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  • Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution
  • Yann Béliard
Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Boston and Leiden: Brill 2010)

This collection is the sixth volume in Brill’s “Global Social History Series,” inaugurated in 2008 by Marcel van der Linden’s Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History. A ground-breaking work, it illustrates just how fruitful the cross-national approach can be for the renewal of labour history.

As stated by the editors in their stimulating introduction (“Rethinking anarchism and syndicalism: the colonial and postcolonial experience, 1870–1940”), the book asks a number of questions that had been left aside by previous historians of the international anarchist movement, such as George Woodcock or Daniel Guérin: “Which social groups formed the base of support for anarchist and syndicalist movements in the colonial and postcolonial world between 1870 and 1940? What were the doctrinal tenets, programmatic goals, and organisational structures of these movements? What methods of struggle did they employ? How did these movements grapple with colonialism, national liberation, imperialism, state formation, and social revolution?” (lxviii) Not only is the object under study – the libertarian movement in the countries dominated by imperialism from the beginning of the first globalisation to the start of World War II – an original one per se, but it is studied through an equally original lens, focusing on “how anarchism and syndicalism developed as transnational movements” and paying unprecedented attention to the “supranational connections and multidirectional flows” (across the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea of Japan, and the East China Sea) that were so essential in their growth. (xxxii)

The starting-point for Steven Hirsch, associate professor of histor y at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg (USA), and Lucien van der Walt, associate professor of sociolog y at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), is the conviction that the study of anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th century has long suffered from what [End Page 355] one might call “the Spanish fixation”, i.e. the vision of anarchism as a movement that attracted mass support in Spain and Spain only. Hence their attempt at “provincialising Spanish anarchism” (xlvi) by demonstrating that anarchism and syndicalism did achieve some impact outside of the Iberian Peninsula, notably in what came to be known after the period covered by the volume as the Third World or, later still, as the Global South. The collection can be read as a welcome sequel to Dave Berry and Constance Bantman’s New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (2010), which had already broadened the view by embracing the whole of Europe from an interconnected perspective.

The volume is twofold, with Part I focusing on “Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial World” while Part II examines their fate “in the Postcolonial World.” The “colonial/postcolonial” partition chosen here is somewhat misleading. The “postcolonial” part is solely about Latin America (the book was indeed born from a panel on “Anarchism and Anarchosyndicalism in the Global South: Latin America in Comparative Perspective” at the European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam in 2006). As for the “colonial” half, it brings together six countries from three different continents (Africa, Asia and Europe) which were “colonial” in senses so different that their juxtaposition under a single heading – in particular the inclusion of the cases of Ireland and the Ukraine – may seem a little artificial.

That said, the chapters taken individually are compelling and united by several fundamental qualities. First one might mention the sheer sense of discovery with which they overwhelm the reader as he or she moves from chapter to chapter. The authors should all be congratulated for bringing to life neglected geographical spaces that Western readers would not naturally classify as hot-beds of anarchism alongside the Black and red capitals of Chicago or Barcelona – Dongyoun Hwang’s and Arkif Dirlik’s Tokyo, Edilene Toldeo and Luigi Biondi’s Sao Paulo...

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