commons" too, We love "our country" and "our nation", We love the slaves, we do, we do. 44 In a similarly light vein, a cartoon published on 12 July 1919 represented the British Empire as a crowned and crying snake -the archetypal symbol of evil -that had swallowed so many territories -Ireland, Egypt, India, Transvaal, Gibraltar and Canada -that it blurted: 'This is terrible. As if my digestion were not bad enough already'. 45 Two young boys, axes in hand, were shown running towards it, the one named 'Self-determination' following close behind the one named 'Bolshevism'. The message was transparent: the Empire's days were counted, and popular revolts led by the communists would play the key role. Stephen Howe has argued that anti-colonialism in the United Kingdom was always more moral and emotional than based on a scientific knowledge of the economics of imperialism, that it was essentially coloured by the radical and philanthropic traditions more than by the Marxist one. 46 The Dreadnought is a compelling exception. Its indictment of British imperialism was not limited to the traditional denunciation of military enterprises overseas, which ethical socialists and radical liberals alike had already formulated in the Late Victorian age. It opposed them above all as the expression of Britain's ambition to retain its hegemonic position in the global economy, i.e. from a materialist standpoint characteristic of Marxism, condemning the domination of British capital over the world, whether it took the shape of direct rule or informal influence. It was indeed keen to remind its readers that Britain's supremacy did not rest solely on military occupation and administrative control, but that its grip on foreign countries relied also, if not primarily, on invisible but profound economic influence -what has come to be known as 'informal imperialism'.

Home and away, colonialism unveiled

According to the weekly, nowhere was Britain's hold more hypocritically imposed than in China, a country that was not officially a colony, but which gunboats had opened by force to Indian opium. 47 Closer to home, the 1920 Overseas Credit Scheme -a governmental plan to support investments in Eastern Europe -was analysed by Pankhurst as a tool to contain the advance of communism. 48 The export of British capital to Argentina was similarly denounced as a means of subordinating a nation whose independence was nothing but formal. 49 Special emphasis was laid upon the fight for raw materials. Shapurji Saklatvala, who 46 See also Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895-1914 (New York, 1968) and Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics. British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920 (Cambridge, 2010). in 1922 was to become the first communist MP ever and the third ethnic Indian MP, devoted a whole page to 'the new competition in Africa, India and China' over access to coal and iron. 50 The race for oil in the Middle East, in Mesopotamia and Persia came under even closer scrutiny, as the Dreadnought foresaw the possibility of an imminent world war between Britain and the USA over the issue. 51 However daring, the unravelling of the manoeuvres of British capitalists abroad and the focus on finance were not new in socialist literature. A more ground-breaking aspect of the paper's anti-imperialist propaganda was the link it drew between the oppression of colonised people overseas and the racist treatment of foreign workers, especially when they were perceived as 'coloured', in the metropole. That connection was made possible thanks to African-American writer Claude McKay, who was invited by Pankhurst to tackle the colour question ad libitum, both as a Negro and as a communist. Boisnard has explored his production for the Dreadnought in detail, underlining the force with which he addressed the unemployed dockers 'who (had) been negro-hunting' and 'stabbing Negroes in the London dock area'. 52 In a series of ten falsely naïve questions, he demonstrated that they were barking up at the wrong tree and playing into the hands of the capitalist class. 53 The use of ethnic differences by the employers to split the working class was a leitmotiv: 'The capitalists soon forgive each other their mistakes. It is we workers who keep on hating each other on account of race differences, nationality and colour!'. But he also expressed confidence in the future: storm will break? When rivers of blood will flow, bearing the souls of white and black workers into eternity? 54 McKay was particularly shocked to see racist prejudice broadcasted by the Daily Herald, when George Lansbury's paper published a letter by E.D. Morel reproving the allegedly beastly sexual behaviour of black troops in Germany: I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race, boycotted economically and socially, who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European War. 55 An unusual report sent from Liverpool in 1923 described a case of local black sailors being 'scabbed' by an all-white crew, a scenario contradicting the stereotype of the 'scabbing foreigner'. 56 It was the weekly's merit, in a delicate period when the state, the shipowners and the National Seamen and Firemen's Union (NSFU) all fuelled anti-alien sentiment, to repeat that 'seamen white, brown and black' had the same interests, and that 'the dockers, instead of being unduly concerned about the presence of their coloured fellow workers, who like themselves are the victims of Capitalism and Civilisation, should turn their attention to the huge stores of wealth along the waterfront'. 57 For the Dreadnought team, the fight against capitalism could not be won so long as white workers were blinded by racism. Any serious fight against imperialism had to begin at home.

A systemic denunciation of imperialism

British imperialism was always the Dreadnought's favourite target, both because the British Empire was the largest, and because Pankhurst and her friends believed it was their duty to 'fight their own bourgeoisie'. Yet the paper's anti-imperialism embraced all empires, as it conceived of imperialism as a globally oppressive structure. For instance, when British authorities published a Blue Book on German atrocities in South West Africa, the paper did not deny that atrocities had taken place, but it insisted that the publication was a tactical move to justify a British mandate over the territory, and focused on the banality of German crimes:

