Seeds of Solidarity is a study of British Guiana amid a wave of Caribbean uprisings that brought modern politics to colonial spaces during the 1930s. It explores the historical power of a movement forged by people at the edges of empire during economic, political, and environmental crises. African- and Indian-Guianese youth, women, and men who worked on sugar plantations led a series of labor uprisings, despite attempts to turn these racialized communities against each other. Rather than erasing identities, their 'overlapping diasporas' signify how solidary can emerge without sameness, and how this process challenged the British Empire and reshaped Caribbean politics. This important work unites Caribbean history, African Diaspora and South Asian Diaspora studies, histories of racial capitalism and labor movements, gender studies, and the politics of colonialism and empire in the post-indenture period. It offers a model of resistance in today's era of deepening racial and economic inequality, fascism, and climate emergency.

‘Seeds of Solidarity rewrites global labor history by uncovering the hidden dynamics and potentialities of multiracial working-class rebellion in Depression-era Guyana. The 1935 uprisings not only modeled cross-racial class solidarity but portended a revolutionary social order more just and democratic than the compromised independence which followed. A brilliant historian and breathtaking storyteller attentive to the culture, rhythms, and voices of the people, Nicole Burrowes is the true heir to Walter Rodney.’

Robin D. G. Kelley - author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

‘With an engrossing narrative, keen analytical eye, and exhaustive research, Nicole Burrowes has gifted us a story of the interracial solidarities that African and Indian sugar workers and their communities built to transform their world and bring about real freedom within the British Empire. It plumbs the complex, vibrant, but unfinished 1935 labor uprising, revealing to students and those who cherish freedom a history of political struggle that confronted the problem, identified long ago, of attempting to build a democratic future on the vestiges of plantation slavery.’

Minkah Makalani - author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939

‘This study is marked by meticulous research, scholarly rigor, lucidity and conviction. Nicole Burrowes seeks to revise entrenched assumptions of their chronic mutual antipathy, while locating the sources of embryonic collaborative resistance in their local and wider international contexts. This book exemplifies the scholarly influence of two eminent Guyanese historians, Walter Rodney and Nigel Westmaas. But it is also permeated ─ and enriched ─ by the ethos of the late activist, Andaiye, in her courageous commitment to the education and emancipation of the underdog.’

Clem Seecharan - Emeritus Professor of History, London Metropolitan University

‘This is a meticulously researched and compellingly rendered study. In seeking out seeds of Afro-Asian solidarity, Burrowes writes against the historiographical grain of assumed divisions, introducing us to constituencies of youth, women and men, painstakingly excavating proximities without romanticizing points of connection. This important contribution enriches our understanding of modern politics in the Caribbean, with urgent lessons for our times.’

Alissa Trotz - Professor of Caribbean Studies and Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto