1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:09,719 Thank you so much. Thank you. My first my deepest thank you for these ads for inviting me on this opportunity to 2 00:00:09,720 --> 00:00:17,879 sing celebration songs and to all of you for attending on this rather beautiful day. 3 00:00:17,880 --> 00:00:22,320 Now that she's excited off with me. I really appreciate your time. 4 00:00:22,680 --> 00:00:27,570 I'm extremely excited to share it, particularly at this forum. 5 00:00:28,260 --> 00:00:36,989 My work on this forum because so much of what I'm trying to do fits in with the intellectual objectives of this forum, 6 00:00:36,990 --> 00:00:40,380 and I have extremely excited to share my work with you. 7 00:00:41,400 --> 00:00:46,620 So I must take you as a prelude. To. 8 00:00:47,640 --> 00:01:00,260 Westminster 1916, where we are a young officer in the British Army forces, sits at his desk in the Moore office, looking out the window twice for. 9 00:01:02,270 --> 00:01:09,679 He asked for some time in busy coordinating with colonial and foreign offices throughout Asia and Africa on behalf of the state government. 10 00:01:09,680 --> 00:01:19,370 In order to compile a list of newspapers and pamphlets designed to foment disturbances in India, Egypt and other further oriental dependencies. 11 00:01:19,820 --> 00:01:26,180 Suicide mutiny in their native armies to boast about Islamism or to create pro-German sentiments 12 00:01:26,180 --> 00:01:32,930 in Oriental countries and caught his star was an important one with Britain and economies at war. 13 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:40,190 It had become more urgent than ever to eradicate the threats to the help of the Empire as any publications. 14 00:01:40,190 --> 00:01:42,530 But denying is a criticism of colonial rule. 15 00:01:42,800 --> 00:01:51,770 Attacks on Western culture and values and any denunciation of the Crown were deemed pernicious and capable of jeopardising the war effort. 16 00:01:52,670 --> 00:02:00,890 It was important hence to neutralise these threats. So every day our officer, according to his desk, can make new entry into his capital. 17 00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:06,460 It's about him, not subversive. Propaganda was produced across the world. 18 00:02:07,450 --> 00:02:16,090 So it's just groups from different parts of the British Empire that published and distributed anti-colonial propaganda from all over the globe. 19 00:02:17,210 --> 00:02:26,480 Of all similarities. The result was obviously produced in the countries themselves and a lot of it wasn't founded, confiscated or otherwise banned. 20 00:02:27,710 --> 00:02:33,170 But many educators found safe havens elsewhere to promote the rebellious Moses Egyptian 21 00:02:33,170 --> 00:02:38,510 and Syrian nationalists published literature in Leipzig as the clergy and activists, 22 00:02:39,020 --> 00:02:43,550 sometimes Constantinople. Others utilised Siege of Paris, Geneva. 23 00:02:45,020 --> 00:02:49,150 It didn't make many groups published material as far as Cisco and Vancouver. 24 00:02:49,910 --> 00:02:56,460 And meanwhile, other East Asian colonialists struggled to go from Tokyo and Shanghai. 25 00:02:57,080 --> 00:03:01,190 Arabic and Turkish dissident writing was even be published in as far as Guatemala. 26 00:03:01,730 --> 00:03:03,170 And in Brazil. 27 00:03:03,950 --> 00:03:13,260 But to get at the droll social networks nature of these footprints, Rothman was assured that the produced and multiply bilingual body of literature. 28 00:03:13,910 --> 00:03:19,970 A large number of these publications were understandably written in English and French as well as in German. 29 00:03:20,390 --> 00:03:26,780 But a considerable amount was all the Arabic word in the thuggish was also reproduced, 30 00:03:27,560 --> 00:03:34,050 and the collection also conveyed false nations in Spanish, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and all. 31 00:03:35,940 --> 00:03:44,159 So perhaps unbeknown to him, this officer was creating a historical artefact which exemplified the collective imaginations of imperial 32 00:03:44,160 --> 00:03:52,470 subjects yearning to overthrow the colonial yoke and radically rethinking the figure of their politics. 33 00:03:53,160 --> 00:03:56,550 This polyglot corpus contained an eclectic mix of literature. 34 00:03:56,760 --> 00:03:58,500 There is a form of content. 35 00:03:59,040 --> 00:04:06,510 There were warnings of the expansionist designs following the British, French and Belgian empires, as well as Tsarist Empire. 36 00:04:07,020 --> 00:04:15,090 Those celebrations of the at the same time, though, of the German war efforts and foreign propaganda in support of the Ottoman Empire, 37 00:04:15,490 --> 00:04:21,780 there were incitements against colonial soldiers against the British Empire growing its 38 00:04:21,990 --> 00:04:28,230 soldiers in the British Army revolt sometimes meant to attack and embarrass governments. 