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  • "Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth": The First International in a Global Perspective ed. by Fabrice Bensimon, Quenton Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand
  • Thierry Drapeau
Fabrice Bensimon, Quenton Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand, eds., "Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth": The First International in a Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill 2018)

The year 2014 marked the 150th anniversary of the creation in London of the International Workingmen's Association (iwma), the so-called First International (1864–1872). Marked by several commemorative events, gatherings, and contributions, including one by the author of this review, the sesquicentennial of the founding of the first independent international workers' association offered the opportunity to revisit its short history in light of the current developments and new approaches in labour studies as well as in cognate fields. The book under review here grew out of such a conference in 2014, convened by the co-editors and held at the Maison de la Recherche of the Université Paris-Sorbonne in Paris. Fifty years earlier in the same capital, as social history was budding as a new subfield of historical research, the Centenary conference of the First International had undertaken a decisive shift in the study of the iwma from congress-history to movement-history, putting its rank-and-files back at the centre of the story. This volume builds on and continues that research trajectory by extending it in new directions, including transnational history, intellectual history, and cultural history, and by shedding light on omitted or forgotten themes, such as the place of women and former colonial subjects. I cannot adequately respond and do justice to each of the rich and diverse contributions to this collection, resigning myself instead to only highlight those that are particularly insightful or most original.

The volume is divided into three parts. The first, "Organisations and Debates," contains six essays about the context of emergence and the organizational nature of the iwma, with themes spanning from the Paris Commune to the General Council's role in English labour politics to the machinery question. The most interesting and innovative chapter in this section, in my view, is offered by Nicolas Delalande, who investigates how iwma members managed to turn sentimental calls of labour solidarity into real, practical, and effective actions of mutual aid among workers of different countries. In focusing on fundraising and money flows circulating through Europe-wide systems of donations and loans to support strikes, Delalande takes us into the daily functioning of the iwma, for which money – as for any labour organization, then and now – was the sinews of war. While the General Council functioned as a coordinating body putting distant iwma members in mutual contact, local sections were the real pivots of monetary transfers to striking or locked-out workers, and they did so through already-existing infrastructures of solidarity. Donations did occur in some desperate cases, but most transfers were made in the form of loans, which followed the Proudhonian free-credit philosophy (no fixed payback requirement) aimed at forging an ethics [End Page 283] of solidarity and egalitarian relations between sections. The First International was thus not only a dense network of labour societies. It was also and simultaneously "a dense network of debts." (83)

The second part, "Global Causes and Local Branches," contains eleven chapters that explore the embeddedness of local sections' politics from Latin America to Russia in transnational political cultures. Jeanne Moisand's essay on the entanglement of republicanism and labour internationalism during the "Cantonalist" revolutions in Spain (1868–1878) stands out here. Since Engels, the conventional interpretation of the federal-republican undercurrent that drove the revolutions tended to view it as both an import of Bakunin's anarchism and the Swiss canton model of federalism. In placing the Cantonalist revolutions in an imperial context, Moisand shows that they owed as much to radical political traditions coming from the Atlantic world. Spanish naval seamen and port workers were at the forefront of the revolutionary movements. They were active members in the Spanish branch of the iwma and were well represented in Barcelona during the Spanish first congress of the Association. When the republic was officially proclaimed in February 1873, crews of naval seamen who...

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