Thank you so much. Thank you. My first my deepest thank you for these ads for inviting me on this opportunity to
sing celebration songs and to all of you for attending on this rather beautiful day.
Now that she's excited off with me. I really appreciate your time.
I'm extremely excited to share it, particularly at this forum.
My work on this forum because so much of what I'm trying to do fits in with the intellectual objectives of this forum,
and I have extremely excited to share my work with you.
So I must take you as a prelude. To.
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.
He asked for some time in busy coordinating with colonial and foreign offices throughout Asia and Africa on behalf of the state government.
In order to compile a list of newspapers and pamphlets designed to foment disturbances in India, Egypt and other further oriental dependencies.
Suicide mutiny in their native armies to boast about Islamism or to create pro-German sentiments
in Oriental countries and caught his star was an important one with Britain and economies at war.
It had become more urgent than ever to eradicate the threats to the help of the Empire as any publications.
But denying is a criticism of colonial rule.
Attacks on Western culture and values and any denunciation of the Crown were deemed pernicious and capable of jeopardising the war effort.
It was important hence to neutralise these threats. So every day our officer, according to his desk, can make new entry into his capital.
It's about him, not subversive. Propaganda was produced across the world.
So it's just groups from different parts of the British Empire that published and distributed anti-colonial propaganda from all over the globe.
Of all similarities. The result was obviously produced in the countries themselves and a lot of it wasn't founded, confiscated or otherwise banned.
But many educators found safe havens elsewhere to promote the rebellious Moses Egyptian
and Syrian nationalists published literature in Leipzig as the clergy and activists,
sometimes Constantinople. Others utilised Siege of Paris, Geneva.
It didn't make many groups published material as far as Cisco and Vancouver.
And meanwhile, other East Asian colonialists struggled to go from Tokyo and Shanghai.
Arabic and Turkish dissident writing was even be published in as far as Guatemala.
And in Brazil.
But to get at the droll social networks nature of these footprints, Rothman was assured that the produced and multiply bilingual body of literature.
A large number of these publications were understandably written in English and French as well as in German.
But a considerable amount was all the Arabic word in the thuggish was also reproduced,
and the collection also conveyed false nations in Spanish, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and all.
So perhaps unbeknown to him, this officer was creating a historical artefact which exemplified the collective imaginations of imperial
subjects yearning to overthrow the colonial yoke and radically rethinking the figure of their politics.
This polyglot corpus contained an eclectic mix of literature.
There is a form of content.
There were warnings of the expansionist designs following the British, French and Belgian empires, as well as Tsarist Empire.
Those celebrations of the at the same time, though, of the German war efforts and foreign propaganda in support of the Ottoman Empire,
there were incitements against colonial soldiers against the British Empire growing its
soldiers in the British Army revolt sometimes meant to attack and embarrass governments.
Others, my department and foster national consciousness still always imagined future a new global politics.
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.
And one day our offices are added to this catalogue, a small book entitled Imperialism as the High State of Capitalism.
And it does have that all story begins. So in this next slide.
You can see what I've just Google what I do today,
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,
what I'm calling the history of global conflict from history of universal time.
Some nations particularly looking at it from South Asia.
And in order to see that one third of all the points, all of two things from the radical underground,
which I recreated in the book, and one of the skills that we finally quoted that the pilgrim.
So. And this on the ground we would meet.
This was just part of the reconstruction of the book. The book recreates.
We will meet a diverse Gazans, intellectuals as well as workers, publishers as well as revolutionary agents and informants.
Through this method. My talk.
My presentation to you today will showcase what the material reality as well as the political content of this global community,
including the skulls of Gaza that animate the book.
Think of it in the opportunity of Android one discuss as well as RB thought.
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.
By examining that noble discourse, Walton practices what is content.
I will show how universal domination not only became the aim of social movements,
but counterintuitively, also the objective of radical internationalism.
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,
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.
Specifically, it asks what role the language of revolutionary internationalism in the wake of
the 1917 water revolution in Russia played in bringing about Empire's formal ends.
And in all this, why did Radical come to recognise the nation state as the dominant form of the state
making this why the presence of we variety of non-state or internationalist projects?
As I indicated to the vignette of the town, I was assaulted at the turn of the century.
The global imperial order was in federal. Has the largest imperial power in the world.
Great Britain face masks spectrum from across the quarter,
various quarters of its empire building and especially in India, but also, of course, in Egypt, in islands.
Emerge and as well as in some way control or semi-official control by China.
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.
But facing the prospect of a changing world.
And they figured out the site not belong to and drove off.
This was an argument that I make in the book.
And then rising as an intellectual and a political activist advocate, a statesman defined by his position in the world,
brought up one that's primarily defined by the crisis of liberal order and the looming question of the future of communities.
As he and his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917,
he announced the dawn of a new era when the empires of the world will eventually fall rolls of the impending world revolution.
My book will show that his all resonated with all sorts of a view of the press.
We saw in his victory the possibility of a new world in Rio Grande, the river Ganges, anti-colonialist darling,
also who had realised the only possible balance in this process the cause and revolutionary movements that sought universal liberation.
I love draws from 25 all across densities,
and it's this multilingual and multiple pilot projects in which I chronicle the
political party practice of anti-colonialist from India as well as from Egypt,
Iran, Turkistan, Trinidad, Kenya, as well as the compatriots across Europe and the Soviet Union.
And I show in the book how they created and connected through a kind of global public square.
The book tracks the spread of our deep rooted vocabularies across geographies, through clandestine networks and underground channels,
and argues that this process led to the emergence of a kind of global Muslim community whose
members do not always approximate share a deep commitment to a radical restructuring of the world.
And particularly I want that I show how South Asia and India formed a critical node in this
imagined community as a centre for physical as well as symbolic centre of anti-colonial making.
So this is sort of narratives in the next has three main purposes and it follows response
to this recent scholarly publications including and especially those coming from scholars.
Here is that study decolonisation in connected rather than discrete jobs as well provide them with the logical tools of global history,
which we have grown as a field in the past.
Many especially did write new histories with an end to the empires, which tied to the ends of empires.
The global phenomenon. Now this is a property intervention has three intellectual objectives.
First is reappraise is the origins of the refashioning of the future political order in the wake of the First World War.
Over the last decade, several historians have highlighted by the end of the war led to a transition of power for empires,
particularly the British Empire.
Many imperial policy makers were bent on coming to do a transformation, often viewed as in the period following the piece of insight.
Some have called this internationalisation of empire champions of liberal internationalism.
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.
And there is a great scholarly debate regarding the philosophies underpinning these designs,
as well as the consequences, both intended and unintended, of their implementation in the world.
However, there is another question that I asked that seems to be implicit in these discussions.
And that merits our attention.
Why did the policy makers and politicians perceive the visual system of the previous century to be in need of some type of reclamation?
I argue that all of the answer to this question lies in the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on anti-colonialism in the world.
Waves of anti-British revolution and politics had been sweeping the world since the turn of the century.
It's not before, but now, after 1917,
not only have the bearers of a revolutionary violently overthrown and imperial governments bizarre as governments,
but they had also launched the call for anti-colonialism across the world to unite.
Thus attempts to nationalise empire by liberal statesmen and their allies were conceived,
at least in part, as a response to the perceived crisis of the internationalisation of surrealism.
My second intellectual objective is in sort of sizing.
This internationalisation of our debut is to trace the origins of the language and movements for universal decolonisation.
The relationship between socialism and decolonisation is a story that has largely been associated with the global Cold War.
It is in this geography, and many scholars of wars acknowledge the influence of socialism on the Global South.
However, I show that the rules of this discourse go back to this earlier period.
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.
On the contrary, many of the actors who came of age in the interwar period, directly or indirectly,
participated in and contributed to the creation of the political and intellectual cultures that
would facilitate and foster the growth of socialist ideals in the latter half of the 20th century,
as well as through the kind of Third World Solidarity Project,
that that would be the focus of a lot of scholarship, especially in the past two decades.
I show in the book that the many, many lessons from South Asia and across the British Empire,
the Bolshevik Revolution, served as a signal, a rupture and a moment of possibility.
The ideals of the revolution were not necessarily entirely new or strange,
but they were a realisation of an imperial global vision, which many had been searching for.