39 00:04:28,500 --> 00:04:35,220 Others, my department and foster national consciousness still always imagined future a new global politics. 40 00:04:36,200 --> 00:04:46,670 This noisy mix of perspectives and expressions was not only by a mutual desire on calls of regulators to disrupt the heads of many of the system. 41 00:04:48,070 --> 00:04:58,300 And one day our offices are added to this catalogue, a small book entitled Imperialism as the High State of Capitalism. 42 00:04:59,340 --> 00:05:05,150 And it does have that all story begins. So in this next slide. 43 00:05:06,790 --> 00:05:09,699 You can see what I've just Google what I do today, 44 00:05:09,700 --> 00:05:20,499 which is just go to the introduction and introduce you to the book project and also look at the kind of the geographical stakes of writing this, 45 00:05:20,500 --> 00:05:24,829 what I'm calling the history of global conflict from history of universal time. 46 00:05:24,830 --> 00:05:28,540 Some nations particularly looking at it from South Asia. 47 00:05:29,050 --> 00:05:37,480 And in order to see that one third of all the points, all of two things from the radical underground, 48 00:05:38,290 --> 00:05:45,750 which I recreated in the book, and one of the skills that we finally quoted that the pilgrim. 49 00:05:46,960 --> 00:05:51,420 So. And this on the ground we would meet. 50 00:05:52,590 --> 00:05:57,270 This was just part of the reconstruction of the book. The book recreates. 51 00:05:57,300 --> 00:06:06,690 We will meet a diverse Gazans, intellectuals as well as workers, publishers as well as revolutionary agents and informants. 52 00:06:07,500 --> 00:06:09,570 Through this method. My talk. 53 00:06:11,290 --> 00:06:20,050 My presentation to you today will showcase what the material reality as well as the political content of this global community, 54 00:06:20,860 --> 00:06:23,920 including the skulls of Gaza that animate the book. 55 00:06:24,280 --> 00:06:29,660 Think of it in the opportunity of Android one discuss as well as RB thought. 56 00:06:29,680 --> 00:06:36,640 I say that it was for Emma that all those who I will get to at the talk but I'm happy to talk about in the Q&A. 57 00:06:37,620 --> 00:06:41,130 By examining that noble discourse, Walton practices what is content. 58 00:06:41,460 --> 00:06:47,220 I will show how universal domination not only became the aim of social movements, 59 00:06:47,730 --> 00:06:52,110 but counterintuitively, also the objective of radical internationalism. 60 00:06:54,300 --> 00:07:06,350 So let's start in the next slide because it would just give you a brief overview of what the book project is of this book project, 61 00:07:07,230 --> 00:07:15,420 which is the sentence of this new story about the importance of global colonialism and the rise of universal self-determination of the 20th century. 62 00:07:16,080 --> 00:07:21,959 Specifically, it asks what role the language of revolutionary internationalism in the wake of 63 00:07:21,960 --> 00:07:27,990 the 1917 water revolution in Russia played in bringing about Empire's formal ends. 64 00:07:28,920 --> 00:07:36,090 And in all this, why did Radical come to recognise the nation state as the dominant form of the state 65 00:07:36,090 --> 00:07:45,060 making this why the presence of we variety of non-state or internationalist projects? 66 00:07:46,630 --> 00:07:53,190 As I indicated to the vignette of the town, I was assaulted at the turn of the century. 67 00:07:53,230 --> 00:07:59,980 The global imperial order was in federal. Has the largest imperial power in the world. 68 00:08:00,340 --> 00:08:05,620 Great Britain face masks spectrum from across the quarter, 69 00:08:05,620 --> 00:08:13,600 various quarters of its empire building and especially in India, but also, of course, in Egypt, in islands. 70 00:08:16,150 --> 00:08:22,720 Emerge and as well as in some way control or semi-official control by China. 71 00:08:23,810 --> 00:08:32,580 And it was not the only one. You had bios of all the European as well as the Ottoman Empire and indeed the chin up. 72 00:08:33,530 --> 00:08:37,160 But facing the prospect of a changing world. 73 00:08:40,100 --> 00:08:44,809 And they figured out the site not belong to and drove off. 74 00:08:44,810 --> 00:08:47,420 This was an argument that I make in the book. 75 00:08:48,470 --> 00:08:56,629 And then rising as an intellectual and a political activist advocate, a statesman defined by his position in the world, 76 00:08:56,630 --> 00:09:05,420 brought up one that's primarily defined by the crisis of liberal order and the looming question of the future of communities. 77 00:09:06,800 --> 00:09:11,090 As he and his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917, 78 00:09:11,930 --> 00:09:18,950 he announced the dawn of a new era when the empires of the world will eventually fall rolls of the impending world revolution. 79 00:09:20,480 --> 00:09:24,330 My book will show that his all resonated with all sorts of a view of the press. 80 00:09:24,470 --> 00:09:32,629 We saw in his victory the possibility of a new world in Rio Grande, the river Ganges, anti-colonialist darling, 81 00:09:32,630 --> 00:09:42,920 also who had realised the only possible balance in this process the cause and revolutionary movements that sought universal liberation. 82 00:09:43,920 --> 00:09:48,090 I love draws from 25 all across densities, 83 00:09:48,510 --> 00:09:53,639 and it's this multilingual and multiple pilot projects in which I chronicle the 84 00:09:53,640 --> 00:09:58,950 political party practice of anti-colonialist from India as well as from Egypt, 85 00:09:58,950 --> 00:10:04,520 Iran, Turkistan, Trinidad, Kenya, as well as the compatriots across Europe and the Soviet Union. 86 00:10:05,460 --> 00:10:10,360 And I show in the book how they created and connected through a kind of global public square. 87 00:10:11,310 --> 00:10:19,530 The book tracks the spread of our deep rooted vocabularies across geographies, through clandestine networks and underground channels, 88 00:10:19,800 --> 00:10:24,930 and argues that this process led to the emergence of a kind of global Muslim community whose 89 00:10:24,930 --> 00:10:31,860 members do not always approximate share a deep commitment to a radical restructuring of the world. 90 00:10:33,460 --> 00:10:44,050 And particularly I want that I show how South Asia and India formed a critical node in this 91 00:10:44,290 --> 00:10:54,280 imagined community as a centre for physical as well as symbolic centre of anti-colonial making. 92 00:10:57,100 --> 00:11:05,649 So this is sort of narratives in the next has three main purposes and it follows response 93 00:11:05,650 --> 00:11:12,290 to this recent scholarly publications including and especially those coming from scholars. 94 00:11:12,310 --> 00:11:21,549 Here is that study decolonisation in connected rather than discrete jobs as well provide them with the logical tools of global history, 95 00:11:21,550 --> 00:11:24,760 which we have grown as a field in the past. 96 00:11:24,790 --> 00:11:31,119 Many especially did write new histories with an end to the empires, which tied to the ends of empires. 97 00:11:31,120 --> 00:11:36,940 The global phenomenon. Now this is a property intervention has three intellectual objectives. 98 00:11:38,310 --> 00:11:45,030 First is reappraise is the origins of the refashioning of the future political order in the wake of the First World War. 99 00:11:45,810 --> 00:11:53,610 Over the last decade, several historians have highlighted by the end of the war led to a transition of power for empires, 100 00:11:53,610 --> 00:11:55,020 particularly the British Empire. 101 00:11:55,440 --> 00:12:03,600 Many imperial policy makers were bent on coming to do a transformation, often viewed as in the period following the piece of insight. 102 00:12:04,260 --> 00:12:11,310 Some have called this internationalisation of empire champions of liberal internationalism. 103 00:12:11,580 --> 00:12:25,800 Like the Wilson module, Smuts sought to bring forth a new order, one that would be subject to some sort of international regulation and control. 104 00:12:27,310 --> 00:12:32,549 And there is a great scholarly debate regarding the philosophies underpinning these designs, 105 00:12:32,550 --> 00:12:39,360 as well as the consequences, both intended and unintended, of their implementation in the world. 106 00:12:40,230 --> 00:12:46,200 However, there is another question that I asked that seems to be implicit in these discussions. 107 00:12:47,180 --> 00:12:48,590 And that merits our attention. 108 00:12:49,400 --> 00:12:58,220 Why did the policy makers and politicians perceive the visual system of the previous century to be in need of some type of reclamation? 109 00:12:59,380 --> 00:13:06,640 I argue that all of the answer to this question lies in the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on anti-colonialism in the world. 110 00:13:07,420 --> 00:13:15,160 Waves of anti-British revolution and politics had been sweeping the world since the turn of the century. 111 00:13:15,310 --> 00:13:19,060 It's not before, but now, after 1917, 112 00:13:19,070 --> 00:13:26,360 not only have the bearers of a revolutionary violently overthrown and imperial governments bizarre as governments, 113 00:13:26,710 --> 00:13:31,540 but they had also launched the call for anti-colonialism across the world to unite. 114 00:13:32,670 --> 00:13:38,790 Thus attempts to nationalise empire by liberal statesmen and their allies were conceived, 115 00:13:38,790 --> 00:13:47,310 at least in part, as a response to the perceived crisis of the internationalisation of surrealism. 116 00:13:49,640 --> 00:13:52,879 My second intellectual objective is in sort of sizing. 117 00:13:52,880 --> 00:14:02,000 This internationalisation of our debut is to trace the origins of the language and movements for universal decolonisation. 118 00:14:02,840 --> 00:14:12,020 The relationship between socialism and decolonisation is a story that has largely been associated with the global Cold War. 119 00:14:12,440 --> 00:14:20,090 It is in this geography, and many scholars of wars acknowledge the influence of socialism on the Global South. 120 00:14:21,060 --> 00:14:25,470 However, I show that the rules of this discourse go back to this earlier period. 121 00:14:26,280 --> 00:14:34,920 It is actually socialism did not influence the Third World Project, and it was only in countries only after the establishment of the Iron Curtain. 122 00:14:35,700 --> 00:14:42,450 On the contrary, many of the actors who came of age in the interwar period, directly or indirectly, 123 00:14:42,450 --> 00:14:49,200 participated in and contributed to the creation of the political and intellectual cultures that 124 00:14:49,200 --> 00:14:55,680 would facilitate and foster the growth of socialist ideals in the latter half of the 20th century, 125 00:14:55,860 --> 00:14:58,760 as well as through the kind of Third World Solidarity Project, 126 00:14:58,770 --> 00:15:04,620 that that would be the focus of a lot of scholarship, especially in the past two decades. 127 00:15:05,710 --> 00:15:10,930 I show in the book that the many, many lessons from South Asia and across the British Empire, 128 00:15:11,110 --> 00:15:16,180 the Bolshevik Revolution, served as a signal, a rupture and a moment of possibility. 129 00:15:17,080 --> 00:15:22,420 The ideals of the revolution were not necessarily entirely new or strange, 130 00:15:22,930 --> 00:15:29,590 but they were a realisation of an imperial global vision, which many had been searching for. 131 00:15:31,270 --> 00:15:40,299 And my third intellectual objective, which I am particularly keen to show in this group, is to think of South Asian as well as African Caribbean, 132 00:15:40,300 --> 00:15:49,810 as colonialists, not only as itinerant revolutionaries and campaigners, but also as intellectuals, as thinkers and as writers. 133 00:15:50,920 --> 00:15:54,940 My work does present a new intellectual history of anti-colonialism. 134 00:15:55,720 --> 00:16:04,480 A central proposition of my love of the book is that Lenin was interpretive by his colonialist mortgages in South Asia and elsewhere. 135 00:16:04,720 --> 00:16:11,260 As a revolutionary anti-imperial thinker, I show the many ways in which anti-colonialist interpreted, 136 00:16:11,380 --> 00:16:18,430 builds on modify, argued and otherwise responded to Lenin's critique of imperialism. 137 00:16:19,800 --> 00:16:27,600 I quote argued that the rise of Marxist antibiotic Romeo harm, coupled with Soviet activity in 1920s and thirties, 138 00:16:27,900 --> 00:16:37,020 contributed to the emergence of a new type of radical and universalist arguments that challenged the legitimacy of a party of competing rule. 139 00:16:37,950 --> 00:16:42,810 These arguments, unlike those in the age of revolution, 140 00:16:43,110 --> 00:16:52,020 stoked social inequality and transformation of the socioeconomic order that has sustained imperial and populist structures. 141 00:16:53,180 --> 00:16:56,810 So unlike earlier forms of revolutionary movements for self-determination. 142 00:16:57,920 --> 00:17:06,740 Anti-colonialism of the 20th century was not just about ousting foreign powers, but also about a social transformation. 143 00:17:10,100 --> 00:17:22,400 So offer this broad view. I can move on to giving you sort of two scenes from the underground and two parts of the book. 144 00:17:24,200 --> 00:17:33,759 And for that, I will start with the first thing. On a cold every morning in 1923 when Mary Lawrence, 145 00:17:33,760 --> 00:17:39,940 who was the why the steamship moguls at Walter Lawrence, receive an urgent telegram from the office. 146 00:17:41,110 --> 00:17:45,240 At Whitehall in London. Since her husband was away from England. 147 00:17:45,480 --> 00:17:47,940 The corresponding officer, a man named Frederic Du, 148 00:17:48,690 --> 00:17:55,410 was Anita persistence in communicating with company managements about immediately on a matter of great significance. 149 00:17:56,130 --> 00:18:02,160 It has come to the attention of the company that it was increasingly evident to the 150 00:18:02,160 --> 00:18:07,380 causes that shipping routes to India had become susceptible to communist infiltration. 151 00:18:08,040 --> 00:18:13,650 Seditious literature was being smuggled on board cities across the Indian Ocean. 152 00:18:14,970 --> 00:18:26,580 It was being smuggled in as well as in Europe, in ports such as in II, Hamburg, Genoa and the tropics across two story Calcutta, Bombay and elsewhere. 153 00:18:27,520 --> 00:18:32,099 Hence, the Secretary of State for India also to communicate with all principal Indian shipping lines, 154 00:18:32,100 --> 00:18:35,969 dumping on European ports in the hope that they may be able to stop the use 155 00:18:35,970 --> 00:18:41,610 of the cruise boats that submerging the Office of the State Executive save. 156 00:18:41,610 --> 00:18:48,599 Was it assured by numerous on her husband that all captains were in strictest confidence, 157 00:18:48,600 --> 00:18:55,740 made aware of the situation and instructions were given to take action against any insubordinate members on. 158 00:18:57,210 --> 00:19:01,500 90% imagination in colonial spaces, but particularly susceptible. 