The Global 1930s: The International Decade 041573830X, 9780415738309

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THE GLOBAL 1930S

Decentering the traditional narrative of American breadlines, Soviet show trials and German fascists, The Global 1930s takes a truly international approach to exploring this turbulent decade. Though nationalism was prevalent throughout this period, Matera and Kent contend that the 1930s are better characterized by the development of internationalist impulses and transnational connections, and this volume illustrates how the familiar events of this decade shaped and were shaped by a much wider global context. Thematically organized, this book is divided into four main parts, covering the evolving concept and trappings of modernism, growing political and cultural internationalism, the global economic crisis and challenges to liberalism. Chapters discuss topics such as the rivalry between imperial powers, colonial migration and race relations, rising anti-colonial sentiments, feminism and gender dynamics around the world, the Great Depression and its far-reaching repercussions, the spread of both communist and fascist political ideologies and the descent once more into global warfare. This book deftly interrogates the western-focused historical tropes of the interwar years, emphasizing the importance and interconnectedness of events in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Wide-ranging and comprehensive, it is essential and fascinating reading for all students of the international history of the 1930s. Marc Matera is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. His publications include The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (2012, co-authored with Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent) and Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (2015). Susan Kingsley Kent is Professor of Distinction in the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Her recent publications include Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (2009), Gender and History (2012), The Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 (2012), Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660–1980 (2015, co-authored with Myles Osborne) and A New History of Britain since 1688: Four Nations and an Empire (2016).

DECADES IN GLOBAL HISTORY

This series takes a fresh view of decades in history, discussing each period from a truly global perspective and interrogating the traditional trope of a decade. In asking questions about what each decade actually represents throughout the wider world and exploring the transnational connections that shaped its course, this global approach allows the reader to see the great events of each decade as intricately bound into and molded by international forces.

Titles in the series: The Global 1920s Richard Carr and Bradley W. Hart The Global 1930s Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent

Forthcoming titles: The Global 1960s Edited by Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga Pieper Mooney The Global 1980s Jonathan Davis The Global 1970s Duco Hellema

THE GLOBAL 1930S The International Decade

Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent The right of Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-73830-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-73831-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20097-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction: the Wilsonian moment betrayed, 1919–1929

1

PART I

Primitive modern

15

1 ’30s modern

17

PART II

Internationalism45 2 Imperial internationalisms

47

3 Anti-colonial internationalisms

70

PART III

International crisis

99

4 The Great Depression

103

5 Revolts

127

vi Contents

PART IV

International challenges to liberalism

153

6 Global communism

157

7 Global fascism

186

Conclusion: the road to war

209

Index221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a global history of the 1930s proved to be far more difficult than we could ever have imagined, and our efforts would have come to naught but for the expertise and generosity of friends and colleagues across a variety of fields. We are deeply indebted to Cemil Aydin, Carol Byerly, Melissa Brzycki, Lucy Chester, Alan Christy, Jennifer Derr, Lil Fenn, Liora Halperin, Alma Heckman, Gail Hershatter, Daniel Joesten, Sanjay Joshi, Rebecca Karl, Miriam Kingsberg, Christopher J. Lee, Mithi Mukherjee, Mike Ortiz, Myles Osborne, Susan Pennybacker, Maya Peterson, Lara Putnam, Mark Reeves, Cecilia Rivas, Ted Rogers, Sherene Seikaly, Juned Shaikh, Mrinalini Sinha, Aaron Windel, Peter Wood, and Marcia Yonemoto. Toby Thacker, who read both the proposal for the manuscript and our first draft, provided us with important suggestions and correctives. We very much appreciate his attention to our work. Lindsay Baker and Anne Davidson provided sustenance and good humor at a crucial moment during our writing. We thank them for all they have done for us. Bonnie Smith read the manuscript in its entirety and gave us invaluable advice. This book has benefited enormously from her erudition; we can only hope that we have done justice to the breadth of her knowledge and her passion for global history.

INTRODUCTION The Wilsonian moment betrayed, 1919–1929

In 1946, the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, attributed his country’s fomenting of World War II in the Pacific to “the contents of the peace treaty signed at the end of the First World War.” Japan had fought in the Great War, as it was called then, on the side of the Allies, and had been invited to attend the Paris Peace Conference ending the war as one of the five big powers, testimony to the stature the country now enjoyed in global affairs. Its delegates had been charged by the government with securing three objectives: to maintain control of the concessions in Shantung, China, it had wrested from the Germans in November 1914; to hold on to the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline islands in the North Pacific; and to see that a racial equality clause be included in the covenant of the proposed League of Nations.This last imperative had become a matter of huge importance to Japanese of all ranks and parties, commanding the attention of the public and driving thundering newspaper editorials. Removing the “unjust practice” of racial discrimination, proclaimed the editor of one paper, was “the greatest of Japan’s missions.” The issue resonated so powerfully because Japanese officials constantly struggled with the question of whether their status as “not-white” rendered them second-class in the eyes of the western powers. Their fears appeared to be affirmed at the Paris conference when the victorious powers established the Council of Four in order to take care of business more efficiently. Japan was not made a member of this elite body.1 The humiliation rankled. So did the discrimination faced by Japanese nationals in other countries. Japanese who had emigrated to or did business in California, for instance, were not permitted to buy or lease land or to bring their wives over to accompany them. Increasingly restrictive immigration policies made it difficult for them to enter Canada or the United States; they were totally excluded from “White Australia” by the stringent policies of that self-governing British dominion. The racial equality clause was seen as one way of addressing such insults on the

2 Introduction

day-to-day level. On a grander scale, Japanese regarded it as a means of achieving equality with the western powers. Japanese diplomats first pitched the racial equality clause to the major powers behind the scenes. Members of the U.S. delegation initially signaled that they could endorse the racial equality clause. It became apparent, however, that the support was only rhetorical as officials backed away from their vague promises. Californians had given their votes to Wilson in the 1912 and 1916 elections in recognition of his opposition to Asian immigration, and President Woodrow Wilson’s top aides knew very well that a racial equality clause would open the door to all kinds of challenges to current American law. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour doubted frankly that an African “could be regarded as the equal of a European or an American.”2 He discreetly avoided mentioning Asians in this formulation, but Japanese officials hardly needed to be reminded of their exclusion from the first rank of the racial order. The refusal of the Australians, who were present as part of the British empire delegation along with representatives of the self-governing colonies of white settlement (or “dominions”) such as South Africa and Canada, to even consider the racial equality clause provided cover for the British and the Americans, allowing them to give lip service to the ideal without having to actually accept it in reality. Rebuffed by the major actors at Paris but determined to eliminate the “badge of shame,” as they called discrimination on the basis of race, the Japanese delegation took the issue before the final session of the League of Nations Commission.When it came up for a vote, a majority of delegates, among them some of the most significant players at the peace conference, supported the proposal.Wilson, however, as chair of the commission, deemed the vote insufficient, asserting – contrary to rulings he had made in earlier decisions – that such a proposal required a unanimous vote for passage. The racial equality clause failed. For Japanese, it seemed clear that westerners did not see them as equals or regard Japan as a great power, a realization that prompted many to seek out and support more bellicose nationalist policies at home. Internationally, the disappointment and humiliation caused by what many regarded as betrayal at the hands of their allies compelled a shift in their thinking about foreign relations with the west. Assertions of equality were all well and good, declared Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a delegate to the peace conference who would go on to become prime minister in 1937, but the real determinant of the course of international affairs, he insisted, was power. His position became increasingly more accepted over the next number of years, informing a foreign policy that would ultimately lead to war across the Pacific. As the emperor recalled in 1946, the events of 1919 led almost directly to Japanese aggression in Asia. “The racial equality proposal demanded by Japan was not accepted by the powers,” the emperor explained. “The discriminatory sentiment between the white and yellow remains as always. . . . These were enough to anger the Japanese people.”3 The experience of the Japanese at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 serves as one example among many of the contradictions of what one historian has called the “Wilsonian moment.”4 As a corollary to the entrance of the United States

Introduction  3

into the war in 1917, the American president had issued his so-called Fourteen Points calling for the creation of a new international order, one based on principles of justice, diplomatic transparency, and the vaguely defined principle of self-determination rather than on the exercise of military power. The assertion of the right of peoples to determine their government and their national borders stood out conspicuously among the objectives, and triggered a surge of optimism amongst colonized and conquered peoples across the globe that their demands for independence and self-determination would be heard. They were not. Delegations from China, Korea, the Middle East, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia were given short shrift, if not ignored outright, by the great powers, which had no intention of undermining their colonial interests by accepting such principles as self-determination for colonized peoples. Five days after the Japanese delegation left for Paris, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a twenty-seven-year-old aristocrat, published “Reject the Anglo-AmericanCentered Peace” in a leading nationalist journal. He insisted upon two principles upon which, in his view, the Japanese could not compromise: all powers to open the doors of their colonies to others, so that all nations will have equal access to the markets and natural resources of the colonial areas. It is imperative that Japan insist on the eradication of racial discrimination . . . we must demand this in the name of justice and humanity.5 For Japanese nationalists like Konoe, racial equality meant comparable access to the resources and markets of the colonized regions of the world, those excluded from the family of nations. In the end, the peace settlement that emerged from the Paris negotiations affirmed the right to empire over self-determination. Indeed, it suggested that domination over subject peoples, territory, and resources was the surest sign of and road to recognition as a great power. ***

An imperial peace The victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference dashed the hopes engendered by the Wilsonian moment in the short run, but they could not stifle the impulses behind them for very long. Indeed, over the next two decades and across the globe, the conventional narrative asserts, the self-determined, sovereign nationstate increasingly became articulated as the only legitimate player on the international stage. This process began in 1919 and continued throughout the 1920s. The 1930s, most historians argue, saw a great expansion of the forces that would establish scores of sovereign, independent nations in the decades following World War II. We suggest that this reading derives from a retrospective viewpoint from which the development of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s are read back into the decade of the 1930s. In the chapters that follow, we assert that, despite incipient or resurgent

4 Introduction

expressions of the national principle, internationalist impulses and transnational connections better characterize the dynamics of the 1930s. Within the framework of the twentieth century, we see the 1930s as the international decade. Coming out of World War I, anticipation of a truly international society based on the sociological and economic realities of an increasingly interconnected world, and the association of the dawning of a new era of internationalism with progress and modernity linked women’s rights organizations, campaigners for racial justice, and anti-colonial lobbyists, among many others. Some groups pursued their aims through traditional political means. Others followed a more confrontational path. The Trinidadian Workingmen’s Association rallied other labor organizations, and railroad and dock workers, municipal employees, and Electric and Telephone Company all went on strike for higher wages and against racial discrimination within the first few months of 1919, culminating in the island’s first general strike by year’s end. Sporadic labor protests and work stoppages continued until 1921, leading to severe government repression and the passage of new legislation against strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of “sedition.” Petitions and calls for constitutional reform or independence not only circulated among widening spheres of anti-colonial dissidents and flooded into the various imperial centers, as they had before the conflict; they also poured into Paris as the great powers met to hammer out the peace settlement in 1919 – many addressed to President Wilson and the delegation from the United States – and into the League of Nations’ headquarters in Geneva thereafter. Korean nationalists looked to the drafters of the League covenant for support for their independence from Japan. Saad Zaghloul led an Egyptian delegation (or wafd, which became the name of the political party that he founded shortly thereafter) to Paris to demand British recognition of the unity and independence of Egypt and Sudan and international arbitration of the dispute over control of the Suez Canal. South Asian representatives of Indian National Congress and Muslim League called upon architects of the new international organization to defend the “rights of non-White races,” which now included, crucially, mobility and employment rights. Chinese activists petitioned for a reversal of the one-sided treaties and a return of that which western powers had wrested from the country in the nineteenth century. Mass protests or revolts followed by bloody reprisals marked the war’s end in the Punjab in India, Ireland, Palestine, Syria, Iraq,Vietnam, and Korea. This combination of anti-colonial and labor insurgencies made world revolution seem possible in 1919. The Senegalese deputy to the French assembly, Blaise Diagne, and the African American sociologist and editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis,W. E. B. Du Bois, organized the first in a series of Pan-African Congresses, as a type of shadow gathering to the peace negotiations in Paris. Despite efforts by the French and American governments to block the attendance of many possible participants, the gathering attracted fifty-seven delegates from the Americas and Africa. In his address, Du Bois reiterated his stance that, as he had declared at the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” The final communiqué from the Paris Pan-African Congress declared that those

Introduction  5

assembled represented lands “inhabited by 85,000,000 Negroes and persons of African descent” excluded from the peace conference. In the end, such attempts to pressure the great powers during the negotiations over the peace settlement or to shape the new international organization came to little, and none of the hopes manifested in the events above came to fruition as a result of the Paris Peace Conference or under the auspices of the League of Nations. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles, especially the awarding of formerly German-controlled Shandong Province to Japan as a mandate territory and the Chinese government’s weak response to it, sparked the May Fourth Movement, an outpouring of popular anti-imperialist political and cultural activity beginning with university students in Beijing that extended into the early 1920s. Proposals for guarantees of religious freedom and the efforts of international women’s organizations to establish women’s equal rights to “self-determination” met the same fate as the racial equality clause. Far from an organization of formally equal nation-states, and even less the germ of a world state envisioned by some, the League of Nations admitted to its ranks a number of “non-sovereign entities,” including the selfgoverning “white dominions” of the British empire (i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) and India. In fact, India contributed nearly as much to the League’s budget as Italy, a permanent council member, even though very few Indians made it into the Secretariat. Though both were territories of the British empire with control of their internal affairs rather than completely sovereign nation-states, Australia and South Africa acquired former German colonies in New Guinea and Southwest Africa as mandates. The “imperial spirit of the peace” produced a new international organization that more than anything internationalized racial and other forms of inequality intended to make the world safe for empire in the years to come.6 Many of the anti-colonial insurgencies, “pan-” movements, and dashed aspirations of 1919 reverberated through the interwar period, reaching a fever pitch during the 1930s.

The 1920s During the interwar period, the political and economic systems that structured the world came apart, processes that had their origins in the First World War. The war or the peace destroyed four empires: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. The Russian empire fell before the war even ended, as a consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. Almost immediately Vladimir Lenin initiated negotiations with the Germans to end the war. The resulting Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 removed Russia from the war, but at a huge cost. Lenin ceded enormous tracts of Russian territory in Ukraine, Georgia, Finland, parts of Poland, and the Baltic states. Seventy-five percent of Russia’s steel and coal reserves, 50% of its other metals, and most of the grain grown in Ukraine fell to Germany. The Bolsheviks had little choice but to accept these terms, the alternative being a resumption of the war, which would certainly result in Russian defeat. But the peace provoked the outbreak of civil war as an unwieldy coalition of tsarist

6 Introduction

reactionaries, bourgeois liberals, and a wide array of non-Bolshevik socialists, supported by the western Allies, rallied to turn out the Bolshevik government. It would last for four years, do extraordinary damage to the country and the people, and ultimately leave the Bolsheviks in power. The new states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, ceded to Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, gained their independence and sovereignty. The civil war that raged between 1918 and 1922 devastated the country. The combination of the war, revolution, the civil war, and the introduction of a policy of terror directed against everyone who opposed the Bolsheviks reduced the amount of land in cultivation to 62% of that in 1914. The addition of drought and the breakdown of transportation during the civil war left four to five million people dead. The country was in ruins. Lenin came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had moved too quickly to impose socialism, and determined on a compromise with capitalism. His so-called New Economic Policy – NEP – maintained state control of basic industry, but it allowed individuals to engage in private trading for their own profit. By this means, Lenin intended to revive trade between the countryside and the cities and towns; the policy worked. Peasants were allowed to sell their agricultural goods at market prices, as were NEP men – middle-men or intermediaries who dealt in agricultural and industrial products. Through the NEP, the economy recovered sufficiently by 1928 to be able to produce at 1913 levels. With Lenin’s death in 1924, a power struggle for control of the Communist Party between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky ensued. Stalin prevailed, and in 1928 he set the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), established in 1921, on a course of successive five-year plans. Designed to make the Soviet Union militarily and industrially self-sufficient and competitive with the west, the five-year plans, which commenced in 1928, established central control over all of economic life. The Versailles treaty imposed harsh terms on Germany and transferred large areas of the former empire to other European powers. France received back the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine seized by the Germans in the 1870 FrancoPrussian war; significant parts of the Rhineland went to France and Belgium. The industrialized Saar region of the Rhineland came under the administration of the League of Nations for fifteen years; and regions of northern and eastern Germany were transferred to Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania. The German empire lost some 13% of its lands in Europe and perhaps 10% of its population. Out of the sprawling, multi-ethnic empire of Austria-Hungary the victors carved the new states of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. An independent Poland emerged from territories previously held by Russia, Germany, and AustriaHungary. The loss of the Saar would hamper considerably Germany’s economic recovery. The new central European and Balkan countries, it soon became clear, did not have the resources or infrastructure to become viable political or economic states. While the war destroyed these European empires, the architects of the peace dismantled the Ottoman empire. After a series of early setbacks that sparked an international shakeup within the state, the Ottoman government rallied under the

Introduction  7

so-called Young Turks – modernizing politicians, officials, and military officers in the Anatolian heartland – and offered stiff resistance to British incursions into the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mesopotamia. Despite exploiting the imperial ambitions of Husayn ibn Ali to foment rebellion and inflicting heavy casualties, the Allies had never completely defeated the Ottoman army on the battlefield. Throughout the Middle Eastern provinces, intellectuals, political figures, and business leaders across ethnic and confessional lines had embraced the notion of citizenship within an Ottoman nation encompassing the whole of the empire, a hope nurtured by Britain during the war in order to rally Arabs to its cause. After the armistice, however, the French and British reneged on their wartime promises to withdraw after the conflict and instead carved up the former Ottoman lands into spheres of influence in the Middle East. The delegates to the peace talks in Paris had to decide what to do with the colonies and territories held by Germany and the Ottoman Turks.Wilson’s commitment to the self-determination of nations had won significant popular support in Europe, much to the discomfiture of imperialists across the globe.Widespread acceptance of the principle meant that the victors could not simply seize Germany’s colonies and the lands of the former Ottoman empire as spoils of war. In order to placate Wilson and bid for American friendship, British and French leaders bowed to his desire to create a mandate system under the League of Nations through which the lands of their enemies would be administered as a “sacred trust of civilization.” This proved to be little more than a smoke screen behind which Britain and France governed the mandated territories they received just as they did their own colonies. The Union of South Africa won German South-West Africa (today Namibia), while Britain gained Togoland in West Africa and, more importantly, German East Africa, now renamed Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania). This latter addition fulfilled Britain’s long-held dream of an unbroken chain of territories running from the Cape to Cairo.The treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920 to settle terms with the Ottoman empire, gave Britain and France mandates over former Ottoman lands. Britain received Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq (an amalgam of Mesopotamia and the old Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul) – the latter two of which it attempted to rule indirectly through the sons of ibn Ali, Abdullah and Faisal (i.e. the Hashemites). France controlled Syria and Lebanon. Japan retained Shandung in China, which it had seized from the Germans during the war, and gained the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline islands, on which it soon settled civilian communities and military installations, much to the consternation of the British and the Americans. The League of Nations body charged with overseeing the mandates, the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), sought to enforce the policy of “trusteeship” embedded in the article that established it. Mandate powers were obliged to pursue and maintain the “well-being and development” of peoples supposedly not yet able to do so themselves in the conditions thrown up by the modern world. The concept of trusteeship differed little from earlier notions of Britain’s and France’s “civilizing mission” or the “white man’s burden,” but it established “self-determination” as a legitimate political aspiration and implicitly acknowledged that colonization

8 Introduction

would, at some time in the future, come to an end. Moreover, the job of the mandate powers was to prepare for that time by developing the economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that would make those future former colonies viable states. The idea of trusteeship proved a useful counter to critics of colonialism at home, to whom apologists for empire could reply: “we are in (pick Africa, Asia, the Middle East) not to exploit the peoples and resources of the territories but to improve them.” The reality of the situation never lived up to the rhetoric of trusteeship, for British and French interests often conflicted with those of its colonies in the fraught years between the wars. The dislocations caused by the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution had a profound effect throughout the world. Europe’s colonial subjects had fought hard and given dearly to the war effort in support of their imperial overlords, often in response to promises of greater self-government once the conflict ended. Those promises rarely materialized, producing much resentment in colonies across the globe. Asians, Africans, Caribbeans, oppressed minority groups such as African Americans, and members of indigenous communities in the Pacific and Americas had served prominently in the war on the side of the Allies. In addition to the large-scale use of colonial soldiers (some 170,000 from West Africa alone), the French government recruited several hundred thousand workers from China and French colonial possessions in Asia and Africa to replace able-bodied men from French industry who had been drafted into its armies. Compared to the thousands of foreign workers from other European countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, Chinese and North African workers experienced a much greater degree of labor regimentation, segregation, and discrimination, culminating a series of race riots that began in 1917 and continued throughout 1918. Mobs of French workers and, in some instances, soldiers home on leave attacked non-European workers. At war’s end, colonized and minority populations expected that their rulers and fellow imperial citizens would recognize and reward their sacrifices. Instead, spasms of racist violence marked the immediate postwar period. Race riots in which whites attacked their non-white neighbors erupted in cities across the British Isles and the United States. In London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff, Salford, Hull, South Shields, Newport, and Barry, rioters targeted African, Indian, Arab, Afro-Caribbean, and Chinese sailors and dockworkers and their mixed-race families, attacking individuals and burning homes and property. In response, the British government passed legislation that effectively instituted a color bar in the British shipping industry. After 1919, non-European seamen could be employed only if there were no white Britons to fill the jobs and only if they had documentation verifying British nationality. During what became known as the “Red Summer” of 1919 in the United States, racist pogroms took place in more than three dozen cities, including Chicago, Omaha, and Charleston. Racially motivated violence continued into the 1920s. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob destroyed one of the country’s wealthiest black communities and thirty-five blocks of Tulsa. Several hundred African Americans died and more than ten thousand were left homeless. Police targeted the victims by arresting roughly six thousand of them, leaving the attackers alone.

Introduction  9

In the wake of broken promises and such violent reassertions of white supremacy, frustration, exacerbated by government repression and economic hardship in the colonies, and demands for political rights and racial liberation mounted during the interwar years. The newly formed Soviet Union sought to capitalize on the bitterness created by the disingenuous commitments of wartime and the expansion of empire following the conflict by calling upon subject peoples to rise up against imperialist “robbers and enslavers.”7 The Communist International – or Comintern, as it was more commonly known – formed in Moscow in 1919 and was the only European political organization to declare the equality of the races and to officially embrace anti-imperialism. It gave assistance to fledgling communist parties organizing in various parts of Asia, and found receptive audiences in and trained agitators from Korea; Iran; India; the Philippines; Egypt; China; South, West, and East Africa; Latin America; and the oppressed black, Latino, and Asian minorities of the United States. Soviet actions, initiatives, and rhetoric, however ineffectual or hollow they might have been in reality, provoked heightened anxiety in Europe and the United States. At the most basic level, the appearance of a communist nation on the world stage frightened a significant portion of the middle classes in Europe. Worker risings in Germany and strikes there and in France, Britain, and Italy convinced many people that workers might indeed take over their countries as well. Conservative parties took advantage of the rising sense of panic to sharpen their ideologies and make overstated claims about the threat of communism. Businesses, in turn, reading the political tea leaves in their favor, hardened their stance against striking workers. In Britain, the General Strike of 1926 seemed to validate conservative fears and enabled them to pass legislation that restricted the ability of unions to operate on behalf of their members. The Liberal party, traditionally the center party bridging the gap between left and right, lost its capacity to seriously contest elections: the middle classes moved right and found a home in the Conservative party, while working-class men and women flocked to the Labour Party. In France, class conflict took on the aspect of two diametrically opposed political groupings. On the right, semi-fascist parties faced a coalition of moderate and leftist parties. In Italy, a variety of middle-class interests gave their support to the Fascist Party. The war wrought terrible destruction in all of the European countries involved in it. Physical damage destroyed a significant portion of the resources and infrastructure of Europe. Nearly nine million men died in the conflict; a third of those aged 18 to 45, the prime reproductive years for men, were either killed or badly maimed. Population growth, which had been slowing in the years immediately prior to the war, virtually came to a halt between 1914 and 1918. These demographic factors had the cumulative effect in the postwar years of limiting the market for goods. Depressed prices in the market for agricultural products left farmers unable to purchase manufactured goods, reducing the market even more. To make matters even worse, while the Europeans were busy slaughtering one another, the United States and Japan had entered the markets the Europeans had previously supplied, and held on to them after hostilities ceased. Europe’s economic supremacy

10 Introduction

was undermined by these actions, as was its financial status as the banker to the world. Because many of the European countries that had provided credit to the rest of the world felt compelled to liquidate their investments in order to pay for the war, they were no longer in a position to lend to others. Europe moved from being the creditor to the rest of the world to being significantly in debt, most especially to the United States. Finally, one of the effects of the Treaty of Versailles was to displace and disrupt the European economy. France won considerable gains as it recovered the province of Lorraine, an iron-ore rich territory. But most other nations lost out as the boundaries of Europe were redrawn. The new states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires were simply not big enough to sustain their economies. Germany lost the coal reserves in Upper Silesia and the Saar Valley for fifteen years following the peace; it also ceded three-quarters of its iron reserves, merchant shipping, and railroad stock. The economic situation for millions of Europeans was grim. By 1920, Britain had begun to experience depression in those industries that had grown up in the first phase of industrialization – coal, shipbuilding, and textiles. Agricultural depression hit large sections of the continent. In Germany, which was required by the Treaty of Versailles to pay reparations costs of $33 billion to the victorious Allies, the Weimar government resorted to printing money in order to meet its obligations. The effect was to drive up inflation to astronomical levels, achieving what economists call hyperinflation. Costs of food and manufactured goods rose faster than anyone’s wage packet could keep pace with: potatoes that cost nine marks in January 1923 sold for forty million marks in October. By the time the reparations debt was renegotiated and financial stability regained in 1924, the savings of the German middle classes had been wiped out. By 1928, unemployment had begun to affect the working classes. People across the entire spectrum of German society experienced disaster, and many of them would look to non-traditional parties such as the National Socialist German Workers Party – the Nazi party – to redress their considerable grievances. In 1924, economic recovery and even prosperity appeared to be in the offing. Between 1924 and 1929, international trade, construction, and the advent of new industries producing automobiles, tractors, radios and the like led to increased demand for steel, coal, oil, roads, and electrical products. This prosperity, however, rested upon a set of assumptions and practices, including intensified exploitation and growing repression of restive colonized populations, that would prove unsustainable over the long run. The industrial economies of the west depended upon raw materials and cheap foodstuffs produced by colonial and semi-colonial societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Colonial economics also produced growing classes of landless and indebted peasants and agricultural workers and of impoverished urban wage-laborers. The relative prosperity of the 1920s in Europe, the United States, and Japan was financed largely by credit – that is, on promises to pay in the future – a system that relied on mutual confidence and mutual exchange, on the belief that the creditor would be paid, that the debtor could pay, that investors would get their money back, and that farmers and workers made enough money to

Introduction  11

buy from one another.Workers’ wages were not sufficient to enable them to uphold their part of the equation; while profits and dividends rose in the later 1920s, wages fell behind, and workers could not absorb the huge output of goods being produced. Farmers suffered from depression in their sector of the economy. Not only could they not purchase goods, they couldn’t pay their debts. The house of cards that was the world economy came tumbling down in October 1929 with the crash of the stock market in New York, a phenomenon we have to regard as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the Great Depression.The prosperity of the second half of the decade had brought thousands of people into the financial market, where they could buy stocks on “margin” – that is, they could purchase stocks by putting down a fraction of the actual cost, planning on paying the rest of the stock price once they had sold their shares and made a profit from them. This pushed stock prices to unrealistic levels. If prices fell even a little bit, stockholders would have to sell in order to pay their debts. A weakening of prices in 1929 led to a massive sell-off, sending stock prices plummeting. Speculators could not pay their debts and banks began to fail – some five thousand U.S. banks between 1929 and 1932 alone. Americans could no longer loan to Europe; because much of the German recovery depended upon American capital, its industry slowed, followed by that of the rest of the continent. In 1931, the Creditanstalt bank in Austria collapsed, causing bankruptcies all over Europe. Businesses and investors could not recoup what was owed them, so they could not buy; factories could not sell to firms that could not buy, so workers lost their jobs and couldn’t buy anything.The downward spiral just kept going and going and going, till world production had fallen by 38% by 1932. International trade dropped by two-thirds. Unemployment rates rose markedly to about 33% in Germany. America’s unemployment rate of 25% was bad enough, but considering that people who were no longer looking for work because there was none to be had were not included in that figure, it underestimates the catastrophe. Historians think that perhaps 50% of Americans were unemployed in the worst years of the Depression. Believing that they could protect their industries by throwing up tariffs against the entry of products from foreign nations, governments embarked on the road to economic nationalism. The world economy, dependent for its existence on free trade in goods and in capital as well as the labor and primary products of the colonial and non-industrialized world, descended into chaos as competing economies vied fiercely with one another for advantage. The major powers sought to mitigate the economic collapse through protectionism at the imperial level. As bad as conditions became in the west, the worst effects of the Depression were exported to the colonies and those countries dependent upon the foreign market for export goods. *** The 1930s opened inauspiciously. When we think of the decade we usually conjure up images of American breadlines, Soviet show trials, and jack-booted, brown-shirted German fascists. Certainly, these form part of the picture, but a

12 Introduction

western-focused view obscures the broader global context of which they were an integral part. The dramatic growth of cities in Asia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East – at precisely the moment when European nations suffered serious demographic decline – set the stage for the development of modernist trends in art and culture. Technological innovations in film and in the reproduction of sound made it possible to disseminate vivid images and new ideas to far-flung places across the globe. The Great Depression disrupted lives everywhere, crushing some outright and producing unprecedented levels of social upheaval. It triggered widespread peasant and worker revolts in agricultural and industrial countries, and gave rise to semi-fascist populist movements in Latin America, South Africa, Japan, and South Asia. Its devastations helped to spread communism across significant portions of the world, a global dispersal that often evaded the determined efforts of the Communist International to direct and control it, even as black internationalists in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States took inspiration from the model of Soviet communism. The specter of communism moved Italian fascists to try to expand their ideology to places like Japan in a bid for friendship and alliance, unaware that the Japanese possessed their own version of fascism that they regarded as superior to Europe’s. The generals who overthrew Spain’s republican government and established a fascist regime there began their revolt in Morocco, dependent upon a military force made up of 250,000 Moroccan fighters. Our global approach to these and other developments that characterized the 1930s necessarily decenters – while not excluding – Europe and the United States within this larger narrative. We focus a great deal on internationalism – as both western imperialists and anti-colonial activists/intellectuals conceptualized it – to foreground and contextualize the role imperialism played in fostering global relations at the same time that it worked to destabilize the European world order. In what follows, we do not treat imperialism or imperialists as neutral entities or innocent actors; it and they played outsized roles in creating the catastrophes of the 1930s and beyond. They also motivated, kindled, and inspired developments that set the stage for decolonization and movements for international standards for human and civil rights that are usually associated with the decades following the Second World War. Postwar conceptions of development, citizenship, and sovereignty, however attenuated, emerged from or in response to the struggles of populations throughout the colonized and semicolonial world during the 1930s. The major developments of the decade – the Great Depression, the consolidation of communism, and the rise of fascism – were the products of global connections and forces rather than simply emanating from events and actors in Europe and the United States. They, in turn, restructured transnational and transcolonial links, by, for example, both fostering and constraining migration and promoting the circulation of ideas through a variety of media. Gender plays an important part in what follows. Almost every society we know of has organized itself according to gender, assigning certain responsibilities, obligations, and privileges to some people – and forbidding them to others – on the basis of the different attributes those people were purported to possess as gendered

Introduction  13

individuals. Gender has been utilized by historical actors and groups to uphold or challenge various social, economic, cultural, and political systems. A variety of distinctive gender regimes appeared across the globe during the 1930s. They were not simply products of static and isolated cultures; in every case, transnational and imperial connections shaped them. The “modern girl” – with her bobbed hair and lipsticked smile, dressed in boyish fashions, smoking cigarettes, driving cars, drinking cocktails, and generally pursuing an active, adventurous lifestyle – stepped onto the global stage, shocking observers everywhere she went.The social and economic upheavals that we will address in the chapters that follow led many people to see in a re-establishment of sexual difference the means to recreate a semblance of order. Some societies, for instance, sought to return to the “traditional” order of the prewar world, an order based on natural biological categories of which sexual differences were a familiar and readily available expression. Other segments of those same societies responded to the disorders of the 1930s not so much by sharpening sexual differences between men and women as by modifying what constituted “manliness.” Still others turned to an aggressive, militarized masculinity as part of their embrace of fascism. In all instances, the mobilization of gender and sexuality in the efforts to recast society had a decisive effect on the way men and women felt about themselves and presented themselves to others as they went about daily lives. An understanding of the world divided into two camps vying for the loyalty of one-time colonies and soon-to-be nation-states is often projected back onto the 1930s from the postwar period. Our approach reveals how anachronistic and myopic such a view is. The often-startling linkages, intersections, and affinities in the 1930s among figures who appear in greater relief in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s compel a story that often confounds the conventional narratives of the decade. The ideological and political fluidity of the period belies the neat and inevitable trajectories these narratives imply, and allows us to produce a history that is far messier, more complex, and much less teleological. And much more surprising.

Notes 1 Quoted in Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 292. 2 Ibid., 292. 3 Ibid., 308. 4 See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5 Quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 288. 6 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 50 and Ch. 2. 7 Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (New York: Picador, 2012), 195.

PART I

Primitive modern

On October 2, 1925, La Revue Nègre premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The packed house awaited excitedly as first the musicians took their seats and then the curtain rose on twenty-five black performers singing, dancing, talking with one another, and sauntering along a dock on the Mississippi River. A strange figure appeared among the crowd in the scene – seemingly half animal, half human as it writhed and shimmied, crossed its eyes, blew out its cheeks, and sent eerie, shrill sounds into the air. Shocked and dumbfounded, audience members watched transfixed as the form suddenly dropped onto all fours, rear-end pitched high in the air, and hightailed it offstage, legs stiff and hands slapping the floor as she scurried away. For it was a she. After another eight acts finished up, the astonishing creature of the first act returned, this time clad in nothing but “a pink flamingo feather between her limbs,” as one theater-goer described the appearance of Josephine Baker in the performance that made her notorious, la danse sauvage. Carried upside down on the shoulders of “a black giant,” Joe Alex, legs akimbo, Baker was then deposited on the floor, where she stood as “an unforgettable female ebony statue.” The crowd “screamed” its shock as she began to move “her violently shuddering body” before them. Against the backdrop of a Harlem nightclub scene, Baker and Alex electrified the crowd. “In the short pas de deux of the savages,” wrote one dance critic, “there was a wild splendor and magnificent animality.” Baker arched her back, thrust out her buttocks, entwined and raised up her arms in a phallic gesture.The explicit sexuality of the tableaux, the combination of animality and eroticism, mesmerized the audience. When the dance ended and the curtain fell, ecstatic cheers and outraged boos filled the air.Whether thrilled or disgusted – or thrilled and disgusted – no one had ever seen anything like it. La dance sauvage, modern critics have observed, seems to have torn away “the fragile veneer called civilization, . . . revealing a primitive, protohuman core.”1

16  Primitive modern

Baker skyrocketed to fame. In subsequent performances on stage and screen over the next decade she established herself as an icon of the primitive and the modern, all at the same time. She exhibited the bestial side of her creation both on stage and on the streets, where she wore nothing but a banana skirt in the former and paraded her cheetah in the latter in a kind of live performance of animality. At the same time, she embodied all that was modern: elegant, sophisticated, “tanned,” with sleek bobbed hair and a long angular body shown off by sheath dresses, she epitomized the chic “modern girl” of the jazz age. Her routines in the 1930 Paris Qui Remue – Paris When It Sizzles – retained elements of the exotic and primitive, but they tended to emphasize the modern more than had been the case in 1925. One review described the grand finale as “super-modern, electric: one hundred electric dresses . . . Debauchery of electricity.”2 In 1937, she opened her own nightclub in the rue François-Ier, in a fashionable and wealthy neighborhood close to the Champs Elysée. La Baker, as she was dubbed by a largely enraptured French press, self-consciously enacted a number of roles that exemplify some of the most salient dynamics of the 1930s. In one guise, she played into the colonial imagination of a nation convinced of the benefits of civilization it brought to its subject peoples; in another, she aroused the fantasies of white heterosexual men desirous of sampling the exotic wares of the sexualized black woman. In yet another, she personified the “It Girl” of the interwar years and even lent her name to a product – Bakerfix – that slicked down the hair of women seeking to emulate her. In her performances of both the primitive and the modern, she conveyed the preoccupations of surrealists and other modernists who focused much of their art on Europe’s “others” and especially on the purported authenticity of the savage and the primordial. At once the “other” and “one of us” (she became a French citizen in 1937), Josephine Baker articulated the many contradictions of the decade.

Notes 1 Quoted in Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer, 1998): 903–934, 914, 915, 916. 2 Quoted in Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis:The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11.

1 ’30s MODERN

In 2008, the world’s population was split evenly between rural and urban areas for the first time. It marked a historical tipping point that was the culmination of a centuries-long transition initiated by the growth of global trade and industrial capitalism. Even for the majority of people who lived outside urban areas in the 1930s, the city was synonymous with modernity. Avant-garde artists, modernist architects, urban developers, and social planners equated the city with the future. Centers of wealth and seats of governmental power, they were also spaces of circulation and “nodal points of change,” objects of artistic representation and intellectual scrutiny, targets of social engineering, and vehicles of collective memory and competing ideologies.1 In the 1930s, people experienced the quintessential features and instruments of modernity in and through cities: the compression of space and time; the mixing of “high” and “low”; the social dislocation, anonymity, and alienation of modern life; the mass nature of modern amusements; the factory floor, department store, dance hall, and cinema. While not all of these were completely new in the ’30s, technological developments such as the advent of electrical sound recording in the mid-1920s were assimilated into the fabric of urban life, generating a host of new spaces, means, and mediums of social intercourse and self-fashioning. Together they constituted the cultural epoch of modernism. Most historians and cultural critics use the terms modernity and modernization to connote an interrelated set of cognitive and socio-economic transformations: on the one hand, the rise of a scientific consciousness, a secular worldview, a progressive philosophy of history, an individualistic conception of the self and rights, and realist aesthetics; on the other, the emergence of a global capitalist economy, industrialization, forms of popular government, urbanization, and increased literacy and mobility. However, the “modern” also entailed an oppositional, “cultural modernity,” as one scholar terms it, led by avant-garde artist movements; collectors and producers of “primitive” art; circles of spiritualists, traveling mystics, and religious teachers; and

18  Primitive modern

many others who rejected the “stifling conformities and banalities” of bourgeois modernity, its materialistic nature, and the violence that produced and sustained it.2 New technologies and the latest innovations spread rapidly, if unevenly, but this did not lead to cultural homogeneity. Entrepreneurs and administrators, cultural producers and average people domesticated new media and foreign cultural forms and used them in distinctive ways, adding new layers of meaning and significance to them. In short, even as certain communication technologies, means of conveyance, and the patterns and noises of daily life linked more people and societies around the world, the modern included – indeed, proliferated – a range of alternatives that took shape in opposition to aspects of modernity.

Urban space and modern culture Writing in the late 1920s, the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin suggested that only the “prompt language” of “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” could match the pace and urgency of the times, could be “actively equal to the moment.”3 The 1930s marked the apogee of small journals and other literary ephemera, and urban readers constituted their primary audience.The visual signs of city life and advertisements for cosmetics, gramophones and records, and an endless parade of other products, promising a taste of modernity and marketed using a modernist aesthetic, filled the pages of mass daily newspapers and foreign and domestic magazines. American magazines, especially Vanity Fair, influenced publishers, designers, and modernist writers in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The literature of the period confronted readers with the recognizable features, scenarios, and characters of urban existence. Publishers churned out urban guidebooks that promised to unlock the city’s secrets for visitors and outsiders with a variety of tastes and inclinations. Crime columns, detective fiction, and memoirs of former vice police – predecessors to the post–World War II explosion of noir film and literature – fed popular fascination with the city’s exotic and dangerous underbelly. Erotic publications and commercial entertainments proliferated alongside more conventional forms of sex work. At the same time, interwar political and cultural movements reshaped understandings of the city, its pleasures, and its perils. While wealthy urbanites engaged in conspicuous consumption and nights out at exclusive restaurants and clubs, cities also offered a growing array of more proletarian enticements. The city itself became a symbol of the social and economic volatility of modernity and global capitalism, the mixing of cultures and people, associated particularly with the more explosive consequences of rapid change, including crowd violence and rioting. Urban growth was a global phenomenon. The populations of New York City and Chicago ballooned due in part to the mass movement of African Americans from the south in the Great Migration, which produced large enclaves of people of color – “black metropolises” – in Harlem and Bronzeville, but stabilized following the imposition of immigrant restrictions during the 1920s and the onset of the Great Depression. Across the Atlantic, London remained the largest city in

’30s modern  19

Europe. Its geographical size expanded at an unprecedented rate during the 1920s and 1930s as the city consumed portions of Essex, Herefordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex in a suburban housing boom.The extension and consolidation of public transport services enabled this growth.The municipal railways and London Underground were electrified, the Northern Line of the latter was extended in north London, and new tram and bus lines connected the city center to outlying areas. Many of the numerous railway companies operating segments of the underground system merged. In 1933, the London Passenger Transport Board absorbed London County Council Tramways and assumed the role of managing the transportation network of southeast England. The population of London reached 8.6 million by 1939.The city also became more diverse, attracting colonial subjects from across the empire, large numbers of Irish immigrants, and Jewish, Germany, and Spanish exiles and refugees from Europe. Urbanization also took place outside the North Atlantic context between the world wars. It stimulated the introduction of distinctive socioeconomic relationships and institutions, novel living arrangements, and new forms of cultural expression enabled by new spaces and objects of consumption. Tokyo and Shanghai moved into the top five largest cities in the world, and Buenos Aires and Moscow into the top ten. Industrialization and migration fueled rapid urban growth in South America’s second largest city, Rio de Janeiro. Its population doubled during the 1920s, reaching 2,380,000 in 1930. Municipal officials introduced the first major urban plan at about the same time, segregating the city along class and functionalist lines. The plan reserved the boroughs of Ipanema, Lebron, and Gavea in the south for the lighter-skinned upper classes and consigned industry and the dark-skinned working class to the suburbs. More than fifty favelas or slums of squatter settlements emerged during the 1930s, the majority sprouting along riverbanks and in the hills around the city center.4 Africa had comparatively few large cities, but as many historians have shown, the scale of urban growth does not necessarily capture the importance of urbanization as an engine of change. In 1930, the populations of Ibadan, Addis Ababa, Lagos, and Khartoum stood at 385,000, 160,000, 125,000, and 100,000, respectively. Cities in the settler colonies of Algeria and South Africa, where the European-descended population was concentrated, enjoyed the most modern amenities, including public transit, communications, and municipal infrastructure. Spatial segregation and deepening inequality divided the urban landscape. As land dispossession and poverty in rural areas drove growing numbers into urban labor markets, the indigenous populations faced increasingly cramped slum-like conditions in strictly delimited districts or on the city’s outer fringes. In Algiers, the celebrations in 1930 marking the centennial of French colonization ranged from military parades and cultural and art exhibitions to ambitious projects to renovate and improve housing in the city. Neoclassicism still dominated after the First World War, but the modernist emphasis on functional design principles became increasingly common in new social housing projects built during the late 1920s and 1930s. The modernist architect Le Corbusier lamented the state of the European quarters of Algiers and devised plans for a completely redesigned colonial city, but French

20  Primitive modern

officials rejected his proposals. Between 1925 and 1933, seven new housing complexes were built for Europeans on the outskirts of the city. The construction of a new waterfront neighborhood pushed the casbah – the Arab and Berber district – further into the hills and reduced its size. Twice the population crowded into one quarter as many buildings as in 1830, when the French first occupied the city. Only three housing projects were completed for Algerians in the city during the 1930s. “To Algerians living under French occupation, home carried a special meaning as the private realm where they found refuge from colonial interventions they confronted continually in public life,” one historian explains. “To the colonizers, the Algerian house represented the impenetrable aspect of Algerian life, centered around the family and women’s activities.” The new complexes both reproduced French understandings of Algerian difference, which often focused on gender relations and the private realm, by adapting rural living patterns to an urban setting, and “rationalized” the “traditional” home by incorporating clean lines and supposedly universal design principles. Far more people ended up living in these structures than originally intended, and a tendency to cut corners to reduce construction costs led to chronic plumbing issues. Nevertheless, French administrators trumpeted the projects as material symbols of their noble efforts to bind Algeria ever more closely to France north of the Mediterranean.5 In East and Southeast Asia, the most dramatic urban growth occurred in cities along the Pacific coast. Provincial or regional “second cities” became peripheries of the metropolis and increasingly dominant centers in relation to their rural surroundings. During and after World War I, cities became associated with the possibility of acquiring great wealth quickly and with new social types such as the narikin (or nouveau riche) in Japan.The great Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and the fires that it sparked destroyed large sections of the city. A new, self-consciously modern Japanese capital arose from the rubble and ashes of the old city; “the earthquake became etched in popular memory as . . . the birth of a Japanese modern.”6 Large new department stores often doubled as venues for art and historical exhibitions, public roundtables and lectures by politicians and intellectuals.7 The glittering metropolis also contained many humbler cosmopolitan spaces. For instance, after the Bengali revolutionary Rash Behari Bose moved to Tokyo in 1915, he and his Japanese wife, Somo- Toshiko, ran her parents’ Nakamuraya bakery in Shinjuku, which reputedly introduced Indo Karii, an Indian-style chicken curry, to Tokyo. It became a gathering place for Indian exiles, spiritualists, and Russians exiled by the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin’s purges. As cities grew, they produced a growing array of print materials, media industries and moguls, mass readerships, and rebellious literary subcultures. City-dwellers in Japan consumed print media at the highest rate in the world during the 1930s. Throughout coastal Southeast Asia, young people in particular migrated to cities in search of economic and educational opportunities. Newspaper stands and bookstores sold local and foreign publications that brought the latest news from distant corners of the globe or that advocated communist revolution, pan-Asianism, and religious reform. On street corners and in meeting halls and public parks, speakers spread these same messages. Cinemas imported films from Hollywood, Bombay,

’30s modern  21

Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Jazz,Tamil and Hindi drama music, Japanese and Korean kabuki songs, and Chinese opera circulated on gramophone records and through the radio, mixing with local musical forms and inspiring musicians and artists to create new hybrid sounds.8 Many of the most cosmopolitan cities were ports. Like the body’s joints, port cities were both essential to the functioning of empires and modern states of all sorts and constituted the sites where they were most vulnerable. In colonial cities and semicolonial treaty ports such as Shanghai, racial and ethnic segregation obtained alongside and often mapped onto economic divisions. Nevertheless, part of what made cities modern was how they juxtaposed and enabled movement between these worlds, at least for some. Cities reflected and generated inequality and the means of exercising power; they also produced pathways to freedom and new struggles for liberation. Beneath elite visions of the city as well-ordered space connecting markets and facilitating the movement of goods and self-regulating subjects, a messier reality prevailed. Cosmopolitanism and the mixing of social orders, classes, sexes, ethnic and racial groups, and cultures defined urban modernity in the 1930s, providing the source of cities’ appeal and the fears it sparked and producing a diversity of oppositional subcultures. By 1930, Shanghai had grown into one of the five largest cities in the world. When China lost the First Opium War to Britain in 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing had opened up Shanghai to foreign trade, setting the stage for the creation of multiple foreign concessions within its city limits. Because of its geographic position as China’s largest port, it served as one of Asia’s biggest financial and trade hubs during the 1930s. By then, the city was split into three main areas: the International Settlement (mostly a joint American-British enclave); the French Concession; and the Chinese-controlled walled city to the south and northern Chapei district. Streets, bridges, trams, and trollies linked the concessions to the Chinese sections of the city. In 1932, the Japanese military invaded the city after weeks of growing tensions between Japanese and local Chinese. Japan eventually signed a ceasefire agreement, brokered by Britain, France, and the United States, but only after bombarding and then occupying the city and dislodging the forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government. The terms of the agreement forbade Chiang’s army from re-entering the city but allowed Japan to garrison a small force there. Observers heralded Shanghai as “the Paris of Asia,” a cosmopolitan city with a bustling harbor, wide thoroughfares flanked by multi-storied department stores, scores of coffeehouses and dance halls, and flourishing arts and literary scenes. Writer and early Chinese Communist Party member Mao Dun catalogued the figures and technologies that marked the urban landscape in his first novel, Midnight [Ziye]: A Romance of China, 1930: neon signs, electric lights, automobiles, radios, Parisian dresses, “dancing girls, film stars.”9 The number of privately owned cars shot up from 1,986 to 4,951 between 1922 and 1931. Another powerful symbol of the modern in the 1930s, the airplane, arrived in more terrifying fashion in 1932, when the Japanese displayed their growing air power in aerial bombardments during their onslaught on the city.

22  Primitive modern

Within the foreign concessions, Chinese and foreigners (including South Asians) lived “in mixed company” (huayang zachu) but in very different circumstances. Out of a total metropolitan population of 3.1 million, nearly half of Shanghai’s Chinese population lived in the concessions among a mere seventy thousand foreigners. Different ways of life and widely disparate levels of wealth separated them.10 The Bund, a strip of river embankment facing the harbor, was the heart of the shili yangchang (“ten-mile-long foreign zone”), and as in cities across the British empire from London’s Regent Street to Calcutta, the neoclassical style of its buildings projected European imperial power. By the 1930s, the cityscape also reflected the growing economic and cultural power of the United States. Skyscrapers of steel and glass had become “the cathedrals of the modern age” after World War I, as Art Deco, the design style most closely associated with them, became all the rage. New York City’s tallest and most famous Art Deco skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, appeared on the skyline in 1930 and 1931, respectively.They provided fitting bookends to the gilded decadence and relentless optimism of the “Roaring Twenties” in the urban United States, while their towering stature provoked a characteristically modern sense of alienation. During the 1930s, Art Deco buildings went up in cities from San Francisco to Miami, Casablanca to Tokyo. In Shanghai, many new constructions, including apartment buildings, department stores, and banks taller than the colonial edifices of the Bund, featured the ascendant Art Deco style.11 While deluxe hotels and exclusive ballrooms and cabaret clubs catered to wealthy foreigners, the Chinese flocked to public parks and department stores.The Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek had removed the notorious restrictions that barred dogs and Chinese (as well as Indians and Japanese except those in western clothing) from parks and gardens in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Although there was a small admission charge, the public response was immediate; municipal authorities recorded more than two million visitors in 1930. Mao Dun’s Midnight immortalized the Rio Rata amusement park, and romantic trysts in the parks became a common plot device in films produced during the decade, such as Crossroads (Shizu jietou). Department stores lined Nanking Road, the main thoroughfare through the International Settlement and Shanghai’s equivalent to London’s Oxford Street or New York’s Fifth Avenue. In addition to multiple floors of goods, these stores combined consumerism, leisure, and entertainment, as did a host of other recreational spaces: dance halls, cinema houses, restaurants, and cafés. Bookstores facilitated engagement and a sense of participation in a global public sphere and, for writers, an international literary avant-garde. Chinese writers and artists in Shanghai read the novels of European modernists like James Joyce and frequented the foreign-run cinemas and bookstores and the coffeehouses of the French concession. Bookshops and tea- and coffeehouses were spaces of creative interaction and intellectual debate, hosting literary salons, readings, and dramatic performances. Zeng Pu’s bookstore at 115 rue Massenet in Shanghai offered a wide selection of French literature and hosted literary tête-à-têtes.12 The growing ease of travel among cities and the circulation of texts and other media shaped the urban

’30s modern  23

cultural milieux and how artists and intellectuals experienced and responded to modernity.

The world on display In 1935, Walter Benjamin penned the first of two versions of an “exposé,” as he termed it, of “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Benjamin’s monumental, unfinished project aimed to excavate the “pre-history of modernity” and the “dreamworlds” embodied in the archetypal spaces and material artifacts of the nineteenth-century city. He had sharp eye for emergent forms and the persistence of the past in the present, the subterranean connections between the spectacular and the quotidian, and the possibilities for self-invention as well as the new forms of alienation generated by modern technology and capitalism.The objects of his archaeology of the urban-modern – advertising, photography, mass-produced fashion, artificial lighting, museums, and exhibitions – had become ubiquitous in 1930s Paris. More recent arrivals – the automobile, cinema, radio, gramophone – increasingly shaped the lifeworlds and dreamworlds, the cultural landscape and soundscape of the city, the site of the largest population of non-European descent on the continent.13 Creators and critics across many fields viewed Paris as the cultural heart of Europe. Its fashion designers and magazines set trends on an international level. It was also the adopted home of an international artistic avant-garde and the denizens of Bohemia. Paris served as a major hub of two internationals: the Third (Communist) International and the Surrealist International. In 1938, Trotskyists in Paris launched the Fourth International.The same year, the leader of the surrealist group, André Breton, visited the exiled former Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s, a vogue nègre or “negrophilia,” encompassing the “primitive” art of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the modern sounds of black America and the French Antilles, overtook the city, affecting everything from fashion advertising to the high art world. During the 1930s, many African American writers, artists, stage performers, and jazz musicians of the Harlem Renaissance generation spent extended periods in Paris, the majority settling in Montmartre, where they mixed with others of African descent from French colonies. Paris was also an imperial metropolis – the capital city of a global empire and a base of anti-colonial agitation. Between May 1931 and January 1932, the city hosted L’Exposition coloniale internationale in the suburb of Vincennes. Like the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, it was the grandest, and one of the last, in a long line of exhibitions celebrating the colonial civilizing mission and showcasing modern technological innovation – “A Century of Progress,” to quote the theme of the 1934–1935 Chicago World’s Fair. L’exhibition both projected imperial unity and staged racial difference for metropolitan audiences by juxtaposing “native” traditions against “European” modernity.The meticulously designed pavilions and choreographed presentation of people and cultures combined elements of a variety of exhibition spaces – trade fairs, artistic expositions, and ethnographic

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museums – utilizing emerging media such as film and radio. Twenty-six territories in the empire contributed to the exhibition, as did a number of foreign powers, including the United States, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The Paris Metro was extended to connect the city center to Bois de Vincennes. Construction crews built a zoo, model villages, and facsimiles of non-western architecture. French architects designed two pagodas, an enormous replica of the famous Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, and a new museum, the Palais de la Porte Dorée. (In 1935, the Palais de la Porte Dorée was converted into a permanent colonial museum and renamed the Musée de la France d’Outre-mer.)14 The French government brought dignitaries, artists, musicians, and performers from the colonies to recreate “native” arts and crafts and to attend the exposition once it opened. Coffee, chocolates, and “restaurants éxotiques” gave visitors a taste of the colonies. In total, eight million people visited the 1931 Colonial Exposition. The exposition stoked public interest in the colonies and provoked wider debates about French colonialism. It provoked counter demonstrations by colonial subjects in the metropole, as Vietnamese workers and students protested the exploitation of Southeast Asian rickshaw drivers within the exhibition grounds and linked it to recent massacres in Indochina. The French Communist Party organized a parallel exhibition titled “The Truth on the Colonies.” It emphasized colonial abuses such as forced labor in Africa and violent repression in North Africa and Southeast Asia, but it attracted only five thousand visitors. The popular fascination with the exotic cultures of the “indigènes” also created limited openings for colonial writers and artists to publish and exhibit their work. New North American and Vietnamese cafés and restaurants opened in Paris during and after the exposition. French filmmakers began using colonial subjects and locations from the 1930s onward. At night during and after the exposition, revelers thronged bals or dances at popular nightclubs, such as the bal nègre at the Cabane Cubaine, that featured live performances of AfroAmerican and Antillean music. Clubs like the Bal Nègre on rue Blomet and the Boule Blanche, which were operated and frequented by people of African descent, drew an international and interracial crowd, and showcased bands playing jazz, beguine from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Cuban son or, as it became known in Europe, rumba.15 Although not as large, British empire exhibitions in Johannesburg in 1936 and Glasgow in 1938 followed the 1924 exhibition at Wembley. Johannesburg, “the roaring African metropolis,” celebrated its jubilee year in 1936, fifty years after the discovery of gold on the Highveld. An entirely new city built literally on the mines, its inhabitants came from across the globe: Dutch-descended Afrikaners from the rural areas; shopkeepers from Gujarat, Syria, and Lithuania; financiers and firms from Britain, Germany, and the United States; refugees and other migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe; miners from the British Isles, Australia, China, Mozambique, Nyasaland, Basutoland, Zululand, and Pondoland; African women teachers, domestic workers, and beer-brewers. More than forty thousand Africans, largely municipal, domestic, and contract workers, lived in the city’s slum yards in 1927 – twice as many as a decade earlier. The lavish estates of the so-called Rand lords

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occupied the northern half of the city. By the 1930s, Johannesburg could boast a population of half a million. Its growing skyline included a number of Art Deco buildings.16 The entrance to the empire exhibition and its centerpiece, the “Tower of Light,” were done in the same style. Like the Paris exposition, the 1936 Johannesburg exhibition portrayed technological innovation as the engine of progress. It presented “new” and “old” spaces in the terms of racial hierarchy, contrasting the latest inventions with traditional practices of southern African cultures. The presentation of the latter aspired to ethnographic realism and drew upon the authority of anthropology and the curatorial and display practices of natural history and ethnographic museums. The Johannesburg exhibition depicted a diverse, if fundamentally unequal, South Africa as a “modernizing nation” within a “modern, progressive Empire.” As one observer opined, “Never will Africa be likely to see such a kaleidoscope of nationalities as on this occasion. This is no parochial metamorphosis. It has the hallmark of an authentic internationalism.” Venda ironsmiths practiced their craft for onlookers, and ethnographic showcases of “primitive” societies exhibited Khoisan “Bushmen” and groups from Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and South Rhodesia with faux naturalism. African actors participated in plays and musicians offered jazz performances. Evening dance shows involved up to 260 dancers, many drawn from the municipal native compound and the ranks of African domestic workers, accompanied by a group of mchopi musicians from Mozambique. Educated and self-consciously modern “New Africans” visited the exhibition as patrons.17 During the Paris and Johannesburg exhibitions, the modern industrial city and the empire became linked spectacles. The exhibitions took place amid a variety of other sites of leisure, cultural exchange, and interracial interaction beyond the exhibition grounds, from private homes to workplaces, nightclubs, and the streets. Intended to inspire pride and an emotional and economic investment in empire, the violence and inequality that made empire possible in the first place were omitted. As anti-colonial agitators pointed out, representations of racial difference at the exhibitions informed relations outside them, but these displays depended on the participation of Africans and other colonial subjects, brought them together, and provided an opening for interventions in the public realm. The Johannesburg Empire Exhibition contributed to the development of black music and theater in the city. Ingom’ebusuku choral groups from the migrant workers’ hostel, mine dancers, church choirs, minstrel acts, jazz bands, and a number of black women singers performed as part of a seventeen-week program. The Bantu Dramatic Society, whose avowed aim was “to encourage Bantu playwrights, and to develop African dramatic and operatic art,” staged three one-act plays during the Johannesburg Amateur Dramatic Societies’ repertory week. Esau Mthethwe’s Lucky Stars combined drama, comedic sketches, music, and dance in productions based on Zulu rural life and customs, providing a template for subsequent performance troupes in Johannesburg. Their appearance during the exhibition led to a tour of the UK the next year. The British theater director who had directed the actor and singer Paul Robeson on the London stage in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got

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Wings oversaw the elaborate Pageant of South Africa. While in South Africa, he also directed plays with African casts at the Bantu Social Centre, including a special New Year’s Eve performance, which was followed by a concert by the Merry Blackbirds jazz band.18 Even by the standards of colonial cities, Johannesburg was highly segregated. Nevertheless, spaces of refuge and interracial sociality did exist. Fanny Klennerman’s Vanguard Booksellers was one such place. Born in Russia, Klennerman immigrated to South Africa as a child and became a union organizer and Communist Party member in the mid-1920s before the latter expelled her for Trotskyist “deviations.” In the 1930s, her bookshop stocked the New York-based leftist journals, New Masses and Partisan Review, and books from Random House’s Modern Library Series. Klennerman was the first to import James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned in Britain after its release in 1922 but published by the Shakespeare Bookstore in Paris. On Saturday afternoons, Vanguard Booksellers became, in the words of one historian, “a haven of nonracial creative energies in a fiercely segregated city.” Poets composed and clandestine love affairs unfolded upstairs, while downstairs in the shop, writers and artists critiqued each other’s latest work.19 Located at the south end of Eloff Street, Johannesburg’s main commercial artery, the two-story Bantu Social Centre housed a small hostel and a hall for meetings, dances, concerts, plays, and adult education courses.The American missionary Reverend Ray Phillips established the center in 1921 to provide morally respectable leisure activities for the disproportionately male black workers in the city, but it became an incubator of generations of South African artists and activists. In the mid-1930s, the future leader of the African National Congress, Walter Sisulu, worked at the Premier Biscuit factory and took evening classes at the Bantu Social Centre, while serving as secretary of the Orlando Brotherly Society, a Xhosa cultural and mutualaid organization. When the writer Peter Abrahams first visited it in 1936, he heard the African-American singer Paul Robeson’s voice playing on gramophone record as he entered. He perused the section of African-American literature in the center’s library, where he discovered W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. “Du Bois might have been writing about my land and my people,” Abrahams remembered. “The mood and feeling he described was native to me.” Soon he began working at the center and spent most of his free time pouring through books in its library. In process, Abrahams recalled, “I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.”20 The circulation of texts and people from the African diaspora through these hubs of quotidian life linked city to city. Like the West African Students’ Union’s hostel and headquarters in London (which we will discuss in Chapter 3), the Bantu Social Centre offered an entry point for visitors and newcomers to the city and became a hotbed of intellectual and cultural activity. While the African-American scholar and future Nobel-Prize winner Ralph Bunche was visiting Johannesburg in 1938, he stayed at the Bantu Social Centre. He wrote to his friend Robeson, “Paul, you are surely an idol of the Bantu.”21 Bunche had come to southern Africa by way of London, where he visited the West African Students’ Union and ate the popular

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West African dish, jolof rice, at the restaurant in its hostel with a group of Caribbean and African friends. Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson, lived in London for much of the 1930s and were patrons of the organization, which hosted parties in their honor on multiple occasions. These interactions had a transformative impact on Bunche and the Robesons, just as Abrahams’ fortuitous encounter with Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk had on him. In 1933, a Bantu Social Centre opened in Durban. Like its predecessor in Johannesburg, its architects, who included white liberals and African professionals and church and political leaders, intended it to channel and control black working men’s leisure activities, but it became a hub of black sociality, creativity, and politics in a hostile city. The members of the Durban Bantu Social Club included pioneers of the Zulu Cultural Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s. Because municipal authorities had recently closed all of Durban’s “native” dance halls, the center allowed African women to access the facilities, and it hosted regular dances. During the late 1930s, Epainette Moerane and Govan Mbeki – the parents of the lifelong ANC activist and successor to Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki – courted at Left Book Club readings, communist and anti-fascist rallies, and dances at the Bantu Social Club. Cultural organizations and social clubs were centers of gravity for minority, marginalized, and displaced groups in colonial cities and imperial metropoles. They facilitated pan-African interaction and politicization, and nurtured creative energies and the development of hybrid cultural forms.22

The modern girl In another kind of display, the “modern girl” made her appearance in the interwar period. Emerging first in the United States and Western Europe, she soon made her debut in countries all over the world as the modan garu ( Japan), the modeng ziaojie (China), or the kallege ladki (India’s college girl). In each locale, she took on particular elements of the local culture, but this readily identifiable figure of modernity possessed a number of universal characteristics. To young women of virtually every class, she represented the carefree, youth-oriented, pleasure-seeking, even hedonistic nature of the postwar generation; for others she constituted proof that society still had to be put right and a traditional gender order restored if things were ever to return to “normal” in the postwar period. The boyish young woman wore simple, plain-cut, tailored clothing that was best shown off on a lithe, slim, athletic figure with small breasts and narrow hips. She sported a short haircut, wearing it bobbed (mimicking the angular silhouettes in ancient Egyptian art after the 1920s King “Tut” craze), shingled, or Eton-cropped like her elite brothers; she smoked, demonstrated great confidence in herself by her masculine posture and movements, and might boast of a sexual freedom not possible for her prewar sisters. She donned short skirts, drove fast cars, flew airplanes, played golf and tennis with abandon; by her youthful antics, boyish figure, and frantic social pace, she asserted a refusal of maturity and motherhood that elicited adverse comment everywhere.

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Promoted and disseminated by companies seeking to open markets across the world for the sale of cosmetics, clothing, cigarettes, and all manner of goods, the image of the modern girl knew virtually no boundaries. New visual technologies – lithography, photography, the cinema – and the mass circulation of printed materials ensured that she was seen everywhere. In South Africa, a woman dressed and coiffed in modern girl style won the 1932 Miss Africa competition held by Bantu World, a newspaper founded by a white sales representative seeking to expand his potential market to a black audience – self-consciously modern “New Africans” aspiring to middle class status. In India she graced the silver screen in countless movies depicting rebellious women seeking romance and love with men who would treat them as equals. In Japanese representations, she flaunted the conventions of marriage and motherhood by dancing and by flirting with men in public. In Shanghai, magazine cartoons portrayed her applying for a position as office clerk in a scandalously revealing western-style dress. Her foil, “the modern young man,” excited a great deal of negative comment, most of it alluding to his effeminacy and impotence. In contrast to her – portrayed as strong, healthy, self-confident, and independent – the “Modern Girl’s Brother” was described as listless, bored, and dandyish, all “dolled up like a girl and an exquisite without masculinity.” Britain’s satirical magazine Punch carried a cartoon in 1928 that depicted a “helpless clinging masculine type” sitting before his assertive, bold fiancée: he with his hands held gracefully in his lap and his legs crossed at the knee, gazing up at her with fawning eyes and sweet expression; she standing above him with her legs astride, hands on hips, and an authoritative manner. Depictions of men in Shanghai cartoons portrayed them as hapless and ineffectual, passive victims of a new set of gender relationships that render them objects of ridicule. Left at home to face household chores and childcare responsibilities; the playthings of sexually aggressive, confident women; cuckolded by wives interested only in how much of their income they could spend on the latest western fashions – the male figures caught in the orbit of the modern girl are pitiful specimens of masculinity. These images were, of course, caricatures of gender that commentators often employed to register the shift of the pace of change in an increasingly frightening world. But young people certainly made their presence felt in the cities around the world, embracing and exemplifying virtually all things modern. Through circulation of print culture and new media, fashions associated with the urban youth spread to their counterparts in rural communities. Some of the most iconic images of the modern girl and modern boy feature them doing the Charleston or the Lindy Hop to the vibrant and exciting new music of the 1930s.

Traveling sounds: records, dance, and the global jazz age Today, jazz is routinely celebrated as the unique product of the modern United States, especially of its oppressed black minority. Between the 1870s and 1939, African American musicians invented a raft of new rhythmic idioms – blues, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing – that, coinciding the development of new recording

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technology, launched a musical revolution.These styles combined European instruments and melodic and tonal structures with West Africa-derived music that foregrounded the interplay and manipulation of rhythmic patterns. They evolved and spread through the movement of black people from the rural South to urban centers in the North, Midwest, and West of the United States.The disastrous 1927 flood in the lower Mississippi delta region, where jazz, ragtime, and the blues were born, drove a new wave of black migrants north. These genres are examples of how cities generated new cultural and expressions of community.The recordings of trumpeter Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands between 1925 and 1929, and those of Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers in 1926, helped launch “hot jazz” into a global phenomenon. The popularity of Armstrong’s “Heebie Jeebies,” featuring his famous “skat” vocal chorus, spurred the release of a second and much larger spate of “race records” in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s.23 James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle’s military band, the 369th Infantry Regiment “Hellfighters,” and the composer Will Vodery’s band first introduced European listeners to the syncopated sounds of black America at the end of World War I. Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra and then the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band toured Europe between 1919 and 1921. A string of popular African American musical stage shows, including Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds revues, followed these bands. The musicals included stereotypical imagery and scenes of plantation life, the “jungles” of Africa, and an ostensibly rural, premodern blackness, borrowing from vaudeville and black face minstrelsy. The disciplined, synchronized movements of the black chorus line dancers and the pulsating rhythms accompanying them, by contrast, embodied the mechanization of modern life. African American revues made women dancers and singers such as Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and Adelaide Hall into international stars. The singer, dancer, and trumpeter Valaida Snow toured in Shanghai, the Philippines, and Dutch Southeast Asia in 1926; played in the Soviet Union in 1929; recorded in London in 1936–1937; and visited India in 1937.24 By the 1930s, touring musicians, bands, and stage acts from the United States followed well-established trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific circuits, and cities throughout Europe and the Pacific Rim became familiar ports of call. Cook and subsequent imitators, from Duke Ellington to Ken Johnson, who led Britain’s most popular black dance band in the late 1930s, projected an air of modern refinement and sophistication. While the association of jazz with urban modernity and cosmopolitanism was, if anything, stronger outside the United States, European audiences also interpreted the new music through the lens of primitivism and associated jazz, ragtime, and swing music with racial authenticity. Jazz revolutionized popular music, among other ways, by subordinating melody to rhythm. While in brass marching band music and ragtime, musicians hit the first and third beats of a bar, black church music and the blues emphasized the second and fourth beats. In Kansas City, the Count Basie orchestra merged these two patterns to create swing music, in which the rhythm section struck every quarter beat. The steady 4/4 beat continues to provide the basic structure to popular music in

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many parts of the world to this day. Jazz and swing influenced musical cultures around the world and developed into arguably the first global popular music. The music, especially but not only in its rhythm, assimilated the cacophony of daily life in modern industrial cities, transforming it into art.25 The global popularity of jazz reflected and helped propel three of biggest innovations in popular culture between the world wars: radio, gramophone records, and commercial venues for social dancing. African American jazz and swing was a part of a larger explosion of modern popular music – sounds that, like jazz, were the products of the movement of people and cultures and their mixing in cities, recorded using a new electrical process, pressed onto shellac-covered discs, and then distributed to gramophone users across the globe. Afro-Caribbeans and Latin Americans contributed to the evolution of jazz as well as the spread of Latin music on both sides of the Atlantic. They participated in the New York jazz scene from the beginning. Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians took the bandstand with African Americans in the era’s leading swing orchestras, and islanders from the British Caribbean were overrepresented among the “Lindy Hoppers” whose acrobatic dance moves were as much a part of the attraction as the bands at Harlem’s nightspots like the Savoy Ballroom. Large cosmopolitan ports such as Aguadilla in northwest Puerto Rico produced a considerable number of musicians, many of whom made their way to New York, especially after the hurricane that rocked the island in 1928 and the crash of the stock market the following year. James Reese Europe traveled to Puerto Rico to recruit musicians for his famous regimental band, while his drum major, the composer and arranger Noble Sissle discovered others in New York. As popular demand for Latin music grew and Latin American-themed establishments opened in New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere during the 1930s, musicians seeking new opportunities habitually moved between clubs and bands specializing in these different idioms. At the same time, segregation and racism in the entertainment industry tended to unite black players across regional, cultural, and linguistic differences.While light-skinned Latinos performed in the high society ballrooms of lower Manhattan, racist hiring policies consigned those of a darker shade to Harlem. The Cuban trumpeter and clarinetist Mario Baúza first travelled to New York to record in 1929. He returned and spent the 1930s playing in the orchestras of Sissle, Cab Calloway, and Chick Webb, in part out of a sense of racial solidarity with black Harlemites.26 In the 1930s, jazz remained a vaguely defined category, and in the clubs, performers mixed jazz with other syncopated styles – calypso, beguine, Cuban, and South American music. Local jazz scenes quickly developed around the world, closely associated with the decade’s “craze” for dancing; jazz and swing infused hybrid musical styles that were already popular on local and regional levels. Caribbean bands and orchestras toured everywhere there were pockets of Afro-Caribbean settlement, performing in dance halls, variety theaters, and cinemas. At the same time that jazz and Argentine tango became popular with dancers in Puerto Rico, Cuban and Puerto Rican tríos, cuartetos, and orquestras increasingly appeared on the New York music scene. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Havana produced

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hundreds of son recordings by sextetos and septetos, “as Afro-Cuban music remade the soundscape of Cuba in the midst of the labor and student struggles against [General Gerardo] Machado’s dictatorship.”27 Cuban music, marketed as “rumba,” spread rapidly and inspired imitators around the world. Tango, which had spurred an international dance craze before World War I, already represented 90% of all records sold in Argentina by the end of the 1920s, and with the release of new electrical recordings, the sound of the working-class arrabales of Buenos Aires travelled the globe during the next decade.28 In Port Limón, Peru, during the early 1930s, jazz sextets such as the Central American Black Stars and the Merrymakers performed at the “weekly regge” where Caribbean youths danced the Black Bottom, shimmy, mento, and tango late into the night.29 With the imposition of migration restrictions and mass deportations we discuss in Chapter 4, these musical forms came to Kingston with returnees from Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, and elsewhere in Central America, while studios in Port of Spain, New York, and London produced some of the first recordings of Trinidadian calypso and Jamaican mento. The musical accompaniment on these records frequently borrowed instrumentation and arrangements from jazz, and the artists who produced them also recorded Cuban sones and Venezuelan paseos. In South Africa, African musicians playing marabi provided the soundtrack to life in the slum-yards and townships. South African whites, like moralizers and critics of jazz in the United States and Europe, heaped scorn upon this subaltern music. Marabi developed in the drinking culture of the shebeens (informal bars) operated by African women in the urban native locations, performed by male and female vocalists and bands playing piano or organ, banjos, guitars, tambourines, bones, and other percussion instruments. The music transported musical elements and instruments from the mission church and Christian schools and choirs to a secular setting, borrowed from the sound of colored “crooners” in the Cape, Afrikaans music, and jazz and other African American music, and spawned several regional variations such as focho, famo, thulandivile, and indunduma. Though very little of this music was ever committed to record, in 1932, William Mseleku’s Amanzimtoti Players and Nimrod Makhanya’s Bantu Glee Singers produced the first recordings of marabi in Johannesburg. Both groups were modeled on Tholakele Caluza’s Double Quartet. In 1930, Caluza had travelled to London, where his band recorded 150 songs for the Gramaphone Company’s Zonophone label. The actor and singer Griffiths Motsieloa visited London the same year and produced a number of recordings for Brunswick, including the African National Congress’s anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Though neither were, strictly speaking, marabi musicians, both Caluza and Motsieloa recorded versions of the popular song, “uTebetjana Ufana Ne’mfene” (“Tebetjane Looks Like a Baboon”), a tongue-in-check reference to the great (but unrecorded) marabi keyboardist.30 Released as gramophone records for the South African market, these recordings migrated back to shebeens where their sound filled the air between or in lieu of live performers. Across the Pacific, the music scene in 1930s Shanghai was markedly international. By 1936, the city had more than three hundred cabarets and casinos. While

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foreigners and wealthy Chinese patronized the ballrooms and cabarets with ostentatious stage shows, Chinese of all classes packed the more numerous dance halls and nightclubs featuring a small band and “taxi dancers” or dancing hostesses. Along tree-lined Avenue Joffre, the main street running through the French concession, “every night,” one contemporary noted, “there are the intoxicating sounds of jazz music coming from the cafés and bars.”31 Two of the writer Mu Shiying’s most well known short stories, “Five Characters in a Nightclub” and “Shanghai Foxtrot,” center on the city’s nightlife scene and its most popular attraction, dancing.32 The African American musician Buck Clayton lived in Shanghai during the 1930s and collaborated with Li Jinhui and other Chinese musicians to create a popular Chinese variant of jazz. Commentators labeled it “yellow” music, which means decadent, obscene, or pornographic in Chinese, to connote its shocking nature, modernity, and association with youth culture.33 Filipino musicians introduced jazz to audiences in dancehalls in Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo in the early 1920s. Japan’s first jazu kissa (“jazz café”), Chigusa, opened in Tokyo in 1936.The trumpeter Fumio Nanri was one of the first Japanese players to gain an international reputation. He traveled to Shanghai in 1929, and toured in the United States in 1932. Inspired by leading African American big bands, he formed his own swing orchestra, the Hot Peppers, after he returned to Japan. During the 1930s, the composers Ryoichi Hattori, Koichi Sugii, and Masao Koga attempted to blend jazz with Japanese folk and theater songs, dodoitsu lyric poetry, and ryu¯ko¯ka (literally “popular song”).The latter became a catchall term for the music of popular Japanese crooners and female vocalists, whose sound was transformed by the introduction of microphones, electric speakers, and elements of western music. Some of them sold hundreds of thousands of records and became film stars by the late 1930s. Jazz first arrived in India during the 1920s. African American jazz musicians stopped in Calcutta and Bombay as they toured Asia and Europe. By the 1930s, Bombay’s nightclubs and ballrooms in upmarket hotels such as the Taj Mahal hotel – bastions of European colonial officials and members of the growing Indian middle class of educated workers and professionals – hosted jazz bands. The African American violinist Leon Abby brought an eight-piece band to Bombay in 1935. The urban jazz scenes in India were ethnically and racially diverse, bringing together Goan, Parsi, and Anglo-Indian musicians. Goan jazz musicians, who played with visiting African American bands, brought the music (and sometimes these guests) with them to more democratic establishments through which it found its way into urban working-class culture. Since most of them also worked in the growing film industry, they introduced jazz and swing to early Indian cinema. By the 1930s, a recognizable “jazz public” had emerged in Europe as well. Louis Armstrong first visited London in 1932, and Duke Ellington’s orchestra performed at the Trocadero the following year. In 1934, the last year that American bands could tour Britain before a Musicians Union ban went into effect, both Armstrong and the saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins appeared in London. From Britain, these musicians toured the European continent, and pockets of passionate jazz aficionados formed in every major city from Paris, Copenhagen, and Brussels to Rome

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(despite the cultural policies of the Fascist government). Beyond such landmark appearances, many more Europeans encountered jazz music in the form of gramophone records or at nightclubs and dance halls. Dances such as the shimmy, the Black Bottom, the Charleston, the Lambeth walk, the Suzie Q, and the jitterbug, which were developed by African American women dancers and choreographers and popularized by the touring stage shows, became emblems of the modern girl.34 The music echoing from the clubs and the rapturous dancing within their walls captured salient aspects of urban modernity in the 1930s: polyphony, mobility, abrupt change, sexual expression, the prevalence of foreign imports, the commercialization of leisure, and the democratization of modern amusements. For some women and men, the racial mixing that took place within the walls of cramped jazz clubs, dance halls, and cabarets became a symbol of the transformative potential of internationalism and of opposition to fascism. In some clubs, the connection to politics was more direct. The Martinican beguine musician Ernest Léardee’s first venture in Paris took the form of a bal antillais (Antillean dance hall) that restricted admission to men and women from the colonies and their guests.Two years later, he opened the Bal Nègre at 33 rue Blomet. It became one of the city’s most popular nightspots, especially during the 1931 Colonial Exposition. Surrealist artists and writers such as André Gide and Man Ray were habitués. At the Bal Nègre, Léardee wrote, “all races and all nationalities mixed” in a “ritualistic ceremony in which all peoples are united in the same passion for rhythm dance.”35 The former shoe salesman Barney Josephson opened Café Society on Sheridan Square in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1938. The club combined elements of left-leaning cabarets in Paris and Weimar Berlin with the atmospherics of Harlem’s jazz clubs in one of few interracial establishments downtown. Its name an ironic reference to segregated upscale clubs for wealthy white New Yorkers, the club proclaimed itself “the wrong place for the Right people.” It attracted African American intellectuals and musicians as well as white jazz lovers, artists, trade unionists, socialists, and celebrities. The door attendant wore tattered clothing and gloves, and the bartenders had all served in the integrated Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the band of volunteers who had travelled to Spain to fight the fascists. The staff gave black patrons the best seats in the house and removed whites who made racist remarks or heckled the performers on stage. Café Society was the first club where Billie Holiday performed the disturbing “Strange Fruit,” whose haunting lyrics evoke the specter of lynching and racial violence; it was likely the only place south of 125th Street she could have at that time. She routinely closed sets with the song. Service stopped, and wait staff, bussers, and bartenders stood in silence as she sang.36 The spread of jazz and swing music emerged from a larger revolution in the recording and consumption of popular musical idioms. During the decade after 1925 and the advent of electrical recording, thousands of recordings of scores of vernacular musical forms entered global circulation. The introduction of electrical recording equipment and electrical loudspeakers enabled dramatic improvements in audio fidelity and reduced the cost of the phonograph and gramophone machines, initiating a boom in the production and consumption of records. Much of this

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music originated in the cosmopolitan, working-class cultures of colonial ports. In a bid to push the hardware, gramophone machines, required to play records, recording companies dispatched teams to record local musicians in port cities around the world – Havana, Port of Spain, Honolulu, Cairo, Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro – while resident or visiting musicians from the colonies and countries bordering the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific entered the studio in cities such as New York, London, and Paris. New electrical microphones captured these sounds, which were pressed onto relatively inexpensive 78 rpm discs coated in shellac – a resin secreted by female lac bugs in the forests of South Asia and thus itself a colonial product. Indonesian kroncong, Balinese gamelan, Egyptian tarab, Hawaiian hula, Portuguese fado, West African palm-wine music, and many other popular styles became part of the soundscape of the global jazz age by the early 1930s. The tarab recordings of the Zanzibari singer Siti binti Saad from the end of the 1920s were popular along the Swahili coast of East Africa, selling more than seventy-one thousand copies by mid-1931. As gramophones assembled in India with Japanese parts made the machines accessible to a wider segment of consumers in South Asia, the records by stars from the urban vernacular theater such as the Marathi singer Hirabai Barodekar drove a “music boom” in port cities across South Asia.West African musicians living in London incorporated tunes such as the Jamaican mento “Sly Mongoose” into the some of the earliest available recordings, and beginning in 1933, the British recording company His Majesty’s Voice (HMV) distributed Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian records, including international hits such as the Cuban Trio Matamoros’ “El manicero” (“The Peanut Vendor”), in West and Central Africa, where they had a tremendous influence on the subsequent development of popular music. The “Western swing” and “hillbilly jazz” that became popular in the American southwest during the 1930s combined jazz, Mexican mariachi, and Hawaiian-style steel guitar, all of which also travelled as far as coastal Africa on records. In some cases, the music had a political edge or added a rhythmic counterpoint to local cultures of anti-colonialism. The recordings of the tarab singer Umm Kulthum and her monthly live broadcasts on Egyptian radio beginning in 1934 attracted devotes across the North Africa and the Middle East. She became the voice of Arab nationalism. Radio similarly helped to make kroncong into an emblem of anti-colonialism in Dutch Indonesia during the 1930s. The most popular palmwine music band in Lagos during the 1930s, the Jolly Orchestra recorded “Wallace Johnson,” an homage to the Sierra Leonean journalist and labor organizer I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson who formed the African Workers’ Union in 1931. Abibu Oluwa’s sákárà praise song, “Orin Herbert Macauley,” celebrated the eponymous leader of the anti-colonial Nigerian National Democratic Party.37 The Depression sparked a process of consolidation in the recording industry in Europe and the United States that greatly reduced the prevalence of field recording and the variety of sounds available to consumers. As demand declined worldwide in the early 1930s, phonograph and record producers went out of business or were absorbed by large radio broadcasting and electrical equipment corporations. Most of the musicians who recorded the vernacular music of colonial port cities never

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recorded again. The music returned to and lived on in the clubs, dance halls, and shebeens from which it first emerged. It reverberated through the decade, becoming the soundtrack for and an expression of anti-colonialism in colonial urban settings and of antifascism and cosmopolitanism in the imperial metropoles.

Modernism and primitivism For Europeans, and eventually for most of the world, the “modern” entailed its antithesis, the “primitive.” Europeans projected a stadial model of historical development onto the diversity of world cultures. In this schema, modern connoted the highest level of advancement and the conquest and harnessing of the natural environment through the application of technology; primitive implied backwardness, stagnation or decline, and savagery. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, as the age of the European imperialism reached its peak, westerners believed that modern machines and technological innovation demonstrated their civilizational and racial superiority. Interest in the primitive focused primarily on indigenous cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific that were thought to be “disappearing” beneath the weight of colonial modernity, and became the special purview of the emerging academic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. During the early decades of the twentieth century, a wider vogue for the primitive swept across the industrialized west, becoming a medium for anxieties regarding the pace and substance of social change. In the arts, “primitivism” provided models for an array of avant-garde movements that collectively came to be associated within modernism. Modernism and its conjoined twin, primitivism, emerged as critical positions within cultural modernity, not outside it. Both modernism and primitivism were the products of distinctly modern and imperial forms of interaction. European colonial officials took works by native artists and craftspeople, funneled them to art and ethnographic museums in the metropole, and parlayed their positions into second careers as writers of ethnographies and imperial adventure fiction and as advisers on film and colonial development projects. At the same time, imperial networks and the trans-regional movements of performers and popular culture linked and brought colonial and other nonwhite artists and intellectuals to New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. Soon after the turn of the twentieth century, a group of European artists, many associated with the School of Paris, turned appreciation for “authentic” African, Amerindian, and Oceanic material culture “into a self-consciously avant-garde project” that generated new styles, including post-impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, and Amadeo Modigliani made their reputations and their careers in these genres of painting.38 Like European empire itself, modernist artists, as one historian observes, “produced the primitive as a space of modern aesthetic and economic production by positing this domain, paradoxically, as precapitalist and premodern.”39 Western artists turned to “the ‘decorative’ art of the ‘primitive’ and non-western peoples untouched by Renaissance naturalism” in a “radical quest for an alternative

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to materialism,” which, they believed, had a stultifying, even destructive effect on their societies and, through their colonizing projects, the world. In this quest, many gravitated to South and East Asian philosophy or derivatives of it, which became, in one art historian’s words, “the intellectual context of the abstract method” in visual art. The anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculptures and other so-called “primitive art” from the Africa, the South Pacific, and elsewhere provided the inspiration and models for abstract painting and sculpture.40 In his seminal book, Primitivism in Modern Art, which first appeared in 1938, the art historian Robert Goldwater traced the development of a “primitive” tendency within modern art that became a distinguishing characteristic of the “modern.” He showed how artists’ appropriations of non-European forms of representation to either implicitly or explicitly oppose urban western culture increasingly became a pronounced feature of that very culture.41 Perhaps the most poignant example of his argument, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” a mural-sized Cubist painting depicting the terror and destruction wrought by the German aerial bombardment of the Basque town in Spain, had been unveiled a year earlier at the Paris Fair of 1937. Artists of color plumbed the critical possibilities of modernism and primitivism for their own purposes, participating in the rebellious artistic subcultures in the cultural centers of Western Europe and the United States, and forming cultural movements that celebrated and returned to African, Afro-diasporic, and indigenous sources in the Americas, Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. A group of young Martinician students, including Jules Monnerot, Pierre and Simone Yoyotte, and Etienne Léro, reinvigorated the surrealist movement in 1930s Paris, which had fragmented owing to André Breton’s domineering influence. Inspired by his love of jazz, Michel Leiris broke with Breton and turned to ethnography. Leiris joined Marcel Griaule’s 1931 Mission Dakar-Djibouti, the collecting expedition that produced part of the collection of the Musée de l’Homme, established by Paul Rivet in 1937, and led to an unprecedented period of government-sponsored anthropological fieldwork in Africa. Early exhibitions in New York, such as the Brooklyn Museum’s “Primitive Negro Art” (1923), the Museum of Modern Art’s “African Negro Art,” and the “Negro in Art Week” in Chicago in 1927 helped introduce African art to artists and audiences in the United States. In 1926, the African American philosopher and internationalist Alain Locke traveled to Europe with the editor of Theatre Arts Monthly, Edith J. R. Isaacs, to scout for artwork for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. During a brief stop in London, he addressed the members of the West African Students’ Union. He professed his hope that internationalism would define the emerging “new world” and replace the “selfish nationalism” and “racialism” of the “old order,” and assured his audience that “the ‘New Negro’ mind is reaching out in intelligent ways to Africa.”42 Isaacs purchased roughly one thousand pieces from the Belgian collector Raoul Blondiau in Brussels, anticipating that the new museum would acquire half of the lot, but the 1929 stock market crash and the start of the Depression undermined Locke’s fundraising efforts, and the museum project collapsed. Works from the Blondiau collection made it into the numerous private collections, including those of the African American singers Roland Hayes

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and Paul Robeson, who began incorporating African material into their own repertoires; Charlotte Osgood Mason donated a number of pieces she had acquired to historically black colleges. In the 1930s, the William E. Harmon Foundation organized a series of exhibitions of contemporary works by African American artists at the Art Center on 52nd Street and other New York galleries. It sponsored a large show of sculptures by Sargent Johnson and Richmond Barthé and paintings by the recently deceased Malvin Gray Johnson at Delphic Studios in 1935. In 1934, Aaron Douglas unveiled his famous four-paneled murals “Aspects of Negro Life” in the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Drawing on African sculpture and dance, the series traces the making of the Afro-American diaspora from to Africa through slavery, Reconstruction, life in the post-Reconstruction South, and finally mass migration to northern cities; the fourth and final mural, “Songs of the Towers,” depicts black contributions to the modern urban landscape in the abstract geometric forms and figures of industrial workers and a jazz saxophonist. Alain Locke called Douglas a “pioneering Africanist” in the essay, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” included in his anthology, The New Negro (1925), which introduced many Harlem Renaissance writers and artists to the world. Locke insisted that “it is as legitimate a modern use of African art to promote it . . . as a stimulus to the development of Negro art as to promote it as a side exhibit to modernist painting,” but his approach to African art varied from those of European ethnographers, collectors, and modernist artists.43 He celebrated some forms of “primitivism” while lamenting that the appropriation of African art by European artists led to “slavish imitation and sterile sophistication” in modern abstract art. In his foreword to the catalogue for the Harmon Foundation’s Contemporary Negro Art exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939, which included works by a number of black artists outside the United States, he outlined the “lessons” that could be drawn from African art: on the cultural side, the lesson of art for use, of art for popular appreciation and consumption, of art with a sound rootage in its own cultural soil; on the technical side, the lesson of originality itself, of close adaptation of the medium to the subject, and of subordination of technique to the artistic idea.44 Cultural movements across Latin American, including Cuban negrismo and Mexican and Guatemalan indigenismo, paralleled and often had ties to the creative ferment in Harlem. Interest in popular music – the blues and son – linked writers such as Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, the founder of the Cuban negrismo movement. White and mestizo artists and intellectuals associated with indigenismo in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean regions of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru turned to indigenous symbolism, imagery, and themes in their novels, poetry, and paintings.The work of “los tres grandes” (the three most influential Mexican muralists of the period) – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros – portrayed the

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destruction of native communities under colonialism and modern capitalism and celebrated Mexico’s diverse culture. Indians themes and characters appeared in many early Mexican films, such as La raza de bronce (The Race of Bronze, 1931), Janitzio (1934), El Indio (1938), and La india bonita (The Pretty Indian, 1938).45

Talking pictures Innovations in the recording and reproduction of sound transformed the experience of cinema-goers during the 1930s. Produced and released in the United States in 1927, The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue; the “talkie” inaugurated a new era of film history. The film features one of the country’s most popular singers at the time, Al Jolson, playing a young Jewish man who is torn between his duties to his family and culture and his ambition of becoming a Broadway star – between tradition and modernity – and who performs in blackface in the film’s climatic scene. In 1930, Fortune Magazine in the United States declared that “the advent of American talking movies is beyond comparison the fastest and most amazing revolution in the whole history of industrial revolutions.”46 The first films in color followed shortly thereafter but had less dramatic effects. Film was perhaps the most seductive cultural form of the interwar years, a symbol of the modern and a medium for the expression of the contradictory mix of hope and despair that it generated. It was also one of the more prominent examples of the cultural influence of the United States, enhancing its association with modernity. Movie stars like the German actress Marlene Dietrich became international “dream girls” on the backs of popular movies such as The Blue Angel (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932). Constituting one-tenth of the world market, Britons flocked to cinemas of increasing size and opulence during the 1930s.47 Because they offered an affordable form of recreation without the attendant loss of respectability or the potential for harassment associated with nights out in pubs and nightclubs, young women frequented them more than men, so much more that Hollywood producers assumed they were making films for largely female audiences at home and abroad. Hollywood exports, which were often cheaper to acquire than films produced in Britain and France – and more popular, even in their own colonies – had a global reach, but local film industries were also growing rapidly in many parts of the world during the 1930s.The 1930s witnessed the first golden ages of both Chineselanguage and Arab cinema.The Chinese film industry centered on Hong Kong and, above all, Shanghai. Although foreign imports, particularly Hollywood films, predominated in the cinemas of Shanghai’s foreign concessions, the decade produced a wide range of Chinese films – musicals, melodramas, comedies, and period pieces. The first locally produced sound films appeared in the early 1930s, beginning with Zhang Shichuan’s Sing-Song Girl Red Peony (1931), but many of the decade’s notable films are silent films or experimental mixtures of sound and silent pictures. A leftist film movement emerged in Shanghai, a reflection of the struggle between Chinese nationalists and communists and a response to the effects of the Depression

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and the Japanese invasion in the northeast. Cheng Bugao’s Spring Silkworms (1933), Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess (1934), Sun Yu’s The Big Road (1935), and Yuan Muzhi’s Street Angel (1937) address social problems, including the status of women, and emphasize class oppression and external pressures, from competition from foreign trading companies and manufacturers to Japanese imperialism.They focus on common people, such as the family of silk farmers struggling to be free of debt in Spring Silkworms. One of the early stars of Chinese cinema, Ruan Lingyu, delivers a powerful performance as a devoted mother who must resort to prostitution to support her child in The Goddess. In Cai Chusheng’s New Women (1935), she plays another mother pushed into prostitution – a music teacher who nurses dreams of becoming a writer but commits suicide after her daughter succumbs to pneumonia. An unabashed call for a united front against the Japanese invaders, The Big Road follows the heroic efforts of six young, patriotic but unemployed men who build a highway to aid the forces resisting the Japanese. These films also contain innovative formal elements: the documentary realism of Spring Silkworms; the close-ups, abrupt cuts, and jarring camera angles, especially in the chilling shot of Ling-Yu’s character and her baby lying on the floor between a man’s legs, in The Goddess; and the use of long silences, which are interrupted by the workers singing and producing percussion sounds with their bodies in The Big Road. The Japanese invasion of China and occupation of Shanghai greatly curtailed film production in the city after 1937. Many filmmakers fled to Hong Kong or the Nationalists’ new capital Chongqing. Those who remained took refuge in Shanghai’s foreign concessions where they continued to produce new work in what became known as the “solitary island” period.48 Cairo generated the vast majority of early Arab cinema. By the end of World War I, there were eighty cinemas in Egypt. The first Egyptian silent films appeared dur­ ing the 1920s, but the industry reached new heights after the introduction of sound. In 1935, the Misr Bank opened Studio Misr, and local production increased from six films in 1933 to seventeen in 1936. Musicals predominated initially in an effort to exploit the popularity of singers such as Umm Kulthum who had developed large followings through the spread of radio and records, but output diversified as the decade went on to include melodramas and satirical comedies. Niazi Mostafa directed a series of promotional documentaries for Misr group companies in the mid-1930s. His first feature film, the comedy Salama fi khayr (Everything’s Okay or Salama’s Doing Okay, 1937), was an enormous success, launching his decadeslong career as a filmmaker. Mohammed Karim’s drama Yawm Sa’id (Happy Day, 1939), starring the actor and musician Mohamed Abdel Wahab, introduced Faten Hamama, who was only eight years old at the time and went on to become known as the first lady of Arab cinema, to the big screen.49 The film industry in India, which is today the world’s largest, developed alongside those in the Americas, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Large studios – Imperial, Kohinoor, Madan, Ranjit, and Sharada – emerged in Bombay, Poona, and Calcutta. During the 1930s, many of the most popular silent films were remade with sound, and Hindustani, a syncretic mixture of Urdu and Hindi, became the

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most widely used language in Indian cinema and, thanks to its popularity, the closest thing to an all-India vernacular in the diverse linguistic landscape of South Asia. Ruby Myers, who was born in Pune to Baghdadi Jewish parents and better known by her screen name Sulochana (a reference to an Indian epic, Ramayana), attracted an adoring fan base and became Indian cinema’s first “sex symbol.” Between 1925 and 1937, she appeared in fifty-two movies, including the eponymous Sulochana (1934), wearing saris, Indian-style braids, and jewels as well as the latest westernstyle dresses, pants, and shoes; drove a 1935 Chevrolet through the streets of Bombay; and, at her peak, earned more a month than the highest-ranking local colonial official.50 Some of the most powerful Indian films from the 1930s depicted recognizably modern conflicts and struggles. Devika Rani’s film, Acchut Kanya (1936), revolves around a love affair between her character, a Dalit or “untouchable” young woman, and an elite Brahmin man – its heart-wrenching story an implicit critique of the laws and social norms barring inter-caste marriage and the social ostracism of members of “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes.”The decade’s most influential drama, Pramathesh Barua’s Devdas (1935), also engages in pointed social commentary. Adapted from Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s romance novel, the plot centers on a love triangle between Devdas, a wealthy Bengali man, his childhood friend Parvati (“Paro”), who is a middle-class Bengali woman from his natal village, and Chandramukhi, a courtesan in Calcutta. The characters are flawed and defy easy categorization as good or evil, their lives marred by the effects of class differences, social convention, and their own choices. Informed by distinctive literary and performance traditions and local social issues, these films nonetheless capture quintessential scenes, emotions, and tensions of the 1930s modern. *** While traveling through East Asia on a speaking tour in early 1937,W. E. B. Du Bois visited Shanghai. Describing the city for the mass African American readership of the Pittsburgh Courier, he wrote, Shanghai is an epitome of the racial strife, the human paradox of modern life. Here is the greatest city of the largest nation on earth, with the larger part of it owned, governed and policed by foreign white nations; . . . with a vast welter of the hardest working class in the world . . . ; with a glittering modern life of skyscrapers, beautiful hotels, theaters and night clubs. Even in the Chinese section of Shanghai, whose idiosyncrasies most fascinated him, many of the technologies, media, and expressive forms found in cities around the world occupied his field of vision – and his ears – as he strolled through its streets. “Like the Chinese,” he wrote of that part of the city, it is unique. It is a series of satisfactions; not merely for the few, for the rich, for the well-to-do, but for everybody. It has color – flamboyant color of

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banners, streamers, flags, lanterns. It has sound – not only the babel of human voices, but cries of selling, song and now the shrieking radio.51 Du Bois’s words succinctly convey the sense of a tenuous, ultimately unstable array of forces that defined the 1930s modern, exquisitely voicing the deep contradictions of the modern: between the coexistence, even interdependence, of multiple life worlds and racial segregation; between the democratic possibilities of urban life and the reality of yawning inequalities. In the chapters that follow we trace these contradictions as they played out across the decade.

Notes 1 Kenneth McPherson, “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change,” in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and Christopher A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 75–95. 2 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 2. 3 Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street” (1928), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 444. 4 Helia Nacif Xavier and Fernanda Magalhães, Urban Slums Report: The Case of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3, 9, 12–13 (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report/pdfs/ Rio.pdf; accessed June 20, 2016). 5 Luc-Normand Tellier, Urban World History: An Economic and Geographical Perspective (Québec, Canada: Presses de L’Université du Québec, 2009), 393; Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4–5, 87–88, and Ch. 4 and 5. 6 Louise Young, Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 21. 7 Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 7. 8 Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920– 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 4–5. 9 Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 75–79, 84. 10 Ibid., 79. 11 Ibid., 79–81; Patricia Bayer, Art Deco Architecture: Design, Decoration and Detail from the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 8. 12 Lee, “Shanghai Modern,” 86, 91, 93. 13 Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–2. 14 The building now houses the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. 15 Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 46, 48–49. 16 Jonathan Hyslop, “Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 121–122. 17 Quoted in Jennifer Robinson, “Johannesburg’s 1936 Empire Exhibition: Interaction, Segregation and Modernity in a South African City,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 3 (September 2003): 770, 777. 18 Robinson, “Johannesburg’s 1936 Empire Exhibition,” 778–779; David Coplan, In the Township Tonight: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [1985]), 126, 138;Yvette Hutchinson, “South Africa,” in A History of Theatre in Africa, ed. Martin Banham, 345–347.

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1 9 Hyslop, “Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern,” 119–120. 20 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (London: Faber & Faber, 1981 [1954]), 193, 197. 21 Quoted in Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 291. 22 Abrahams and Bunche quoted in Hyslop, “Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern,” 133; Ntongela Masilela, The Cultural Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007); Mwelela Cele, “Co-opting Durban’s Black African Urban Dwellers: the Establishment of the Durban Bantu Social Centre” (unpublished seminar paper) (http://www.kznhass-history.net/files/seminars/Cele2009.pdf; accessed July 27, 2016); Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki, 34. 23 Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitcs of a World Musical Revolution (London: Verso, 2015), 16–17. 24 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 239–240. 25 Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 20–21. 26 Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 156; Ruth Glasser, My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917–1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 31, 54–57. 27 Denning, Noise Uprising, 16. 28 Denning, Noise Uprising, 16–17. 29 Putnam, Radical Moves, Ch. 5. 30 Denning, Noise Uprising, 32–33. 31 Quoted in Lee, “Shanghai Modern,” 85, 87–88. 32 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of New Urban Culture in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 192. 33 For more on Buck Clayton, see Gerald Horne, Race War:White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Buck Clayton and Nancy Miller Elliot, Buck Clayton’s Jazz World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 34 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 131–132. 35 Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 57–60. 36 David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (New York: Ecco Press, 2001), 25–27, 33–35; David W. Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,” Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (March 1998): 1384–1406. 37 Denning, Noise Uprising, 2–3, 18, 21, 23, 29, 31–32. 38 John Warne Monroe, “Surface Tension: Empire, Parisian Modernism, and ‘Authenticity’ in African Sculpture, 1917–1939,” American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 445–446. 39 Andrew Zimmerman, “Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea,” History of the Present 1, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 5, 25. 40 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–47 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 12; David Pan, Primitive Resistance: Rethinking German Expressionism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 112. Francis S. Connelly, “Authentic Irony: Primitivism and Its Aftermath,” Critical Interventions 4, no. 2 (2010): 21. 41 Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern,’ ” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1993): 62–81. 42 “Editorial,” Wãsù, no. 8 ( January 1929): 2–3.