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,
as colonialists, not only as itinerant revolutionaries and campaigners, but also as intellectuals, as thinkers and as writers.
My work does present a new intellectual history of anti-colonialism.
A central proposition of my love of the book is that Lenin was interpretive by his colonialist mortgages in South Asia and elsewhere.
As a revolutionary anti-imperial thinker, I show the many ways in which anti-colonialist interpreted,
builds on modify, argued and otherwise responded to Lenin's critique of imperialism.
I quote argued that the rise of Marxist antibiotic Romeo harm, coupled with Soviet activity in 1920s and thirties,
contributed to the emergence of a new type of radical and universalist arguments that challenged the legitimacy of a party of competing rule.
These arguments, unlike those in the age of revolution,
stoked social inequality and transformation of the socioeconomic order that has sustained imperial and populist structures.
So unlike earlier forms of revolutionary movements for self-determination.
Anti-colonialism of the 20th century was not just about ousting foreign powers, but also about a social transformation.
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.
And for that, I will start with the first thing. On a cold every morning in 1923 when Mary Lawrence,
who was the why the steamship moguls at Walter Lawrence, receive an urgent telegram from the office.
At Whitehall in London. Since her husband was away from England.
The corresponding officer, a man named Frederic Du,
was Anita persistence in communicating with company managements about immediately on a matter of great significance.
It has come to the attention of the company that it was increasingly evident to the
causes that shipping routes to India had become susceptible to communist infiltration.
Seditious literature was being smuggled on board cities across the Indian Ocean.
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.
Hence, the Secretary of State for India also to communicate with all principal Indian shipping lines,
dumping on European ports in the hope that they may be able to stop the use
of the cruise boats that submerging the Office of the State Executive save.
Was it assured by numerous on her husband that all captains were in strictest confidence,
made aware of the situation and instructions were given to take action against any insubordinate members on.
90% imagination in colonial spaces, but particularly susceptible.
The Communist incitement. Intelligence officers argue that communist literature of any variety,
even theoretical or otherwise, would prove dangerous in the hands of impressionable young minds.
Moreover, colonial authorities considered controlling the spread of subversive propaganda in India as especially dangerous.
This surmise the strategy of the India of India under the Eastern policy of the third international
communist national in Moscow and thwarted would increase Bolshevik activity in the subcontinent,
resulting in the patron of radical groups and organisation.
Second the subcontinent through the conquest, of course, through which political dissidents would connect with the Middle East of any South Africa.
On the one hand, as with East Asia and Southeast Asia on the other.
Literary paraphernalia travel down from alien worlds to draw Alexandria the rumble across Iran as far as Tokyo.
This made in the intersection of this literature in India, especially imperative.
So the scope of the prescription of this, or at least look at the legal level of this,
the prescriptions in these laws will increase every year after 1914.
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,
had been confiscated and stored in police depots so they could go.
And this slide gives you a. I look into theses collections that contain classical works alongside Engels and others,
and another times include the texts by leading communists who were living previously across the world.
There's Lenin and Trotsky and in Russia, but also a German broadly enemy.
Right. Has the U.K. plural that given Germany scope narrowing of the United States.
The semantic revolution was considered especially sedentary,
leading to later acquisition of Falsettos in our genes as well revolution that was published in 1987.
The reportage of sleep on this was seen so as insightful so that books like Gondry's Famous The Second of the Revolution.
Then because much of the world of oppression was banned.
Yes, data and gospels read sorry, which I not another journalistic account.
And Agnes Smedley is China's madame. All Jews were likewise barred from entry.
Similarly, novelists with communist sympathies were also regarded as punished, despite authorities leading to the central notes from around the world,
including Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Radical Bosses Storming Heaven,
the crop leadership by Japanese Communist author Kobayashi on the island's bullying.
It was also about all political parties and newspapers by communists or perceived
communist organisations were continuously strictly prohibited from entering.
These lists were sent out to publication houses and booksellers across Europe and particularly in Britain.
It will then begin a strict instruction to cooperate with the government to take necessary measures to control the conventional,
seditious, amateurish subcontinent concurrently.
The modern world is thought to be about to get published anywhere in India from being exported
censor stations across the globe and are opening up in vernacular languages and travelling abroad.