159 00:19:02,550 --> 00:19:08,520 The Communist incitement. Intelligence officers argue that communist literature of any variety, 160 00:19:08,550 --> 00:19:14,970 even theoretical or otherwise, would prove dangerous in the hands of impressionable young minds. 161 00:19:15,690 --> 00:19:22,560 Moreover, colonial authorities considered controlling the spread of subversive propaganda in India as especially dangerous. 162 00:19:23,400 --> 00:19:28,590 This surmise the strategy of the India of India under the Eastern policy of the third international 163 00:19:29,580 --> 00:19:35,250 communist national in Moscow and thwarted would increase Bolshevik activity in the subcontinent, 164 00:19:35,550 --> 00:19:39,050 resulting in the patron of radical groups and organisation. 165 00:19:40,460 --> 00:19:47,420 Second the subcontinent through the conquest, of course, through which political dissidents would connect with the Middle East of any South Africa. 166 00:19:47,660 --> 00:19:52,130 On the one hand, as with East Asia and Southeast Asia on the other. 167 00:19:53,530 --> 00:20:02,470 Literary paraphernalia travel down from alien worlds to draw Alexandria the rumble across Iran as far as Tokyo. 168 00:20:03,760 --> 00:20:08,260 This made in the intersection of this literature in India, especially imperative. 169 00:20:09,130 --> 00:20:16,600 So the scope of the prescription of this, or at least look at the legal level of this, 170 00:20:16,600 --> 00:20:21,610 the prescriptions in these laws will increase every year after 1914. 171 00:20:22,840 --> 00:20:34,510 By the end of the Second World War in 1939, outlaw titans numbered in the hundreds and several thousands of copies of banned books and newspapers, 172 00:20:34,510 --> 00:20:39,340 had been confiscated and stored in police depots so they could go. 173 00:20:40,540 --> 00:20:50,679 And this slide gives you a. I look into theses collections that contain classical works alongside Engels and others, 174 00:20:50,680 --> 00:20:55,350 and another times include the texts by leading communists who were living previously across the world. 175 00:20:55,360 --> 00:21:00,790 There's Lenin and Trotsky and in Russia, but also a German broadly enemy. 176 00:21:01,510 --> 00:21:05,920 Right. Has the U.K. plural that given Germany scope narrowing of the United States. 177 00:21:06,790 --> 00:21:09,820 The semantic revolution was considered especially sedentary, 178 00:21:09,940 --> 00:21:15,940 leading to later acquisition of Falsettos in our genes as well revolution that was published in 1987. 179 00:21:16,780 --> 00:21:24,760 The reportage of sleep on this was seen so as insightful so that books like Gondry's Famous The Second of the Revolution. 180 00:21:25,330 --> 00:21:28,960 Then because much of the world of oppression was banned. 181 00:21:29,260 --> 00:21:35,140 Yes, data and gospels read sorry, which I not another journalistic account. 182 00:21:35,470 --> 00:21:40,630 And Agnes Smedley is China's madame. All Jews were likewise barred from entry. 183 00:21:41,580 --> 00:21:50,219 Similarly, novelists with communist sympathies were also regarded as punished, despite authorities leading to the central notes from around the world, 184 00:21:50,220 --> 00:21:54,360 including Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Radical Bosses Storming Heaven, 185 00:21:54,660 --> 00:21:59,580 the crop leadership by Japanese Communist author Kobayashi on the island's bullying. 186 00:21:59,580 --> 00:22:06,360 It was also about all political parties and newspapers by communists or perceived 187 00:22:06,360 --> 00:22:10,260 communist organisations were continuously strictly prohibited from entering. 188 00:22:11,240 --> 00:22:16,400 These lists were sent out to publication houses and booksellers across Europe and particularly in Britain. 189 00:22:16,850 --> 00:22:23,590 It will then begin a strict instruction to cooperate with the government to take necessary measures to control the conventional, 190 00:22:23,600 --> 00:22:26,970 seditious, amateurish subcontinent concurrently. 191 00:22:27,260 --> 00:22:32,900 The modern world is thought to be about to get published anywhere in India from being exported 192 00:22:33,470 --> 00:22:41,300 censor stations across the globe and are opening up in vernacular languages and travelling abroad. 193 00:22:43,120 --> 00:22:50,200 And yet the contagion of revolutionary propaganda I continue to see across colonial borders 194 00:22:50,830 --> 00:22:56,920 averting the gaze of the state and slowly making its way to ship bankers and trade union meetings. 195 00:22:57,340 --> 00:23:06,700 The unremarkable bookshops underground political gatherings to obscure shops, secret hideouts, even to prison cells. 196 00:23:07,840 --> 00:23:12,430 And I argue that this is where the international really resided in. 197 00:23:15,150 --> 00:23:20,390 But he's not he was press was a key instrument of creating a sense of simultaneously 198 00:23:20,730 --> 00:23:25,560 amongst political organisers scattered across empires working in this underground. 