Cruelty towards the subjugated native has been used by some members of every European nationality that has colonised, or has imported the peoples of another type of civilisation as workers. Individual atrocities are certain to be perpetrated as soon as one race has power to dominate another. 58 The violence used by the French and the Russian governments within their own imperial domains was also under accusation, the weekly refusing to consider Britain's allies as less nefarious than her rivals. Even Wilson's United States of America, in spite of their proclaimed anti-imperialism, came under the Dreadnought's fire. 'Mexico, Haiti, San Domingo, Nicaragua and Panama have all something to say about the benevolence of America', the paper observed in a detailed review of US interventions south of the border. 59 'The moral of all this is that the great capitalist Empires cannot safely be trusted with absolute power over alien populations': such was the Dreadnought's guideline. 60 Imperialism was attacked for the oppression each European bourgeoisie imposed on its own colonised peoples, and more generally for the chaos and destruction that the neverending rivalries between superpowers had produced with the outbreak of the world war. 'This clash of European armies (…) is the outcome of competition between the Powers for the possession of those territories inhabited by Eastern and African people', the paper stated, following the analysis defended by Lenin in his Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). 61 The Dreadnought's propaganda, in line with the Comintern's theses, argued that the 1918 Armistice would soon be followed by another world war, opposing yesterday's allies, i.e. the declining British Empire to the rising American one. The potentially explosive competition for control over the seas was represented, in a cartoon entitled 'The Rift in the Loot', by the confrontation between a triumphant Uncle Sam, standing above a trunk overflowing with 'war profits', and a humiliated, sobbing 'Mrs Britannia'. 62 The control of oil fields in the Middle East was another sore point, and 'Blood for Oil' was a recurring nightmare in the paper's columns. 63 But a war provoked by the struggle for cotton or even, more classically, for territorial conquests, was not excluded. 64 Rivalries but also collusions between rival powers were pinpointed, for example the secret understandings the British government had signed before the war with Russia against India, and the ones it had signed with Japan against China and Korea. 66 As for the League of Nations and its promotion of Wilsonian anti-imperialism, the Dreadnought rebuked it as a sham. The fact that it was promoted by South African General Smuts, notorious for his crushing of a general strike in 1913-1914, was one reason among others to mock it as 'the League of Capitalism'. 67 The mandate scheme, because it gave such obvious advantages to British and French interests, came under particularly critical scrutiny. 68 The nail in the coffin was a passionate poem by an Indian, rejecting the plundering of 'the backward blacks of half the world in the name of goodwill and peace on earth' that the League would allow. 69 Logically enough, Pankhurst did not take the International Labour Organisation (ILO)'s pretence to bring about fairer industrial relations around the world any more seriously. The ILO, like the League of Nations, she perceived as a camouflage for the winning powers' appetites. The Dreadnought's critique of imperialism, British and otherwise, was therefore an original and wide-ranging one. Beyond the negative judgement on European and US domination, it also entailed a positive appreciation of all the struggles erupting in the colonies, be they led by women, nationalists or workers -three identities that often overlapped.

Solidarity with women's struggles in the colonies

The Dreadnought's anti-imperialism was also original in the importance granted to gender.

Admittedly, between 1917 and 1924, Pankhurst was, first and foremost, a communist, with workers' power as her compass, and her championing of the women's cause receded into the background. 70 But the Dreadnought did remain a woman's Dreadnought. Revealingly, the only picture illustrating the CP-BSTI's provisional programme on the paper's front page on 3 July 1920 was that of a woman with her new born baby crying over the start of 'another war' -a sign that Pankhurst never jettisoned her feminist ideal. She was one of the rare female activists, alongside Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, to combine socialism and feminism, and look at colonial questions with particular attention to women's plight. 71 Several of the Dreadnought's articles on India highlighted how the traditional oppression of women had not been alleviated but perpetuated by the British domination. In a sceptical presentation of the Settlement Scheme supposed to put an end to the system of recruitment of indentured labourers from India in the tropics, the paper explained: 'The Indian woman is not yet a human being in the eye of the Government. (…) Women unaccompanied by their families will not be assisted', and regretted that India '(had) yet produced no suffragettes'. 72 On numerous occasions, the weekly denounced the violence inflicted by British troops upon Indian women because of their participation in protests against excessive taxes: the burning of a woman in Gujarat during the destruction of her village; 73 the beating and shooting of many others in Bundi during a punitive military operation. 74 The Dreadnought was careful not to portray women merely as victims but also as agents of change. In its coverage of the Egyptian revolt of 1919 against British rule, based on reports from Le Populaire and L'Humanité, their part in the rebellion was underlined: 'The women have even torn off their veils, broken the gratings of the harems, and gone out in the streets to demonstrate. In Cairo, 20,000 of them have joined the demonstrators'. 75 The importance granted to female agency in the field of politics could lead the weekly to surprising obliterations. When the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs sent the paper a letter explaining that there would be 'no need for "Votes-for-Women" campaigns in the new Jewish State that (was) to be established in Palestine', equal suffrage being accepted as 'a matter of course by the pioneers', the editors published it in full without any commentsignoring the ways in which the Balfour Declaration penalised the Arab population and served the cause of British imperialism. 76 To keep her readers informed about women's conditions around the British Empire, Pankhurst relied to a large extent on external sources but was occasionally capable of producing original reports thanks to her own transnational network. This is vividly illustrated by an article on 'Women workers in Limerick', based on interviews conducted by the Dreadnought correspondent with local lace and mattress workers, and hiding none of the disturbing truths: the precarious terms of employment, the lack of washing facilities, the absence of any woman factory inspector, the low level of wages, the bleeding fingers, underfeeding and premature ageing. 77 The report celebrated the women's moves towards the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (IT&GWU), the very union Pankhurst had supported in 1914 against her family's advice, with no reference to the national oppression of the Irish. For the Dreadnought, economic exploitation always came before questions of nationality, though it did attempt more than other labour periodicals to tie those dimensions together.

The Dreadnought was able to provide its readers with news from Australia's female anti-imperialists thanks to Pankhurst's connection with an expatriate sharing her world-vision: her younger sister Adela, who had emigrated from Britain in 1914, due to discomfort with their mother Emmeline and their elder sister Christabel's autocratic ways as well as with their rejection of the labour movement. 78 In Australia as in Britain, the anti-war minority grew louder after 1916. Its progress was reported in the columns of the Dreadnought, using The Socialist -the Victoria Socialist Party's official organ, which was published in Melbourneas a complementary source of information. 79 What emerges from the reports is the importance of female mobilisation in the anti-war agitation, and Adela's leading role in it. Women were at the forefront, as keepers of the family budget unable to cope with the rising food prices. The Women's Peace Army (WPA) called for the Nationalist government to put an end to speculation by controlling the price of foodstuffs and distributing them to working-class 77 'Women Workers of Limerick', WD, 24 May 1919.

78

Adela shared Sylvia's socialist and feminist convictions, but not her antiracism: she embraced the White Australia policy advocated by the mainstream of the Australian labour movement, preaching a racialised and racist view of womanhood. See Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia, 1890-1955 (Melbourne, 1994).

79

The Socialist, founded by Tom Mann during his stay in Australia, became a promoter of whiteness after his departure in 1909. See Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism: The Connected Lives of Tom Mann and R.S. Ross (Liverpool, 2016), especially Part III ('Womanhood, Whiteness and War', 179-252).

families. 80 But Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who had succeeded Andrew Fisher in 1915, believed the mechanics of supply and demand should be left untouched. Besides, wartime legislation forbade demonstrations of more than twenty people. As a consequence, a series of massive protests in front of the Federal Parliament -one thousand women on 9 August and twice that figure a fortnight later -led to Adela being arrested, fined, and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment. 81 The extensive agitation that followed, pioneered by the Australian Socialist Women's League (SWL), also found its place in the Dreadnought, which sided with the so called 'seditionists and disloyalists' against the War Precautions Act. 82 After that movement, the weekly's articles about Australia focused on industrial topics rather than on women and imperialism, but still came under a female signature: A.W. for Adela Walsh, as Adela Pankhurst married a leader of the sailors' union, Tom Walsh, one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1920. Still a herald of women's emancipation, she devoted a full article to the CPA's position on prostitution. 83 Informed coverage of women's conditions in South Africa was also made possible by the Dreadnought's connections overseas, in this case through a male correspondent, W.H. Andrews, and a female one, Chris Barnet, two internationalists about to found the South 80 WD, 16 Feb. 1918.

81

'Coercion and Profiteering in Australia', WD, 24 Nov. 1917.

82

The Dreadnought was surprisingly uncritical of one of the reasons given by Australian activists to protest the war: that it might lead to 'the white races (…) being exterminated' (WD, 24 Aug. 1918). The only but tangible sign that Sylvia disapproved of Adela's views was her refusal to reproduce her sister's numerous articles on 'Australia's colored problem'. , 26 Feb. 1921. Like Sylvia, Adela was to turn away from communism, but sooner and more sharply: in 1928, she founded the Australian Women's Guild of Empire; and during the Second World War, in the name of Australian nationalism, she advocated the severing of ties with Britain and the signing of a separate peace with the Japanese Empire.

83

WD

African section of the Third International (CP-SASTI). 84 Both complained that 'the women's movement in South Africa' was virtually non-existent, that there was 'no sign of activity among Socialist or Labour women', and both agreed on the diagnosis. Because of the abundance of native workforce, most manual jobs, be it in agriculture, in the industry or in domestic service, were occupied by blacks, who weren't allowed to form trade unions, and the war had not caused the number of white women workers to soar. They tended to remain outside of the labour market and be 'more parasitic than in all-white communities', so that unions of women workers had never materialised. Even the suffrage movement was lagging behind its British counterpart: white women could not imagine asking for 'adult suffrage', as it would enfranchise the totality of African and Indian adults. But without the backing of black women, no mass movement comparable to the metropolitan one seemed possible. On top of that, the voting rules varied from province to province, the Cape being socially rather than racially exclusive like Transvaal, further complicating the adoption of a common claim.

On a humorous note that proved her disdain for so called 'British civilisation', Barnet concluded: 'We are somewhat in advance of the Patagonians, but a long way behind the Eskimos'. More seriously she added that a growing number of Dutch women ('woefully ignorant and easy of exploitation') were entering factories and that a female labour movement might emerge from that group. 85 As for Andrews, he concluded that 'the woman and the coloured problems will only be solved by (…) the social revolution. Organisation by women is no solution, nor is organisation by race. The organisation of the future must be organisation on class lines'. Though those were not Pankhurst's words, they aptly sum up her weekly's principles.

However essential the feminist strand, Pankhurst's loyalty to the cause of women did not make her tender towards female activists with whom she disagreed politically. The Dreadnought's treatment of Annie Besant is a case in point. 86 Being one of the pillars of the Indian Home Rule Movement, she appeared often in the paper, but in reports that were mostly unflattering. In the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre, having explained that, faced with 'mob rule', the Government of India was justified in using machine guns, she was denounced as 'a very strong Imperialist', supportive of 'British suzerainty'. 87 Such was also the judgement expressed on the weekly's first page a few weeks later, in a long article entitled 'Mrs. Besant, India and Labour'. 88 Besant's answer to the paper's accusations was published extensively but immediately followed by Pankhurst's harsh comments: 'She was rather a rebel herself, once -in the days of long ago!' but 'it (was) useless to expect from her an enlightened regard for the oppressed Indian masses'. The attacks, crudely expressed, were not gratuitous: during the war, Besant had supported the recruitment of Indians into the British army and, on the colonial question in India, she was now a moderate in terms of both goals and means, believing that the connection with the British Crown should be preserved, that Gandhi's tactics were too provocative and created an atmosphere too favourable to Bolshevik propaganda not to be repressed. Whatever sympathy Pankhurst may have had for the Besant of the late 1880s, Besant's recent interventions in favour of the restoration of law and order both in the metropole and in India meant she could only be perceived by Pankhurst as a class enemy, 'a Tory', 'an individualist with a capitalist outlook', '(believing) in the caste system, 86 On Annie Besant's relation to India, see Terrier's chapter in this volume. the rule of the many by the few', not as someone entitled to speak out in the name of 'Indian Labour' and certainly not as a sister in arms.

A Dreadnought interview with Constance Markievicz, though far from being so negative, reveals the same prevalence of political convictions over female solidarity. 89 The Countess had much in common with Pankhurst: a childhood free of material hardship, an artistic training, early sympathy for the toiling masses soon translated into political involvement within the ranks of the labour movement, not to forget sustained pro-suffrage activism. 90 Yet the feminist question was quasi-absent from the interview, the only mention of women's specific experience being in relation to the physical and mental torture inflicted upon female Republican prisoners in the Irish Free State jails. The questions asked concentrated mostly on the fight between the Republicans, the side Markievicz belonged to, and the Treatyists, which she insisted were supported by the British state. Though the Dreadnought too sympathised with the ideal of a united Irish Republic and refused any legitimacy to the Free State institutions, it also underlined everything that Markievicz and Pankhurst did not have in common. As a Minister of Labour in the Irish government between April 1919 and January 1922, Markievicz 'had taken a part in damping down' industrial disputes, her role being 'to arbitrate between employers and employed in the interests of Irish unity'. And when asked about her views on communism, she answered that her model was also anti-capitalist, but based on 'the old Gaelic civilisation', a perspective which the Dreadnought dismissed as follows: 'In this we totally disagree with her', the only possible 'Workers' Republic' in Ireland would be 'a Communist Republic', or else 'the Irish Republic States'. 91 Here we touch upon another distinctive feature of the Dreadnought's antiimperialism: its refusal to automatically categorise the bourgeois enemies of British rule as friends of the colonial working class.