And yet the contagion of revolutionary propaganda I continue to see across colonial borders
averting the gaze of the state and slowly making its way to ship bankers and trade union meetings.
The unremarkable bookshops underground political gatherings to obscure shops, secret hideouts, even to prison cells.
And I argue that this is where the international really resided in.
But he's not he was press was a key instrument of creating a sense of simultaneously
amongst political organisers scattered across empires working in this underground.
It was a conduit through which left us one that could converse across spaces, crossing barriers of distance and language,
and a key song for the formation of a global left and a forum where whole world brotherhood members to talk.
This period also saw the rise of what I call the global public spell,
whose members may not have a physical injury to them but nonetheless consider themselves as
part of an intellectual community connected through this underground Republic of Letters.
Indeed, one of the most noteworthy contributions made by this international communist
network was to bring various anti-colonial movements in the same ideological frame.
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.
Within government spaces, the consumption of literature contributed to the radicalising of national standards, particularly in the case of India.
Questions of economic distribution of the future of our labour and peasantry and the eradication
of mass poverty increasingly became central to our politics as we move from 1914 to 1937.
Marxist anti-colonialist charters.
The efficacy of the ideas about India form, form, representation and participation, instead linking the liberation of the masses,
the wholesale dismantling of the economic and political structures that have sustained empire.
And I was I was were understood as the penultimate manifestation of capitalist accumulation in governance was.
If this was seen as a form of institutionalised class exploitation in the school.
All that, of course, complex worlds post-revolution world was necessarily one bereft of empires.
This symbiotically tied revolutionary idealism to a communist revolution.
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.
So if he.
In the early 1920s, this community of international writers who I recalled counted in their numbers the book The Bengali Evolutionary Socialist,
Edmond Roy amongst their numbers. And let's see.
So I told my animal, please click license.
So here is a picture of what was that? The door that is Roy.
This is at the second meeting of the National in Moscow.
Roy's political journey is fascinating, and I'm happy to talk more about them.
And I'm sure many of you have encountered him already.
His journey took him from the underground in Calcutta in the early 20th century to San Francisco to post-revolution Mexico City,
and then eventually to Moscow and across Central Asia, South Asia,
and intellectually removed from nationalism, socialism and communism and then beyond in the final night.
I've written about it extensively and I'm happy to talk about it more.
But right now, I want to focus on his only period of Elvis work between 1919 1946.
He was particularly prolific in this period, along with his wife, as in Roy, we met at Stanford.
He regularly contributed both of them the pages of pages, often correspondence which I showed earlier,
as well as editing and publishing a number of periodicals, newspapers and books.
This chapter of Roy's career does encapsulates the relationship for me between the articles on the ground,
the spread of the consequent propaganda and the making of a global imaginary.
With the financial support of the Soviet government.
His wife, Evelyn, developed a network of Communist agents that would help them produce as well as disseminate political propaganda to India.
In Britain, they relied on the assistance of politicians such as Socrates ex-lover Anton Welsh,
as well as the labour activist and communist writer Charles Ashley.
His compatriots included communist colonists across Europe, such as the Irish activist James Connolly and the draws in Switzerland,
political theatre in Paris and otherwise of France as well.
I have also collaborated with many Indian communists, including political thought he had known and worked with since fighting to redeem.
His network featured over the days from Dublin to Java, from Hamburg to Aligarh.
And this large network demonstrates how Communist the Communist international enabled the global production and dissemination of artificial heart.
So 2000s of copies of Roy's newspaper, The Vanguard, as well as the masses,
were sent to Indian political emigres in England, America, Japan, Indonesia and forwarded into the subcontinent.
In other cases, he arranged for that literature that we sent Russia via Iran.
And then. And then Afghanistan.
And then entering into what is now Pakistan. This also illustrates a slide the significance of maritime labour as a trip on workers.
The history of radical socialism. And this is a part of what I argue in in the book.
The smuggling arrangements often rely on the expertise and the capacities of sailors and dock workers in European as well as in India alike.
Roy collaborated with European Army to stop this,
to organise and recruit European settlers in Rotterdam and Hamburg, Mysore as well as in Liverpool and London.