199 00:23:26,130 --> 00:23:34,080 It was a conduit through which left us one that could converse across spaces, crossing barriers of distance and language, 200 00:23:34,380 --> 00:23:40,530 and a key song for the formation of a global left and a forum where whole world brotherhood members to talk. 201 00:23:41,670 --> 00:23:46,230 This period also saw the rise of what I call the global public spell, 202 00:23:46,500 --> 00:23:51,209 whose members may not have a physical injury to them but nonetheless consider themselves as 203 00:23:51,210 --> 00:23:57,090 part of an intellectual community connected through this underground Republic of Letters. 204 00:23:58,400 --> 00:24:02,860 Indeed, one of the most noteworthy contributions made by this international communist 205 00:24:02,900 --> 00:24:07,820 network was to bring various anti-colonial movements in the same ideological frame. 206 00:24:08,090 --> 00:24:17,690 And why be does not only see them as selective, we also borrow from each other and see them as signposts for the imminent collapse of capital. 207 00:24:18,970 --> 00:24:27,940 Within government spaces, the consumption of literature contributed to the radicalising of national standards, particularly in the case of India. 208 00:24:28,630 --> 00:24:34,090 Questions of economic distribution of the future of our labour and peasantry and the eradication 209 00:24:34,090 --> 00:24:42,160 of mass poverty increasingly became central to our politics as we move from 1914 to 1937. 210 00:24:43,720 --> 00:24:45,700 Marxist anti-colonialist charters. 211 00:24:45,700 --> 00:24:53,290 The efficacy of the ideas about India form, form, representation and participation, instead linking the liberation of the masses, 212 00:24:53,290 --> 00:24:58,870 the wholesale dismantling of the economic and political structures that have sustained empire. 213 00:25:00,090 --> 00:25:07,590 And I was I was were understood as the penultimate manifestation of capitalist accumulation in governance was. 214 00:25:09,560 --> 00:25:16,580 If this was seen as a form of institutionalised class exploitation in the school. 215 00:25:16,580 --> 00:25:26,020 All that, of course, complex worlds post-revolution world was necessarily one bereft of empires. 216 00:25:26,570 --> 00:25:34,730 This symbiotically tied revolutionary idealism to a communist revolution. 217 00:25:35,830 --> 00:25:44,660 So in the final scene, I would like to illustrate this by focusing on one intellectual and his part of the process, the illusionary ROI. 218 00:25:47,260 --> 00:25:47,980 So if he. 219 00:25:48,920 --> 00:26:01,280 In the early 1920s, this community of international writers who I recalled counted in their numbers the book The Bengali Evolutionary Socialist, 220 00:26:01,280 --> 00:26:05,800 Edmond Roy amongst their numbers. And let's see. 221 00:26:06,770 --> 00:26:10,560 So I told my animal, please click license. 222 00:26:10,760 --> 00:26:16,870 So here is a picture of what was that? The door that is Roy. 223 00:26:17,150 --> 00:26:21,460 This is at the second meeting of the National in Moscow. 224 00:26:22,930 --> 00:26:26,290 Roy's political journey is fascinating, and I'm happy to talk more about them. 225 00:26:26,290 --> 00:26:29,530 And I'm sure many of you have encountered him already. 226 00:26:31,150 --> 00:26:39,400 His journey took him from the underground in Calcutta in the early 20th century to San Francisco to post-revolution Mexico City, 227 00:26:39,670 --> 00:26:43,570 and then eventually to Moscow and across Central Asia, South Asia, 228 00:26:44,020 --> 00:26:52,210 and intellectually removed from nationalism, socialism and communism and then beyond in the final night. 229 00:26:54,530 --> 00:26:57,110 I've written about it extensively and I'm happy to talk about it more. 230 00:26:57,500 --> 00:27:04,850 But right now, I want to focus on his only period of Elvis work between 1919 1946. 231 00:27:05,450 --> 00:27:10,560 He was particularly prolific in this period, along with his wife, as in Roy, we met at Stanford. 232 00:27:11,930 --> 00:27:18,100 He regularly contributed both of them the pages of pages, often correspondence which I showed earlier, 233 00:27:18,440 --> 00:27:22,820 as well as editing and publishing a number of periodicals, newspapers and books. 234 00:27:24,140 --> 00:27:31,370 This chapter of Roy's career does encapsulates the relationship for me between the articles on the ground, 235 00:27:31,670 --> 00:27:37,370 the spread of the consequent propaganda and the making of a global imaginary. 236 00:27:38,870 --> 00:27:41,510 With the financial support of the Soviet government. 237 00:27:41,750 --> 00:27:49,640 His wife, Evelyn, developed a network of Communist agents that would help them produce as well as disseminate political propaganda to India. 238 00:27:50,090 --> 00:27:55,310 In Britain, they relied on the assistance of politicians such as Socrates ex-lover Anton Welsh, 239 00:27:56,030 --> 00:27:59,270 as well as the labour activist and communist writer Charles Ashley. 