I wonder how many scholars, activists and other readers have come across or tracked down a copy of James Hooker’s 1967 biography of George Padmore, read it, and thought: “that was fascinating. Now where can I find a more up-to-date biographical study of such a significant twentieth-century figure?” Like his own surviving correspondence and published writing, Padmore scholarship has been scattered, if often engrossing. While a good library might hold or be able to acquire Padmore’s ten singular-authored and edited books, his letters are dispersed amid archival collections in England, Ghana, Russia, Trinidad, the United States, and elsewhere, and his two thousand or so articles can be found in a broad range of periodicals. Meanwhile, beyond a collection of essays on Padmore edited by Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis and a further noteworthy essay by Bill Schwarz in his West Indian Intellectuals in Britain anthology, Padmore, himself, appears in, but is not the primary subject of, various excellent secondary sources. As one might travel the globe to pick up Padmore’s intermittent archival trail, a researcher might learn a lot about Padmore through the work of Hakim Adi, Brent Edwards, Kevin Gaines, Minkah Makalani, Marc Matera, Ani Mukherji, Susan Pennybacker, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Carol Polsgrove and Holger Weiss. But now, thanks to historian Leslie James’s astute interpretive skill and evident willingness to go the distance to locate those archival traces, we again have a current biographical study with her George Padmore and Decolonization from Below. If Hooker’s 1967 Black Revolutionary still rewards our returning to it, and it does, James’s George Padmore is now essential reading.

Because Padmore’s life overlapped with and indeed helped shape so many of the most momentous historical dynamics of the twentieth century, any biographical study of him has its work cut out for it in delineating what these dynamics were and how the author intends to approach them. Yet within the first few pages of her introduction, James very clearly sets out her agenda by providing a brisk preliminary account of the book’s major themes, contexts, argument and participation in intellectual debates. Themes? The importance of Padmore’s printed output, of race in his conception of international relations, and of pragmatic strategizing in his contributions to anti-colonialism. Contexts? Caribbean influences, Communist politics, fascism in the colonies, World War II, the cold war, and the advent of formal post-colonialism. Argument? “That the rising tide of anti-colonialism and anti-racism after the 1930s should be considered a turning point not just in harnessing a new mood or feeling of unity, but primarily as one that viewed empire, racism, and economic degradation as part of a system that fundamentally required the application of strategy to their destruction” (2). And debates? Whether race was constitutive to the structure of the British Empire, whether imperialism shaped metropolitan politics, whether violence was integral to the imperial order, and whether empire facilitated transnational interconnectedness (James agrees that it did, or it was, in each of these disputes). The remainder of James’s introduction situates Padmore within what Cedric Robinson famously called the Black radical tradition, with the subsequent chapters proceeding chronologically and thematically to give depth to this dizzying array of concerns.

Like the fast-moving introduction to George Padmore, its first chapter takes the Padmore story from early twentieth-century Trinidad to Depression-era London, with signal stops along the way in the United States and the Soviet Union. Readers might find this chapter too cursory, but James is forthright about being most interested in Padmore from the late 1930s until his death in 1959, and this earlier period, especially concerning Padmore’s break with the Comintern, has been catalogued in considerable detail elsewhere. In any case, beginning with the second chapter, James documents Padmore’s life and work in greater detail. Chapter two looks at The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, How Britain Rules Africa, and Africa and World Peace in order to consider how Padmore infused Leninism with antiracist analysis, how he linked struggles across the British empire in his writing, how he proposed an interrelationship between fascism and colonialism, and how he conceptualized imperialism as a system that would take the allied efforts of Black and white workers to bring down. The third chapter turns to World War II, and the shift it prompted in Padmore’s tactics from fomenting revolution to allying with sympathetic liberals, though Marxism remained an important influence. Chapter four, which focuses on Padmore’s journalism, really puts James’s strengths as researcher on display, from her confirmation of authorship on unattributed articles to her discussion of Padmore’s ideas across a truly impressive swath of magazines and newspapers. The emergent cold war, Padmore’s evolving views of it, and the growing ideological power of anticommunism are the subject of chapter six. The seventh chapter examines Padmore’s sense—one apparent in his Pan-Africanism or Communism?—that as the formal breakup of Europe’s empires became an imminent reality after World War II, the goal of seizing and holding state power came to rival that of plebeian mobilization. Relatedly, chapter eight charts Padmore’s ideas about nationalism’s utility as a necessary means toward the end of substantive self-determination. We then see these ideas in action in chapter eight, which tracks Padmore and his partner Dorothy Pizer’s journey to independent Ghana, where Padmore took up a frustrating government position as Adviser to the Prime Minister on African Affairs before an untimely death and subsequent ideological memorialization in 1959. James concludes by combining a thoughtful discussion of Padmore’s legacies and ultimate significance in demystifying imperialism with a re-contextualization of Padmore’s thought within several political and historiographical debates.

This summary does little justice to the valuable work that this book does, but let me note a few additional matters. James is adept throughout in showing us what we can learn about some of the most significant developments of the twentieth century and thus the twenty-first by studying the life of George Padmore. As important, this book shows us what we can learn about such developments directly from George Padmore. James achieves this through her attention to the dynamic nature of Padmore’s ideas, his strategic recalibrations and intellectual evolution which at times anticipated, responded to, and influenced the shifting grounds of politics. What is largely missing, though, is the personal dimension. James does provide glimpses of Padmore’s personality, of his “witty honesty combined with conscientious manners and determined privacy” (146), but the intimate measure of Padmore’s life, especially the gender politics of his anticolonial circles and of his and Dorothy Pizer’s relationship within them, is only roughly sketched out. Which brings us back to James Hooker’s earlier study, with its similar concentration on Padmore’s public politics and comparable reticence about the personal. But in fairness, James makes crystal clear her intentions about this being a primarily political and intellectual biographical study, meaning that there’s still room to further explore Padmore’s transnational life. For now, though, Leslie James should be commended for bringing us back up to date on George Padmore and the myriad issues and debates to which his biography speaks.