The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917) by Pietro Di Paola (review)

Pietro Di Paola takes the Italian anarchist community that gathered in London as his topic in The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917). The book’s title, borrowed from anarchist writer and lawyer Pietro Gori, situates Italian anarchists in London as radical wanderers rather than working class labor migrants; most Italian anarchists in London were exiles or otherwise seeking a place of refuge not available to them on the continent. London was one location along the path of movement and within an extensive transnational network of Italian anarchists that spanned Europe, occasionally North Africa, and many locations throughout North and South America. Di Paola makes clear the distinction of London’s Italian anarchists in the broader network through their continued focus upon and participation in Italian politics. London-based Italian anarchists also participated in crucial debates over the direction of the anarchist movement and the broader Left during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making this a compelling work of transnational history.

Four chronological chapters open the book before two thematic chapters with temporal overlap examine the surveillance of Italian anarchists in London and the organizing function of anarchist clubs respectively. This choice slightly clouds the change over time narrative, but it emphasizes the transnational dimensions of policing and surveillance, as well as the continuity of anarchist community organizing throughout the period. Di Paola supports his study with extensive archival digging through Italian language anarchist newspapers, many of which survived only an issue or two, together with surveillance documents generated by the Italian Ministry of the Interior and Italian diplomatic staff in London. From these sources the author pulls together disparate strands of information in a work of history with engaging ground level details of the Italian anarchist movement. These sources reveal London as both a place of refuge and a site of continued surveillance by Italian police, exposing the interplay of nation-based politics and policing with transnational mobility at the individual and state levels.

The Italian anarchist community, concentrated in the neighborhoods of Clerkenwell and Soho, was never very large. In the 1880s and 1890s around two hundred Italian anarchists lived in London. In the twentieth century numbers remained constant, held together by “a core of fifty to eighty” (205). The broader Italian community in London grew from around 3,500 in 1891 to over 10,000 at the turn of the century. Many worked in the hotel and restaurant industry for poor wages under the “Truck System” in which cooks and waiters did not receive a regular wage, but rather had to pay the owner out with their tips. Anarchists spearheaded a few unsuccessful attempts to organize these workers, but building an anarchist movement among laborers in London was not the primary focus of Italian anarchists in London. They maintained a “strong national structure” and orientation in London (207). This comes through strongly in anarchist print culture, one of the strongest connecting threads in the global anarchist movement. For example, the first goal of publishers of most anarchist newspapers was to smuggle them back to Italy or elsewhere through the network, not circulate them in England. The intense focus upon Italy within the London node of the Italian anarchist movement, Di Paola argued, evidences the “retention of practical and conceptual nationalist frameworks” among Italian anarchists participating in a movement espousing internationalism (207).

The Italian anarchist community in London formed because the United Kingdom maintained open immigration policies through most of the nineteenth century, though anarchist Errico Malatesta characterized the English as “perhaps the most xenophobic in the world” (157). The presumption of innocence in UK law and a tradition of free speech afforded anarchists some protection from arrest for speaking or publishing their ideas. The legal framework changed with the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act. The new law restricted immigration of destitute aliens—the law targeted...