Critical support for Irish anti-colonialism

Beyond the systemic critique of imperialism and the attention paid to women's problems across the Empire, the variety of anti-colonialism defended by the Dreadnought was also characterised by its support for each and every struggle that weakened British domination.

Logically enough, that support went to labour rebellions rocking the imperial boat but also, more problematically, to forces that situated themselves on the terrain of national rather than social emancipation. For that reason, the weekly's siding with what it termed 'bourgeois nationalists' was always complemented with warnings about their potential betrayals of colonial workers, and calls for the necessity of independent class organisation. The unconditional support for any nationalist revolt defying British rule distinguished the Dreadnought from the imperial loyalism often expressed at the time by the Labour Party and the TUC. As for the critical outlook on nationalist leaders, it helped the paper not to fall into a pitfall that has been common on the left ever since the European empires started to decline: blind adherence to this or that anti-colonial leader, with little regard for how his policy affected the colonial proletariat. Having already analysed that positioning in a study of the Dreadnought's coverage of South African affairs, I have chosen here to concentrate instead on its approach of the Irish question, which, in spite of all the contextual differences, was built on the same underlying assumptions. 92 To inform its readers about Ireland, the editorial team chose, as it did for South Africa, to publish articles signed by local activists rather than by the 91 The year before, because Markievicz had rejected the Treaty partitioning Ireland, the Dreadnought had expressed a more laudative opinion, affirming that 'she alone repeated the 1916 slogans, saying that she stood for the Workers' Republic and the Co-operative Commonwealth'. WD, 14 Jan. 1922. later its acceptance of the Treaty dividing Ireland in two, were interpreted as further signs of that complicity. 98 On Imperial policy, which is the bedrock on which British governments are founded, the Labour Party is irreproachable from the Court and Capitalist standpoint. (…) The call for international class and Trade Union solidarity falls on deaf ears (…) when a question of Imperial etiquette is involved. 99 The weekly showed no mercy on the Irish Labour Party either, as its 'Yellow Fakirs' refused to condemn a Treaty that mutilated the Irish nation. 100 Even the IT&GWU was criticised for its betrayal of its founding fathers' patriotism, as its call for a general strike 'for peace' on 24 April 1922 was an implicit condemnation of the Republicans. 101 The 'scabs' officially leading the Irish labour movement were 'endeavouring to keep clear from the Treaty controversy' when, like Jim Larkin from his prison in North America, they should have been 'repudiating the Treaty and all association with the British Empire, and declaring for a Workers' Republic'. 102 The only position acceptable for the Dreadnought was that of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI): full support for independence and a categorical rejection of partition.

In a daring reversal of British paternalism, an editorial even argued that 'English Labour must (…) learn of Ireland, imitate its seal and take flame from its devotion'. 103 Backing those who fought 'to be free of an Empire, to be free of the suzerainty of a To Communists, the question of Ireland's Independence is only important because the workers in an independent Ireland would be more free to learn that their real enemy is Capitalism, and because the break-up of the British Empire means the destruction of a great bulwark of the capitalist system. 124

Labour in the Dominions, or paradise lost

What is remarkable about the Dreadnought's coverage of events in Australia and New Zealand is how it contrasted with the vision of a 'workers' paradise' so prevalent in the labour press before the First World War. 125 The war, because it caused pressure to enforce conscription in Dominions that had once seemed more progressive than the Mother Country and free of Old World constraints, was indeed a turning-point in the state's relation to the labour movement. The weekly told its readers of the Illegal Associations Act that, in June 1919, allowed the Australian government to ban the IWW, deport those of its leaders born abroad, and thus prevent a general strike in Sydney. 126 Adela Walsh, née Pankhurst, noted the xenophobic propaganda used to attack the Seamen's Union leaders: they were accused of being 'imbibed with foreign notions' when they decided to launch a strike against conditions on Australian ships. She too highlighted the repression endured by labour activists, by her communist husband Tom Walsh in particular. 127 A report on the prolonged mining strike at Broken Hill in 1920 conveyed the same image of a country where life for the workers was far from free and easy, where the authorities and the employers were at least as inflexible as in 124 'False Pretences Towards Ireland', WD, 3 Sep. 1921. 125 Neville Kirk, 'The Australian " Workingman's Paradise" in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1914' in Comrades and Cousins. Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, 2003), 59-148.

126

'Australian News ', WD, 21 June 1919. 127 Adela Walsh, 'The Australian Shipping Strike ', WD, 18 Oct. 1919. the metropole. 128 According to the 'impressions on this particular part of the British Empire' sent by an anonymous correspondent, Australia was a 'capitalist Eldorado' where the farmers lived 'under the heel of the Banks' and where the majority of Labour men sitting in the federal House were 'grafters of the first water', submitted to a Labour premier, Billy Hughes, who had just been 'presented with £27,000 last week for efforts in saving the Empire'. 129 An illustration of that devotion to British imperialism, the correspondent underlined, was the expulsion of Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Mahon for his scourging of Britain's military intervention in Ireland.

As for nearby New Zealand, a land that, socially and politically, could also be perceived as more advanced than Britain prior to the war, another correspondent went so far as to describe it, 'from a militant working-class standpoint', as 'one of the worst (countries) in the world'. 130 The employers' attacks were frontal, he wrote, progressive literature was virtually banned. Speaking about the official Labour leaders he explained: 'We used to call them "yellow" but I think they are pure white'. For, like most of their Australian counterparts, they had not tried to oppose the war, and had let down one of their representatives in Parliament, Patrick Webb, who had campaigned against conscription and been sentenced to months of hard labour for his disloyalty. A letter from John McDonald, the secretary of the Workers' Industrial Propaganda League (WIPL), painted so 'rotten' a picture of the social situation in his country that the conclusion was inevitable, 'emigration (was) no solution': Let the workers of the Old Dart stay where they are, and agitate, educate and organise for the betterment of their conditions and the overthrow and abolishment of the wage-128 'The Class War in Australia', WD, 18 Sep. 1920. 129 'Bolshevism in Western Australia ', WD, 5 Feb. 1921. system and capitalism, which is the cause of all the wrongs and miseries afflicting the workers, including the apparent necessity of emigration. 131 All in all, the British Empire territories of the antipodes as they appeared in the pages of the Dreadnought were anything but a workers' haven. 132 And the imperialist war into which they had been plunged was blamed for the evils now affecting Australasian society, from influenza to unemployment and industrial strife.