240 00:27:59,960 --> 00:28:08,300 His compatriots included communist colonists across Europe, such as the Irish activist James Connolly and the draws in Switzerland, 241 00:28:08,660 --> 00:28:12,440 political theatre in Paris and otherwise of France as well. 242 00:28:13,130 --> 00:28:22,410 I have also collaborated with many Indian communists, including political thought he had known and worked with since fighting to redeem. 243 00:28:24,090 --> 00:28:29,040 His network featured over the days from Dublin to Java, from Hamburg to Aligarh. 244 00:28:29,820 --> 00:28:39,330 And this large network demonstrates how Communist the Communist international enabled the global production and dissemination of artificial heart. 245 00:28:40,110 --> 00:28:46,530 So 2000s of copies of Roy's newspaper, The Vanguard, as well as the masses, 246 00:28:46,800 --> 00:28:55,980 were sent to Indian political emigres in England, America, Japan, Indonesia and forwarded into the subcontinent. 247 00:28:57,180 --> 00:29:04,290 In other cases, he arranged for that literature that we sent Russia via Iran. 248 00:29:04,560 --> 00:29:07,950 And then. And then Afghanistan. 249 00:29:08,670 --> 00:29:18,360 And then entering into what is now Pakistan. This also illustrates a slide the significance of maritime labour as a trip on workers. 250 00:29:18,830 --> 00:29:26,700 The history of radical socialism. And this is a part of what I argue in in the book. 251 00:29:27,480 --> 00:29:36,410 The smuggling arrangements often rely on the expertise and the capacities of sailors and dock workers in European as well as in India alike. 252 00:29:37,320 --> 00:29:39,510 Roy collaborated with European Army to stop this, 253 00:29:39,510 --> 00:29:46,770 to organise and recruit European settlers in Rotterdam and Hamburg, Mysore as well as in Liverpool and London. 254 00:29:47,790 --> 00:29:53,730 But currently Communist agents were assigned to both cities, schools and on the other side, in India, in Bombay and Calcutta, 255 00:29:54,060 --> 00:30:05,490 with strike and strike was material from the ships and then circulated in factories, local political organisations, student unions, trade unions, etc. 256 00:30:06,570 --> 00:30:10,110 Thus the creation of this, what I call the Underground Republic of Letters. 257 00:30:10,410 --> 00:30:14,370 It not just ordered the global e-tolls of international communist talk, 258 00:30:14,940 --> 00:30:20,820 but also the organisation Agitation and Solidarity of Transnational Maritime Networks. 259 00:30:21,780 --> 00:30:29,720 It depended on the work of people like as a colleague, a steward of the ship, or the owner who was caught smuggling copies of Roy's name. 260 00:30:30,180 --> 00:30:34,530 What do we want from the Calcutta? It needed. 261 00:30:34,530 --> 00:30:41,189 People like John Ralston Agrisa on a ship and my side, who was also doing a hundred of these convoys. 262 00:30:41,190 --> 00:30:48,440 Bulletin to Colombo. And it reminds us of DAVIES and Sydney Machine were members of the International Seamen's 263 00:30:48,440 --> 00:30:56,060 Union who aimed to illegally distribute communist sailors abroad embezzled an oil company. 264 00:30:57,320 --> 00:31:04,040 It is to very close despite strict prohibitory measures and severe policing that are taking. 265 00:31:04,040 --> 00:31:09,290 The literature began spreading across the Indian Ocean in ever increasing quantities. 266 00:31:09,800 --> 00:31:14,290 Not only the vanguard, but copies of international press correspondence, publications of the ready, 267 00:31:14,720 --> 00:31:21,800 labour unions and various affiliated bodies circulated amongst the colonial and labour circles within India. 268 00:31:22,460 --> 00:31:28,280 Sometimes sailors would carry them amongst their personal belongings, hiding them in food, tents and boxes of soap. 269 00:31:28,910 --> 00:31:36,420 Another, they were discreetly crammed into inoffensive books, like novels, including for these and other colleges. 270 00:31:37,220 --> 00:31:42,470 These guerrilla tactics, I argue, are an important part of the subversive repertoire of methods. 271 00:31:42,830 --> 00:31:45,920 But ironically, it has used the building underground, 272 00:31:46,640 --> 00:31:52,070 and it is due to this system that these texts sort of bearing and then be translated 273 00:31:52,070 --> 00:31:55,760 across the Indian subcontinent and indeed in the British story of world. 274 00:31:58,030 --> 00:32:06,010 So if you get up the next slide, it is using this system that Roy was able to propagate a revolutionary theory of anti-colonialism. 275 00:32:07,210 --> 00:32:16,690 Roy was a part of a ghetto, open, anti-colonial fighting intellectuals who shared a deep global imagining of social emancipation. 276 00:32:17,350 --> 00:32:24,069 At the core of his political talk was a commitment when designing the revolutionary potential in India in historical material. 