But currently Communist agents were assigned to both cities, schools and on the other side, in India, in Bombay and Calcutta,
with strike and strike was material from the ships and then circulated in factories, local political organisations, student unions, trade unions, etc.
Thus the creation of this, what I call the Underground Republic of Letters.
It not just ordered the global e-tolls of international communist talk,
but also the organisation Agitation and Solidarity of Transnational Maritime Networks.
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.
What do we want from the Calcutta? It needed.
People like John Ralston Agrisa on a ship and my side, who was also doing a hundred of these convoys.
Bulletin to Colombo. And it reminds us of DAVIES and Sydney Machine were members of the International Seamen's
Union who aimed to illegally distribute communist sailors abroad embezzled an oil company.
It is to very close despite strict prohibitory measures and severe policing that are taking.
The literature began spreading across the Indian Ocean in ever increasing quantities.
Not only the vanguard, but copies of international press correspondence, publications of the ready,
labour unions and various affiliated bodies circulated amongst the colonial and labour circles within India.
Sometimes sailors would carry them amongst their personal belongings, hiding them in food, tents and boxes of soap.
Another, they were discreetly crammed into inoffensive books, like novels, including for these and other colleges.
These guerrilla tactics, I argue, are an important part of the subversive repertoire of methods.
But ironically, it has used the building underground,
and it is due to this system that these texts sort of bearing and then be translated
across the Indian subcontinent and indeed in the British story of world.
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.
Roy was a part of a ghetto, open, anti-colonial fighting intellectuals who shared a deep global imagining of social emancipation.
At the core of his political talk was a commitment when designing the revolutionary potential in India in historical material.
The Stones for Roy, the rise of nationalism in India presented a paradox.
On the one hand, the mass movement was unquote undeniably powerful and represented what he called it as a struggle story.
Again, to a certain extent unprecedented Tata uncle.
But on the other hand, a movement based on orthodox nationalism was incapable of leading the destruction of the socioeconomic
structures that found most of the population in an endless cycle of economic destitution.
In his book, India in Transition. In 1922, it was published.
Roy and Salter write a sort of history to lay bare the deep rooted social tides of the present unrest,
to indicate a revolutionary trend of the growing movement,
and to impress upon those concerned with the necessity of conforming to the program and tactics according to it.
Royal knew that the conventional consequence of the centrifugal tendencies inherent in the
international movement was the divorce of the mass movement from its bourgeois leadership.
For Roy, India was now inoculated with the same revolutionary energy that affected societies across across the world.
In the in the next slide. I would. The awakening of mass energy just strengthened the movement for national liberation.
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.
In that case, bourgeois nationalism will end.
The compromise with the supremacy and the liberation of India will be left to the political movement of the workers,
the peasants consciously organised and fighting on the grounds of class struggle.
So I would like to sort of. This was published in 1922.
This remained the basis of his critique of the social movement.
Now, in the last part, I just would like to offer some concluding remarks about global anti-colonialism,
which is it wants process and project political process as well as philosophy.
This period marks the emergence of the rise of a kind of global anti-colonial consciousness that boasted a universalist and revolutionary ethos.
So the account I have through this account I have index me the means to which this consciousness proliferated across borders.
If the Bolshevik Revolution had galvanised revolutionary activism across the world,
the symbolic and mature patronage of the Soviet Union contributed to the formation of the global community of radical anti-communists.
This marks a decisive shift, I argue, in the intellectual history of decolonisation.
Exemplary of the shift, the writing and the activities of someone I am adroit illustrates the functioning and political stakes of anti-colonialism.
An antibody Zimbabwe formed by Marxist Leninism is in its horrors, believe us.
As I mentioned, the imminent collapse of capital which would create the conditions of possibility for a new type of world.
For a new type of possibility at work. The windows of conceptualisation were universal in ambition, and political practice was global in scale.
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.
Are important. They are very important not only for the possibilities of the future.
But also they continue to mature and form our presence.
And those ideals are not found in the halls of power alone.
But they found the quiet reflections of actors known and unknown.
So all the stations are long shadow with their histories abound within and without the worlds of the economy.
And as we try to imagine a better future in the face of historic challenges,
I hope the book contributes to the collective project of uncovering and thinking through the lives of parts of those who,
in times of peril, have sought to make the world anew.
Thank you.