Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross by Neville Kirk (review)

Another book on transnational labour history? Another book by Neville Kirk on transnational labour history? Yes, as Kirk makes clear, he has had an enduring interest in transnational and cross-national comparative labour history. He was trained as a transnational labour historian: first as one of a group of talented ma students at Warwick University's newly-founded Centre of the Study of Social History in 1968 and 1969 who were taught by lifelong friends, David Montgomery and Edward Thompson who specialized in US and British labour history respectively. Montgomery in particular explored "labour migration, connections, networks, exchanges and mutual influences" (57) between the two nations (and beyond) and Kirk followed him back to Pittsburgh to do his doctorate. Montgomery, a Communist Party activist in a pre-academic working life, became the Farman Professor of History at Yale University, leading labour historian and editor of the journal, International Labor and Working-Class History. In turn, Kirk taught British and US history at Manchester Metropolitan University for many years. His corpus of labour history publications includes two volumes comparing British and US work and workers from 1780 to 1939, Labour and Society (1994), comparative USA, UK and Australia labour history from 1880s to 1914, Comrades and Cousins (2003) and Britain and Australia from 1900, Labour and the Politics of the Empire (2011). This instalment is the most recent a series of work, then, around the issues and debates over transnational labour history by a historian long experienced in this field. Indeed, the first chapter on the "strengths, weaknesses, promise and pitfalls" (36) of the turn to transnational history, and concomitant comparative and global worlds is a strength of this book and will be essential reading for historians working in the area.

The book is formally divided into three parts: the transnational context; socialism; and women, whiteness, and war. The title is more indicative of its bifurcation: the nature and implications of Mann's and Ross's connected activism on the one hand and the wider contexts of their transnational radical world on the other. I think that Kirk's major contribution is in regard to the latter aspect than to the former, which might be surprising given the work concentrates on an investigation of the connected lives of British-born global-hopping Tom Mann (1856–1941) and Australian-born Robert Samuel "Bob" Ross (1873–1931), who also spent time in New Zealand. Kirk focuses on the particular period between September 1901 when Mann arrived in Melbourne from New Zealand, and Ross' return from New Zealand in April 1913. When Kirk was considering radical transnational figures in Australasia to study, Stuart Macintyre suggested Mann and Ross would "make a good pair of connected socialists" (vii) and so it has proven. These two radical socialists have attracted much study individually but they have rarely been considered together. They were friends who shared socialist beliefs. They worked together in Australasia between 1902 and 1913. After that, and most importantly, they stayed in touch, corresponded, and wrote for each other's publications. As with all his work, Kirk sets out to place their experience within the broadest economic and political contexts, using this example of paired connected socialists to develop a "network approach to transnationalism," considering their shared cultural field as well as the "relevant wider and more impersonal processes and structures." (51) He is able to do this because of the richness of the archives which he has researched meticulously. The records sustains a consideration of their socialism rather than their interiority; that is their transnational radical views in regard to politics generally and specifically on three issues: womanhood, whiteness, and war. Mann and Ross shared unwavering hopes for gender equality, albeit emphasizing differing particular reformist policies at the same time as being male breadwinners in their own marriages. Similarly Kirk challenges the "globally monolithic, unchanging and consensual" racism of whiteness that "abounds in the historiography" (201) to argue that...