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43 Quoted in Helen M. Shannon, “The Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection,” Tribal Art, Special Issue no. 3 on the “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013): 55. 44 Alain Locke, “Foreword,” in Contemporary Negro Art (Baltimore, MD: Museum of Baltimore, 1939). 45 David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 148, 180–181. 46 Quoted in “Talking Motion Pictures” (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug00/3on1/movies/ talkies.html; accessed August 12, 2016). 47 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 419. 48 Zhiwei Xiao, “The Myth about Chinese Leftist Cinema,” in Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-Present, eds. James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 145–164. 49 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007 [1998]) and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007). 50 Priti Ramamurthy, “All-Consuming Passions: The Indian Modern Girl in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl around the World, eds. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, and Madeleine Yu Dong, 147–148, 151. 51 W. E. B. Du Bois, Newspaper Columns, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 2 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thompson Organization, 1986), 1, 172, 177.

PART II

Internationalism

On June 30, 1936, the exiled emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, stood before the delegates at the League of Nations in Geneva to plead for support for his nation. Upon uttering his first words, “Monsieur le president,” Italian journalists in the press gallery behind him whistled shrilly, trying to silence the dignified speaker. Someone tried to end the interruption by turning out the lights, but the whistling resumed when they came back on. Another dimming of the lights had the desired result, and the emperor was allowed to make his speech before the likes of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov, and French Prime Minister Léon Blum. He declared to the assembly, I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today to claim that justice which is due to my people, and the assistance promised to it eight months ago, when fifty nations asserted that aggression had been committed in violation of international treaties. He was there to try to persuade the western powers to uphold the sanctions they had levied against Italy following its invasion of Abyssinia. Using a minor skirmish with Ethiopian troops at the end of 1934 as a pretext, Benito Mussolini had launched a military invasion of the sovereign state and member of the League of Nations from the neighboring Italian colony of Eritrea on October 3, 1935. In response, the major powers took only minor steps to admonish the Italian dictator.They decried his actions, but not the imperialist impulse behind them, and took only those steps that would protect their own colonial interests. In the months leading up to the start of invasion in October, the British government offered a self-serving proposal amounting to collective colonization or an internationalized form of indirect colonial rule via the League-appointed Committee of Five. Eventually, roughly a month after the war began, both Britain and France

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voted for League sanctions against Italy, but in practice, these, especially the arms embargo, injured rather than assisted the Ethiopian cause. In December, the two democracies and the Soviet Union, which had joined the League in 1934, rejected a proposal to extend the sanctions to include oil imports, and behind the scenes, the French and British foreign ministers, Pierre Laval and Samuel Hoare, concluded a secret pact essentially conceding the majority of Ethiopia to Mussolini. When the specifics of the agreement came to light, the ensuing public outcry in Britain forced Hoare to resign, but the backroom dealings between the Italians and representatives of the major European empires continued.The Soviet Union, for its part, continued to supply Italy with petroleum and other war matériel. The League of Nations met in June 1936 to decide whether to lift the sanctions. Selassie asked pointedly, “does this initiative not mean in practice the abandonment of Ethiopia to the aggressor? . . . does not this initiative deprive Ethiopia of one of her last chances to succeed in obtaining the support and guarantee of States Members?” He tried to hold the European powers to the principles they claimed to promote through the League, demanding, “are States going to set up the terrible precedent of bowing before force?” He urged them to hold fast to the ideal of collective security and the protection of small states against aggressors embodied by the League, pleading with them to continue and even extend the sanctions against Italy. “What reply shall I have to take back to my people?” he asked, and then left the podium to loud applause.1 The reply came within hours. The League voted to lift the sanctions on Italy, effectively giving its imprimatur to the invasion of the Abyssinia, one of only two states in Africa that remained independent following the colonization of the continent in the late nineteenth century. The invasion of Ethiopia and the failure of the League of Nations to live up to its very raison d’etre provoked an international outcry from people across the globe, but it was felt most acutely by people of color. The Italo-Ethiopian War brought together moderate and more radical black intellectuals – Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American, and African – across political and regional divisions. Some, like the Trinidadian George Padmore, turned away from one form of internationalist mobilization in the Communist International to another: pan-Africanism. The response to Ethiopia also fueled a trend toward internationalization of efforts and agendas. It sparked new levels of coordinated, autonomous political organizing among people of African descent in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, radicalizing and expanding existing black organizations and inspiring the new ones. It inspired South Asian anti-colonialists like Jawaharlal Nehru to enlarge their fight for independence beyond the borders of their own countries, and gave rise to strikes and riots across the colonized and semi-colonized world.

Note 1 Quoted in Suzanne McIntire and William E. Burns, eds., Speeches in World History (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010), 333–334.

2 IMPERIAL INTERNATIONALISMS

The creation of the League of Nations in 1919 marked the onset of what some political scientists have called a revolution in the relationship of states to one another. Called by some “internationalization,” by others the development of a “world” or “international community,” by still others “internationalism,” it spurred the growth of networks of political, economic, diplomatic, and health-related agencies that served and connected peoples and governments across the globe. In the aftermath of the Wilsonian moment of 1919, there was a resurgence and proliferation of internationalisms across the political spectrum and around the world. Socialist and communist internationalisms had developed alongside and in tension with liberal capitalist and imperialist forms in the nineteenth century. The new League of Nations and its various programs, from the mandate system to the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation across national boundaries, further institutionalized aspects of both of the latter. The dangers of imperial rivals and the challenge presented by racial or cultural differences preoccupied advocates of international organization of all stripes. Most radically, internationalism galvanized many individuals and groups in their efforts to achieve greater rights under and even independence from imperial rule, and the Communist International (or Comintern) declared its commitment to the liberation of people of African descent and colonial peoples at its founding in 1919 – topics we discuss in later chapters. Imperialism also assumed an increasing internationalist guise during the interwar period. As many contemporaries recognized, in bringing different races and cultures together within a political structure, however unequal, empire represented a type of international system by another name. For the imperial powers, however – including the United States and the newly formed Soviet Union, despite their regular anti-colonial pronouncements – there was never any intention of letting their colonies go, at least not for decades to come. Each imperial state possessed its own vision of a new international order following World War I and the Bolshevik

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revolution, but they shared the common impulse of maintaining colonial rule and the aim of making the international order work on behalf of their respective interests. In pursuing the latter, they trumpeted contending emancipatory projects and asserted claims to a world order rooted in rights but one in which some presided over others. Many British internationalists looked upon their empire as a model and building block for greater international organization, while others proposed the extension of the League of Nations’ mandate system to include British colonies and thereby internationalize colonial administration and avoid another world war over colonial resources. The countries that became known as the “have-nots” – Germany, Italy, and Japan – sought to gain or expand their colonial holdings. For them, internationalization meant gaining the approbation of the international community for the pursuit of their own imperial and foreign policy objectives. The mandates system created under the League – an archetypal manifestation of internationalization – did not dramatically change the way the imperial powers governed their colonies, but it did compel them to alter the way they justified their rule. In the 1930s, internationalism usually connoted colonial reform, as Britain, France, Italy, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan frequently administered their colonial possessions mindful of the need to present themselves as responsible players within the new international system. Their actions on the ground did not usually conform to the ideals putatively put forward by the League, but they did face constraints, if only rhetorical ones, in the ways they went about their business on the global stage. The internationalist vision promulgated through the Permanent Mandates Commission called for inter-imperial consultation and cooperation in the administration and legitimation of empire, a strategy designed to postpone, if not silence, calls for the end of colonialism. Indeed, one historian has reminded us that the “League of Nations” was also a “League of Empires.”1 The United States and the Soviet Union, neither of which belonged to the League until, in the case of the latter, 1933, declaimed against imperialism whenever they could, but acted nonetheless as serious and active colonial powers; their versions of internationalism pursued both paths. Japan, Italy, and Germany first turned to internationalist mechanisms to enforce the various provisions of the Mandates Commission, especially those that called for the opening of all mandate colonies to free trade and free labor, and demanded, in essence, a more fulsome internationalization of the benefits of colonial rule.They later sought international support for the acquisition or reacquisition of their own colonies.When their efforts failed, all three left the League of Nations, ending any possibility of the League acting as an effective agent of international peace and collaboration through the internationalization of imperialism.

The British and French empires By the 1930s, the British and French empires were hierarchically arranged, internally differentiated assemblages of a variety of states enjoying varying degrees of sovereignty: metropolitan nations (which, in the case of France, included colonial

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Algeria), internally self-governing territories, colonies, protectorates, and mandates. Each power advanced its own visions of empire as international community under the headings of “Greater France” and “Greater Britain” or the “British Commonwealth of Nations.” This terminology increasingly replaced the old language of empire in the years before World War II. With the addition of the mandate colonies in Africa and the Middle East granted after the war, the British empire proper comprised some sixty discrete territories, encompassing nearly one quarter of the earth’s land mass. The possession now of the former German East Africa completed the long dreamt-of corridor of land running from the Cape to Cairo; Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan provided a similar swathe of British-controlled land from Suez to Singapore. Though average Britons may have given little thought to the size and composition of the empire, their rulers regarded it as an integral aspect of Britain itself, and more essential than ever to the maintenance of Britain’s great power status. They could no more envision a world without their empire than they could a nation without their king. The newly enlarged empire, however, created difficulties unfamiliar to metropolitan officials in the prewar era. Its sheer size would have tested the capabilities of any state at virtually any time, but the nation that emerged from the Great War – victorious but broke – faced particular and unprecedented problems. The United Kingdom had liquidated its overseas investments in order to pay for the war; it had lost overseas and colonial markets to the United States and Japan while occupied fighting Germany; and it was saddled with outdated machinery and plants throughout its industrial areas. As a result, the country had begun to slip into depression as early as 1920. The war debts it owed to the United States crippled the government’s ability to live up to its promises of creating “a home fit for heroes”; instead, cuts to domestic and imperial spending became the order of the day. Anti-colonial movements in many of the colonies exacerbated the economic difficulties faced by British politicians and officials, as did challenges from old rivals such as Russia in the Middle East and Asia. Former friends like Japan posed new threats to British interests in Asia as well. The conditions of the postwar period compelled Britain to devise new strategies to manage a wide array of potential hazards to its rule overseas. Economically, it was vital from the imperial perspective that the colonies not only support themselves but the metropole as well. Britain’s colonies took on added importance during the interwar period as the country sought to recover from the devastations of war and negotiate an increasingly difficult economic terrain. Prior to the Great War, Britain had virtually no coherent policy governing the economic administration of its colonies: its aims were to see that colonial economies served in a complementary capacity to enhance Britain’s domestic prosperity. To that end, colonial governors had worked to facilitate the growing and extraction of primary materials – foodstuffs, metals, and minerals – that would be exported to feed a world market and supply Britain’s and others’ industrial needs.They had not viewed their mission as including any effort to stimulate the growth of industry itself in their colonies, as these would compete with Britain’s. Indeed, they had supported

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manufacturers at home in their efforts to squelch any potential competition. Most colonial economies depended upon one or two crop-growing or mining enterprises, and lacked diversification. Now, however, with the war over, British officials took a new approach. The difficulties of the post–World War I era compelled them to begin thinking about how Britain’s colonial possessions ought to be ruled so as to meet the obligations of trusteeship on the one hand and assist Britain’s recovery on the other. The incompatibility of these two aims ensured that neither succeeded. Truly enhancing the welfare of their colonial subjects would have required governors, surely, to improve local economies through diversification – encouraging small-scale peasant agriculture for domestic consumption rather than export and promoting local manufacturing of secondary goods. But supporting the growth of diversified, sustainable economic development in the empire would have harmed the domestic British economy that depended upon privileged access to colonial markets for increasingly uncompetitive British-produced goods. So, instead, British colonial officials turned to policies of “empire strengthening” to develop infrastructure – railroads, roads, communications systems, factories, port facilities, warehouses – that would enhance the production of and trade in the commodities that constituted most of Africa’s economic exchanges with Britain.The government also created the Empire Marketing Board to further intra-imperial trade and to promote consumption of colonial products. These measures, culminating in the Colonial Development Act of 1929, only increased many colonies’ dependency on one or two export commodities, and as the Depression became worldwide after 1929, the prices peasants could command for their products fell dramatically, and export industries shed workers. Indebtedness and unemployment grew, and standards of living deteriorated concomitantly. Prices for commodities such as cocoa and palm oil from West Africa, for instance, dropped by 60–70%, forcing down wages and inducing private companies to drive their workers harder. Colonial subjects across the empire faced terrible poverty and immiseration. Meanwhile, at home in Britain, the act failed to lessen unemployment. Britain imposed techniques of indirect rule it used in India and parts of Africa on most of its new mandate territories. Hamstrung by a serious lack of finances with which to administer them, colonial officials placed Prince Faisal and Prince Abdullah, two sons of Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif and emir of Mecca, on the thrones of Iraq and Transjordan, respectively.The 1922 treaty that established Iraq acknowledged the new kingdom’s “national sovereignty” while at the same time requiring it to submit to British decision-making in matters military, judicial, and financial. In an effort to secure Faisal’s loyalty, British negotiators agreed to revisit the mandate status of Iraq on a regular timetable and to support Iraq’s bid to join the League of Nations. In 1930, three years after Anglo-Persian Oil Company engineers discovered vast reserves of oil in the territory, Britain and Iraq entered into another agreement: in return for substantial guarantees and protections of its commercial – read oil – interests and the granting of rights to establish and maintain military forces, including a network of airbases, Britain recognized Iraqi independence in 1932 and

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championed the kingdom’s bid for membership in the League, while fundamentally compromising the meaning and significance of both. The First World War had transformed Britain’s relationship to colonial India. While the drain on its resources had brought great hardship for the majority of the Indian population, the war had also opened the door for industrial development and, by war’s end, locally produced Indian cotton textiles were outstripping imports from Lancashire. By 1922, the metropolitan British government had relinquished control of fiscal and economic matters to the colonial government in India, and, henceforth, financial policy remained the key to Britain wringing economic benefits.2 After the British pound sterling left the gold standard in 1931, a currency bloc known as the sterling area began to take shape. It comprised not only colonies where the pound served as the local currency but also states, including the self-governing dominions of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, whose currencies were pegged to the pound. The sterling bloc buttressed the increasingly tenuous connections among the different parts of the empire and the external value of the pound, while acting as a fetter on capital flight. After the Labour government resigned in 1931, fractured over management of growing economic and budgetary crises, the center-right coalition National Government took over. As the global depression worsened, the funds and political will for continuing even modest empire-strengthening initiatives like the Empire Marketing Board disappeared. Nevertheless, internationalist ideals and symbolism suffused public rituals and political culture in Britain. Support for the League of Nations ran high until the end of the 1930s and transcended party-political divisions. Pacifism remained a prominent feature of liberal and socialist variants of internationalism in both Britain and France. In 1934–1935, 11.5 million Britons (or 38% of the adult population) responded to the League of Nations Union’s short questionnaire on rearmament and Britain’s relationship to the League in an unprecedented experiment in direct democracy. Although the Conservative Party officially boycotted the exercise, those who cast their “vote” in the “Peace Ballot,” as it became known, included a broad cross-section of political opinion; it overwhelmingly supported Britain’s membership in the League.3 Support for the League extended to – indeed, in many cases, focused on – the mandate system. British internationalists shared a preoccupation with the potentially destabilizing effects of imperialism in an increasingly interdependent global order. Many observers linked the relative prospects of war and peace to the ability to manage the resurgence of imperial rivalries and chauvinistic nationalisms. Thus, the Labour Party’s official statement on colonial policy in 1933 endorsed an expansion of the mandate system of putatively international administration to include Britain’s colonies in Africa and the Pacific. In 1936, the National Peace Council of Britain declared that all countries (including protectorates) having peoples of primitive culture not at present capable of self-government should be brought within a strengthened mandate system, firstly in order to accelerate the training of native

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populations in self-government, and secondly to ensure that training should not be such as to obstruct a general advance towards world prosperity and world peace. At the Congress of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies in 1938, the British League of Nations Union pushed for a resolution advocating the transfer where practicable of non-self-governing colonial territories held by various colonial powers to the mandate system subject to two fundamental principles: 1. Any change must be on such terms as will safeguard the existing interests of the populations concerned, and must be subject to the free consent of these populations. 2. It must secure equal opportunities for trade and commerce of all Members of the League.4 In sum, for most British liberals and socialists, internationalism meant interimperialism in practice. In 1931, Britain enacted the Statute of Westminster, granting legislative independence to the self-governing dominions. In bifurcating the British empire into a Commonwealth of Nations with legislative equality and an empire of colonial dependencies and protectorates, the act effectively institutionalized the color bar at the imperial level, but it also established responsible self-government and dominion status as a goal for colonies with a non-European majority. As the decade went on, politicians, officials, and other defenders of the empire applied the term “Commonwealth” to the entire imperium, disingenuously minimizing this distinction. The British Commonwealth was originally invented to distinguish the white dominions from India and the so-called tropical dependencies.The new uses of the Commonwealth ideal provided a convenient fiction that disguised an empire riven by racial inequality and by widely varying degrees of political rights as a “family” consisting “of majors and minors certainly, of trustees and wards if you like, but not, on your life, of parasites and hosts,” as the socialist advocate of colonial reform, Leonard Barnes, put it. Undoubtedly cynical and self-serving, the rhetorical expansion of the Commonwealth to include the colonies nevertheless remained a powerful internationalist rationale for the continuation of British colonial rule through the 1940s and 1950s.5 As in the British case, the French empire attained its greatest size and scope after the Great War, comprising by the middle of the 1930s nearly eight million square miles and containing some eighty-six million people in West Africa, Central Africa, North Africa, Syria, Lebanon, and Southeast Asia. Having survived the catastrophes of the First World War, the French saw the enlargement of their empire as no less than their due; more importantly, empire represented to many of them the promise of continued international standing and sustained economic success. In the face of potent international challenges to the legitimacy of empire from new powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union, they, like the British, fashioned new ideas about how empire should be regarded and administered.They placed their old

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and new colonies within the conceptual framework of a “Greater France,” a social, political, economic, and cultural project that integrated the nation and the colonies into a new international nation-empire, informed, ostensibly, by the internationalist mandates of the League of Nations. Whereas Britain administered an empire made up of idiosyncratic territorial possessions through local “traditional” rulers and other intermediaries, France pursued a policy of assimilation to incorporate the colonies into a closer relationship with the metropole and to transform non-European colonial subjects into protocitizens of the Republic, at least in a cultural sense. Or so it purported. In actuality, the French empire possessed no such coherence or holistic framework, neither the government nor private investors did much to further its development, and colonial administration increasingly resembled British-style indirect rule by the 1930s. The French empire, in general, underwent “severe decline between the wars,” as one historian has put it, despite its dramatic increase in size under the mandate system.6 France’s political leaders, despite invocations of internationalism and a global “Greater France,” pursued an almost totally European-oriented set of policies. Beset by disagreements over fundamental issues of policy, colonial officials, politicians, settlers, business leaders, missionaries, and the French populace failed to advance the empire project in any meaningful way. In this atmosphere of dissension and in the face of the country’s reluctance to put material resources into development initiatives, France’s efforts to use the instruments of internationalist models to further its imperial interests necessarily fell short, and repression and a more pronounced military presence became the norm in French African and Indochinese territories. One of the most significant sources of disagreement concerned the question of citizenship and its extension to non-European colonial subjects. The debate contributed to the development of internationalist politics among elements of the évolués – a term applied to Africans and Asians who had “evolved” through education and assimilation to embrace and European social norms and display European patterns of behavior, including marital practices. Colonial subjects who obtained a French education, spoke the language, espoused republican values, and renounced their civil status (as Muslims or Jews, for instance) could hope, under the doctrine of assimilation, to be integrated as full citizens into the French “empire nationstate.” In theory, assimilation offered virtually any subject access to the full rights of French citizenship, but in practice one had either to have considerable resources and hard-to-gain access to people who could facilitate one’s rise, serve in the military, or have been born of a French father. These attributes qualified some Africans to sit in the National Assembly, but the government granted only a few colonial applications for citizenship. In the interwar period, French colonial officials and their political supporters adopted a different way of regarding the subjects of empire, espousing a policy called “associationism.” In part a response to the demands of assimilated subjects to take a meaningful place in administration, society, the economy, and culture, and in part a product of trends in the “colonial sciences” of anthropology and ethnology, which urged the protection of “authentic” cultures under siege by industrialization

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and modernization, associationism called for colonial officials to abandon assimilationist efforts and to give more respect and support to the political, social, and cultural customs of local populations. The École Coloniale, which trained administrators for service in Africa and Indochina, began to instruct students in languages and ethnology, expertise that would assist them in understanding local cultures and improve their abilities to govern rationally. In terms of governance, associationism amounted to what one historian of Africa describes as “the politics of retraditionalization,” and closely resembled British practices of indirect rule in which the metropole ruled through local indigenous leaders and respected the social and political hierarchies that undergirded their power.7 Colonial officials established ties to local chiefs, mandarins, and headmen who kept order in their towns and villages and provided the workers – including corvée or forced, unpaid laborers – necessary to enable the French to exploit its colonial economies.Where assimilation promised – however falsely – a path to a shared citizenship among colonizers and colonized, associationism provided a far more conservative mechanism through which France could manage, extract, and utilize the resources of the empire. Or as one historian put it, “where assimilationism sought to re-engineer colonial societies, associationism preserved them as if in a museum.”8 In the face of the two unsatisfying alternatives of assimilationism and associationism, black university students and intellectuals in Paris such as the Sengalese Léopold Senghor, the Martinican Nardal sisters (Paulette, Jane, Andrée), and Aimé Césaire opted for neither, creating instead a political vision and cultural movement that embraced certain elements of both while rejecting the racial hierarchies that sustained them. Their movement, which became known as “Negritude,” embraced a form of métissage or cultural mixture that combined the liberatory political rudiments of the French republican citizenship with a celebration of the distinctive aspects of African and Afro-diasporic cultures. Their promulgation of this hybrid ideology drew them into the orbit of a larger internationalist pan-Africanism. As one historian described it, the proponents of the Negritude movement “claimed political equality while demanding cultural recognition, sought a place within the republican nation as ‘Negro-Africans’ while identifying with a transnational Panafrican community, collaborated with colonial reformers while envisioning an alternative Greater France as a nonracial supranational federation.”9 Those with the most to lose from the turn to associationism, educated Africans and Antilleans in France and the colonies, engaged with but often opposed reform-minded French colonial officials, termed “colonial humanists” by one recent historian, to bring what they regarded as more enlightened and rational practices and greater tolerance of cultural difference to colonial administration. The participants in the International Congress on Native Society in 1931 and the 1937 International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples, for instance, endorsed colonialhumanist initiatives that would “act upon the native, and promote him, in human terms,” by recognizing the autonomy of indigenous civilizations and tailoring educational policies to their particular cultures. In practice, this would entail abandoning French-style education and turning toward what in the Jim Crow South of the

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United States and other contexts was called adaptive education, a policy to which Senghor vigorously objected because it would remove a key avenue, at least in theory, to full citizenship and render African colonial subjects “diminished citizens.”10 Such protests, however, did little to stem the advance of associationist policies until after the Second World War.

The pretend-not-to-haves: the Soviet Union and the United States The Soviet Union and the United States explicitly espoused anti-imperialism in the years following the Great War, while acting very much like other empire states. Wilson’s call for the self-determination of nations – which at any rate had been directed toward the peoples of Europe, not of Asia or Africa – had in fact been preceded by Vladimir Lenin’s disclosure of a secret agreement among the Allied powers for the parceling out of the Middle Eastern territories at the end of the war. Lenin repudiated Russia’s “take” in this distribution of the spoils of the war and further relinquished special concessions the country possessed in China. He also proclaimed that the ethnic nationalities that had made up the tsarist empire would be self-governing and could, if they wished, exercise their right to secede from Russia. He urged colonized Asian peoples outside of Russia to revolt against the “robbers and enslavers” who had colonized them. The success of the revolution, Bolshevik leaders believed, required revolution in other countries. Some saw their best chances to foment “permanent revolution,” as they put it, among the workers of the western industrialized countries; others put their money on the colonized peoples of the east, from whom revolution would then spread back to the west. Either way, Russia’s future depended upon an internationalization of communism. The organization known as the Communist International, or Comintern, looked to spread revolution abroad so as to ensure Russia’s – and after 1922, the Soviet Union’s – survival. It helped to set up communist parties across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Only in the late 1920s did the Stalinist regime replace permanent revolution with a policy of “socialism in one country.” The Soviets continued, however, to help build and support communist parties, especially in Asia, a process to which we will return in Chapter 6. Despite its protestations against colonialism and its championing of anti-colonial activities in Asia and Africa, the Soviet Union had consolidated a Central Asian empire by the middle of the 1920s, retaking lands held by the former tsarist regime and carving out new “republics” of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan over the next ten years. This was part of a process that one historian has described as “internationalist nationalism”: the practice begun under Lenin and continued under Stalin of creating and recognizing “national” territories inhabited by “national” peoples with their own “national” cultures and incorporating them within a multiethnic Soviet state. It was the strategy employed to consolidate an empire without using the term, for there was never any question of the national republics having autonomous political power, and Lenin and Stalin

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knew well that Russian efforts to rule the peripheral republics from the center would result in denunciations of imperialism. “Because the Bolsheviks intended to rule dictatorially and to promote major social transformation,” notes this historian, “their actions were likely to be perceived as Russian imperialism.To avoid this perception, the central state would not be identified as Russian.”11 Bolshevik leaders viewed Central Asian peoples as primitive and backward; their societies, politics, economies, and cultures would have to be dramatically transformed so that they might become full-fledged, modern Soviet citizens. Russian peasants were often seen and treated in this way, too, but the U.S.S.R.’s policies regarding the Central Asian territories and their populations reflected Soviet convictions that Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, Kazaks, and Kyrgyz were not Russians; they were different and separate peoples with individual national identities, political structures, and languages. Soviets might proclaim their anti-colonial sentiments vociferously, but they ruled the territories as possessions, and they treated the various republics in varied ways according to perceived differences along geographic, ethnic, political, economic, religious, and cultural lines. The Soviets developed their own version of the civilizing mission avowed by Britain and France, even if their empire looked more like those of the Ottomans or the Hapsburgs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly Central Asians regarded themselves as subjects of a colonial empire and strenuously resisted Soviet efforts to eliminate practices and customs they had come to regard as “traditional” signs of their identities (even if those so-called traditions, like women wearing a particular veil, were actually quite new); their resistance to forced collectivization of agriculture and other Soviet development initiatives, along with that of Ukrainians, Finns, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and other ethnic groups, led to massive crackdowns in three successive waves of terror taking place in 1928–30, 1932–33, and 1937–38. Regarded as “enemy nations” because of their ethnic identity, millions of individuals became labeled “bourgeois nationalists” and were arrested, deported, and/or executed. In its attempts to fashion a new Soviet citizenry living within a new, enlightened social, political, and economic order, notes one historian, the U.S.S.R. looked very much like “another atypical empire, one that likewise denied it was an empire: the United States.”12 The United States had become an imperial power after 1898 with overseas possessions in the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. Americans told themselves that the peoples of their colonial possessions could someday gain independence or even become Americans themselves by embracing the principles and practices of the mother country. Most believed that American rule in the Philippines, for example, was necessary to improve and modernize life there for its inhabitants, but that when Filipinos embraced the habits and ethos of Americans there would be no need for continued overlordship. Once an “empire of the mind” had been established, as one historian has put it, American rule could fall away.13 In practice, the United States reversed President Wilson’s policy of Filipinization, a process in which political authority gradually devolved to the local community, and resisted calls for growing independence from Filipinos and some Americans during the 1930s. It did grant the islands commonwealth status in 1934, and established

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a ten-year timetable for outright independence, but the outbreak of World War II postponed it until 1946. American policy-makers imagined themselves to be in charge of “an empire without colonies”14 in the Caribbean and Latin America – an informal empire, in other words, comprised of countries they would turn into viable republics with stable political, economic, financial, and justice systems that deferred to and enhanced the interests of the United States. Puerto Rico had become a U.S. possession following the Spanish-American War, and in 1917 the Jones Act gave Puerto Ricans American citizenship and established a legislature for the island. U.S. governors introduced programs designed to turn Puerto Ricans into Americans, a policy embraced by some who called themselves incondicionales (unconditional or hardcore) and who went so far as to advocate an English-only program of study in the schools, but rejected by many others who formed a Nationalist Party looking for out-and-out autonomy. Regarded as a “colony” by Congress and the Supreme Court alike, the country acquired commonwealth status in 1952. The Spanish-American War had placed Cuba in the hands of the U.S. military. Congress eschewed annexation of Cuba, but informed by vital interests the United States had on the island, by the desire to assert hemispheric hegemony, and by a pronounced sense of racial superiority to the predominately mixed-race Cuban population, officials sought an instrument that would define the connection between the two countries. In 1901, the Platt Amendment to the Army Appropriation Act spelled out the terms of the American-Cuban relationship, making Cuba, in effect, an American protectorate. It might not be a formal colony of the United States, but the American government had rights to intervene in and even assume control over Cuban activities that made any such distinction moot. American interventions in Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in the first three decades of the twentieth century established the equivalent of protectorates there as well, many of them under the auspices of the very president who had been so vociferous about the self-determination of nations in 1918 and 1919. The Great War had prevented European nations from accessing commercial and financial markets in Latin America, a void that American companies and investors rushed to fill. The end of the war found the United States economically and financially dominant throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, a status the U.S. government intended to maintain through various policies designed to protect and advance American business interests in the region. American investments in Latin America doubled in size during the 1920s. Thus, an American version of imperial internationalism, embodied in measures to sustain economic dominance undertaken by the departments of State and Commerce, coexisted peaceably alongside the policy of isolationism that had compelled the U.S. Senate to reject membership in the League of Nations. Commercial and financial power gradually replaced the occupying military forces in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as the primary U.S. instrument of imperialism. Private corporations did much of the work, as companies such as Standard Oil – the predecessor of Mobil and Exxon – drilled for oil in Mexico and Venezuela, Anaconda and Kennecott extracted minerals and ores across

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Latin America, RCA and International Telephone and Telegraph established communications systems throughout the region, Ford Motor Company set up automobile manufacturing, and the United Fruit Company produced agricultural products for export to America. The success of all these commercial ventures depended upon intensifying exploitation of impoverished local workforces. Latinos decried their economic dependence on the United States, but they could do little to alter the situation. All of the Latin American countries had signed on for League of Nations membership, but the international body had no mechanism through which to hold the United States to its principles of nonintervention and equality of peoples. The economic and then political instabilities in Latin America introduced by the onset of depression compelled U.S. policy-makers to revise their stance toward their neighbors to the south. President Franklin Roosevelt had asserted during the presidential campaign of 1932 that the United States must stop interfering in Latin America and instead implement policies that respected the rights of others. Institutionalized as the “Good Neighbor Policy” when he assumed the presidency, Roosevelt’s call for non-intervention in Latin American affairs culminated in the 1933 Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, where Secretary of State Cor­ dell Hull signed the “Convention on the Rights and Duties of States.” The accord declared that all states enjoyed legal equality with one another and that no state should interfere in the internal affairs of another, although Hull added a few caveats that effectively undermined the full implementation of the agreement. The Roosevelt administration intended the Good Neighbor Policy to advance reciprocal trade agreements with Latin American and Caribbean nations in the midst of an economic catastrophe that had led countries to turn away from free trade in the hopes of protecting their national economies and local industries. To that end, in 1934, the United States agreed to demands from Cuban officials to end the Platt Amendment that had given it significant rights of intervention, but the United States retained its naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Later that year, the two countries signed a reciprocal trade pact, the first of its kind for the Americans. In 1936, the United States categorically promised to cease interfering in Latin American affairs at the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in Buenos Aires. Here and at a conference the following year in Lima, the United States and Latin American countries promised to consult one another in the event of a significant military threat. The United States lacked any kind of coherent imperial or colonial policy, but one consistent thread connected the various iterations of American efforts to administer its formal and informal colonies: the need to protect and advance the interests of American capitalism and to project American influence abroad without incurring costly military or political obligations. These imperatives frequently led the United States to join Britain, France, and the Netherlands in internationalist initiatives designed to uphold those countries’ imperial regimes, especially in Africa and in South and Southeast Asia. The United States participated in international agreements to track and suppress anti-colonialists and leftists and generally acted to support, rather than challenge, the colonial order in Southeast Asia. American ideas of internationalism differed from those of the Europeans and Japanese, who sought

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to act and gain international approbation for their actions through the League of Nations. In the face of a powerful strand of isolationism among the American public and politicians generally, internationalist initiatives came from private philanthropic organizations, financial institutions, and corporations. The Big Three of U.S. foundations – the Carnegie Corporation, founded in 1911, the Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, and the Ford Foundation, formed in 1936 – worked assiduously to develop programs and institutions that would halt the spread of communism; help build international cooperation; and, not incidentally, advance American power across the world.15 The Rockefeller Foundation funded Katherine Mayo’s two books, Isles of Fear:The Truth about the Philippines (1925) and Mother India (1927), which defended the necessity of American and British colonial rule in these territories. It funded research programs in “non-western studies” at Yale and Princeton in the 1930s, including programs geared toward training up experts to work in areas of the world its benefactors considered vital to American interests. At the suggestion of the State Department, it also underwrote the expenses of the Council on Foreign Relations’ War-Peace Studies Project, which produced numerous scholarly publications designed to position the United States as a major player on the world stage. The three foundations developed or promoted connections with universities abroad, especially those in London, who already enjoyed a widespread international reach through their colonial holdings; they also convened conferences at which international actors and academic experts discussed a wide variety of pressing issues. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the initial grants for the creation of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, which supported new anthropological research in colonial Africa in London. All three foundations supplied funds to the Council of Foreign Relations and Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (shorthanded as Chatham House). Other institutes enjoying American foundational support soon appeared in the British dominions and across Europe; like their Anglo-American predecessors, they advocated the use of international exchanges for avoiding war, dealing with depression, and adjudicating disputes. Private associations promoting internationalism such as the Institute of Pacific Relations, the International Labor Organization, and the Permanent Court of Justice enjoyed handsome material support, especially from the Carnegie Corporation. American philanthropic internationalism attempted to further American power and capital interests across the globe. The International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, funded research on tropical diseases primarily as a means of opening up “backward” countries for U.S. goods and improving the productivity of workers whose labor provided food, metals, and raw materials for American consumption.