277 00:32:24,070 --> 00:32:28,690 The Stones for Roy, the rise of nationalism in India presented a paradox. 278 00:32:29,380 --> 00:32:36,610 On the one hand, the mass movement was unquote undeniably powerful and represented what he called it as a struggle story. 279 00:32:36,620 --> 00:32:40,450 Again, to a certain extent unprecedented Tata uncle. 280 00:32:41,320 --> 00:32:48,670 But on the other hand, a movement based on orthodox nationalism was incapable of leading the destruction of the socioeconomic 281 00:32:48,670 --> 00:32:54,130 structures that found most of the population in an endless cycle of economic destitution. 282 00:32:55,230 --> 00:32:59,100 In his book, India in Transition. In 1922, it was published. 283 00:32:59,430 --> 00:33:06,030 Roy and Salter write a sort of history to lay bare the deep rooted social tides of the present unrest, 284 00:33:06,990 --> 00:33:09,690 to indicate a revolutionary trend of the growing movement, 285 00:33:09,990 --> 00:33:17,490 and to impress upon those concerned with the necessity of conforming to the program and tactics according to it. 286 00:33:19,880 --> 00:33:24,080 Royal knew that the conventional consequence of the centrifugal tendencies inherent in the 287 00:33:24,100 --> 00:33:28,910 international movement was the divorce of the mass movement from its bourgeois leadership. 288 00:33:29,780 --> 00:33:39,890 For Roy, India was now inoculated with the same revolutionary energy that affected societies across across the world. 289 00:33:42,040 --> 00:33:49,150 In the in the next slide. I would. The awakening of mass energy just strengthened the movement for national liberation. 290 00:33:49,600 --> 00:33:56,440 And we shall know what is capable of making this movement a success. At the same time weakens the position of the bourgeois national movement. 291 00:33:56,830 --> 00:33:59,830 In that case, bourgeois nationalism will end. 292 00:33:59,830 --> 00:34:06,640 The compromise with the supremacy and the liberation of India will be left to the political movement of the workers, 293 00:34:06,650 --> 00:34:11,320 the peasants consciously organised and fighting on the grounds of class struggle. 294 00:34:14,850 --> 00:34:20,170 So I would like to sort of. This was published in 1922. 295 00:34:21,280 --> 00:34:26,980 This remained the basis of his critique of the social movement. 296 00:34:30,080 --> 00:34:36,850 Now, in the last part, I just would like to offer some concluding remarks about global anti-colonialism, 297 00:34:37,600 --> 00:34:43,180 which is it wants process and project political process as well as philosophy. 298 00:34:44,160 --> 00:34:53,100 This period marks the emergence of the rise of a kind of global anti-colonial consciousness that boasted a universalist and revolutionary ethos. 299 00:34:54,130 --> 00:35:03,130 So the account I have through this account I have index me the means to which this consciousness proliferated across borders. 300 00:35:03,790 --> 00:35:08,590 If the Bolshevik Revolution had galvanised revolutionary activism across the world, 301 00:35:08,890 --> 00:35:16,570 the symbolic and mature patronage of the Soviet Union contributed to the formation of the global community of radical anti-communists. 302 00:35:17,510 --> 00:35:21,920 This marks a decisive shift, I argue, in the intellectual history of decolonisation. 303 00:35:22,700 --> 00:35:32,060 Exemplary of the shift, the writing and the activities of someone I am adroit illustrates the functioning and political stakes of anti-colonialism. 304 00:35:32,690 --> 00:35:39,170 An antibody Zimbabwe formed by Marxist Leninism is in its horrors, believe us. 305 00:35:39,740 --> 00:35:48,470 As I mentioned, the imminent collapse of capital which would create the conditions of possibility for a new type of world. 306 00:35:48,770 --> 00:35:58,400 For a new type of possibility at work. The windows of conceptualisation were universal in ambition, and political practice was global in scale. 307 00:36:00,470 --> 00:36:10,880 Overall, my book is premised on the idea that the soaring imaginations of people like Roy and those at the bottom of the polls and who supported him. 308 00:36:12,660 --> 00:36:20,730 Are important. They are very important not only for the possibilities of the future. 309 00:36:21,690 --> 00:36:25,170 But also they continue to mature and form our presence. 310 00:36:25,950 --> 00:36:29,610 And those ideals are not found in the halls of power alone. 311 00:36:30,710 --> 00:36:34,280 But they found the quiet reflections of actors known and unknown. 312 00:36:35,780 --> 00:36:41,120 So all the stations are long shadow with their histories abound within and without the worlds of the economy. 313 00:36:41,840 --> 00:36:45,530 And as we try to imagine a better future in the face of historic challenges, 314 00:36:46,160 --> 00:36:52,520 I hope the book contributes to the collective project of uncovering and thinking through the lives of parts of those who, 315 00:36:52,520 --> 00:36:55,550 in times of peril, have sought to make the world anew. 316 00:36:56,060 --> 00:36:56,520 Thank you.