In the firmament of Pan-Africanism, few figures rival the intellectual and organizational influence of George Padmore. Born Malcolm Nurse in 1903, he left Trinidad in 1925 to pursue an itinerant career as a journalist, organizer, and activist, which took him to New York, Moscow, Hamburg, Paris, and ultimately Accra—although London, where he lived from 1933 until 1957, was his most consequential place of residence. Padmore's ideological journey from Communist Party member in the 1920s to Pan-Africanist “beacon” by the 1950s traverses the most important terrains of transnational anti-imperialist thought. In Leslie James's illuminating biographical study, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below, this story of Pan-Africanist intellectual development is contextualized within wider frameworks of postwar decolonization and the Cold War. The result is a most readable book that raises important new questions about the circulation and reception of transnational political ideas within imperial communication networks.

Padmore's life work was to make empire “attackable” by developing and publicizing arguments in print. Communist Party calls for global revolution provided his initial framework of attack, yet even during years of direct Moscow support, Padmore stressed the necessity for blacks to end their dependence on white political and intellectual leadership. His long (if never quite categorical) break from Soviet communist ideology in favor of a socialist-minded Pan-Africanism over the 1930s and 1940s has served as the main focus for previous academic studies of Padmore's life, cast in normative efforts to categorize his work within a larger body of black revolutionary thought and praxis. James wisely sidesteps these canonical-minded debates in favor of showing how Padmore worked through and towards new ideas, not only as a Pan-Africanist thinker but also as lobbyist and networker; as marketer and distributer of books, pamphlets, and, most significantly, news reports. Padmore's intellectual rhythms generally resembled those of a working journalist rather than those of a retiring philosopher. Global events—in particular the Italo-Abyssinian crisis and West Indies labor revolts of the mid-1930s—decisively shaped Padmore's influential critique that “fascistic” violence was the foundation of British colonial rule in Africa, and could be upended only by a transnational, black anti-imperial solidarity. Padmore was quick to recognize the bargaining space for Africa's self-determination that was opened with the Second World War and concomitant British pledges to colonial development, which led to his increasing fascination with British parliamentary politics. Oddly, James does not consider that Padmore's comparatively muted politics during the Second World War was a straightforward concession to navigate a less tolerant British state—one that thought little of imprisoning more outspoken fellow travelers like I. T. A. Wallace Johnson for sedition. Yet she makes a persuasive case, framed within literature on decolonization, that the visible postwar waning of Padmore's confrontational Marxism is best explained not by tracking specific debates within black revolutionary thought, but rather by tracking how colonial opportunities of negotiated independence emerged—opportunities that for Padmore proved far more attractive to his Pan-Africanist sensibilities than the pursuit of metropolitan Marxist fantasies of overthrowing a British (Labor) government.

James constructs her study around Padmore's published work and scattered archival correspondence. There are no real “Padmore papers”: whatever existed seems to have disappeared from Flagstaff House in Accra along with Kwame Nkrumah's papers following the latter's overthrow in 1966. Thus, the biographer must compose the life of a seminal print figure around what amounts to surprisingly ephemeral documentation. James does this with admirable rigor in two different ways. More conventionally, she has written an authoritative biography of Padmore by gathering original correspondence and government reports from Britain, Russia, Ghana, the United States, France, and Trinidad—an impressive feat that lacks only (certainly no fault of James) Padmore's MI5 files, which are not yet released or even publicly acknowledged, but which, given the social milieu surveilled in other recently released files, seem inconceivable not to exist. More inventively, James has reconstructed Padmore's vast print network through an exhaustive reading of newspapers in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States that carried his timely and polemical news reporting. This reconstruction supplies the material for the book's most important and revelatory chapter, “Writing Anti-imperial Solidarity from London,” which argues that Padmore created an unrivaled one-man press service to inform the British colonized world about developments at both the heart and peripheries of empire, employing rhetorical traditions from Caribbean print culture, the communist press, and the British Left. Much of this voluminous reporting was anonymous, but James demonstrates that “Our London Correspondent,” “By Airmail,” and “Censored by MOI” were bylines that Padmore undoubtedly posted himself. Through Padmore's press service, West Indies readers learned of famine in Kenya; West African readers learned of strikes in the Caribbean; and readers across the empire learned of the healthy postwar profits enjoyed by protected British companies operating in the colonies. The mechanics and politics of transmission were more complicated than this—local editors like Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria tailored Padmore's news to fit their own ends, reflecting the fate of all news service copy—but James has established a fruitful base on which productive scholarship of imperial and anticolonial communication networks can grow.

Having grown to despise “café intellectuals” and admire ambitious politicians, Padmore finished his career as an unwavering supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, serving as his head of the Bureau of African Affairs following Ghana's independence in 1957, charged with supporting and coordinating African liberation movements. Working among the liberation figures who came in and out of Accra, Padmore remained the outsider at the center, doing much behind the scenes but never imposing prescriptive pronouncements on liberation's “true” path. James addresses Padmore's anti-counterrevolution rationales for supporting Nkrumah's growing authoritarianism, which cannot help but appear unflattering in hindsight. Yet the persistence of his transnational vision, which sought to “un-complicate” British imperialism and Cold War interventionism alike as acts of exploitation and racial chauvinism, confirms his position as a singular figure in the history of Pan-Africanism.