The have-nots: Japan, Italy, and Germany In February 1933, the Japanese delegation to the League of Nations announced that Japan, a charter member of the organization and permanent member of the League Council, would leave that august body. A special assembly of the League’s

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members had just voted unanimously to demand that Japan withdraw from Manchuria in Northeast China and return the territory to the Chinese. “We are not coming back,” declared the delegation’s leader,Yosuke Matsuoka, as he led his colleagues from the hall.16 The dramatic walkout marked the culmination of Japan’s frustration with an international system that implicitly sanctioned the imperial ambitions of some of its members while condemning those of others. Although Japan certainly possessed colonies, and, like the United States and the U.S.S.R., aggressively pursued imperial expansion during the 1930s, it also presented itself as a bulwark against western imperialism and an agent of decolonization in Asia. Japan held colonies in Taiwan, parts of southern Manchuria, and Korea by the time the Great War broke out in 1914. As we saw in the Introduction, the Versailles settlement gave Japan German holdings in the Pacific and Shandong in northeastern China. Chinese nationalists had expected to regain Shandong for the Republic of China; the dashing of their expectations led to the outbreak of huge protests in Beijing and elsewhere in May 1919.  Although opposed by many nationalist leaders because it challenged aspects of traditional Chinese culture, the May 4th Movement, as it came to be called after the day it began, galvanized efforts to rid China of imperialist forces and unify the country.The Nationalist Party (the Guomindang, or GMD) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party gained strength from the anti-imperialist sentiments sweeping the country and together, at least at first, unified China under the auspices of the GMD by 1928. The two parties soon split, a subject that we will cover in Chapter 6, but the successes of the anti-imperialist forces in northeastern China persuaded Japan that it had to take steps to protect its interests in Manchuria. Japan’s control in southern Manchuria, initially established after its victory over Russia in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, consisted of formal and informal spheres of influence. In the first, Japan held long-term leases to land in Kwantung on the Liaodong Peninsula and along the South Manchuria Railway – known as Mantetsu – which it governed directly through a colonial-style administration. In the second, it exercised power indirectly over a much larger swath of territory through a local Chinese warlord who was dependent upon the extensive Japanese commercial ventures in southern Manchuria and especially upon the presence of the ten-thousandstrong Kwantung Army for his survival and advance against rival warlords. In 1930, the warlord, Zhang Xueliang, bowing to the nationalist forces that had brought the GMD to power in China, turned Manchuria over to Chiang, who announced in 1931 his government’s intention to recover the Kwantung Leased Territories and the operation of the Mantetsu railway. The Kwantung Army, which had become an imperial force of its own virtually independent of the Japanese government, reacted swiftly to the GMD’s challenge. Without the knowledge of the home government, it cooked up an incident involving an explosion along Mantetsu tracks to justify its taking of the railway zone and then moved on Zhang Xueliang’s army, driving it out of Manchuria entirely within eighteen months. Finding itself now in full control of Northeast China, the Japanese government did not annex Manchuria as a colony but turned it into an

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independent puppet state – called Manchukuo – under the last Chinese emperor, Puyi. This subterfuge reflected the degree to which anti-imperial attitudes had advanced across Asia. Japan justified its depredations against Manchuria in nationalist anti-colonial terms, claiming to have rid the land of its imperial Chinese overlords and sponsored Manchukuo’s bid for entry into the League of Nations, much as the British had done with Iraq. The other League members would have none of it, however, and condemned the actions of its charter member. Japan then cast its walkout as a rejection of western imperialism, thus burnishing its anti-colonial image among Asian nations and making a play for leadership of a pan-Asian movement that had been gathering steam ever since the failure of the Wilsonian moment in 1919. After 1933, Japan took steps toward internationalism not simply by advancing pan-Asian projects but also by establishing ties with Muslim countries and their inhabitants. In some instances the two initiatives overlapped: it was the Japanese pan-Asian association, Kokuryu ¯ kai, for example, that promoted an official Islamic policy and arranged for Japanese to go on the hajj in Mecca in the mid-1930s. Japan funded organizations conducting research into Islam and the Islamic world so as to educate its people about Muslims, and entered into substantive trading relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The League of Nations did nothing to punish Japan for the invasion and occupation of Manchukuo beyond insisting that it be returned to China. Its inaction signaled the failure of the international body to live up to its obligations, and did not go unnoticed by other countries whose leaders had imperial ambitions. Appeasement, that purportedly quintessential emblem of European politics after 1935, manifested itself first in Asia, as the European imperial powers, without the means to respond militarily in Northeast China, and the United States, following a policy of nonintervention, allowed it to be absorbed into a new Japanese empire. Emboldened by its success, the Japanese army, having gained the political upper hand both at home and in Manchukuo, embarked on a further round of empirebuilding, moving first into China in 1937 and then on the Soviet Union in 1938 and 1939. As one historian has observed, “the boundaries of empire became an endless war front. In the process, the empire and war grew indistinguishable. The hallmark of the new imperialism was a perpetual state of war.”17 Like Japan, Italy had been a founding member of the League of Nations, but the Versailles Treaty that created the international body also deprived Italy of the territories it was led to believe it would gain when it joined the Allied war effort in 1915 by signing the secret Treaty of London with Britain and France. Promised lands in the eastern Adriatic and islands in the Aegean, areas in the Ottoman Middle East, and increased territory in Somaliland, Italy’s leaders saw in the treaty the means by which the country would realize its long-standing dreams of becoming the dominant power in the Mediterranean. A Mediterranean colonial empire would provide much-needed raw materials and agricultural goods, stabilizing and enriching Italy’s economy and helping to staunch the “perpetual hemorrhage” of Italians leaving the country for a better life in America.18

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But it was not to be. Wilson’s call for the self-determination of nations thwarted Italy’s ambitions for colonial territory and subject peoples outlined in the Treaty of London. Outraged by their betrayal, Italians found themselves among the “havenot” nations whose interests remained unfulfilled after the Great War. When he came to power in 1922, fascist leader Benito Mussolini set his sights on building an Italian Mediterranean empire that would recall the days of ancient Rome. For ten years, however, he did little to advance his aims, eager to avoid any confrontation with France or Britain over his imperial ambitions. He focused instead on expanding and firming up Italy’s control over Libya, Eritrea, and its share of Somaliland through diplomatic efforts, a strategy acceded to by British officials who sought to assuage their guilt over the treatment Italy had received from the Versailles Treaty. The colonization of “Italy’s fourth shore,” as colonial apologists termed the North African coast, during the 1920s, involving land reclamation programs, the development of tourism, and the improvement of urban areas, resulted in the deaths from gassing, incarceration, disease, and starvation of 10% of the Libyan population by the early 1930s.19 Mussolini’s efforts in Somalia and Eritrea concentrated on building up a base of Italian settlement from which to slowly and unobtrusively expand into Abyssinia. His plans had advanced sufficiently by 1925 that he was formulating plans for a military invasion of Ethiopia at such time as conditions in Europe would allow it. Part of his strategy included building a garrison in 1928 at Wal Wal in Ethiopian territory, a provocation that attracted little attention at the time but would serve Italy’s expansionist interests some six years later. By 1932, Mussolini felt confident enough to challenge British and French interests in the Mediterranean. In December of that year he instructed his minister of colonies to draft a plan for the expansion of Italian imperialism into East Africa. The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933 strengthened Il Duce in his ambitions, for the German dictator’s designs on the European continent would, by tying up Britain and France, provide space for Italy to expand south- and eastward into North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. In December 1934, Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie sent troops to Wal Wal to demand that Italian forces there remove themselves to Somaliland. The Italian commander refused, setting off a series of armed clashes that resulted in the loss of hundreds of soldiers. Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations for redress, while Italian officials demanded a formal apology from him. Mussolini used this incident to order his general staff to ready the armed forces for the “total conquest of Ethiopia,” all the while reassuring Britain, France, and Germany of his peaceful intentions, even as he sent large numbers of Italian troops to the border between Somaliland and Ethiopia.20 In the spring of 1935, Mussolini gave up all pretense of peaceableness and publicly made known his plans, confident that neither Britain nor France, distracted by the need to respond to Germany’s recent declaration that it would rearm itself in violation of the Versailles Treaty, would intervene to stop him. Selassie appealed again to the League for help in settling the dispute, but talks proved futile in the face of Italy’s determination to add Ethiopia to its East African empire. In September, the desperate emperor ordered his troops – numerous

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but insufficiently armed – to mobilize against the Italian threat of invasion. On October 3, 1935, Italian fighter planes bombed the Ethiopian town of Adowa, where in 1896 Italians forces had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Abyssinian warriors. While bombs rained down upon the town’s inhabitants, Mussolini insisted to the League of Nations that his country had been attacked without provocation by a vicious aggressor and enslaver, drawing on the rhetoric of the internationalist anti-slavery movement to level this last charge. Few in the international community believed his tale; the Italian public, for its part, responded to the outbreak of war with apathy. But when the League voted unanimously to condemn Italy for its actions, its citizens rushed to their country’s defense, loudly volunteering for service in large numbers. Italy mobilized more than five hundred thousand troops and civilian laborers in its invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, the largest army ever assembled to prosecute a colonial war. Using conventional weaponry in tandem with the dropping of poison gas from the air, Italian forces engaged a determined but ill-equipped Ethiopian army, capturing the Abyssinian capital of Addis Ababa in May 1936 and declaring Ethiopia a part of the Italian East Africa empire. When Abyssinians persevered in their resistance, they suffered terrible punishment at the hands of the Italians, including the destruction of whole villages and towns, decapitations, castrations, mass executions, and on-going gas poisoning from the air. Italians killed between 350,000 and 760,000 Abyssinians in their campaign to “bring civilization to backward lands, build roads and schools [, and] diffuse the hygiene and progress of our time,” as Mussolini put it.21 This amounted to 3.5% to 7% of the Ethiopian population. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia dealt a serious blow to the vision of internationalism – collective security – that the League of Nations ostensibly embodied.The actions of the “have-not” states required League members to respond to the depredations against one of its members (by another of its members, no less), but the interests of France and Britain militated against any kind of decisive move against Italy. Fearful of Hitler’s aims for the continent, and hopeful that they could still persuade Mussolini in a pact to contain the German leader, British and French officials rejected any kind of military engagement and would only go along with the imposition of economic sanctions on Italy; even then, they watered them down significantly so that they had little effect on the behavior of Mussolini and his government. Italy, as Mussolini had expected, would not be constrained in its desires to conquer the last remaining independent state in Africa and place its people under the control of King – now Emperor – Victor Emmanuel.The Italian empire – Impero fascista – now contained 1.5 million square miles of territory, ranking it among the largest of the European colonial powers. Italy’s success in Abyssinia had powerful reverberations in Nazi Germany, serving “to kindle Germany’s expansionist ambitions” overseas, as one historian has put it.22 Germany had been excluded from the League of Nations on the insistence of the French, who sought to isolate their long-time enemy and to make it an international pariah. Not many Germans wished to join in any event, regarding it as a tool of the victorious powers that had imposed the humiliating Versailles Treaty on

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them. But in the context of severe economic problems and following Germany’s acceptance of the borders established by the Peace of Paris, Germany joined the League in 1926, seeking not only to establish itself as a respectable international player but also to regain the colonies in Southwest and East Africa and the Pacific it had lost in 1919. It failed in that bid, and so turned its attention to getting the League to enforce the policies it had espoused at the time of the creation of the mandates. Mandate colonies were meant to be under international control, their economic and commercial prospects open to all those from countries belonging to the League. The German delegation exploited the so-called “open door” principles of the mandates to advance the commercial interests of German companies in places like Tanganyika, Cameroon, Southwest Africa, and New Guinea. It also tirelessly promoted the ultimate goal of independence for the mandate colonies in the face of British, French, and Japanese attempts to bring them into their respective empires more closely. German revisionist impulses following the loss of territory and colonies under the Treaty of Versailles had largely been focused on the continent of Europe, but the Treaty of Locarno of 1925, which made permanent Germany’s western boundaries, had left open the question of its prewar overseas colonies.Virtually all the political parties under the Weimar regime, with the exception of the Communists, favored the recovery of Germany’s prewar colonies, and a number of organizations promoting overseas colonization, organized under the aegis of the Reich Colonial Task Force, agitated ceaselessly for the recovery of their former colonial territories in Africa and the South Pacific. Popular sentiment lagged behind somewhat, but at least as judged by the consumption of novels, nostalgia for empire had gripped the German reading public by the 1930s. Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space), for example, written in 1926, had sold more than three hundred thousand copies by 1935. With Hitler’s rise to power, Germany left the League of Nations, eschewing internationalist efforts to revise its postwar situation in favor of more frankly nationalist expansionist endeavors. Despite its retreat from internationalism, Italy’s adventurism in Ethiopia sparked a great deal of interest in Germany, offering an example of how “later-coming” “have-not” nations such as Germany might succeed in gaining their own lands abroad. The German consul in Addis Ababa, Gustav Strohm, urged his superiors in the German foreign office to take a lesson from Italy’s creation of “white men’s country” in East Africa by establishing settlements of Italians there; it offered a model of how to fashion an empire “from scratch.” Max Knecht, who had served in the colonial forces and belonged to the German Colonial Society, went even further, declaring that Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia presaged a “colonial dawn” for Germany, providing the opening for the Reich to “step out” onto the global stage as an imperial power.23 Hitler paid attention. While he regarded overseas empire as secondary to his quest for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, he understood that the recovery of colonial possessions appealed to a significant sector of the population, especially among the elites of the professional and business classes. He used the prospect of regaining German’s prewar African colonies to attract support to his regime, promising that just

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as Italy under fascist rule had succeeded in achieving its long-standing desires for an African empire, Nazi Germany would follow suit and realize its own ambitions for colonies. Plans begun in 1933 for establishing a German Mittelafrika incorporating the Belgian Congo, German Southwest Africa, German East Africa, French Senegal, Madagascar, and Portugal’s colonies in Angola and Mozambique picked up steam after Italy’s success in Abyssinia. They called for the extraction of natural resources, raw materials, and agricultural products to support Germany’s burgeoning population and the Reich’s plans for war, and the mobilization of massive numbers of Africans working as virtual slaves. Madagascar, officials judged, could host the “super ghetto” they were imagining for the confinement of Europe’s Jews. Here, too, Italy provided a model. Its policies on “race relations” outlawed “racial mixing” and imposed heavy punishment on those who crossed “colour lines.”24

Anti-colonial metropoles The crossing of color lines, in fact, occurred in cities across the globe, especially those in the imperial powers themselves. Imperial internationalism frequently found its greatest critics right in the heart of empire itself, in the European and American capitals where Africans and Asians had resided even before the dawning of the twentieth century. Soldiers and workers from the colonial and semi-colonial world joined them in unprecedented numbers during the First World War. Many stayed or returned after it, and the numbers of colonial students grew steadily during the interwar period. In part out of necessity, owing to the prevailing atmosphere of racism, in part by choice, colonial migrants in Europe mixed with numerous social outsiders – African American expatriates, Jewish exiles, Spanish partisans, Irish revolutionaries, South and Central Asian mystics, and political radicals of many stripes. The capitals and large cities of the major western empires became sites of political agitation and interaction among different anti-colonial movements. By 1931, more than 10% of the Parisian population had been born abroad, including between seventy thousand and ninety thousand Algerians, predominately young, male, Berber, and Muslim. As many as thirteen thousand Caribbeans and West Africans, roughly twenty-five hundred Vietnamese, and an equal number of Chinese made their homes in Paris. The city also attracted Latin American and African American intellectuals, artists, and revolutionaries, all of whom led the African American activist Roger Nash Baldwin to characterize it as “the capital of men without a country.”25 If relatively privileged, small in number, and isolated from the masses back home, anti-colonial intellectuals and activists in the colonial metropoles during the 1930s comprised an incredible concentration of talent, including many future postcolonial leaders. They participated in the new instruments and institutions of “international society” and formed their own pressure groups. They rigorously debated the relative merits of nationalism, internationalism, and federalism in small meeting halls, hostels, and private homes or within newspaper opinion columns, small periodicals, and fugitive tracts. They made concrete political and material claims upon the central government and metropolitan populations, and challenged representations of racial inferiority and the civilizing mission in domestic imperial

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culture, employing the new media of radio and film as well as the grandest imperial spectacles to date. Their movements and organizing efforts linked New York City, London, Paris, Moscow, and Hamburg to colonial cities and anti-colonial foment across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean – from Port of Spain to Freetown and Dakar, Casablanca to Hong Kong and Shanghai. The intellectual, political, even financial resources that fueled metropolitan anticolonialism flowed through cross-cultural contact in particular social spaces. Both the relative freedom from the more extreme forms of political repression and segregation in the colonies and the racism that marked the migrant experience shaped anti-colonial politics. If the former enabled political speech and activism, the latter brought groups together across regional and ethnic differences and politicized many. Organizations and individuals rose to prominence by defending the rights and ministering to housing, employment, or social welfare needs of fellow migrants and sojourners. A significant proportion of the first generation of postcolonial leaders in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean acquired part of their political education – and reputations that preceded them back home – through activism that linked the challenges of daily life in the metropole to larger anti-colonial struggles and global inequalities. Many first met the British or French politicians and officials who would one day hand over power to them in course of such activities at the heart of the empire. The Algerian nationalist leader Messali Hadj led the Étoile Nord-Africaine in Paris.The organization sponsored cultural activities, published the journal El Ouma, and provided vital social services and legal advise to its members, many of whom lived in same area, the fifteenth arrondissement. The West African Students’ Union and League of Coloured Peoples, established in London in the mid-1920s and early 1930s, respectively, functioned as clearinghouses of news and ideas and centers of political organizing for the goals of self-government and federation in West Africa and Caribbean. Their founders, however, sought first and foremost to address the “color bar” in the housing market and the other ways that racism scarred black life in Britain. Camden Town in north central London became the center of daily life for Africans, especially Nigerians, due in large part to the presence of the West African Students Union’s headquarters and hostel, popularly known as Africa House. Scores of new arrivals spent their first nights in London there. Many became active members; some settled into private residences in close proximity to Africa House. Many more spent their free time at the union’s Saturday-night dances or other social events. A group of women in the union operated a small African restaurant, the first in the city, in it. Conviviality, collaboration, and debate within the hostel’s walls became a model for forging wider political unity across differences. The Nigerian Ladipo Solanke, a cofounder and longtime manager of the hostel, described it as “a miniature West African Federal State under the management of a miniature West African Federal authority popularly known as WASU.” Similarly, Chinese,Vietnamese, and Indian restaurants, and black dance clubs in Paris and London functioned as spaces of leisure and socializing, and fostered diasporic identities. North African cafés (cafés maures), including several owned and operated by L’Étoile Nord-Africaine, were important gathering spots for Algerians in the French capital.26

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After the Jones Act of 1917 extended U.S. citizenship to islanders, Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States in larger numbers, the majority settling in New York City. The peak of the “great migration” from the island began after World War II, but during the 1920s and 1930s, a vibrant and heterogeneous colonia developed there. Puerto Ricans in New York participated actively both in local politics and the nationalist movement in their homeland. Social interaction and their involvement in the latter connected them to other communities of Latino immigrants and incorporated New York into pan-American circuits of anti-imperialism; physical proximity to Harlem led to cultural exchange and multilingual organizing with African Americans and migrants from the British Caribbean. As the U.S. government stepped up repression of the National Party in Puerto Rico, imprisoning a number of its leaders in Atlanta, Georgia, a range of anti-imperialist and antifascist groups in Cuba, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Peru agitated for the release of the political prisoners and the cause of Puerto Rican independence during the mid1930s.27 Occupied by the U.S. Marines from 1915 to 1934, Haiti attracted the sympathy and support of African Americans, generating interest in its revolutionary history and culture and renewing its power as symbol of black liberation. Du Bois called the Haitian diplomat Dantès Bellegarde, who had participated in the first and second Pan-African Congresses and represented his country at the League of Nations against the wishes of the U.S. government, “the international spokesman of the Negro.”28 London, Paris, and New York were not only the imperial metropoles which drew people, goods, and wealth from the colonies; they were also global cities and nodes in cross-cutting, trans-imperial conversations among people of African, Asian, Arab, and Latin American descent. Regional, continental, and transoceanic migratory networks and the circulation of printed media linked metropolitan anti-colonialism and communities of migrants or sojourners in London, Paris, and New York to regional hubs throughout the global south. At the start of the decade, there were thirty-three Arabic publications in Paris, thirty-six in New York, thirty in Rio de Janeiro, and thirty-nine in São Paulo.29 A constant stream of African-American, Caribbean, and Latino musicians, writers, and stage performers, many politically active, bounced between the urban centers across the Americas and Europe. Nevertheless, diasporic and imperial ties also constrained and delimited the extent of trans-colonial alliances and anticolonial solidarities. Some Africans and Afro-Caribbeans in London and Paris gathered in the same social spaces and formed personal or political ties to South or East Asians, but most spent much more time with each other and African Americans than with Asians or other groups of non-Europeans. Similarly, connections were far weaker, and political collaboration more elusive, across empires than within them. *** The internationalist visions and intentions of the imperial and would-be imperial powers, always pursued with their own self-interest in mind, narrowed considerably

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after 1933. In that year Japan and Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, throwing off the rhetorical constraints on their expansionist aims. The invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and the failure of the League of Nations to take substantive action against Italy marked “the rupturing of the international order” established after the Great War, as one historian has put it.30 Italy responded to the mild rebuke of the League by withdrawing its membership in 1937, punctuating the ineffectiveness of internationalism as promoted by the imperial powers. But as we shall see in the next chapter, internationalist movements and initiatives promoted by colonized peoples and their champions not only still compelled widespread support and approbation, they would increase after 1936, as the invasion and occupation of the last independent territory in Africa galvanized millions of people to agitate on behalf of freedom and independence.

Notes 1 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 403. 2 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 29. 3 Helen McCarthy,“The League of Nation, Public Ritual and National Identity in Britain, c. 1919–56,” History Workshop Journal 70 (Autumn 2010): 110, 124–126; Helen McCar­ thy, “Democratizing British Foreign Policy: Rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934–1935,” Journal of British Studies 49, no. 2 (April 2010): 358, 360–361, 384. 4 Leonard Barnes, Empire or Democracy? A Study of the Colonial Question (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), 27–28. 5 Ibid., 193. 6 Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 2. 7 See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question:Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 8 Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and Their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24. 9 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 10 Quoted in Ibid., 239. 11 Terry Martin,  The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 19–20. 12 Douglas Northrup, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 24. 13 Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power:The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 177. 14 This phrase comes from Lester D. Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 13. 15 See Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century:The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 16 Stewart Brown, “Japan Stuns World, Withdraws from League,” United Press International, February 24, 1933 (http://www.johndclare.net/league_of_nations6_news.htm; accessed October 23, 2016). 17 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 48.

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18 Quoted in Reynolds M. Salerno, Vital Crosroads: Mediterranean Origins of the Second World War, 1935–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 3. 19 See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 125. 20 Quoted in Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (New York: Knopf, 1982), 191. 21 Quoted in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 126. 22 Patrick Bernhard, “Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansionism,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 4 (2013): 617–643, here 619. 23 Quoted in Ibid., 618, 621. 24 Ibid., 628, 629. 25 Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2, 24–30. 26 See Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis; Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). 27 Margaret Power, “The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Transnational Latin American Solidarity, and the United States during the Cold War,” in Human Rights and Transnationalism Solidarity in Cold War Latin America, ed. Jessica Stites Mor (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 25–26. 28 Quoted in Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, “Dantès Bellegarde and Pan-Africanism,” Phylon 42, no. 3 (1981): 236. 29 Andrew Arsan, “ ‘This Age Is the Age of Associations’: Committees, Petitions, and the Roots of Interwar Middle Eastern Internationalism,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012): 175. 30 Quoted in Nicola Labanca, “Studies and Research on Fascist Colonialism, 1922–1935: Reflections on the State of the Art,” in A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 37.

3 ANTI-COLONIAL INTERNATIONALISMS

The 1930s began with a mixture of anti-colonial disturbances, renewed pushes for political rights or independence, and spasms of violence against restive colonized populations. Racial barriers within and among states had grown, and in response to the global economic downturn, many Westerners advanced imperial ambitions or new efforts to exploit existing colonies. Despite an intensification of imperial depredations, alternative visions of internationalism survived within varied currents of anti-colonial thought and activity, assuming greater urgency – and, with it, a new sense of possibility. As one recent historian of internationalism has observed, bobbing alongside the association of internationalism with . . . national states of mind, with [liberal] middle-class rather than proletarian values, were the demands for progress and liberty on an international scale and on behalf of politically marginalized cultures and races as much as classes, women as well as men, those whom the nation had failed, and those who still awaited the nation’s arrival.1 The spread of communism, the onset of the Great Depression and labor militancy, and national liberation struggles, buoyed and then dashed during the Wilsonian moment, fed into anti-colonialism between the world wars. The enhanced prestige of communism after the creation of the Soviet Union and, more importantly, its public proclamations against racism and imperialism provided a new language. The organizational structure of the Comintern created new channels for and institutional supports to anti-colonial organizing. The Depression, whose worst effects were experienced in highly unequal, racialized ways, drove political agitators, trade unionists, and workers closer together. The history of interwar anti-colonialism encompasses but is not reducible to these sources, factors, and causes.

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Opposition to colonialism and imperialism took many forms, and its goals were equally varied. It included movements to obtain complete independence but also efforts to secure rights and representation within existing imperial arrangements and administrative structures. It entailed open insurrection, terrorist attacks, and nonviolent protest as well as attempts to claim and act upon citizenship rights that did not yet exist and thereby to radically transform and transcend empire from within.The goals of many anti-colonial intellectuals and agitators during the 1930s challenge the usual tendency to reduce resistance to colonialism to nationalism and the quest for independent nation-state status. Across the colonial world, activists promoted explicitly anti-imperialist projects that did not necessarily assume symmetry between nationality, conceived in cultural or ethnic or religious terms, and political citizenship. Calls for “self-determination” and “self-government” did not necessarily equate to narrowly nationalist agendas or a conception of national sovereignty as undivided and total. The aspirations of critics of empire from Africa, Asia, and the Americas – what seemed politically possible and desirable to them at the time – developed in conversation with a wide array of internationalist movements and institutions. Whether imperial, liberal, socialist, communist, Christian, Islamic, feminist, or pan-ethnic in their orientation, all of them offered models of supra- or extra-national community. Even avowedly nationalist movements developed in interaction within and through transcolonial networks, and with a consciousness of shared struggle with contemporaries elsewhere.Their most prominent spokespersons pursued independence as only a first step toward the creation of a regional federation or confederation. At the same time, pan-ethnic or hemispheric movements – as, for example, certain versions of “pan-Americanism” and “panAsianism” espoused in the United States and Japan – could provide convenient masks for assertions of regional domination. When we consider the many and diverse expressions of anti-colonialism and the borrowings and gestures of mutual recognition among them, we see that anticolonial internationalisms and transcolonial connections flourished as never before during the 1930s, often taking newly institutionalized and coordinated forms. The “interwar moment marked a crisis not just within but of an extant geopolitical order,” notes one historian. Among anti-colonial intellectuals and activists, the crisis became associated “with an anticipatory sense of open-ended possibility.”2 In a world arranged by colonial hierarchies and riven by white supremacy and xenophobic nationalisms, anti-colonial internationalists tended to emphasize commensurability across colonial locations, to celebrate the benefits of cultural exchange, and to insist that the present crisis urgently demanded new forms of transnational political community. Due in part to the flourishing of print cultures in and linking urban centers across the globe, anti-colonialists increasingly thought about racism and colonialism comparatively and drew connections or forged alliances between anti-colonial struggles. They found their favorite and most potent weapons in small journals, newspapers, books, and pamphlets. As terms such as “modern” and “cosmopolitan” became racially coded shorthand for decline and degeneration in Europe and the

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United States, most anti-colonial writers embraced them as markers of an imposed and irreversible cultural hybridity that, in their view, prepared them to be architects of a transformative future. Others that we might call counter-moderns (or “antimodern moderns”), no less the products of colonial encounters within the context of modern capitalism and every bit as cosmopolitan in their influences, repudiated European modernity as inseparable from predations of colonialism. They decried the modern imbalance that favored the new, superficial, and material over the archaic, esoteric, and spiritual. Such thinkers often reproduced the dichotomies underlying European imperialism (the “Orient” or “Islam” versus the “Occident” or “West”) but reversed the valence and marshaled various neo-traditionalist perspectives to further anti-colonial projects. Despite these divisions, anti-colonial intellectuals and agitators regarded the 1930s as a decade offering both perilous challenges and exciting new opportunities.

Nationalisms in interaction: South Asia Although there remained a marked discrepancy between literacy levels in urban and rural areas, by the 1930s, an ever-growing array of print materials reached more readers across Asia than ever before, especially in cities whose size and number had swelled. Those readers were more aware of and more sensitive to colonial abuses and anti-colonial movements elsewhere. Periodicals in Malaya and Singapore, for example, covered and helped to extend the reach of pan-Islamic ideas, Chinese republican nationalism, and the Indian National Congress. Individual writers and readers identified with more than one if not all of them, while claiming the rights of subjecthood in the British empire without any sense of contradiction. Similarly, Taiwanese and Korean identities and political claims were formed in the interplay of Chinese nationalism, Japanese imperialism, and pan-Asianism. On January 26, 1930, the Indian National Congress – the umbrella party of the Indian nationalist movement led by Mohandas Gandhi and his emerging successor, Jawaharlal Nehru – officially adopted the goal of purna swaraj (complete independence). Up to that point, for most in the Indian National Congress, swaraj (self rule) meant the attainment of internal self-government and a status within the British empire equivalent to that enjoyed by the “white dominions” of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In December of 1929, the Congress Party issued a “declaration of independence,” in pursuit of which it launched a boycott of central and provincial governments and a campaign of civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes.3 Gandhi targeted the government’s monopoly on salt production, which affected the poor most adversely. Accompanied by a select group of followers, he trekked some 240 miles from his ashram near Ahmedabad to the coast of Gujarat. Press coverage turned the diminutive, bespectacled man clad in a homespun dhoti into a globally recognizable figure. Reaching the sea at Dandi on April 6, Gandhi collected salty sand in a choreographed act of civil disobedience and the culmination of what became known as the Salt March or Salt Satyagraha. Gandhi’s nonviolence (ahimsa) was a creative amalgam of several philosophies of

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resistance – Hindu, Jain, dissenting Christian, pacifist – and his tactics, including consumer boycotts and hunger strikes, drew upon well-established practices of protest within the British empire stretching back to the abolitionist movement, the tactics of the Irish Land League in the late nineteenth century, and the women’s suffrage movement. The campaigns initiated by the Salt March in 1930 caught the world’s attention, but it had little impact on British policy. The colonial government jailed Gandhi and the first woman president of the Congress, the feminist Sarojini Naidu, along with as many as fifty-four thousand other participants, in the hope that the mass arrests would quell the disorder. British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald convened the first of three Round Table conferences in London in November 1930 to discuss the future of India’s government, though Congress party members refused to attend it while many of their comrades still languished in jail. Gandhi and the Congress participated in the second Round Table Conference held during the fall of 1931. In advance of the conference, the former agreed to discontinue the civil disobedience campaign, and the government pledged to release the remaining prisoners, to cease prosecutions of nonviolent protesters, and to remove ordinances targeting the Congress’s activities. However, the Labour government in Britain collapsed just weeks before the conference began, and when it did both British officials and other Indian delegates challenged Gandhi’s claim to speak for all Indians. In the end, the second conference, like the first and the third (which lacked congress representation entirely) failed to address the constitutional future of India. By the mid-1930s, many Indians viewed Nehru as the natural successor to Gandhi’s leadership role. Nehru would reemerge from imprisonment during World War II as the Congress party’s leader during the British raj’s final days and went on to became the first prime minister of postcolonial India. He and the Congress have become symbols of and central players in the nationalist narrative of anticolonialism in India and more broadly. But there was nothing inevitable about the development of an All-India movement or the evolving demands of the Indian National Congress or the ultimate outcome of decolonization in South Asia and a secular Indian nation-state. The Congress drew upon ideas, resources, and allies outside India and became not only an inspiration to movements elsewhere but also a operative force in interwar transcolonial networks. The “India” that Nehru expected to take over in a transfer of power was a sub-imperial power in its own right. Its influence extended from the Middle East to Malaya, and its size and administrative structures varied dramatically from those of postcolonial India. The Indian National Congress was only the tip of an iceberg of interconnected and contending anti-colonial projects linking South Asia to other parts of the colonial world, and in the late 1930s, the political vision of Congress leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru continued to extend far beyond the subcontinent and nationalist goals. The Indian National Congress had affiliates throughout the Indian Ocean world and beyond, from Natal, South Africa, to Fiji. Ananda Mohan Sahay established a branch in Kobe, Japan, in 1929.Trade unionists in Dutch colonial Indonesia adopted swadeshi (or community self-sufficiency), which Gandhi described as the

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“soul” of Swaraj, during the mid-1930s, advocating strongly for boycotts of foreign goods and in support of domestic industries.4 The Congress and Gandhi’s peaceful civil disobedience and boycott campaigns were part of a wider spectrum of Indian anti-colonial activity. Some Congress party leaders, including Chittaranjan Das, Srinivasa Iyengar, and S. Satyamurthi, promoted a pan-Asian union or federation. Das included the goal of a pan-Asiatic Federation in the platform of the new Swarajya (or Swaraj) Party. The Madras Province Swarajya Party, led by Satyamurthi and Iyengar, performed well in provincial elections during the 1930s until it merged first with the All India Swarajya Party in 1934 and then the Indian National Congress the following year. The nationalist demands of the Congress largely subsumed dreams of wider pan-Asian unity by decade’s end, but they survived on the margins within the party. The Khilafat movement developed among Muslims in India in response to the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire and envisioned the restoration of the caliphate. It contributed directly to “All India” nationalism but gave voice to identifications that cut across different empires. Khilafat leaders such as Dr. Ansari, Maulana Azad, and Hakim Ajmal Khan strongly supported Gandhi and the Congress, while others, led by Syed Ata Ullah Shah Bukhari, created Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam, an important political party in the Punjab that promoted the concept of an independent Pakistan during the 1930s. Like Indian pan-Islamists, revolutionaries who engaged in violent tactics formed transcolonial networks in pursuit of their own ends while moving in and out of the Congress Party and constitutional politics. Indian communism and revolutionary terrorist movements, which linked Bengal, the Punjab, United Provinces, and Burma to London, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo, shared members with the Congress and other parties. Adherents of the revolutionary Jugantar Party joined Das’s Swarajya Party in Bengal. Das mentored Subdas Chandra Bose, who developed into a major figure in the Congress Party and a proponent of using force, if necessary, to oust the British. Bose traveled across Europe during the mid-1930s, visiting fascist Italy, Germany, and Austria and meeting with Indian students and exiles and even Benito Mussolini. In 1935, he published The Indian Struggle, a history of the Indian anti-colonial movement from 1920 to 1934, in Britain. The colonial government in India immediately banned the book, but it circulated clandestinely among anti-colonial agitators within and beyond South Asia. He rose to the position of Congress president in 1938 and was re-elected the following year, but his public disagreement with Gandhi over the use of violence forced him to resign. Meanwhile, Bengali revolutionaries who had been active in the 1920s reorganized in Burma and re-emerged with greater women’s participation in the 1930s. Surya Sen propagandized and recruited for an “Indian Republican Army” in Rangoon, Barisal, Calcutta, and Chittagong. On April 18, 1930, shortly after Gandhi launched the Salt March, Sen led over sixty of his followers in a daring raid on the Chittagong Armory. Sen modeled the raid, which took place on Good Friday, on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland.The revolutionaries occupied key sites such as the armory and telegraph office for four days; even more embarrassing for the colonial

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administration, Sen evaded capture for almost a year, and several of his associates remained at large for nearly three years. A number of other attacks followed thereafter. Revolutionaries assassinated nine British officials between 1930 and 1934. Bina Das fired three shots at Governor Stanley Jackson during a convocation at the University of Calcutta in 1932. Jackson’s successor, John Anderson, who instituted new draconian powers of search and detention, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Darjeeling in 1934. Women revolutionaries such as Kalpana Dutt, who served nine years in prison, and Preeti Waddadar, who swallowed a cyanide capsule rather than surrender, illustrated women’s growing involvement in anti-colonial agitation in its many forms, as did Bina Das’ assassination attempt. They created a new problem for police and colonial officials by exploiting the latter’s tendency to focus on young men and became powerful symbols of bharat mata (Mother India). As the government detained growing numbers of anti-colonial agitators and suspected terrorists, the prisons and detention camps which held them became schools of Marxism and communist internationalism. Many renounced revolutionary terrorism, threw themselves into organizing workers and peasants, and assumed leadership roles within the Communist Party and Forward Bloc following their release.5 Even as a more conventional nationalist politics marginalized alternative political projects, Indian nationalism continued to develop alongside and to benefit in complex ways from transcolonial networks and internationalist imaginaries.