Canada is a New Britain that figured less prominently than Australia and New Zealand in the columns of the Dreadnought, as the paper lacked permanent correspondents there. The shape taken by the social movements there owed little to the subordinate status of the country, and the longest articles devoted to the Canadian Dominion were a series of three comprehensive reports on the Winnipeg general strike of 1922, narrating the dispute from its start on 15 May until the defeat of the 'Winnipeg Soviet' at the end of June -reports from which the question of imperialism was virtually absent. 133 But the articles did enhance the part played by the Great War in the revolt, during which the demobilised soldiers formed a Parliament of their own and demonstrated in their thousands. Like in Australasia, the strike leaders were accused of being of foreign origin or under foreign influence, their supposed disloyalty to the Crown being pinpointed as their major crime.

Colonial workers as the revolutionary vanguard

131 John McDonald, 'Open Letter to British Workers ', WD, 16 Oct. 1920. 132 As denounced by the Dreadnought decades before it became a public scandal, it was not a paradise either for the dozens of poor British boys and girls sent there every year 'to develop the Empire', i.e. to work as 'indentured wage-slaves (…) alone and friendless (…) for unknown masters'. WD, 24 Feb. 1923. For lack of local correspondents, the Dreadnought published a significantly smaller number of articles on Britain's crown colonies than on the Dominions and Ireland. Yet the place granted to workers' struggles in the Indian Empire and the territories under direct British rule was symbolically important. 'From all around the Empire comes news of revolt; only here in Britain a heavy apathy holds the oppressed masses', lamented the paper in early 1922. 134 A strike of several weeks in Hong Kong, involving seamen but also servants and bank employees, had just succeeded in obtaining an increase in wages, in spite of the British government's extreme response. The union headquarters had been raided, the labour leaders thrown into jail and their associations declared illegal. To break the strike, the authorities ('O benignant British rule!') had allowed the recourse to compulsory labour and released Chinese gangsters to intimidate the strikers. 135 The very severity of the reaction comforted Pankhurst and her comrades in seeing the labour movement in the Far East as possibly more vigorous and therefore more threatening than its Europe cousin for the stability of imperialist capitalism as a world system. 'Industrialism is spreading fast in the East, and bids fair to eclipse Western methods in the early future', the paper proclaimed a few months later, drawing the lessons from the movement. 136 The British seamen present in the harbour having accepted to be used as strike-breakers, it seemed the European trade unions were no longer showing the way, leading the Dreadnought to wonder: 'Why is the Anglo-Saxon race so lacking in solidarity?'.

Prior to the First World War, it seemed only natural for labour activists around the world to consider that the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism would begin in the countries that had been the first to undergo the industrial revolution, therefore in Europe and North America. The less industrialised parts of the world would eventually follow, if their case was considered at all. The Russian Revolution of 1905, and more importantly that of 1917, had challenged that vision, and showed that even in a land with 80 per cent of peasants, a highly concentrated working class could play an essential political role.

The workers of a backward country could be at the vanguard -an observation generalised and theorised at the first Comintern congresses, and applied by the Dreadnought to the British colonies, in particular to 'the Jewel in the Crown'. In 1919, the weekly heralded 'Labour's awakening in India'. 137 It reported that 'amidst great difficulties workers and peasants' unions (were) being formed', unions capable of putting 100,000 mill hands out on strike in Bombay, despite the sending in of policemen and soldiers, capable, also, of organising their own type of soviet ('sabha' was the term used). 'Let the workers of Europe extend their assistance to the workers of India': the Dreadnought's invitation to its readers reflected the paper's attachment to proletarian internationalism. But the lexical field of 'assistance', which still implied some form of Western or Northern superiority over the East and South, was seldom used, the stress being more and more on the colonial workers' own potential. The Dreadnought journalists also contended that the Indian working class, because it was present in the subcontinent but also in South Africa, Kenya, the West Indies and the metropole, was now a transnational force to be reckoned with.

When the Dreadnought incited the British worker to financial solidarity with Indian Labour, for example on the eve of the first All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) to be held on 22 August 1920, the argument of 'fraternal generosity' was balanced with that of 'self-defence'. 138 Donations would help Indian militants, of course, but more fundamentally they should be motivated by the sense that workers in India and the metropole shared Welfare League of India. The AITUC would be presided by Annie Besant, who was not exactly a Dreadnought favourite, and the weekly had already denounced some Indian leaders on the railways as spineless negotiators. Still the weekly felt it could only encourage the creation of a body representing hundreds of thousands of so far barely organised workers.

Two articles published in 1920 reflected the Dreadnought's confidence in India as a springboard for the international socialist revolution. In 'India and Bolshevism', a local correspondent compared the social structure of India with that of pre-revolutionary Russia, and concluded that in Asia, India was 'the (country) most prepared for Socialism'. Using an argument that was borrowed from the populists rather than from the Bolsheviks, he described the traditional village structures as 'akin to Sovietism'. More in line with the teachings of Marx, he mocked those who saw Lenin's hand behind all acts of rebellion great and small, when 'Bolshevism (would) be quietly brought into India (…) by British exploiters' themselves. Equally optimistic was M.N. Roy's editorial 'Proletarian Revolution in India'. 139 In an epic evocation of the 1857 and 1873 revolts up to the present 'unprecedented series of strikes', the Indian communist defended the idea that 'bourgeois democrats' in India were 'insignificant' compared to the masses of 'disinherited toilers', so that, 'even if the first stage of the Revolution in India (was) fought under a nationalist banner, (…) the revolutionary ferment in India (was) bound to express itself through a proletarian mass movement, which British imperialism in India could play the same role the October Revolution had played in pushing forward a global upsurge against capitalism. 140 For all the attention paid to anti-colonial revolts in Ireland, India and elsewhere, for all the sympathy expressed towards them, the Dreadnought showed no traces of what would later be called 'third-worldism'. Pankhurst is known for having embraced the cause of Ethiopian independence, for her protests in the 1930s against the Italian invasion and against British plans to turn the country into a protectorate. After Corio's death in 1956, she even moved to Ethiopia where, due to her support for Emperor Haile Selassie's regime, she was granted a state funeral on 27 September 1960 and was buried. But of that late adhesion to bourgeois nationalism, one finds no harbingers in the pages of the Dreadnought. Some have sneered at the apparent lack of intellectual coherence that this demonstrates. But this chapter merely wishes to underline the coherence that did prevail between 1917 and 1924 in the Dreadnought's analysis of bourgeois anti-colonialism. Leaders such as Gandhi or De Valera were treated with little indulgence, as men to be supported in their duel with the British Empire, but in the long run not worthy of the workers' confidence. 141 In her challenge of imperialism, Pankhurst made sure that her followers would not automatically consider the Empire's enemies as their comrades.

Conclusion

According to John Callaghan, it was limited access to information about the colonies that limited awareness of imperialism in the metropole. If it was indeed ignorance that fuelled 'popular imperialism', then the Workers' Dreadnought can be said to have provided a precious alternative to the sanitised views of the Empire still prevailing at the end of the First 140 'Indian News ', WD, 28 July 1923. 141 Irish and Indian nationalism were often studied in connection with each other. See 'India Going Sinn Fein', WD, 7 Jan. 1922.

7

  Hannam, 'Pankhurst'. and the Woman's Dreadnought was renamed the Workers' Dreadnought in July 1917. 11 From July 1917 to August 1921, the Dreadnought continued its move to the left, as illustrated by significant changes on its front page. From 12 June 1918, the S in WSF stood for 'Socialist' instead of 'Suffrage'. On 20 July 1918, the Dreadnought changed its subtitle from 'Socialism, Internationalism, Votes for All' to the shorter 'For International Socialism'. By then Pankhurst had become one of the most vocal British advocates of the Bolshevik revolution and she transformed the Dreadnought into a tool for the construction of a British section of the Communist International. In 1919, the motto 'For International Socialism' gave way to 'Towards the Communist Party'. On 14 June 1919, the WSF presented itself as the 'WSF -Communist Party' for the first time, and on 26 June 1920, it gave up the WSF label completely, swapping it for 'Communist Party, British Section of the Third International (CP-BSTI)' until August 1921. The changes in the headings of the Dreadnought do not tell the entire story. For Pankhurst disagreed with the Third International on key tactical issues. She did not believe that the future British Communist Party should ask for affiliation to the Labour Party, and she rejected participation in elections and in reformist trade unions. So when Pankhurst, on 19 June 1920, formed the first official Communist Party in Great Britain (the CP-BSTI), it was not recognised by Moscow and her backing in Britain was limited compared to that of the CP-GB launched one month later, on 31 July-1 August 1920, around the British Socialist Party (BSP). 12 Could the CP-BSTI adhere to the CP-GB to form a united Communist Party 11

  Navy. Because she refused to inform the authorities about her sources, Pankhurst was charged with sedition under the Defence of the Realm Act. See 'Sedition: Sylvia Pankhurst. Imprisoned for publishing seditious articles (1920-1921)', The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew, HO 144/1697/414256. See also 'File relating to Sylvia Pankhurst. Convicted at Mansion House on 23 October 1920 for publishing seditious matters and sentenced to six months' imprisonment (1920-1921)', NA: PRO, HO 144/1697/414256. 14 A vehicle for her fight for freedom, the weekly published her photo on the front page on 6 Nov. 1920 (for her trial) and on 4 June 1921 (for her release). The 15 Jan. 1921 issue was devoted almost entirely to her prison declarations.

20

  See'Sylvia Pankhurst record file (1921-1938)', NA: PRO, MEPO 38/36. See also 'Activities and biographical notes on Miss E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1950)', NA: PRO, FO 371/80230. 21 Chandrika Kaul, Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century

  22WD, 20 May 1922.23WD, 29 Dec. 1917.

33

  On the same theme, see 'A Menace to British Workers. How the Business Government Works in Britain, India and Burma', WD, 25 Jan. 1919. 34 WD, 26 Apr. 1919. 35 WD, 18 June 1921. See illustration section in this volume. 36 WD, 29 Mar. 1924.

  May 1920. 40 WD, 17 July 1920. 41 WD, 8 May 1920.

  42WD, undated clipping. 43 WD, 11 Oct. 1919. 44 WD, 15 July 1922.

47

  Arthur Finch, 'The Destruction of China's Independence. A Tale of Shame', WD, 21 June 1919. 48 WD, 24 Apr. 1920. 49 WD, 1 Feb. 1919.

  The spirit of rebellion (…) is now being fostered by all Negroes subject to British imperial rule. (…) Socialism should step in to bridge the gulf that has been created between the white and coloured workers by Capitalism. (…) For who knows when the 50 WD, 14 Feb. 1920. 51 WD, 21 Jan. 1922. 52 Boisnard, 'Pankhurst'. 53 WD, 7 June 1919.

  under the pen name Leon Lopez, 'The Yellow Peril and the Dockers', WD, 16 Oct. 1920. See Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain (Liverpool, 2009) and Laura Tabili, 'Review of Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain', http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/840 (accessed 11 Feb. 2016).

58'

  Germans in South West Africa', WD, 21 Sep. 1918.59'The Benevolence of America', WD, 13 Jan. 1923. The US government was also criticised for its repression of pacifists, syndicalists and communists. 'Letters from an American Communist',WD, 17 and 24 Jan. 1920; 'Under the Stars and Stripes', WD, 14 Apr. 1923.

'

  As early as 1919, the Dreadnought had printed a cartoon showing a 'rickshaw boy' -in fact a conscripted workerpulling two heavy and smiling statesmen carrying the flag of 'Imperialism' in the direction of 'the next war'. Oil and Politics', WD, 21 Jan. 1922. 'Oil and the War Clouds', WD, 30 Sep. 1922. 'Oil and the Troubled Waters of the World', WD, 7 Aug. 1920. 64 'War Still Threatens', WD, 7 Oct. 1922. 'War Preparing -and Why. Cotton and the War Clouds', WD, 14 Oct. 1922. 65 WD, 10 May 1919.

