Yann Béliard and Neville Kirk's fine edited collection, Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s–1960s, originated in 2013 with a conference in Paris at the Sorbonne Nouvelle to consider what “a social history of [British] decolonisation” might look like (1). In his introduction to the collection, Béliard pays homage to two important pathbreaking works in this field—Partha Sarathi Gupta's Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964 (1975) and Stephen Howe's Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (1993)—noting that in general “in academia, imperial history and labour history” developed “as two separate fields” (6). Workers of the Empire, Unite—like the collection edited by Billy Frank, Craig Horner, and David Stewart, The British Labour Movement and Imperialism (2010)—testifies to what Béliard calls the “mutation and rapprochement” that took place at the end of the twentieth century “as the result of three different developments: the rise of New Imperial History, of post-colonial studies and of global labour history” (6).

The first part of the volume, “Contesting Imperialism,” opens with Marie Terrier's essay, in which she carefully details the veteran socialist and theosophist Annie Besant's work in relation to fighting for dominion status for India in the early twentieth century, often in partnership with the British Labour Party. Terrier elucidates the continuities in Besant's thought in relation to women's oppression and class exploitation and explains how Indian nationalists became increasingly frustrated with her moderate approach once Gandhi had launched his civil disobedience campaigns. Béliard's fascinating chapter on the wide-ranging Marxist anti-imperialism of Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers’ Dreadnought follows, though it would have been interesting to have had more reflection on how Black colonial subjects of the British Empire who were active in Pankhurst's group in the imperial metropole, like the Jamaican poet Claude McKay, might have shaped Pankhurst's thinking.

Nicholas Owen rightly pays attention to those Indians, seafarers and students, who were in Britain, in his authoritative chapter on anti-imperialist activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain with respect to India from 1920 to 1934. Owen outlines the difficulties and challenges which meant the party's work here was slow-going, even before one takes into account the role of the British state repression (such as the Meerut Trial). Even when the party took anticolonialism more seriously as an organization following prompting from the Communist International after its Sixth Congress in 1928, the sectarianism of Stalin's “new line” destroyed many of the tentative alliances the party had established with Indian nationalists, a case of—to evoke the title of a book by Lenin—“one step forward, two steps back.”

Matt Perry, a biographer of Ellen Wilkinson, examines Wilkinson's 1932 visit to India as part of a wider fact-finding mission undertaken on behalf of the Indian nationalist movement, and then her work trying to educate British audiences in the aftermath. In a convincing critique of postcolonial theory with its stress on difference, Perry shows how in both India and Britain, “Wilkinson deployed devices to establish for a transnational audience a shared purpose, a mutual comprehensibility and frames that could build transnational movements . . . she subverted difference to make common cause—as she did in describing herself when in India as an ‘Untouchable” in England for being a trade unionist” (127).

Quentin Gasteuil explores the critical contribution to anticolonialism in the imperial metropole made by the British socialist Fenner Brockway, later famous for organizing the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Gasteuil focuses on Brockway's relationship to the French socialist Marceau Pivert and how it was mutually beneficial, enabling them to share information and anticolonialist contacts, though Pivert and the wider French left failed to build anything comparable to the Movement for Colonial Freedom. The important role around translation, here played by the forgotten British far-left figure John McNair, is rightly highlighted, but, again, more could have been said about how colonial subjects (like the Black Trinidadian radical George Padmore) shaped Brockway and Pivert.

In the second part of the volume, “Labour, Decolonisation and Independence,” two essays, by Gareth Curless and Dave Hyde on Sudan and Kenya respectively are fine examples of African labor history. Curless examines “how Sudanese workers combined the colonial discourse of labour productivity and stability with local idioms and vernacular understandings of morality and modernity in order to advocate for improved labour rights, higher wages and greater social entitlement” in the political space available to them amid a high level of class struggle in the 1940s and early 1950s, before nationalist elites closed it down during the transition to independence (170). Hyde analyzes in detail the mass class struggles on Kenya's tea plantations, such as Brooke Bond, as the country began to make the transition from the state of Emergency to national independence in 1959–60. Such studies are obviously highly pertinent to a volume titled Workers of the Empire, Unite, for as George Orwell noted in 1939, “What we always forget is that the over whelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa” (“Not Counting Niggers,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, An Age Like This, 1920–1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus [1968], 394–98, at 397). Further research into the responses by the British labor movement to the strikes in Sudan and Kenya would be fascinating.

Tom Sibley's biographical study of the Gibraltarian Communist trade unionist leader Albert Fava, who was deported to Britain, effectively integrates metropole and colony in the same frame of analysis. Evan Smith uses a transnational and comparative frame to explore political shifts in the Communist Parties of Great Britain, Australia, and South Africa in relation to national liberation struggles amid wider world-historical processes such as de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. The volume concludes with further thoughtful and thought-provoking reflections from Kirk and Béliard.

I would have appreciated more discussion of the potentialities for actual working-class unity across the British Empire, especially in a work whose very title (for me) evoked the neglected study by Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian, Strike across the Empire: The Seamen's Strike of 1925 in Britain, South Africa and Australasia (1992). Nonetheless, Workers of the Empire, Unite is a sophisticated and scholarly contribution to the ongoing process of what might be called decolonizing British labor history through excellent historical studies relating to British labor and decolonization.