Pan-Asianism, Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism as anti-imperialism Dutch, French, and British colonial territories in Asia were often rigidly segregated along racial lines. Local populations were subjected to harsh labor regimes in mines and on rubber, pepper, and sugar plantations; intrusive and dehumanizing public health measures in urban settings; and press censorship, incarceration, and collective punishment for expressions of discontent. In British-controlled Hong Kong, race shaped every aspect of daily life, including the organization of and access to social spaces and public transportation, and local Chinese suffered from extremely high rates of poverty. In Dutch-controlled western Java and Sumatra, surveillance and government repression increased markedly after communist-inspired uprisings of 1927–1928. Pan-Asianism, a transcolonial and transnational expression of resentment of Euro-American imperialism formed part of a larger trend toward regionalism and the resurgence of pan-ethnic and religious movements during the 1930s. Arab and Asian intellectuals from Egypt to Japan debated its meaning, merits, and possible futures throughout the interwar period. While some advocates presumed a degree of civilizational or racial unity, many did not and instead conceptualized it more in terms of a unity of cause. Pan-Asianism was linked to anti-imperialism almost everywhere, but it was not inherently egalitarian. During the 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century, Japan had developed into a hub for exiled intellectuals and would-be revolutionaries from Egypt,

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India, Russia, Korea, China, and Vietnam. Tokyo, in particular, became a crossroads of Asian intellectuals after World War I, and Japan remained an inspiration to colonized societies and oppressed minorities across the world during the 1920s and 1930s. Like another imperial power, the Soviet Union, Japan espoused antiimperialism and sought to distinguish itself from the empires of western Europe and the United States, all the while imposing its will on subject peoples. The Japanese empire espoused a close, even familial, relationship between itself and its colonized subjects. Even after the Korean Independence Movement of 1919 shattered hopes of easy assimilation (do¯ka) of Korean colonial subjects into Japanese-ness, the Japanese continued to emphasize it as the goal, encapsulated by the phrase naisen ittai ( Japan and Korea as a single body). In reality, however, the Japanese colonizers, like their European counterparts, relied on divide-and-rule tactics, such as different legal codes for Korea and Japan, and do¯ka morphed into a harsher form of forced assimilation, ko¯minka (imperialization). By the 1930s, many Taiwanese considered themselves Japanese, but aboriginal Taiwanese did not assimilate as rapidly as their Han Chinese counterparts. Following the Musha Incident in which a Taiwanese aboriginal group, the Seediq, attacked Japanese settlers near the village of Musha (Wushe) in 1930, killing more than one hundred, the Japanese moved away from depicting Taiwanese aborigines as savages in need of civilizing, increasingly emphasized their status as fellow imperial citizens, and encouraged them to show their loyalty by joining the Imperial Army.6 Many aboriginal Taiwanese responded by identifying with the Japanese empire and joined the army, only to later suffer high rates of injury and death. Historians have often associated the turn away from pro-western, liberal internationalism and toward pan-Asianism in Japan with the efforts of anti-liberal, expansionist-minded conservative intellectuals, politicians, and military officials. But visions of regional solidary in the face of a European-dominated global order in crisis appealed to many others as well. Pan-Asianism and a shared sense of Japan’s international mission in Asia formed, as one historian puts it, a “common vocabulary” for liberals and antiliberals, socialists and conservatives. Bristling at what they perceived as a series of insults to the rising Asian power, many intellectual heirs of the Meiji-era project of modernization distanced themselves from their earlier admiration of Europe, which they associated with a superficial materialism and a dogged commitment to white supremacy, and embraced a vision of Japan as the liberator of Asia. Angered by western disrespect, writers such as Tokutomi Soho, who had once advocated industrialization, liberal freedoms, and democratic reform now gravitated toward a view of pan-Asianism that dovetailed with Japan’s regional goals and ultimately produced apologias for Japanese militarism. As Tokutomi observed in 1931, “today is a time of domination by the white races . . . because there are no powerful people other than the white races. By breaking through this condition, we can make a positive contribution to all of mankind.” After the start of World War II, he described the conflict as one pitting “a moral magnanimous Japan” dedicated to pan-Asian liberation against an “immoral West” set on perpetual domination.7

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Following Japan’s notice of withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, pan-Asianism attracted growing support from the government, military, and industry. Asianist organizations, publications, and events proliferated after 1933, but it is short-sighted to draw a straight line from these to Japan’s imperial ambitions and military actions later in the decade. In fact, Rash Behari’ Bose’s bilingual EnglishJapanese publication, The New Asia-Shin Ajia, urged the Japanese government to maintain friendly relations with the United States, China, and the Soviet Union in order to focus on combating British imperialism in Asia. Dai Ajia Shugi (Greater Asianism), the monthly journal of the Greater Asia Association – formed by a group of high-level military officers and civilian politicians – assumed a broad continental perspective, disseminating news and ideas from South Asia and the Muslim Middle East as well as East and Southeast Asia. Although the publication would become a major influence on official Japanese pan-Asianism and the “New Order in East Asia” proclamation in 1938, like Bose’s journal, Dai Ajia Shugi was consistently antiBritish and just as strikingly not anti-American; its vision of pan-Asianism hinged, first and foremost, on mounting opposition to European hegemony in Asia. Nor was this a one-way conversation or simply an imposition of a self-serving Japanese vision on intellectuals and activists from elsewhere in the region. Asianist groups in Japan attempted to increase the numbers of Indonesian and other foreign Asian students in Japanese universities. When the prominent Indonesian anti-colonialist Muhammad Hara visited the country in 1933, he received a hero’s welcome from the Japanese press and the Greater Asia Association, which hailed him as the “Gandhi of the Netherlands East Indies.” During his stopover in Japan two years later, another anti-colonial leader from Indonesia, Ahmad Subardjo, praised Japan’s withdrawal from the League and turn toward pan-Asianism as a turning point in the history of Asia. Such figures cautiously embraced the language of pan-Asian unity and invested their own hopes in it but not without criticizing imperialist actions such as the Manchurian Incident or pressuring the Japanese to live up to their rhetoric.8 The Japanese state ultimately exploited anti-western animus and ideas of panAsian unity to national and imperialist ends. Japanese pan-Asianism projected a hierarchical vision of unity, positioning Japan as the first among equals. In practice, it was both an ideological excuse for Japanese imperialism and an important contributing factor to the independence of colonies from Southeast Asia to Burma. The Japanese empire nurtured a militant strain of Bengali nationalism and inspired pockets of loyalty in Taiwan and Korea. It also brought Korean and Chinese forces resisting Japanese colonialism closer together, while in China it became the crucible in which Mao Zedong developed his distinctive critique of capitalism and imperialism. While squashing political dissent and ruling with increasing brutality, in the name of pan-Asianism Japan fostered national and nationalistic elites in the former Euro-American colonies that it seized during World War II, helping to pave the way for their independence after it. Religious and spiritualist networks contributed to and provided other avenues for interwar anti-colonialism. In Korea, a politicized Christianity became central to the non-communist nationalist resistance to Japanese colonialism, while activist

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monks, intellectuals, and students around Rangoon University in Burma, led by Ba Thaung, formed the Dobama Asi-ayone (“We Burmans Association”), which espoused a Buddhist-inflected nationalism informed by Irish nationalism, Fabian socialism, and Marxism. More important, pan-Islamism linked Muslim thinkers and political actors from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Postwar disillusionment and anger toward the major western powers reached new levels during the 1930s. After arbitrarily carving up the former Ottoman lands, the British and French spent much of the interwar period suppressing both socialists and liberal nationalists, including democratically elected political parties such as the Egyptian Wafd Party and Syrian National Bloc.The British propped up client monarchies in Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, and continued to allow Zionist expansion in Palestine in the context of growing inter-communal violence, while the French stubbornly clung to mandatory power in Syria. This set of factors politicized religion and spirituality in new ways. Across the Middle East, especially in cities, reformist Islamic teachers networked with and through nationalist movements, whose liberal, secularist leaders viewed their efforts within the context of a wider pan-Arab world, and small pockets of communist partisans variously competed and collaborated among increasingly restive local populations. Urbanization, rising literacy rates, and the growth of print culture produced an increasingly politicized public and a growing constituency for nationalists in Egypt. At the same time, nationalists shifted the focus of their political ambitions from the territory of historical Egypt to a wider, supranational community including other Arabs and/or other Muslims, a tendency reinforced by mass immigration from Palestine and Syria. As the importance of Istanbul as a significant crossroads of pan-Islamist thought declined after Turkish President Mustafa Kemal moved the capital to Ankara, a string of other cities, from Casablanca, Cairo, and Aleppo to Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo, served as important nodes in the circulation of texts and ideas during the 1930s. The backlash against Ashkenazi Jewish settlement and the growing Zionist presence in Palestine contributed to the resurgence of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. Jewish immigration, propelled by mounting anti-Semitism in Europe, surged between the wars, despite growing British efforts to halt it in the interest of maintaining order. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the mufti of Jerusalem, AlHajj Amin Al-Husayni, attempted to rally Muslims across the region and beyond to the Palestinian cause. In response to Zionist claims to the Wailing (or Western) Wall, he organized a General Muslim Conference November 1928, attracting delegates from Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan. Al-Husayni also cultivated ties with South Asians, especially those formerly associated with the Khilafat movement. In October 1930, the mufti traveled to Cairo to meet with the Indian delegates en route to London for the Round Table Conference. The mufti’s efforts culminated in the General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in December 1931. Delegates issued an Arab Covenant declaring:  (i) The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved or recognized by the Arab nation.

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(ii) All efforts in every Arab country are to be directed towards the single goal of their complete independence, in their entirety and unified; and every idea which aims at limitation to work for local and regional politics must be fought against. (iii) Since colonization is, in all its forms and manifestations, wholly incompatible with the dignity and highest aims of the Arab nation, the Arab nation rejects it and will combat it with all its forces. The Congress established an executive committee to further these aims. Although it largely failed to do so, it did achieve a symbolic victory for pan-Arab unity by brokering a peace settlement to the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1934.9 The 1937 Pan-Arab Conference in Bloudan, Syria, was held in response to the Peel Commission’s recommendation for partition and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. More than one hundred dignitaries, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals representing Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Egypt, and Tripolitania attended and passed a series of resolutions rejecting partition and affirming Palestine’s status as an integral part of the Arab world. Messages of support poured in from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, the emir of Kuwait, and several Islamic organizations. After the official conference concluded, a contingent of more radical participants, calling themselves the Conference of Nationalist Youth, met to discuss strategies to foster unity among Arab youth and plans for a second, larger conference in Europe. The French mandate government actively discouraged Lebanese participation and urged neutrality. The statement issued by the British consulate in Damascus noted with alarm that there was “little doubt that the long drawn-out deliberations over Palestine are reviving from the ashes of local jealousies: the panArab phoenix.”10 Such fears were only partially justified. While leading participants in the conference celebrated it as an expression of pan-Arab unity, the Palestine issue dominated the agenda. Chaired by the former Iraqi prime minister Naji alSuwaidi, the conference delegates represented the political establishment and sought to consolidate power in their countries. That power sometimes depended on tacit acceptance or tolerance, if not the support, of foreign imperial countries, muting the anti-colonialism of the earlier Islamic Congress. Iraq and Transjordan pursued the goal of a confederated Arab union with the Hashemite dynasty at its heart. The French had ousted the Hashemite King Feisal from Syria after the war. Pursuing a strategy more in line with the practice of indirect rule, the British, in turn, had helped install Feisal in Iraq and his brother, Abdullah, in Transjordan. Conflicting links to British or French interests in the region fractured nascent Arab unity. One such example of a splintered Arab unity took place in Syria. In October 1927, Hashim al-Atasi and Saadallah al-Jabiri founded the National Bloc, which grew into the largest anti-colonial organization in Syria.After French officials closed the National Bloc’s Damascus office and arrested two of its leaders in January 1936, the bazaars went on strike; students and youth protesters took to the streets. A week into the disturbances, the Bloc called a general strike, which paralyzed the Syrian economy and led to the mass arrests and the deaths of hundreds of civilians at the hands of French or colonial (predominately, Moroccan or Senegalese) police and

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troops. The thirty-six-day strike forced the French to the negotiating table, and the Bloc party succeeded in securing recognition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people and a commitment to gradual independence over twenty-five years in the treaty of 1936. The partial victory helped them sweep the year’s elections and win a decisive majority in the Syrian parliament. Atasi, who headed the Bloc delegation to the Paris talks, was elected president of the new Syrian republic, and Jamil Mardam, also a member of the delegation, became prime minister. However, the government under the socialist Leon Blum in France failed to ratify the treaty and refused to follow through on the promise to move toward Syrian independence.11 At the Bloudan conference, the Syrian delegates, consisting largely of Bloc members, defeated a resolution condemning Lebanese neutrality on Palestine rather than anger French authorities with whom they were engaged in ultimately fruitless negotiations.The future Lebanese prime minister, Riad al-Sohl, denounced the move as a betrayal of Arab unity and the commitment to liberation from European colonialism. Despite Sohl’s condemnation, we find many countervailing examples of crosspollination of influence and of solidarity behind the general strike and the National Bloc’s rise. Ardent pan-Arabists rejected the territorial boundaries imposed on the Middle East after the Great War and embraced an expansive vision of the “Arab nation.” This, in theory, placed them at odds with movements for independent states along such territorial lines, but in practice, the relationship between nationalist movements and pan-Arab connections and ideology was more symbiotic than antagonistic. For many pan-Arabists, Islam and the trappings of western modernity such as rights-bearing citizenship and liberal, democratic institutions were not mutually exclusive; achieving the proper harmony was the issue.12 Running alongside and often in tension with these liberal, capitalist strains of pan-Arabism and anticolonial nationalisms, Salafism – a movement to purify Islam according to a strict interpretation of the Koran, the prophet’s sayings, and the conduct of the righteous forefathers of the faith (the Salaf ) – began to spread on the margins of anti-colonial struggles by the 1930s.The Syrian writer Rashid Rida’s magazine al-Manar (Beacon), circulated throughout the Muslim world from Central Asia to the Malay Peninsula and China until his death in 1935. It gave new life to the pan-Islamism espoused by the Iranian activist-thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and the Egyptian Mohammed Abduh during the late-nineteenth century, voicing growing skepticism over merits of westernization and criticism of “native collaborators” that reflected the political frustrations of the interwar years. Rida declared in 1930 that the global umma – community of the faith – needed “an independent renewal like that of Japan,” not “imitation of Western Civilization.” The publication’s combination of anti-colonialism and pan-Islamist ideas helped inspire Hasan al-Banna to form the Ikhwan al-Musilmun (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt in 1928.13 In French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, pan-Islamism informed anticolonial discourse across the political spectrum. After World War I, the Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union) in Indonesia split into communist and non-communist wings.

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With the support of the latter, Achmed Sukarno formed the Indonesian National Party (PNI) in 1927. Sukarno’s ideas melded pan-Islamist themes, anti-aristocratic values, Gandhian non-cooperation, romantic peasant-centered socialism, and the goal of political and economic independence for the Indonesia archipelago. Dutch authorities arrested Sukarno and seven other party leaders in December 1929. The party dissolved itself in 1931, but another former PNI leader soon founded the Indonesian Party or Partindo. Sukarno quickly rose to chairperson after his release in 1932, and he turned Partindo into a mass movement with fifty branches and more than twenty thousand members by mid-1933, when the Dutch again arrested and exiled him first to Flores and then to Bengkulu in South Sumatra. By then, the non-communist faction of the prewar Islamic Union had reconstituted itself as the Indonesian Islamic Association Party (Partai Sarekat Islam Indonesia or PSII) and had become a critical counterpoint to secular nationalism. Muslims in Minangkabau formed Persatoean Muslimin Indonesia or Permi in 1930, and by 1933, it had ten thousand members, 40% of them women. Permi domesticated pan-Islamism by reconciling it with nationalism. Established by former students at Al Azhar University in Cairo, who had witnessed the nationalist struggle there, and graduates of a local “modernist” Islamic school, the Sumatra Thawalib of Padang Panjang, its slogan was “Indonesia Merdeka, Islam Mulia” (“Indonesian independence, Islamic glory”). The Dutch crackdown on political activity and dissent in 1933–1934 forced political Islam underground. The leaders of Permi and PSII were exiled along with those of Partindo. The PSII reemerged, however, after the war and led the Dar’ul Islam Rebellion (1949–1962) for the creation of an Islamic state in Indonesia.14 During the 1920s and 1930s, Tatar Muslims fleeing the Soviet Union settled in Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe. Abdul Hay Qurban Ali, who emerged as the religious leader of the Tatar community in Tokyo, published Yani Yapon Muhbiri (New Japan Journal), a Turkish-language periodical that addressed the entire Muslim world. East Asia remained the primary focus of official Japanese panAsianism, but the Japanese state subsidized research centers treating Islam and the Islamic world during the 1930s. The Greater Japanese Islamic Association, founded in 1938, sought to educate the Japanese public about Islam and fostered closer ties between Japan and the Islamic world. Ali secured support from the Japanese government to construct Tokyo’s first mosque the same year. Dignitaries from Saudi Arabia,Yemen, and Egypt attended the official opening, and the pan-Islamist thinker Abdurreshid Ibrahim became its first imam. In 1939, Japan hosted the Islamic World Exhibition, held jointly in Tokyo and Osaka and attended by 1.5 million people. Such moves reflected not only a vision of Japanese leadership of the world’s non-European peoples but also Japan’s relative diplomatic isolation after exiting the League of Nations and the importance of its economic relations with the Middle East. By 1934, Japan was the second largest exporter to Egypt after Britain, and the source of 41% of Egypt’s porcelain goods. As a corollary to its pan-Asianism, the well-connected Kokuryu¯kai group drafted a foreign policy statement on Islam, which the Japan government adopted in 1931, and assisted small numbers of Japanese to go on the hajj to Mecca and other Muslim holy cities in the Middle East.

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For individual Japanese such as Wakabayashi Han, an imperialist traveler-adventurer and an active member of Kokuryu¯kai, and Tanaka Ippei, who made the hajj in 1924 and 1934, the satisfaction of playing a role in a world historical struggle against the West and in the dawning of a new epoch of world history suffused their personal choices and actions. Wakabayashi funded Tanaka’s second journey during which the latter acted as a semi-official emissary of Japan, meeting with the Saudi finance minister among other foreign dignitaries and influential figures. Like many of his contemporaries, Tanaka denounced European political and economic imperialism, contrasting what he viewed as an overly materialistic West with eastern spiritualism. He espoused the need for a broad alliance among people of color worldwide in order to challenge and defeat the white race. He converted to Islam but remained a fervent Japanese nationalist and a firm believer in the country’s rightful role as leader of Asia; while on the hajj, he prayed facing the Ka’ba in Mecca and the Japanese Imperial Palace in Tokyo.15

Black internationalism and Ethiopia The invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the League of Nations’ anemic response to the violation of all that it stood for in the way of collective security gave panAfricanism a powerful jolt. The movement, a political project for solidarity and the liberation of Africans on the continent and abroad, had been around for decades by the 1930s, manifested in such events as the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London organized by the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams and the short-lived African Association, and a series of Pan-African Congresses beginning in Paris in 1919. The great African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois participated in the 1900 conference and became the central figure behind the Pan-African Congresses held between the world wars. He famously declared in 1900 that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line, the question as to how far differences of race . . . are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing . . . the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.16 Du Bois’s contemporary, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, inspired efforts at panAfrican organizing for decades through his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). First established in Jamaica, the UNIA became the largest African American organization to date and spawned affiliated branches and organizational networks across the Americas. With the UNIA at its height and its newspaper, Negro World, in mass circulation, Garvey issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which asserted the right to “self-determination for all peoples” and “the inherent right of the Negro to possess himself of Africa,” at the group’s 1920 convention.17 Connections among UNIA members around the Atlantic shaped black antiracist and anti-colonial movements through the 1930s and beyond.

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Different black intellectuals and agitators invoked pan-Africanism to call for a metaphorical or cultural as well as a literal “return” to Africa. In some instances, as in Garvey’s case, the pursuit of pan-African unity rested upon assumptions of biological racial descent, but by the 1930s, it more commonly involved a rejection of race as a biological category and took the form of a cultural internationalism, which celebrated cross-cultural exchange and cultural differences and emphasized the distinctive contributions of people of African descent. Pan-Africanism was, thus, a black internationalism. It developed as much through the negotiation of difference among people of African descent and long histories of contact and dialogue within the diaspora as it did against shared racial oppression. Black or anti-colonial nationalism and internationalism were not mutually exclusive, but whereas black nationalists focused on organizing around race either to co-opt existing political structures or to build new ones to exercise sovereignty, black internationalists drew on models of extranational community and directed their efforts at the global color line. Many of the latter viewed national sovereignty as a dangerous fiction in an increasingly interdependent world and an idea that could not be divorced from the current imperial order and white supremacy. The invasion of Ethiopia sparked so furious a reaction because the words Ethiopian and Abyssinian had been used not only to refer to the inhabitants of the African horn but also as self-conscious terms of racial identification encompassing all Africans and people of African descent. Ancient Ethiopia had long been a powerful symbol for black Christians on both sides of the Atlantic. The coronation of Haile Selassie as Ras Tafari in 1930 and the visit of a Japanese trade delegation in 1932 made it a source of pride as a modern example of African statecraft and statebuilding. At the other end of the spectrum, millennialist preachers such as Leonard Howell, who returned from Harlem in 1932 and started the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, hailed Selassie’s coronation as a divine harbinger of black liberation worldwide.18 In the mid-to-late 1930s, the African American press followed the Italian invasion and negotiations on the diplomatic front, and helped to instill a sense of solidarity in outrage among readers by reporting on protest actions and by opening their pages to perspectives from elsewhere in the African diaspora. The black responses to Ethiopia were often highly gendered. Black men around the world represented the conflict in terms of sexual assault, describing it as the “rape” of Ethiopia, and saw it as a new challenge to black manhood heaped upon centuries of degradation. Some volunteered for military service in Selassie’s armies; African Americans wrote to the Ethiopian Research Council in Washington, DC, for example, to volunteer for military service, declaring, “We are Ethiopians.” Some later fought in the Spanish Civil War as members of the so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade, viewing it as a proxy war for the conflict in Ethiopia. Women of African descent set up relief funds for refugees, particularly women and children, and publicized Italian human-rights violations. For actor and singer Paul Robeson, Ethiopia “was a watershed for black American consciousness, since it exposed ‘the parallel between [black American] interests and those of oppressed peoples abroad.’ ” In British-controlled West Africa, a mass

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meeting in Lagos in late September 1935 attracted more than two thousand people, and leading members of the Nigerian Youth Movement formed the Lagos Ethiopia Defence Committee three months later. The Guyanese pan-Africanist Thomas Griffiths changed his name to T. Ras Makonnen after Italy invaded Ethiopia. Makonnen remembered hearing that schoolchildren wept in the Gold Coast when Italian troops entered Addis Ababa. Expressions of outrage reverberated throughout the Caribbean, provoking work stoppages and boycotts of Italian-owned businesses. Estate managers in British Guiana traced strikes on six sugar plantations to anger over the British government’s handling of the crisis. While European leaders and the British left debated the merits of sanctions, dockworkers in South Africa and Trinidad imposed their own by refusing to offload Italian cargo.The Reporter newspaper in Britain attributed the labor unrest in Trinidad in part to local anger over Ethiopia. Three weeks into the oil workers’ strike, Governor Selwyn Grier cited “racial feeling” provoked by the country’s fate as one of its main causes during an emergency session of the Legislative Council.19 Events in Ethiopia precipitated a rush of activity in the imperial metropoles of London and Paris. Eight hundred people, including Antillean, Africa, and Asia intellectuals and workers as well as European socialists, pacifists, and feminists, attended the first meeting of the French Comité International pour la Défense du Peuple Ethiopien. Led by Hadj Messali, the Algerian anti-colonial organization, L’Étoile NordAfricaine, offered its Paris headquarters and the pages of its publication, El Ouma, to “our black friends.”20 Black women led many of these new organizing efforts or formed new links between black organizations as well as with white and interracial internationalist groups. Paulette Nardal served as secretary of the pacifist Comité Mondial contre La Guerra et le Fascisme and the Comité International pour la Défense du Peuple Ethiopien, founded by Malian labor organizer Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, and formed her own group, the Comité d’Action Ethiopienne. She established ties to the male-dominated Union des Travailleurs Nègres and became the first female contributor to its journal, Le Cri des Nègres. Her article included a telegram sent to the League of Nations in which she decried the Italian assault on Ethiopia in the name of “the colored peoples [les groupements de couleur] of the entire world, without distinction of nationality, party or class.” Fluent in English, she also became the “primary relay point” between the Comité International and the Jamaican Amy Ashwood Garvey’s International African Friends of Ethiopia in London. Nardal tried to use the Comité International to deliver funds raised in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone to Emperor Selassie.21 Like Nardal, Ashwood Garvey, the first wife of Marcus Garvey and one of the many women who helped build the UNIA, launched a new black organization dedicated to the defense of Ethiopia while collaborating with a mix of groups in Britain. In July 1935, she and the Trinidadian C. L. R. James formed the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE). James chaired the group, and Dr. Peter Milliard from British Guiana and T. Albert Marryshow, the head of the Grenada Workers’ Association, served as vice chairpersons. The future president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, the St. Lucian economist and future Noble-Prize winner W. Arthur

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Lewis, and an impressive constellation of intellectuals, musicians, and activists from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States joined as well. Ashwood Garvey’s International Afro Restaurant served as the group’s base of operations. After she addressed a meeting of the West African Students’ Union, women within the union formed the Ethiopia Defence Fund. As the organization’s journal noted: “While the men were discussing, the women had acted.” The Ethiopia crisis also marked the beginning of a close friendship between Ashwood Garvey and the British feminist Sylvia Pankhurst. Pankhurst became a supporter of the IAFE and the League of Coloured Peoples. In 1936, she launched the staunchly anti-imperialist New Times and Ethiopian News.22 An early member of the League of Coloured Peoples and editor of its journal, The Keys, the Jamaican writer and feminist Una Marson and many others of African descent were among the throng that greeted the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie when he arrived at London’s Waterloo Station in 1936. Marson witnessed closer than most Selassie’s final, ill-fated plea before the League of Nations in the name of “collective security.” She volunteered at the Ethiopian embassy, handling its correspondence and press releases in the months before Selassie’s arrival in London, and then accompanied him to Geneva as his personal secretary. She had been moved, as a poem she wrote in memoriam of the Ethiopian ambassador’s sons states, “to fight for a country / yours, and yet not yours.” The Italian invasion of Ethiopia positioned Africa as a crucial pivot of the global imperial order. It convinced people of African descent that the combined forces of imperial ambitions and white supremacy were destined to plunge the world into another war. In their eyes, the world’s fate was bound up with their own. As Ashwood Garvey declared from the plinth at Trafalgar Square at a demonstration in August 1935, no race has been so noble in forgiving, but now the hour has struck for our complete emancipation . . .You have talked of ‘The White Man’s burden,’ . . . now we are . . . standing between you and Fascism. This meant that if the moment presented a grave threat to Africans, it also provided an opening. The future president of Nigeria Nnamdi Azikiwe wrote in Renascent Africa (1937), “To-day, the continent of Africa is the focal point of European territorial ambitions,” and thus, a “Renascent African must be reckoned with as a concrescent factor in the peace of the world.” For black activists and intellectuals, the Italo-Ethiopian War offered a “lesson” in the fundamental nature of imperialism, as C. L. R. James wrote, and it informed black anti-colonialism and freedom struggles for the remainder of the decade.23 After the arrival of the Sierra Leonean trade unionist and anti-colonialist I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, who had led pro-Ethiopia demonstrations in West Africa, he, James, and George Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau in London in 1937, which focused on publicizing and coordinating black struggles on a global level. The plight of Ethiopia stirred feelings of Afro-Asian solidarity as well. An outpouring of support issued from the Japanese public and anti-Italian coverage and

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commentaries filled Japanese newspapers. The reaction to the invasion of Ethiopia ran counter to the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s efforts to maintain good relations with Italy and briefly threatened to cause a rift between the two states.24 Such spontaneous displays of unity demonstrated an unprecedented awareness of international events and a widespread sense that a global struggle between the white race and colored races lay behind the changing tides of geopolitics and contemporary crises. The great Indian poet, Nobel laureate, nationalist-turned-internationalist, and fierce critic of the myopic politics of Indian nationalism, Rabindranath Tagore articulated this sentiment in “To Africa,” a poem he wrote in response to a request from the Ugandan anthropologist and black internationalist Prince Hosea Akiiki Nyabongo. Today when on the western horizon the sun-set sky is stifled with duststorm, when the beast, creeping out of its dark den proclaims the death of the day with ghastly howls, come, you poet of the fatal hour, stand at that ravished woman’s door, ask for her forgiveness, and let that be the last great word in the midst of the delirium of a diseased Continent. Tagore later told Nyabongo that your request was like a call to duty which could not be denied. I shall feel richly compensated if I know it will reach my friends in Africa and let them realise how an Indian poet feels about the despoliation of a whole continent in the name of civilisation.25 For people of color across the world, Ethiopia was just such a “call,” one which exposed and clarified the deepest of contemporary fault lines. Expressions of solidarity flowed in the opposite direction as well. Even after the Manchurian Incident, many African Americans and others of African descent continued to view Japan favorably in comparison to the western imperial powers. In 1937, Du Bois toured Japan and China. At Port Arthur, the site where the Japanese navy defeated the fleet of imperial Russia during the Russo-Japanese in 1905, he lectured on “Race Segregation,” touching upon “the Negro, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican and southeast European Problems.” Du Bois justified the Japanese seizure of Manchuria and Japan’s exit from the League of Nations, dismissing the protests raised against the moves as cynical self-interest: “England, France and America, gorged with the loot of the world, suddenly became highly moral on the subject of annexing other people’s land.” He recognized that “Japanese colonialism” merely represented colonialism of a different sort and accepted categorically that Manchukuo was a Japanese colony. The salient questions, in his view, were: can Japan prove “to the world that colonial enterprise by a colored nation need not imply the caste exploitation and subjection which it has always implied in the case of white Europe,” and “what is Japan doing for the people of Manchuria and how is she doing it?” As he told readers of the Pittsburgh Courier, “I came prepared to

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compare this colonial situation with colonies in Africa and the West Indies, under white European control,” and have come to the conclusion that in no colony that I have seen or read of is there such clear evidence of (1) Absence of racial or color caste; (2) Impartial law and order; (3) Public control of private capital for general welfare; (4) Services for health, education, . . . and other social ends; (5) The incorporation of the natives into the administration of government and social readjustment.26 That summer, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. Back in the United States, Du Bois reflected on this tragic turn of events from afar.Writing in September, he asserted, It is to escape annihilation and subjection and the nameless slavery of Western Europe that Japan has gone into a horrible and bloody carnage with her own cousin; but the cause and the blame of this war lies on England, and France, and America; on Germany and Italy; on all those white nations, which . . . have by blood and rapine forced their rule upon colored nations. Looking back on his recent visit to East Asia, he continued, I stood, a year ago, . . . on those busy corners [in Shanghai] where . . . shells killed hundreds in the midst of the International Settlement, and I knew then, as I know now, that the present war in Asia has as its effective cause the African slave trade and the Industrial Revolution in Europe.27