66

  Arthur Finch, 'Criminals Behind the Scenes. The Fruits of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance', WD, 13 Nov. 1920. The disclosing of Russia's secret pre-war treaties by the Bolsheviks was emulated in Britain by the Dreadnought with the publication, on 9 Feb. 1918, of a supplement showing the projected arrangements on a world map. 67 WD, 18 Jan. 1919. A few weeks later (WD, 29 Mar. 1919), a cartoonist invented the following dialogue between two stereotypical bosses: '(1) What do you think of the League of Nations? (2) Oh! "Capital," my boy, "Capital"!'. 68 WD, 29 Mar. 1919. 'The Scandal of the Mandates. The League of Nations Exposed', WD, 26 June 1920. 69 M.O. Abbassi, 'League of Nations', WD, 19 Apr. 1919.

70

  Davis contends that Pankhurst's call for household Soviets led by women reflected an acceptance of the sexual division of labour -a possible inheritance of syndicalism's gender-blindness. See 'The Liberation of Mothers and Socialisation of Houses', WD, 3 July 1920. 71 In different ways, so did Annie Besant and Ellen Wilkinson. See chapters by Terrier and Perry in this volume.

73'A

  Massacre of a Peaceful People', WD, 20 May 1922.

74'

  Rajputana States Letter', WD, 1 Sep. 1923. 75 'Egyptian Awakening', WD, 5 Apr. 1919.

  84W.H. Andrews, 'South African Socialism and the War. Women Workers', WD, 16 Feb. 1918. Chris Barnet, 'The Women's Movement in South Africa', WD, 4 Jan. 1919.85That prognosis was later confirmed by the important role played by women in the 1922 rising on the Rand. See Jeremy Krikler, White Rising.The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (Manchester, 2005).

  87WD, 26 Apr. 1919.88WD, 28 June 1919. The quotations that follow are from the same article.

(

  would) be as far from Communism as the Republics of France, Germany or the United 89 WD, 10 Mar. 1923. The quotations that follow are from the same article. 90 Markievicz's part in the 1913 Dublin lockout and the Easter Rising of 1916 inspired respect on the part of the Dreadnought team, as shown by the article published on its front page on 23 June 1917.

98

  See also'Policy of Communists and Labour Party', WD, 27 Nov. 1920. The Labour Party's scheme, Dominion Home Rule, was decried as 'pseudo-self-determination'. See also 'War with Ireland? Labour Party Support?', WD, 29 Oct. 1921. 99 'The Outlook After the Election. The Irish Executions', WD, 25 Nov. 1922. 100 Wobbly, 'The Four Courts', WD, 29 Apr. 1922. 101 Rank-and-Filer, 'The Irish Strike and Lock Out', WD, 13 May 1922. 102 WD, 14 Jan. 1922.

133'

  The Winnipeg Soviet. Part One', WD, 26 July 1919. 'The Winnipeg Soviet. Part Two', WD, 2 Aug. 1919. 'The Winnipeg Soviet. Part Three', WD, 9 Aug. 1919. The paper only mentioned in passing the most important female figurehead, Mrs Helen Armstrong.

  134 WD, 11 Mar. 1922. 135 WD, 11 Mar. 1922. 136 WD, 22 July 1922.

  common interests: 'The lower condition of Indian Labour is the future doom of the British workers', argued one article, citing J.E. Potter Wilson, the general secretary of the Workers' 137 WD, 1 Feb. 1919. 138 WD, 14 Aug. 1920.

(

  would) put an end to class rule under any form, and usher the Communist State'. The 1947 scenario was quite different. But it is revealing of the Dreadnought's positive appreciation of the colonial labour movement that it should have printed such hopeful prose on its first page. The publication of the Indian strike statistics for years 1921 to 1923 could only reinforce the readers' impression that something grand was brewing in the East, that labour protests against 139 WD, 11 Sep. 1920. On M.N. Roy's links with Russian and British communists, see Owen's chapter in this volume.

Pankhurst remained proud of that collaboration, even when she became disillusioned with communism.

'"Settlement" Scheme for Indians', WD, 3 Sep. 1917.

'Woman Suffrage in Palestine', WD, 31 Aug. 1918.

'The Martyrdom of Ireland'.

 WD, 30 Mar. 1918.

'From New Zealand', WD, 8 Apr. 1922.

I wish to thank Matt Perry and the late Sam Davies for inviting me to discuss this work with their

King', however, could not be the final word. 104 Time and again the periodical explained that the replacement of British exploiters by Irish ones would bring no solution to the labouring majority: 'Political freedom for Ireland is all very well, but the worker must not be exposed to a system of despotic industrial control by an Irish Republic'. 105 Sinn Fein (SF) was characterised as a party representing 'small capitalists' and 'would-be capitalists', but neither Irish workers nor the landless peasants: 'The Sein Feiners are not fighting for a Workers' Republic, but an Irish Republic; they are not Red Guards but Green Guards'. 106 The Dreadnought used a South African comparison to identify the typical rural supporter of Irish nationalism, speaking of 'the back-veld type of Sinn Feiner', as opposed to the working-class Sinn Feiner. 107 The Irish Republican Army (IRA) did comprise a number of urban militants who, calling themselves Larkinites or Bolsheviks, saw an 'identity of aim and interest between genuine Irish nationalism and International Socialism'. 108 One of the Dreadnought's major correspondents in Ireland, 'Wobbly' -a pen name indicating sympathy for if not affiliation to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) -went so far as to evoke 'a strong minority of reds' inside the IRA executive, and a situation that resembled 'the early stages of the Russian revolution', a judgement that Pankhurst, in an unusual display of internal dissension, allowed herself to call 'nonsense' in the comment she printed alongside the report. 109 Admittedly the SF leadership's attitude towards labour claims was sometimes so tolerant that it could be assumed it would never turn against the workers. The situation was ambiguous enough for the Dreadnought to feel the need to ask the question: 'Will Sein Fein Go Red?'. 110 But its answer was a definite no, whatever branch of the nationalist movement the paper looked at. The Michael Collins fraction, at the head of the Free State, was not long in sending in troops to reclaim the factories for their legal owners in those numerous cases when workers' soviets had taken control. 111 Theirs was evidently 'an employers' Free State'. 112 As for Eamon De Valera, his 'Document 2' defended the principle of cooperation in terms so vague that it could hardly be taken for a socialist manifesto. For all its heroism, the occasional protection given to working-class initiatives by the anti-Treaty faction was therefore analysed as circumstantial rather than ideologically motivated. 113 In 1922, the Dreadnought deplored that Connolly's Irish Citizens' Army (ICA), launched during the Dublin lockout of 1913, was severing its links with the labour movement to become a mere appendix of Republicanism. 114 To those readers tempted by Wobbly's optimism, the editors repeated: the 'bourgeois nationalists' would sooner or later try to 'efface the class struggle', as they were 'tactically as well as theoretically opposed to Communism'; 'the militant Nationalists are definitely opposed to working-class emancipation'. 115 The Republicans' rebuttal of CPI collaboration in the fight against the Treaty was another sign that the communists needed to 'sow their own seed' if they wanted the anti-imperial struggle to lead to a 'Red Republic '. 116 'Mere Republicanism will not provide a change of system', declared Jim Larkin in an interview to the Dreadnought shortly after his release from US jails. 117 Sharing that point of view, the weekly tried to tell its readers about every working-class struggle in Ireland that went beyond nationalist aims. It noted that Ireland was 'seething with proletarian unrest' and hoped that 'the peasantry and proletariat of Ireland may turn Red to-morrow'. 118 This might have sounded too triumphal, if so many collectivist experiences had not taken place. The seizure of workplaces by what the workers themselves called 'soviets' was not a rarity, occasionally leading to the takeover of a whole town and area. 119 Though power never remained for long in the soviets' hands, the experience, which did lead to economic advances, was deemed 'of inestimable value' and celebrated as the path British workers should follow. 120 'The Irish Soviets are purely the work of the humble rank and file', the paper claimed, praising the Irish worker for being 'more consciously "Bolshevik" than many theorists'. 121 That was, to a certain extent, an exaggeration. They were maybe communists in practice, and certainly 'the deed (was) outstripping the word'. 122 But they were in general not convinced of the doctrine to the point of joining the CPI which, in spite of that wave of labour militancy, rapidly lost ground to the nationalist current. The Dreadnought, once Pankhurst was expelled from the CPGB, became increasingly critical of the CPI, calling its official programme 'a Fabian Scheme'. 123 Nonetheless, in its approach of Irish anti-colonialism, it remained faithful to its original Marxist view: World War. Of course, communism having been described as the longest footnote in modern British history, it would be easy to discard Pankhurst's publication as merely a footnote in the footnote, and easier still to argue that, in the process leading to the liquidation of the British Empire, the part played by the Dreadnought was minute. It is nonetheless a periodical that deserves to be rescued from oblivion -because it brought to thousands of working-class readers, whether male or female, whether metropolitan or colonial, news from the Empire they could not have been aware of otherwise; and because it offered a critique of British imperialism at once fierce and sophisticated, incorporating feminist preoccupations and warnings against bourgeois nationalism in the colonies. The Dreadnought's anti-colonial objectives came fifth in a list of six 'principal aims' introducing its 'Provisional Resolutions Towards a Programme' for the foundation of a Communist Party in Great Britain:

The breaking-up of all empires, since these are instruments of capitalist oppression and exploitation, and the establishment of a world federation of Communist republics, and the consequent abolition of all racial and national barriers. Whoever lives and works in a Soviet republic is entitled to all the rights of citizenship. 142 That perspective, diverging widely from the dominant ideology, was surely a minority one.

Representing John Bull as a 'champion baby killer' and a 'holder of world records' in the sport of mass massacre was not the mainstream vision of the day. 143 Neither was the argument that 'the great empires will be disintegrated and the bursting forth of the small nationalities will hasten the world's progress to the eventual Socialist confederation of all peoples'. 144 That language placed the paper at odds with the Labour Party and the TUC leaderships, which in September 1914 had agreed, like the mainstream suffragettes, not to disturb the war effort and later participated in the recruitment campaign. 145 Yet the Dreadnought did have an impact, and a legacy.

With the global rise in labour militancy that followed the wartime strikes, the soldiers' mutinies and the October Revolution, the weekly reflected, especially in the first half of its brief existence, the preoccupations of many a rank-and-file worker, in one of those exceptional moments when social protest in the metropole and overseas seemed to be converging. Admittedly, the space devoted to imperial questions in the Dreadnought's pages diminished over the years. In 1923 and 1924, anyone in search of information about social movements in the Empire was more likely to find it in the Workers' Weekly, the official organ of the CPGB, as it now benefited from the Comintern's global network, while Pankhurst's milieu was shrivelling. 146 But that does not mean that the Dreadnought, in its most dynamic phase, was not an inspiration for the rest of the revolutionary press, be it Plebs or other periodicals more directly related to the CPGB, such as the Communist Review or the Labour Monthly. Indeed, as noted by Mary Davis, the Dreadnought was 'refreshingly unsectarian' and 'distinguished itself by its verve, openness and internationalism' 147 . Few activists outside of the WSF circles ever explicitly admitted being intellectually indebted to Pankhurst. 148 The 145 The Dreadnought's reports on the post-war Labour Party gatherings (29 June 1918 and 23 Nov. 1918) and TUC conferences (20 Sep. 1919 and 20 Dec. 1919) were highly critical. Pankhurst's arrogance is paramount in accounting for that lack of recognition. The Special Branch agents keeping an eye on her were not so mistaken when they reported: 'Miss Sylvia Pankhurst wants her own way'; 'No one has yet succeeded in working amicably with Sylvia Pankhurst'. 'Sylvia Pankhurst record file fact that Pankhurst chose to adhere to the Labour Party in 1948, while one of the major reasons for her split with the CP had been her refusal to join Labour, did not help. But she was interested in and critical of the British Empire before many others and her anti-colonial views were to become commonplace on the left, inside the CPGB as well as inside the ILP. 149 If only for that reason, it is hard to disagree with June Hannam's judgement that 'Sylvia Pankhurst made an important contribution in her own right to radical politics during the twentieth century' and it is hoped that this chapter has confirmed that 'her lengthy involvement in political life deserves serious consideration'. 150 Further explorations of Pankhurst's anti-colonialism would need to look at her copious correspondence, the many books she published on related topics and her work as the editor of the New Times and Ethiopian News from 1936 to 1956, and of the Ethiopian Observer from 1956 until her death in 1960. 151 How similar or how different her later anti-colonialism was from her views during the Dreadnought years is a question that still requires in-depth study. The International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and the Women's Library in London both hold sizeable collections of her letters.