The challenges of feminist internationalism During the 1930s, feminism in western Europe, the Americas, and antipodes lost a great deal of the momentum it had gathered in the years prior to the Great War. In many instances this was a consequence of victory: in early 1918, for example, the United Kingdom granted the vote to British women over the age of thirty. French women did not gain the vote, despite their contributions to the war effort, though German women did with the creation of the Weimar Republic; American suffragists won their fight for enfranchisement with the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. The passage of Women’s Enfranchisement Act in 1930, which applied only to white women, greatly diminished the impact of the “coloured” vote in the western Cape – the last significant nonwhite electorate in South Africa. But even as western feminism saw a fall-off in intensity, or even helped consolidate systemic social inequalities as in South Africa, initiatives to extend campaigns to other parts of the world grew during the interwar period. Organizations such as the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAW) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) held international

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meetings to demand women’s suffrage and other reforms across the globe, while feminists in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America joined in efforts to expand women’s rights and launched their own movements to improve their positions in their respective societies. Feminist internationalism was a prominent part of the international decade of the 1930s. Women in many corners of the globe articulated distinctive understandings and agendas of internationalism, developed transnational and transcolonial ties, and formed regional – pan-Pacific, black Atlantic, Middle Eastern – networks and movements. In India, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Africa, feminist campaigns were part of and contributed to the growth of anti-colonial movements and cross-cutting currents of feminist internationalism, which linked them to feminists elsewhere. In Jamaica, for instance, the Garveyite movement provided a platform and organizational networks for women like Amy Jacques Garvey to pursue strategic links with other activist women, of African descent or otherwise, while other Jamaican feminists such as Amy Bailey and Una Marson insisted on the inclusion of women’s unique concerns at the forefront of emerging anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles in their writings in Cosmopolitan, Public Opinion, and other Kingston-based publications. The first organized Indian feminist movement appeared in 1917 with the formation of the Women’s Indian Association (WIA). Subsequent groups arose in the 1920s, the most visible and influential being the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), whose members sought originally to open discussion of women’s education. They quickly realized that many other issues – purdah, dowry, child marriage, the remarriage of widows, for example – were intricately connected to it, and all of them, in turn, bound up in the questions of British rule and the terms of political citizenship. Equality and opportunity for women, they knew, were inseparable from the burning issue of Indian independence. Nationalist men supported feminists’ demands for suffrage, eager to demonstrate that Indian men were far more progressive than their supposedly superior British overlords and, thus, to counter British claims that the debased state of Indian women epitomized “Asiatic despotism” and justified colonial rule. Indian feminists – the vast majority of them educated, upper-caste, Hindu women – consistently argued that men and women should be enfranchised equally. The possibility of success in this regard took on heightened possibilities in the early 1930s, when the civil disobedience campaign of the Indian National Congress compelled Britain to hold a series of Round Table talks to discuss increasing Indian participation in the running of their country. Amidst the international controversy over the American Katherine Mayo’s book, Mother India (1927), which defended British rule on the basis of a sensationalist and slanderous depiction of gender relations in South Asia, among Hindus in particular, women’s collective agency as women introduced a new model of the individual, rights-bearing citizen that transcended differences of religious community and caste.28 As soon as the British government declared its intention to prorogue the first of the Round Tables, Indian feminists demanded that women be represented. The WIA’s Muthulakshmi Reddi “immediately asked [Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India] that women should

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be among its delegates,” and the organization sent a petition to the secretary of state for India with the same request.The WIA suggested that Reddi, Sarojini Naidu, and Brijial Nehru, all of whom advocated universal adult suffrage, attend the talks as its representatives.29 Irwin instead chose Begum Shah Nawaz and Radhabai Subbbarayan, pro-British women who accepted the government’s position that women should gain only a limited special franchise, restricted by education and property qualifications and distributed in reserved seats according to women’s membership in sectarian groups. At the Second Round Table talks, held in 1931, Sarojini Naidu joined Begum Shah Nawaz as a delegate and made it clear that Indian feminists rejected any suggestion of reserved seats for women or a limited franchise. She denounced the property requirement – by which the property of a woman’s husband qualified her to vote – as inimical to equality. It would “give new lease of life to the old male notion of a woman’s dependency on a man and as such is repugnant to the educated and thinking women of India,” she protested. Reserving special seats for women, she urged, would pit women against men, feminists against nationalists, religious and caste groups against each other. “The special privilege idea for women is characteristic of Western feminism,” she later wrote in explanation, “but entirely against Eastern ideas.There is no thought in the East of women being pitted against men.” She took pains to position Indian feminism as its own movement, led by its own leaders and espousing its own ideology. “The day for Western leadership in the East has passed,” Naidu declared. “The East does not desire the West to pioneer in the East but will receive the Western leaders if coming in the spirit of general service. . . . The West will not be repudiated, but should not set the standard,” she insisted, echoing the sentiments of Egyptian and Syrian feminists who valued their alliances with white feminists but determined to follow the path that made the most sense in the context of their own local conditions – conditions shaped by the history of colonialism.30 This position directly contradicted a longstanding rationale for British rule in India – namely, that, as one contemporary South Asian feminist puts it, white men were “saving brown women from brown men.”31 The Government of India Act of 1935, which provided for increased Indian participation in government while reserving the real sovereignty for the British Raj, did not grant universal adult suffrage in the end. It imposed literacy and property qualifications on women, and, true to British policies of divide and rule, gave women special seats designated by their adherence to a particular faith – a practice known as communalism. Dismayed but undaunted, Indian feminists continued to advocate for universal rights and unity among Indians. Mrs. Hamid Ali of the AIWC, for example, reassured the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom of Indian feminists’ intentions to remain true to the cause. “We are one and all united in desiring not to allow the communal poison to enter the ranks of womanhood,” she declared.32 The men of the INC supported equal rights for women. But when it came to sexual equality in the home, their solidarity faltered. In fact, when the All India Women’s Conference proposed the reform of the Hindu Code in 1934, seeking to

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change marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws to better serve women, nationalist men objected. Feminists had been clear from the start that their agenda depended upon the success of the nationalist agenda, but when the time came for nationalist men who had succeeded in throwing off foreign domination to agree to ending their own domination of women in personal affairs, they balked. Moving forward, Indian nationalist men coopted and subsumed, as one historian notes, “women’s collective agency . . . for a reconstituted Hindu, upper-caste, and male polity” in the making of an independent state.33 In Egypt, during the national revolution between 1919 and 1922, at which time Egypt secured its nominal independence from the Britain empire feminist and nationalist leaders organized mass demonstrations of elite women, who left the security of their harems and entered the streets and meeting halls to express their hatred of colonial rule. For centuries upper- and middle-class Arab women, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, had lived lives of domestic seclusion within their households. Working-class and peasant families did not enjoy sufficient economic means to segregate the female members of their families; they needed their labor and could not afford to keep women from going outside to work. Likewise, when upper- and middle-class women left their homes to venture into the public realm, they always did so veiled, as did working-class urban women. Peasant women did not usually cover their faces, as it made labor in the fields unwieldy; Bedouin women had no such barriers as they tended their animals, so they did often veil themselves. Veiling had been a cultural practice long before the advent of Islam in the seventh century and was never limited to Muslim women, and the precepts of the religion mandated neither it nor the seclusion of women. Many Muslim leaders, however, invoked the religion in their defense of the practices. Veiling and seclusion grew out of the conviction that “the woman” was a wholly sexual being. “The man,” on the other hand, while certainly a sexual creature, possessed many other characteristics and elements as part of his nature. Regarded as excessively sexual, women were believed capable of unleashing chaos into the world: the mere presence of a woman, it was popularly thought, could cause men to lose all control and indulge their lust. Moreover, a stain on a woman’s sexual purity dishonored not just herself but her entire family, whereas similar behavior on the part of men did not. “Restricting women to their homes and camouflaging them if they were out,” writes one historian, “were deemed necessary to the preservation of their purity and with it the honor of their men and families.”34 Families who could not afford to seclude their women or women whose daily labor constrained the use of the veil counted on community surveillance to enforce morality. Violations of prohibitions could bring harsh punishment down upon the heads of offenders. Though the precepts of Islam forbade it, families married off their daughters at the age of thirteen without requiring the girls’ consent. Wealthy men often took as many as four wives and as many concubines as they wished. Women had no control over their property or possessions, and few legal rights. Again, these practices did not come into being with the arrival of Islam but had been in place for many centuries, and pertained, moreover, to women of all religions.

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With the colonization of Egypt toward the end of the nineteenth century, Egyptian men began to embrace two intellectual movements designed to empower them to resist British control: one, secular nationalism, sought to provide the philosophical and political underpinnings of an independence campaign; the other, the modernization of Islam, encouraged Muslims to return to the original sources of their faith to determine how it could best provide the guidance for a happy and moral life. In the course of doing so, men and women alike discovered that Islam did not dictate that women be secluded or veiled. They found that practices deemed to be Islamic were in fact nothing of the sort: not requiring the consent of women or girls to marry, for instance, or the misuse of divorce and polygamy to further the interests of males in society were in fact violations of Islamic precepts. The confluence of anti-colonialism and Islamic reform between the 1890s and 1960s opened the possibility for Egyptian women to articulate a distinctive feminism – a feminism within the principles of their religion. Feminism, in other words, was not seen to threaten their identification with Islam. On the contrary, their religion made room for women to become feminists, and feminism, they were convinced, enriched their lives as Muslims. In 1920, feminists demanded the creation of a women’s section of the Egyptian nationalist party and insisted that it partake substantively in decision-making processes, making its objections loudly and publicly known when it was bypassed.With independence, nationalists’ enthusiasm for women’s involvement and for feminist demands such as education and employment opportunities, the right to worship in mosques, and political participation weakened appreciably. The Constitution of 1923 declared, “all Egyptians are equal before the law. They enjoy civil and political rights and equally have public responsibilities without distinction of race, language, or religion.” While this appeared to instantiate a regime that would fully recognize women’s rights, an electoral law negated them by excluding women from the suffrage. Almost immediately, the Egyptian Feminist Union, led by Huda Sha’rawi, formed, demanding education and work for women, reform of personal status laws that restricted their movement and their comportment in public, abolition of statesponsored prostitution, and the vote.Women won education rights and a minimum age of marriage, but their other demands were ignored. In 1929, in the aftermath of the conference in Berlin of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, Egyptian feminist Saiza Nabarawi urged “Eastern” women to develop regional associations to promote feminist causes. The General Union of Syrian Women answered her call by organizing the Eastern Women’s Congresses, the first in Damascus in 1930 and another in Tehran in 1932. Neither conference generated much in the way of concrete results; a regional feminist movement among Arab and Muslim states proved elusive, especially as British and American feminists worked to block its creation. Colonial governments had little incentive to accede to women’s demands because their power on the ground depended upon fragile alliances with local elite men, but even among nationalists, feminists faced considerable opposition and had to tread carefully. They modified their calls for reforms of such hot-button issues as eliminating

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the requirement that women veil themselves so as not to alienate their nationalist allies. At the first conference in Damascus, for example, feminists passed resolutions calling for the abolition of polygamy in all of its manifestations; equal rights to divorce for women and men; an increase in the minimum age of marriage to 16 for girls and to 18 for boys; equal pay and equal opportunities for work and promotion; an increase in the minimum age for child labor to 14; and compulsory elementary education for girls and boys. No resolution to eliminate the veil was introduced, in deference to conservative elements within the nationalist movement. Two years later, in Tehran, the second Eastern Women’s Congress reaffirmed the resolutions of the first, but also strove to frame them within a nationalist context. Delegates asserted that all individuals and all nations possessed the right to selfexpression, and demanded “full responsible self-government” for all nations. This conference also enlarged their slate of resolutions, adding suffrage to the list as well as the right of women to fight alongside men on the battlefield in the event of defensive war. Once again organizers deferred discussion of the veil to a time in the future when passions might be less inflamed. “Going into it now would only muddle things and electrify the atmosphere,” noted one conference attendee.35 From the start, the Eastern Women’s Congresses demonstrated the determination of “eastern” feminists to establish a movement that reflected the reality of their lives, to adapt those causes within western feminist internationalism that served their purposes to respond not just to patriarchy but to colonialism as well. They welcomed western feminists to their conferences in the spirit of international solidarity, and prized the support and input they received from them, but Arab and Muslim women in the Middle East and Indian feminists such as Sarojini Naidu asserted their independence vis-à-vis their European and American sisters in no uncertain terms. As the invitation to the second Eastern Women’s Congress put it, we Oriental women should make a determined effort to understand one another and develop among ourselves a spirit of Asian sisterhood, with the object of preserving all that is valuable in our age-long national and social cultures and of discriminating what is best for us to assimilate from outside Asia [our italics].36 Of particular concern for feminist leaders such as Nour Hamada, a member of a prominent Druze family from Lebanon, was the so-called “modern girl,” the women “who dance and wear the latest fashions,” who partake of “dancing, frivolous entertainments, loafing, gambling, drinking parties.”37 She took great pains to distance eastern feminist activists from such “lowborn” women, cognizant of just how inflammatory the image was to anti-colonialist men who saw in the “emancipated woman” a threat of sexual independence and a disruptor of the family. Regarded as representatives and protectors of “eastern” culture, Middle Eastern feminists, allied as they were with the larger, male-dominated political movements throughout the region, could not afford such associations. Activists like Hamada worked assiduously to promote a self-consciously eastern feminism as compatible

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with morality and virtue, and walked a fine line, attempting to ally with but remain autonomous from Middle Eastern men and western women. As the case of feminists in Turkey demonstrates, the triumph of secular nationalism hardly guaranteed an end to – indeed, often reproduced – gender hierarchy. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman empire after World War I, Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk sought to project the image of a modern progressive state that could proudly take its place among the family of nations. To that end he capitalized on western discourses that equated the modernity of a nation with its treatment of women and introduced a number of reforms that enhanced their position both in the state and in the family. New educational opportunities, the abolition of polygamy, the replacement of Islamic family law by a new Turkish civil code, increased openings in the labor force, the granting of political rights demanded by the Turkish Women’s Union since the founding of the new nation – these elements of what one historian has described as “state feminism” announced that Turkey had arrived on the world stage and would take its place among the modern powers. In 1935, Atatürk seized on the occasion of the twelfth conference of the International Alliance of Women held in Istanbul to enfranchise Turkish women, thus cementing his image among Turkish and international reformers alike as women’s “savior” and the “liberator of Turkish women.”38 After the congress, he invited a small group of delegates to the new capital of Ankara, where they were greeted with a lavish reception at the presidential palace. Atatürk and the new Turkey greatly impressed Una Marson, who was the only woman of African descent at the congress and spoke as part of the “East and West in Co-operation” panel. She left fully convinced of his progressive credentials. Not everyone was overjoyed by this turn of events. The association of modernization with European colonialism and secularism left Turkish feminists vulnerable. Both before and during the conference, the satirical press in Turkey ran cartoons and items lambasting the “over-sexed” tyrannical women who had tired of monogamy and the “cuckolds” who had married them. Commentators and cartoonists excoriated feminists for challenging the traditional conventions of marriage and society and for driving their husbands, portrayed as cowed and oppressed by dictatorial women whose excessive demands for rights never ceased, to desperation.The amount and volume of the criticism hit home, and within two weeks of the conference’s conclusion, the Turkish Women’s Union was closed down. Atatürk had done enough, he calculated, for women’s equality, and they should turn their attentions to building up the power and welfare of the republic through a variety of charitable institutions. As one newspaper put it, “the Women’s Union is not a political organization, because no political struggle remains.”39 A similar dynamic of the state using the status of women to signify its level of modernization created the conditions for a feminist movement to arise in Japan earlier in the twentieth century. Upon the establishment of the Meiji government in 1868, reformers looking to transform Japan from a feudal society into a liberal capitalist one saw in women the agents of what they referred to as “civilization.” They promoted a western-style education – modeled on American institutions – for

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women, whom they expected to help create a modern polity. The experiment proved to be very short-lived, however; as early as the 1880s, the Meiji government reversed its direction and oriented women’s education not toward work in the public sphere but to the domestic sphere of family and household. Moreover, within the patriarchal family of Confucius-informed Japan, women could not own or inherit property, and were obliged to obey men, even their sons. They could not vote or belong to political parties or attend political meetings. These restrictions were at odds with Japan’s eagerness to show the world that it was a modern nation as defined in the West. A middle-class feminist consciousness developed within this context, manifesting early on in a movement to provide birth control information and devices to women. This particular issue arose in the context of the great weight attached to women’s obligations as mothers. Certainly an emphasis on domesticity characterized western ideals for femininity as well, but in Japan, the expectation that women would care for home and family was more than an expectation. It was a duty.Women had the responsibility of becoming mothers of children who would advance the interests of the state; by the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, maternal duty encompassed the fostering of nationalism and militarism. As one historian explains, “Japanese women of all classes were regarded merely as social, economic, and reproductive tools for the imperial project.”40 They were expected to produce offspring who would people the nation’s factories, farms, and military forces.To that end, the government criminalized abortion and embarked on a campaign to encourage women to have as many children as possible. In fact, the role of women in the Japanese empire was markedly different than that of women in most European settler colonies. While men made up the overwhelming majority of settlers in the latter for decades, if not longer, there were roughly equal numbers of Japanese men and women in the colonies in Korea and Manchuria. Japanese officials viewed empire as “women’s business” because they believed women were better suited to the key tasks of colonization, including “languages, business, and the management.”41 This led to high numbers of middle-class women business-owners and managers as well as women in positions of authority within the local administration, which contrasted with more conservative gender roles in metropolitan Japan. Others were indentured sex workers, or madams or traffickers in the sex trade. Japanese feminists in the metropole such as Ishimoto Shidzue, who cultivated close ties with American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, challenged the state’s control of reproduction. Before long, she and her colleagues in the birth control movement joined forces with other feminists seeking to enlarge women’s rights generally and to obtain the vote. They explicitly linked women’s control of reproduction to the political agenda of women’s rights. At the Fifth National Women’s Suffrage Convention in 1934, for example, Ishimoto succeeded in persuading the delegates to resolve that the Japanese government ease restrictions on abortion in the criminal code and to establish clinics that would provide both birth control information and contraceptive devices throughout the country. For many feminists, the right of women to control their births went beyond individual

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rights; it also served as a means of acting against the government’s military and imperial agenda by cutting down on the number of sons they provided to the army. The government knew of this connection and had begun to act to defend its interests in encouraging population growth. In 1935, it introduced regulations on Japanese doctors’ abilities to prescribe and promote contraception. Ishimoto told American reporters in 1937 that women’s crusades for contraception reflected not just “the necessity of raising [the] standard of living by limiting the number of children in any family. . . . We want peace,” she emphasized, “and we want lives free from the terror of impending struggle.”42 Local authorities arrested her in midDecember, keeping her for some two weeks. The government then prohibited her from disseminating contraceptive information or devices in January 1938. By this time, Japan had embarked on war with China, and targeting the birth control movement was part of the effort to impose nearly total control over the civilian population. *** In the 1930s, the territorial, racial, religious, and other boundaries that sustained colonialism continued to present significant, often insurmountable, obstacles to anti-colonial mobilization. Nevertheless, the global reach of empires provided not only the cause (in both senses) but also the frameworks, networks, and other means of forming transcolonial ties and fomenting opposition to imperialism. Few across the colonized world conceptualized the present historical conjuncture solely in terms of a domestic project of national liberation and state sovereignty. Many, particularly among the literate urban elite, viewed their homelands within the global context of an imperial order in crisis and themselves as players in an emerging new epoch of world history. They claimed multiple identities and addressed networked publics across large geographical distances. Transcolonial and extra-national identifications coexisted and competed with strictly nationalist ones. An awareness of the dangers of the moment but also a sense of radical possibility marked anti-colonial politics during the 1930s.

Notes 1 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 65. 2 Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1461–1485, here 1463. 3 David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours:The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 57–60; Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 90–107; Kevin Grant, “The Transcolonial World of Hunger Strikes and Political Fasts, c. 1909–1935,” in Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, ed. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (New Delhi: Longman Orient, 2006), 243–269, and “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery, c. 1885–1956,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950, ed. Frank Trentmann, Philippa Levine, and Kevin Grant (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 80–102.

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4 See John Ingleson, Workers, Unions and Politics: Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2014), Ch. 3. 5 Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years,” in Decentering Empire, eds. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (Hyderabad, India: Orient Blackswan, 2006), 270–292; Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 308–310. 6 Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 137, 171–172. For more on the relationship between the Japanese empire and Taiwanese aborigines, see Jordan Sand, “Imperial Tokyo as a Contact Zone: The Metropolitan Tours of Taiwanese Aboriginese, 1897–1941,” Asia-Pacific Journal 12, no. 10 (March 2014): 1–11. 7 Quoted in Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 245–246. 8 Cemil Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Ch. 7. 9 A. K. Hourani, Syria and Lebannon: A Political Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 114. 10 Quoted in Raghid El-Solh, Lebanon and Arabism: National Identity and State Formation (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 69–70. 11 Sami M. Moubayed, Steel and Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped Syria, 1900–2000 (Seattle, WA: Cune Press, 2006), 255–257. 12 Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 13 Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 99, 120–121, 267. 14 Ibid., 209; John Ingleson, Road to Exile: The Indonesian Nationalist Movement, 1927–1934 (Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong: Heinemann Southeast Asian Studies Series, 1979);Taufik Abdullah, Indonesia:Towards Democracy (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 56. 15 See Mikiya Koyagi, “The Hajj by Japanese Muslims in the Interwar Period: Japan’s PanAsianism and Economic Interests in the Islamic World,” Journal of World History 24, no. 4 (2013): 849–876. 16 W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Leavering Lewis (New York: Owl Books, 1995), 11. 17 Reprinted in Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Papers, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 571–580. 18 See, for example, George Padmore, “Ethiopia Today: The Making of a Modern State,” in Negro Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Author, 1934), 612–618; Putnam, Radical Moves, 215–216. 19 Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 95–96; Robeson quoted in Penny von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 11; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 203; Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within, ed. Kenneth King (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 116; Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 220; Grier quoted in Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]), 400, n. 171. 20 Quoted in Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 341.

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21 Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators,’ 332–334; Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 161–165; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 298. 22 “Editorial,” Wãsù 4, no. 5 (November 1935): 70. 23 Una Marson, The Moth and the Star (Kingston, Jamaica: published by the author, 1937), 81; “Meeting of White and Coloured Peoples in London Protests against Arms Embargo,” Daily Gleaner (September 11, 1935): 18; Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1968 [1937]), 7; C. L. R. James, “Abyssinia and the Imperialists,” The Keys 3, no. 3 ( January–March 1936): 32, 39–40. 24 Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, 179. 25 Rabindranath Tagore to Prince Akiiki Nyabongo (March 22, 1937), Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 306. 26 Du Bois, Newspaper Columns, 1, 166–167, 169. 27 Ibid., 241. 28 See Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 29 Quoted in Theodore Courtney Rogers, “The Interactions Between and Influences of British Feminist Groups and Indian Feminist Nationalists: 1918–1938” (PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2016), 144. 30 Quoted in Rogers,“British Feminist Groups and Indian Feminist Nationalists,” 150–151. 31 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A  Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 93. 32 Quoted in Rogers, “British Feminist Groups and Indian Feminist Nationalists,” 161. 33 Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 199. 34 Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5. 35 Quoted in Charlotte Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1933,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 83–106, here 91. 36 Ibid., 90. 37 Ibid., 99. 38 Quoted in Kathryn Libal, “Staging Turkish Women’s Emancipation: Istanbul, 1935,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 31–52, here 38. 39 Ibid., 45. 40 Taeko Shibahara, Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014), 13. 41 Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 87. 42 Quoted in Shibahara, Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement, 100.

PART III

International crisis

On November 24, 1929, rumors that the British planned to tax women reached the village of Oloko in the Bende district of southeastern Nigeria. In response to what appeared to be efforts by the local warrant chief, Okugo, to assess their numbers and wealth, a large crowd of Igbo women surrounded the chief ’s compound and “sat on” him, a locally recognized practice undertaken when men committed offenses against women. When “sitting on a man,” women danced and sang until the object of their grievance acknowledged his offense and promised to make restitution.1 In this particular instance, Okugo not only refused to admit to any wrong-doing, he set male members of his compound on the women, causing injury to eight of them. Angered by their treatment and dissatisfied with Okugo’s previous disrespectful behavior towards them, the Oloko women sent a deputation to the district officer at Bende, Captain John Cook, to complain about Okugo’s actions. While the deputation of Oloko women conferred with Cook, women from Aba, Owerri, and Ikot Ekpene arrived in Oloko, and, upon hearing that Cook had agreed to try Okugo, moved on to Bende, gathering up other women en route. By the time they arrived, their numbers had reached into the thousands, and Cook had handed over his commission to Captain John Hill. Hill testified later, The women, numbering over ten thousand, were shouting and yelling round the office in a frenzy. They demanded [Okugo’s] cap of office, which I threw to them and it met the same fate as a fox’s carcass thrown to a pack of hounds. Satisfied by Hill’s promise that Okugo would be tried in the colonial courts for assault and that women would not be taxed, the women disassembled and returned to their villages without incident.2 Persistent rumors of taxation of women and news of the women’s victory at Bende spread to other towns and villages, where women met in late November

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and early December to discuss their situation. On December 9, a crowd of women estimated to number one thousand attacked the native court at Owerrinta, knocking the caps from the heads of warrant chiefs, damaging property, and destroying documents. The next day, December 10, crowds of women gathered at Aba, where they again attacked the native court and then looted Barclay’s Bank and a number of European warehouses, locations where palm oil, the staple product of women’s economic activity, was stored. A week later, on December 15, at Utu Etim Ekpo, in Calabar Province, women attacked the native court, a warehouse, and the houses of the clerks employed there.When they turned their attention to demanding a meeting with the district officer, troops were called in; when the women insisted upon proceeding to the district officer’s offices, the troops opened fire on them with rifles and a Lewis gun, killing eighteen. The following day, December 16, 1929, a bigger crowd of women met at Opobo, where they demanded a written statement from the district officer that asserted, among other things, that women would not be taxed. While they waited for the agreement to be typed up, the women grew increasingly restless, pushing on the fence that held them outside the yard of the district office and offering up insults to the troops inside the fence line. Just as the fence began to give way, the lieutenant in charge of the troops gave an order to fire. The soldiers shot and killed thirty-nine women and one man; an additional eight women were pushed by the retreating crowd into the river below and drowned; thirty-one women lay wounded by gunfire. This remarkable series of demonstrations, protests, risings, and riots involving tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio-speaking women throughout southeastern Nigeria was known to their participants and to subsequent West African memory and historiography as the Ogu Umunwaanyi, the Women’s War. In the course of it, more than fifty Igbo and Ibibio women were killed by British troops and an unknown number were wounded and otherwise traumatized. Their Women’s War marked a historical high point in West African resistance to colonialism under the impact of the Great Depression, not least because the activities of southeastern women during this brief moment of gender rebellion made an indelible impression on all who witnessed it, Britons and Africans alike. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, the Depression caused massive upheaval throughout the world in the 1930s. Economic collapse disrupted not just the economies of the world but whole social and even political systems as well. Governments’ attempts to manage the crisis were ineffectual at best and frequently entailed government repression of expressions of distress, especially in colonial areas. Nonetheless, from the Women’s War of 1929 to the Caribbean labor rebellions of the late 1930s, people refused to suffer in silence and engaged in desperate acts of resistance during the Depression years.

Notes 1 See Judith Van Allen, “ ‘Sitting On a Man:’ Colonization and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, no. 2 (1972): 165–181.

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See also Judith Van Allen, “ ‘Aba Riots’ or Igbo ‘Women’s War’? Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women,” Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 59–85. 2 Minutes of Evidence Taken by a Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into Certain Incidents at Opobo, Abak and Utu Etim Ekpo in December, 1929, by Major William Birrell Gray, chairman ( January 1930); Aba Commission of Inquiry, Notes of Evidence, Annexure II, Appendix III (14) (a), The Royal Empire Society, Received 11 March 1931, 5.

4 THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The effects of the Great Depression reverberated across the globe. As people’s incomes fell or vanished entirely, they could purchase fewer and fewer goods; manufacturers who saw declining profits had to reduce their output, and could not buy the raw materials they ordinarily used in their processes. Prices for raw materials and foodstuffs dropped concomitantly, and the people who produced them – in the export economies of Latin America and the Caribbean islands, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and China – watched helplessly as their incomes fell, their jobs disappeared, and life changed dramatically. Without work, men faced severe challenges to their identities as men; working-class women sought ways to ameliorate the threats to masculinity posed by unemployment, often at great physical cost to themselves.

Men and women The depression in agriculture began in the early 1920s in much of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The years of depression also set in in Britain as early as 1921, when one million Britons were out of work (that number rising to 2.5 million by 1935), severely challenging that most fundamental of criteria for masculinity, breadwinner status. In most western countries during the 1930s, the vast majority of wives, and especially mothers, did not work outside the home: the breadwinning husband and his stay-at-home wife characterized working-class ideals of masculinity and femininity, however difficult they were to achieve. In many places, the hardships of the Great Depression placed enormous strain on workingclass men’s abilities to carry out their prescribed role as provider for their families. Men who prided themselves on their independence and on their ability to support a family found themselves out of work, sometimes for years at a stretch.Women had to make do on dramatically reduced pay packets or the unemployment assistance that came to be called, derisively, “the dole,” going without food themselves in order that their husbands and children might eat, and introducing economies that

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they withheld from their husbands’ knowledge for fear that his diminished sense of manliness might be further eroded. Families broke apart over the implementation of the draconian and humiliating “means test,” through which eligibility for assistance was established. By 1935, unemployment for millions of people appeared to be the normal state of things across the west. Work conferred a status on working-class men that no other attribute could replace. Certain jobs created a higher manly standing than others, at least for some men, even at the height of unemployment, when most men took any job they could find. Colliers, for example, Clifford Steele recounted,“were apt to look on lesser laborious tasks as being a bit cissyish. They were he-men when they went down the pit,” a categorization, he believed, that “is what got lads down the pit.” When he himself began to work and to bring home a wage to help his family, “I was the big he-man. I had to be catered for. . . . I got a bit of prestige then.” No wonder that when unemployment struck many of the coal fields, men would travel for miles over mountainous terrain to find other jobs. One South Wales collier, Kenneth Maher, recalled that these “desperate men” got up at 3:00 a.m., walked for three hours to make it to the pit by 6:00 a.m., worked an eight-hour shift, and walked back another three hours to get home. Conditions of work became abominable, and the treatment meted out to many men by the bosses constituted an acute threat to their sense of manliness. Many struck back. Maher witnessed one collier who had been insulted by a pit under-manager. “I have a woman in the house who thinks of me as a husband and a man, three children who look up to me and think they see a man, their father,” the collier yelled. “But I can’t be a man to put up with this.” He took hold of the undermanager’s tie and pulled him against the window separating the two men, breaking his nose and cutting off his air supply. Four men had to pull the collier away. He was fired, Maher remembers, “but he could hold his head up. He didn’t grovel to them.”1 Emotional depression, especially among older skilled workingmen who could not find work, became pronounced. Bitter, humiliated, feeling hopeless, useless, and impotent, these men lost their self-respect and self-confidence. Many men in this situation “broke down” as they faced a future of permanent unemployment, lost “spirit” or “heart,” as they put it.Younger men, some of whom had never been employed, showed different signs of strain, according to officials investigating the effects of joblessness on the population. One group reported, For many, self-confidence is shattered and this, in itself, becomes a barrier to further employment. Personal worth tends to be assessed at a lower level and, in contrast to the ambitions and day-dreams of their earlier days, they go forward to maturing manhood with more limited ideas as to the worth of their contribution to life and work.2 Some became violent as a consequence of unemployment, others took on an attitude of fatalism, apathy, or carelessness. Suicide rates among unemployed men rose. In 1932, according to the Home Office, two out-of-work men killed themselves every day. In the years from 1921 to 1931, the numbers of suicides among men under twenty-five years of age rose by 60%.

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In some instances, investigators found that the severe economic conditions had reduced British working-class women to unusual levels of apathy as well, describing “women [who] had lost all pride in personal appearance and appearance in the home.” But for the most part, wives of the unemployed and underemployed strove valiantly to protect their men from the degradations and humiliations of having lost their breadwinner status, having become “unmanned.” Women went without food, “literally starving themselves in order to feed and clothe the children reasonably well,” health investigators discovered; in a third of the families officials believed the wife was ill. Malnourished, exhausted, and driven to distraction by anxiety, many of these women could not withstand the trials of childbirth: maternal mortality rates in the distressed areas of Britain were far higher than those in the wealthier south, for instance.3 Others secretly pawned items that could be spared for the week in order to keep food on the table or Sunday shoes on their children, a ritual long practiced by poorer workingclass women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but now one undertaken by those of the more respectable ranks as well. Clifford Steele described how he was sent to the pawnshop once and I hadn’t to let my father know. He’d have gone mad if he’d have thought. But what he didn’t realise was how my mother was having to budget. He wasnt aware of a lot of things that we had to do, my mother and myself, to keep the cart on the wheels. George Orwell reported that the wives of unemployed men in the north of England had to work much harder than ever before, trying to manage their households on less money, but that they would not think of asking their husbands to pitch in. He declared, Practically never in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention, which on the face of it seems a little unfair. The man is idle from morning to night but the woman is as busy as ever. . . .Yet so far as my experience goes the women do not protest. I believe that they, as well as the men, feel that a man would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he developed into a “Mary Ann” [shorthand for a homosexual].4 But for some among the middle classes, domestic life had its appeal: as an alternative means of stemming the violence and conflict of the wartime and postwar years, many middle-class men adopted a style of manliness that centered not on the public world of politics but on the private world of the home.

Natural disasters Compounding the effects of the Depression, the disaster that became known as the Dust Bowl devastated the American plains. A cooling of the earth that began in 1918 as the Great War wound down had the effect of strengthening westerly winds. In Europe and Central Asia, the winds brought more and regular rains. In the lands

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sitting in the rain-shadow of the Rocky and Andes mountains, however, increased westerly winds meant drought in lands cleared for commercial agriculture. Beginning in 1931, the states of the American Great Plains became so dry that they could hardly be differentiated from deserts. The inhabitants of the Great Plains were no strangers to drought and the heat that accompanied it (temperatures in Nebraska reached 118 degrees in 1934; 115 degrees in Iowa); they were a regular feature of their lives. Nor was the dust that rose over areas that had been denuded of crops or native grasses a surprise. What was a shock to Midwesterners was the outbreak of dust storms of such ferocity that they created “black blizzards.” These and smaller, less dramatic dust storms battered the people of the plains day after day, year after year, for a full decade. As high as seven thousand to eight thousand feet in height, waves of earth driven by a polar air mass and infused with atmospheric energy roared across the land, stripping it bare of its soil and blasting houses with sixty-mile-perhour winds.The storms coated everything with fine dust, which infiltrated windows and doors and clothing, smothered livestock in the fields, blinded and choked those unlucky enough to be out in them, and turned day into night in a matter of minutes. Perhaps the worst of these storms took place on May 9, 1934, when high winds blew earth into the air in Montana and Wyoming and then eastward across the United States. Over the Dakotas, more dirt was swept up into the vortex, some 350 million tons of it, making its way across Dubuque, Iowa, and Madison, Wisconsin, to Chicago by that evening, where it fell like snow. It reached Buffalo by noon the next day, darkening the skies overhead. One-hundred-mile-per-hour winds sent the dust eastward and southward to Boston, New York, Washington, and Atlanta on the 11th. It blew out to sea, where ships some three hundred miles offshore discovered dust on their decks the following day. Other storms of this size would reach the East Coast, but for the most part they remained on the plains, making life unbearable for people there. As the Dust Bowl’s chief historian has noted, the “dirty thirties” were the result of human actions. Certainly drought figured into the equation, as did the winds that carried the dirt from bare lands. The natural factors of drought and wind, however, were not the principal causes of the dust storms. The stripping of land of all its natural vegetation caused them. With no grass or sod to hold the fine dirt in place, the land had no way to defend against the winds that came up and blew everything away. Farmers had plowed up sod to meet the demand for more and more wheat with which to feed the armies of the Great War. Some six million hectares, an area the size of West Virginia, had been placed into cultivation during the war years, leaving no natural defense against the brutal storms that plagued the Dust Bowl. Armed with new machines mass-produced in the factories of Henry Ford, twentieth-century sod-busters broke the land with unprecedented efficiency. Land not put into production in any given year lay fallow, but without grass to hold the soil in place, it was susceptible to pronounced erosion. When the war ended and demand for wheat fell precipitously, agricultural depression set in, leaving the farmlands of the Great Plains areas under-cultivated.With no grass or crops to keep the soil in place, it dried up and blew away.

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Drought descended upon significant areas of South Africa as well. In 1932–33, one of the worst incidents of drought killed thousands of grazing animals and made it impossible to grow crops. Fields of maize, wheat, cotton, and tobacco withered in the harsh sun, rendering the impact of the drop in commodity prices all the more disastrous. African farmers and white settlers alike faced ruin.White Afrikaner farmers and civil servants blamed the situation on Africans, who, they charged, had created the conditions that led to the failure of the land by using primitive and inefficient farming methods. They were wrong about this, as historians have demonstrated, but it did not keep them from promulgating such calumnies, for it helped them make the case for pushing Africans off the land, a staple of South African government policy since 1913. The U.S. government introduced a number of measures designed to address the disasters of the Dust Bowl, practices that the South African government adopted in turn to deal with its drought problems. Under the auspices of the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC), American officials introduced new farming techniques: terracing, contour plowing, strip cropping of drought-resistant plants, crop rotation, the establishment of bands of trees to shelter plots, and the management of animal grazing. These innovations worked; by the end of the 1930s, 80% of farmers who had arranged with the SCS to utilize these techniques reported that they had boosted their net incomes. In an instance of “agro-technical internationalism,” South African officials watched carefully and learned from their American counterparts. They implemented many of the same practices under a program they called “betterment,” a system intended to prevent soil erosion by dividing plots into arable and grazing sections, separating them with fences, and reducing grazing in general. These new farming methods also provided a rationalization for removing more African farmers from the land.5 In Northern Nigeria, a years-long invasion of locusts and grasshoppers aggravated an already disastrous economic situation for farmers. Swarms of ravenous insects descended upon farms and in minutes destroyed the crops ripening in the sunshine. They invaded Zaria Province in 1930, eating up virtually all of the sorghum-like Iburu and Acha grains. They did “serious” damage to the rich agricultural area around Lake Chad and obliterated crops in Kano. The next year, “hoppers” appeared “in every direction” in Bornu Province; one official described “an immense swarm of locusts . . . coming from the North and moving off towards the South.” Perhaps the worst incident occurred in 1932, when a locust cloud big enough to stop trains appeared in Kaduna.6 The combination of collapsing food prices and locust invasions led to out-and-out famine in some regions of Northern Nigeria. The Northern Territories of Ghana and a number of areas in Kenya also faced crop devastation from locusts during the 1930s. The district commissioner in Bole, in northern Ghana, reported on April 28, 1930, this evening at 5:30 my compound was invaded by hoppers. A really horrid sight. Nothing I have seen so far has resembled this. There was not a spot of

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grass or ground visible. They filled my house, climbed right to the top of the walls, covered the roof. He brought in two hundred laborers the next day to try to burn out the locusts, but the numbers just kept coming. “They easily defeated our efforts and swarmed over the compounds,” he recorded in his diary, a loathsome sight. We noticed that they readily feed on their slain brothers if not burnt, that they climb to the top of the telegraph poles, that they eat donkey and cow excrement. To-night a large body is encamped all over the town . . . Everyone is tired out and the stench is all-pewarding [sic].7 In Kenya, officials tried to poison the predators and directed local people to kill the locusts by hand and put them in the bags and baskets they usually filled with harvested grains. The inspector of schools in Maragoli watched one morning as villagers passed by with what he guessed to be fifty tons of locusts stashed in their carriers.8 Colonial officials in both Kenya and Ghana urged locals to plant root crops in place of their grains as the invasions continued throughout the 1930s, but this substitution of food crops could do little to stave off famine in the worst-hit regions, as farmers lacked the seedlings and the digging sticks to make the cultivation of yams or cassava successful. The 1930s also saw an unusually high number of massive earthquakes across the world, their magnitudes ranging from a low of 4.2 in Louisiana to 8.5 in Indonesia. Ten thousand Chinese died in the Xinjiang earthquake in 1931; another 9,300 two years later in Sichuan. A 1934 quake in Bihar, India, killed 10,700; the next year, 60,000 South Asians died in Quetta (in what is today Pakistan) and an additional 56,000 in India. The year 1939 proved especially bad, with quakes in Chile and Turkey killing 28,000 and 32,700 people, respectively. Catastrophic flooding of the Huang He (Yellow) River, Yangtze River, and Huai River drowned an estimated 3.7 million Chinese in 1931.9 Floods in 1938 and 1939 killed a total of one million Chinese. Natural disasters happen all over the world all the time, but their occurrence in the years of the Great Depression made peoples’ lives and governments’ attempts to address the problems they faced all the more difficult.

What governments did All of the capitalist governments attempted to introduce measures designed to cope with the economic disasters of the 1930s. Some of their efforts had a minimal effect: unemployment insurance in Germany, France, and ultimately Britain may have blunted the severity of the downturn for a while. Even the United States was compelled to abandon decades of economic policy that dictated against such social insurance, however ineffectual it proved in the short run. More often, government decisions had the effect of worsening the Depression. Thinking that they could protect their industries by throwing up tariffs against the entry of products from

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foreign nations, governments embarked on the road to economic nationalism. The United States passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, placing unprecedentedly high tariffs on some twenty thousand items imported into the country. In 1932, the last major power to remain committed to free trade, Britain, embarked on a policy of imperial preference known as the Ottawa Agreements. These placed prohibitive tariffs on goods coming into Britain, the dominions, and colonies from foreign countries outside the imperial-preference zone, and required producers across empire to sell their goods to one another rather than to outside countries. Some countries negotiated bilateral trade agreements, creating, in effect, barter systems with trading partners, which, in practice, benefited the more economically powerful and industrialized party. In 1933, for example, Britain signed an agreement with Argentina, known as the Roca-Runciman Pact, under which it would continue to import Argentinian beef at 1932 levels in exchange for a reduction in tariffs on more than three hundred and fifty British goods to 1930 rates. In addition, British businesses received preferential treatment in the awarding of permits and contracts, and British-owned railroads gained certain concessions and exemptions. The major powers consistently received the better end of such deals. The bilateral agreement safeguarded the interests of the invernadores or wealthy cattle ranchers at the expense of the impoverished majority (in 1933, chilled beef represented only 16% of Argentine exports) and stirred bitter resentment toward the British.The following year, Brazil and Germany entered into a relationship that exchanged coffee for machinery.10 Latin America suffered deeply from the crash in commodity prices, as most countries’ economies depended on the export of raw materials and agricultural products. In certain countries, governments intervened heavily to encourage local industries to become self-sufficient, thus abandoning long-standing principles of free trade. Brazil and Columbia, for example, had extensive coffee-exporting sectors held by wealthy, lighter-skinned planters with considerable political power, and the states worked hard to protect these industries. Facing price reductions of 50%, the Brazilian government bought up surplus coffee in order to drive up the price on the world market, but this soon became untenable. It turned to storing the excess beans but quickly ran out of storage space. Finally, it resorted to simply burning the product, which must have created an extraordinary aroma throughout the countryside. At the same time, the Brazilian government encouraged an expansion of the local cotton industry to broaden and diversify the agricultural economy. In 1930, with the help of the Brazilian army, Getulio Vargas overthrew the liberal government dominated by coffee producers in the areas around Sao Paulo. Vargas hailed from the province of Rio Grande do Sul, where as governor he had been part of a local government culture of intervention and modernization in order to support the small landowners and cattle ranchers of the region. True to his interventionist nature, once in power at the national level he placed controls on foreign exchange, established a moratorium on paying Brazil’s international debts, and protected local industry through tariffs and expanding production of export crops besides coffee. In response to challenges from both the left and the right, Vargas

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flirted with proto-fascist groups as he consolidated his power, but many Brazilian workers considered him a savior. In 1937, he established the Estado Novo dictatorship that lasted until 1945. In Columbia, the Depression catalyzed a different kind of political revolution. Where Brazil’s government fell to a rightist authoritarian, Columbia’s went in the other direction.The conservative coffee planters, called Cafeteros, lost their majority to liberals seeking to promote the interests of the middle classes in the country in 1930.The center-right government of President Enrique Olaya Herrera did not go far enough for many in his party, and it was succeeded in 1934 by a liberal-socialist faction under the leadership of Alfonso López Pumarejo.11 This government, supported by the masses of the Columbian people, introduced reforms designed to protect workers and peasants and to diversify the economy in a movement that came to be called the “Revolution on the March.” It also instituted a new constitution in 1936 that placed a premium on social justice: it gave the government the right to seize property for the public good; protected labor and recognized the right of unions to strike; and asserted the state’s responsibility for providing public assistance to the poor. The elections of 1938 returned a more conservative branch of the party, but López Pumarejo’s reforms had become so popular that most of them could not be rescinded even if they were not implemented or enforced. In Peru, by contrast, where the chief export industries – minerals and petroleum – were in the hands of foreign corporations, government officials realized that foreign investors had little incentive to help them diversify their economy by putting resources into the development of local industries. As a result, Peru tended to maintain its free trade policies. The “banana republics” of Cuba, Honduras, and Guatemala, because they were, for all intents and purposes, run by (largely American) corporations, lacked the independence even to make such decisions about intervening in the economy.They simply had to wait for the world economy to improve. The regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic used violence and scapegoating in response to the catastrophe of the Depression. Seeking to bring lands in the northwestern part of the country under the control of the state in order to expand cultivation of crops for export and domestic consumption, Trujillo, who came to power in a coup in 1930, embarked on a program to plant “colonies” in the sparsely populated region of the border with Haiti. He also proposed agrarian reforms designed to modernize farming practices, thereby promoting agricultural self-sufficiency and, not incidentally, extending state control to an area where peasants had long been able to avoid it. Though the regime did little to actually expand colonization in the end, it exploited the significant presence of Haitians in the border region to articulate and promote an anti-Haitian nationalism. Decrying what he called a “pacific invasion” of the Dominican Republic by Haitians crossing the border, “Haitianizing” and “Africanizing” the area, Trujillo ordered his army to kill all Haitian immigrants in the area, including many who had lived there for generations.12 Between October 2 and October 8, 1937, soldiers, municipal authorities, and a few civilian Dominicans slaughtered some fifteen thousand ethnic Haitians.

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Called el corte (the cutting) by Dominicans and kout kouto-a (the stabbing) by Haitians, after the predominant use of machetes to kill the victims, the brutal massacre was followed in the spring of the next year by the forcible deportation of thousands more Haitians and by the murder of hundreds in the southern border region as well. This bloody episode has informed Haitian-Dominican relations ever since. Imperial governments continued or introduced measures in their colonies that exacerbated rather than alleviated the distress of their subjects. France and Britain pursued programs designed to protect their own interests at the expense of the colonies they ruled. In Senegal, for example, French officials imposed imperial preference policies that required the Senegalese people to export their goods to and purchase goods from France and/or its colonies.This meant that they paid more for imports than they would have if they had bought from other sources and could not sell their own commodities at competitive prices.These policies left them destitute. The same dynamics played out in Burundi – made a Belgian mandate colony after the Great War – and the Belgian Congo, sparking riots against the Belgian authorities there. All of the European imperial powers insisted that their colonial governments maintain balanced budgets throughout the Depression. As revenues dropped with the fall in prices for export commodities, which under colonial rule had become much more vital to local economies, officials sought new sources of cash to replace the shortfall and turned to increasing taxes on the local population. In the Northern Protectorates of Vietnam, held by the French, revenues actually produced a surplus in 1934, so high was the take from increasing taxes. In Tonkin and Annam, peasants nearly starved, but authorities refused to reduce tax rates. The case of Northern Nigeria offers a dramatic illustration of how colonial governments’ response to the Depression affected their subjects. Prior to 1929, Nigeria supplied British companies with tin, lumber, cotton, cocoa, groundnuts, and palm oil and kernels, which the firms then sold to British industries at home. The colonial government taxed the exports and the profits they generated to cover the costs of administration and other projects. The collapse of the New York stock market changed things almost immediately. Prices fell precipitously, by half in many instances, gutting peasant farmers’ income and significantly reducing the wages of workers in the mining, logging, and rubber-producing enterprises that employed so many Nigerians. Faced with shortfalls in revenue, the British authorities insisted that their budgets still be balanced, and to that end, they cut back on pay, eliminated positions in the administration, discontinued the building of roads, rails, schools, health clinics, and other infrastructure, and imposed higher taxes. Retrenchment had the effect of throwing some 40% of the native colonial staff out of work. In 1932, the imperial preference program established at the economic conference in Ottawa helped to bolster the fortunes of British merchants and companies at great cost to Nigerians. Faced with unemployment and lower prices for their goods, Nigerians could not pay their taxes. In the Idoma division of Northern Nigeria, the district officer, W. R. Crocker, travelled to villages across the region to seize food, animals, and other

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property in lieu of pounds sterling. He hoped that the confiscations would lead villagers to come forward to claim, and pay for, their goods. They didn’t, because they couldn’t, and Crocker’s inventory of appropriated chickens and goats soon overwhelmed him. He could try to auction them off, he supposed, but recognized how futile that would be. “The people haven’t enough hard currency to pay their tax let alone buy extra goats,” he noted.13 Nigerians responded to hardships and greater interventions by the colonial state with a variety of strategies. In southeastern Nigeria, women rose up against British authority in the notorious Women’s War. In Idoma, in the north, protests took less dramatic form. Locals learned to anticipate the arrival of colonial authorities: they devised booby traps, hid their animals, and absconded into the forest. Frustrated and embarrassed, officials resorted to ever harsher measures, burning homesteads and compounds and destroying the food stores of the villages’ inhabitants. Food shortages led to wholesale famine in some places, which authorities did nothing to address. The combination of retrenchment, brutal repression, and the refusal to alleviate local distress went far to undermine and delegitimize British authority. When the Depression struck in 1929, the governments of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia acted to divert the wealth of African farmers to the white settlers. They did so by prohibiting Africans from growing lucrative cash crops – maize and tobacco in Southern Rhodesia and maize and coffee in Kenya. This practice ensured that only white settlers could produce the most profitable crops, striking directly at the well-being of middle-class African farmers and incurring their undying enmity. Southern Rhodesia and Kenya also made liberal use of the notorious marketing board system that hurt African producers so badly. A Shona maize farmer living in eastern Southern Rhodesia, for example, was legally obligated to sell his entire maize crop to the government Maize Marketing Board at a price fixed by the board. The government then marked up the maize, sold it on the world market for a significantly higher price, and pumped those profits into loans and other credit instruments, fertilizers, and equipment for white settlers.That Shona farmer’s cattle-keeping neighbor faced the same discrimination. The government taxed cattle for domestic consumption – that is, African cattle – but did not tax cattle for export – stock owned by Britons. It directed the tax revenues gained thereby to the settlers, with the two control systems often overlapping. In Kenya in 1938, the government forced the Kamba to sell their cattle for one-quarter of their market value to a firm on the outskirts of Nairobi called Liebig’s, a Southern Rhodesian company experienced in culling African “scrub cattle” from the Victoria and Gutu reserves in the southeast of the country and sending them south. The profits the company realized from the sale of the cattle on the world market provided funds for building a facility to chill settler beef for export. As one settler whose family raised cattle in Kamba areas at the time put it, Liebig’s operated “solely for our benefit.”14 In South Africa, where prices on certain agricultural produces had fallen by more than 55%, marketing boards, price subsidies, low-interest loans, and even debt forgiveness could not staunch the bleeding. White farmers who had been so

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instrumental in bringing J.B.M. Herzog’s Nationalist Party to power in the late 1920s used their leverage to compel their African tenants to labor longer on their lands and to pay more for the privilege of doing so. Herzog’s government doubled the number of days African tenants had to work their landlords’ holdings from 90 to 180; in return for working their own plots, Africans had to pay more than twothirds of their yield to their landlords, leaving them with insufficient food to feed themselves and their families. White farmers colluded to set low wages for their laborers, and tightened pass laws made it virtually impossible for Africans to leave bad situations. New versions of the 1926 Land Act and more draconian interpretations of the Cape Reserve policy made it far more difficult for Africans to own land until it became virtually impossible by 1936. That year, despite vigorous African protests, the passage of the Native Trust and Land Act only enlarged the land designated for native reserves to a mere 13.6% of South Africa land. However, the South African government failed to meet even this benchmark until the 1980s.The responses to the Depression helped turn Africans into serfs on the lands of white South Africans. The impact of the Depression on white South Africans, especially poor white farmers, paved the way for the ultimate introduction of apartheid after 1948. In early 1933, the Nationalist Party of Herzog and the South African Party under the leadership of Jan Smuts “fused” to form a new United Party, with Herzog as prime minister and Smuts holding the office of deputy prime minister. This had required compromise on Herzog’s part, a toning down of the profoundly racist policies designed to ensure white supremacy in all areas of South African life, and it angered the more extreme members of his party. Under the leadership of D. F. Malan, a number of Afrikaners broke off to form the Purified Nationalist Party in 1934; the party began to attract followers espousing doctrines alternatively labeled “Christian Nationalism” and “National Socialism.” Members of Malan’s party and of proto-fascist movements such as the Broederbond, however limited in number, held significant positions in the army, the police, the schools, and the civil service, so their impact was considerable. They persuaded white settlers that their problems had been caused by Africans, Indians, and Jews; they initiated campaigns targeting racially mixed marriages, Indian merchants, and the “present British-Jewish imperialist capitalist system”;15 they influenced the passage of legislation that limited the immigration of Jews into the country, pushed even more Africans off the land, and made it ever harder for them to move about the country freely. The measures helped establish the framework for the system of segregation put in place by Smuts’ government after the end of the Second World War, the system that would become out-and-out apartheid with the fall of Smuts’ government in 1948. The British followed the same principles they used in Africa to address the shortfall in their revenues in colonial India, reducing expenditures and raising taxes. The levying of new taxes ruined the small businesses and cottage industries that employed a considerable number of Indians, and together with the dramatic fall in exports produced massive unemployment on the subcontinent. Some forty million Indians were out of work by 1932. Many among the heavily indebted peasantry

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could not meet their obligations as their incomes plummeted. To make matters worse, thousands of migrants who had been deported from Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya returned to impoverished communities. When these groups protested their predicament, the Indian government regarded them as political agitators and threw them in jail. This set of circumstances pulled more of the South Asian masses into the anti-colonial movement. The leaders of the Indian National Congress, which had embarked on a campaign of civil disobedience in an effort to gain independence from Britain, saw the economic plight of the rural peasantry and urban workers as an opportunity to gain greater support and altered their message to include more economic reforms. Calls for “no rent” and “no tax” echoed from Congress platforms, and in 1931, the party formally issued economic demands in its Karachi Resolution. As one member of the Legislative Council in Madras observed, “the Government is only responsible for the powerful way in which the civil disobedience movement is carried on in some of the districts of this province because it created discontent in the minds of a very large number of peasants.”16 A new British viceroy, Lord Willingdon, vowing that he would meet any “damn nonsense” put forward by nationalists with a “blitz of lathis” (long clubs used by the police) and “knotted ropes,” determined to answer protests against imperial rule with violence, imprisonment, and repression. He refused to negotiate with Gandhi and other Congress leaders, and when the mahatma returned from the second Round Table conference in London in 1931, Willingdon had him arrested, along with some eighty thousand of his followers. The government of India imposed greater censorship on the press; required Indians to carry identity cards listing their religion, employment, and status; prohibited meetings of more than a few people; restricted travel; and outlawed the wearing of what were called Gandhi caps. Congress members decried the actions of the government, but disagreed on what actions to take in response. Even Willingdon conceded privately that he was “becoming a sort of Mussolini of India.”17 As part of a carrot-and-stick approach to colonial unrest, the British government passed a new measure purportedly designed to increase Indian participation in the political life of their country, but that in actuality kept real power, especially fiscal policy, in the hands of the viceroy. The India Act of 1935 enlarged the autonomy of provincial governments, expanding the functions of legislatures and making ministers responsible to them. It also increased the size of the electorate dramatically to some thirty million Indians, including some women. But because it identified specific constituencies – women, for example, princes, and Muslims – and gave them special voting rights, the Congress president in 1936 and 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other party leaders opposed the act, seeing it as a new mechanism for the old strategy of “divide and rule.” Nevertheless, as part of its campaign for seats in the enlarged and empowered legislatures in 1937, the INC issued an election manifesto in which it delivered specific economic messages to the peasantry, handloom weavers, industrial workers, and the business classes of India. “The Congress . . . stands for a reform of the system of land tenure and revenue and rent, and an equitable

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adjustment of the burden on agricultural land,” the manifesto declared. As for factory workers, the policy of Congress is to secure them a decent standard of living, hours of work and conditions of labour in conformity . . . with international standards, . . . protections against the economic consequences of old age, sickness and unemployment and the right of workers to form unions and to strive for the protection of their interest.18 The INC’s strategy paid off: in Madras, for example, where it faced competition from the Justice Party, it won 159 out of 215 seats in the Legislative Assembly and 27 of 46 elective seats in the Legislative Council. Almost 74% of the electorate had voted for Congress candidates. The hardships of the Depression in India had produced a restive and distressed population. The Brahmin leadership of the INC recognized their plight, and in tailoring their message to include solutions to economic problems, they turned their organization into a party that could command the support of the Indian masses across class and caste differences. But only up to a point, for just as the INC was becoming a mass party under the impact of the Depression, new challenges to the Indian nationalist movement emerged from below. By 1930, B. R.Ambedkar had emerged as the leader of a growing movement demanding social and political equality for Dalits (“untouchables”). The issue of untouchability increasingly preoccupied Gandhi as well. He chastised his fellow caste Hindus for their treatment of Dalits, urging “self-purification,” led the All-India Anti-Untouchability League (whose name he changed to Harijan Sevak Sangh – “harijan,” meaning “People of God,” being the term that he proposed as an alternative to “untouchable”), and campaigned for opening Hindu temples to Dalits. Significant differences of opinion marked the relationship of Gandhi and Ambedkar from the start, differences that only grew as the decade progressed. Revealing a degree of paternalism, Gandhi believed that Brahmins and other highcaste Hindus should lead the drive for change; Ambedkar argued that it was foolish to expect caste Hindus to have a “change of heart” and insisted that the Dalits must fight for – and would only achieve – real change through their own movement of direct action. Whereas Ambedkar veered toward the left during the 1930s, developing more of a socialist position, Gandhi held fast to his position on socialism as a product of “modern materialist civilization,” an ideology exhibiting the same “insensate worship of matter” and “material advancement” as capitalism.19 After Gandhi and other Congress leaders failed to support a satyagrapha (nonviolent protest) in Maharashtra in 1930, irreconcilable differences began to emerge between the two. At the Second Round Table Conference, Ambedkar proposed a separate electorate for Dalits, a right already granted to Muslims. Gandhi vehemently opposed the proposition and went so far as to launch a hunger strike. Ambedkar relented in the end, securing, instead, reserved seats for Dalits within a general electorate. The two men collaborated in the Harijan Sevak Sangh, and under pressure from Ambedkar, Gandhi began focusing on gaining Dalit access to

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social spaces and resources – public wells, water tanks, schools, roads – instead of access to temples. However, Ambedkar soon broke from the group and Gandhi. He outlined a radical new religious agenda that linked the religion to political self-determination and that explicitly challenged Gandhi’s own blend of Hinduism and anti-colonial politics. In 1935, Ambedkar began urging on Dalits to convert to other religions, such as Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity. Ultimately, he settled on mass dharmaantar (conversion) to Buddhism as the most appropriate option. Gandhi dismissed the suggestion, and Ambedkar retorted by questioning the conventional foundations of religious faith, which he characterized as a largely unquestioned inheritance passed down from one generation to the next. “The conversion of the Untouchables,” by contrast, “would take [place] after full deliberation of the value of religion and the virtue of different religions. . . . It would be the first case in history of genuine conversion.” Buddhism, Ambedkar maintained, stood for social justice and human equality, and encouraged rational thought and scientific determination of facts while opposing superstition; the “official doctrine” of Brahmanical Hinduism was inequality. In Gandhi’s view, the reform of Hinduism not only would solve “the problem of the Untouchables”; it would also provide the spiritual resources for meaningful independence from an overly materialistic west. For members of internally colonized groups such as Dalits, Hinduism, however reformed, offered little hope for liberation. In an address to Dalit Christians in 1933, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, the militant leader of the Self-Respect Movement among lower castes, enjoined his followers to eschew the dream of an independent India. “If you desire true freedom,” he told them, “you must have the courage to destroy that which validates and constitutes the basis of your abject and enslaved condition.” As Ambedkar put it to Gandhi at the 1931 Round Table Conference, “Gandhiji, I have no homeland.”20 By the end of the 1930s, the depredations of the Depression, along with fears of Soviet-inspired communist threats and actual revolts on the part of colonized peoples across the British empire, sufficiently alarmed British officialdom and a growing number of colonial experts to compel them to rethink colonial policies and practices. A new model of colonial rule, which emphasized “development” and frequently was described as a “partnership,” increasingly supplemented the concept of “trusteeship” embodied in the League of Nations mandates charter by the late 1930s.This revised rationale for empire emphasized Britain’s obligations to improve the social and economic lives of people in the colonies, but in practice, it differed little from its predecessors until after World War II. Meager funds were made available to colonial governments to the support small-scale enterprises such as water projects in local communities. The actual implementation of development policies did little to improve the standards of living for most colonial subjects, though some privileged groups did benefit from them. They were too little, too late to alleviate the suffering wrought by the Depression years, and in any event, the start of a second world war delayed the implementation of development programs. In some respects, imperial Japan initiated more ambitious schemes for colonial development than the western empires but ones with a particularly militaristic bent

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that reflected growing tensions in the Pacific. The Depression gave the Japanese government the opportunity to embark upon an economic experiment in Manchukuo, the territory the military had seized in northern China in 1931 without government approval, and allowed politicians to turn a controversial and potentially treasonous military conquest into a bold colonial initiative. Within the context of the global economic crisis, Manchukuo offered the prospect of a protected trade zone whose markets would help stimulate industrial growth at home. Beginning in 1932, Japan sent massive amounts of capital and a new breed of administrators to the puppet state with the aim of developing a state-managed economy that would combine the Japanese and Manchurian industrial sectors and enable Japan to become militarily self-sufficient. The government established new companies to build up the fields of automotive manufacturing, aviation, shipping, gasoline production, and electricity generation; it introduced five-year plans modeled on the Soviet Union; and it implemented plans to develop the agricultural sector as well. In 1936, Japanese officials implemented an emigration scheme that would send three hundred thousand Japanese farmers to Manchukuo. Promised free land, free transportation, and other inducements, these settlers reluctantly uprooted themselves from their ancestral homes and put down stakes in the rural areas of the region. Administrators dictated nearly every aspect of their lives, including the kind and amount of crops they could grow, the tools they could use, the animals they could raise, and the goods they could purchase in village stores. Unlike urban colonists in Manchukuo who could come and go pretty much as they pleased and their pocketbooks allowed, the rural migrants found themselves ensconced among thirty-four million Chinese peasants, dependent upon the government for their well-being and, indeed, their very subsistence. The government used the rural Japanese migrants purposively, intent upon keeping them on the land as part of its colonization and security plans. In an effort to establish a cordon between Manchuria and the Soviet Union, Japanese civilian and military officials established villages of Japanese farmers along the border with Siberia. They trained the settlers in the use of weapons and fighting, counting on the latter to be their eyes and ears in the on-going effort to prevent guerrilla attacks on the part of local Chinese. What had begun as military adventurism on the part of the Kwantung Army in northern China became an ambitious colonial development scheme. The creation of Manchukuo marked the start of a new chapter of Japanese imperialism in Asia.21

Reverse migrations and repatriation The economic collapse of markets, production, wages, and employment first disrupted and then reversed decades- (and, in some instances, centuries-) long patterns of migration in regions across the globe. Following the end of the trade in enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and Indian oceans by 1870 (and, in some cases, much earlier), four major migration systems fulfilled the world’s labor needs: (1) networks spanning the Atlantic and the Americas brought Europeans to the Americas and,

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later, large numbers of Mexican nationals to the United States; (2) the Asian system provided free and indentured labor to European and American colonies in the region and, to a lesser extent, in the Americas; (3) the Russo-Siberian system connected European Russia to areas in Siberia and areas surrounding the Caspian Sea; and (4) recently established migratory networks drew large numbers of people from North China to Manchuria. The explosion of industrialization after 1870 required massive amounts of raw materials to supply rapidly expanding manufacturing sectors, while population growth during the same period demanded unprecedented levels of food production. In order to obtain the workers needed to grow and harvest crops and to supply vast quantities of raw materials, employers, governments, and imperial regimes established schemes of indentured and contract labor that placed millions of men and women in some form of bondage. Many millions more moved on their own to take jobs in the factories, in the mines, and on the plantations that served the imperial and capitalist powers. Migration acted as one of the most powerful drivers creating an interconnected world. The disruption of the Great Depression spurred new waves of migration as well as efforts on the part of governments to curtail immigration and, in many instances, to forcibly deport migrants already in their countries. In many instances, especially in Europe and the Americas, racism guided efforts to police mobility and introduce immigration restrictions and deportation schemes, and it informed populist antiimmigrant sentiment.

Diasporic Asia The decades after 1870 saw a massive expansion of products grown and mined in what has been called the “plantation belt” situated along the border regions of Asia. Tin, sugar, pepper, and rubber from the Malay peninsula; tobacco from Sumatra; sugar from Java; spices from Indonesia; tea and coffee from Ceylon and parts of south India; tea from Assam in northeastern India; rubber from Indochina; and rice from Burma,Thailand, and Indochina – the production of all these depended upon the labor of millions of workers predominately from colonial India and China. Servicing their needs for food and clothing, and providing transportation, credit, and other infrastructural basics attracted men and women to work as shopkeepers, restauranteurs, moneylenders, dock and railway hands, rickshaw and carriage drivers, and later bus and taxi drivers. Indian migrants travelled to other parts of the British empire, especially Malaya, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma, and Fiji. Chinese workers also journeyed to these lands but spread farther afield as well into Indochina, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Millions of northern Chinese migrated to Manchuria.The numbers of migrant workers peaked in the first decade of the twentieth century, fell off a bit during the war years of 1914–1918, and then recovered to achieve an even higher level during the 1920s. The Depression put the brakes on this immense movement of Asians across an interconnected system of labor and production. As the prices for agricultural products and minerals dropped and as investors pulled out of enterprises they believed

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to be vulnerable to falling demand, plantation- and mine-owners reacted by curtailing production, lowering wages, and firing workers. A combination of voluntary and involuntary reverse migration set in in Burma, Singapore, and Malaya, as lack of employment and official repatriation programs compelled millions of Chinese and Indian laborers to return to their homelands. Fearful that local people might stir up political unrest under the pressures of unemployment and the presence of “foreign” workers, the British colonial governments in Singapore and Malaya introduced legislation that prohibited new Chinese migration there. They attempted to reduce Indian migration to Singapore and Malaya as well by restricting the number of licenses distributed to labor recruiters. The Dutch sought to slow the migration of Chinese workers to Indonesia by imposing a tax on “alien” labor, which had the effect of discouraging planters from hiring new Chinese laborers. Local anger against “foreign” or “alien” workers turned violent in Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand. Large crowds in Rangoon set upon Tamil moneylenders and other Indian workers in May 1930, killing 120 and injuring 900 more. As many as twenty-five thousand Indians fled the city in order to avoid the violence. The colonial government later reported that because many of the migrants who left worked in the sanitary department of the city, “the sanitary service was paralysed, and the city was rotting in filth.”22 Malayan, Thai, and Indonesian wrath against Chinese migrants, long a latent feature of inter-ethnic relations in those countries, became more pronounced amid the hard times of the Depression. In Thailand and Indonesia, rioters targeted Chinese businesses.

Africa and the Mediterranean Rural Arab and Berber migrants from North Africa who had travelled in search of work to the cities of Algeria and France in previous decades similarly faced a variety of schemes to send them back to their natal communities once the Depression began. During the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of workers, merchants, and adventurers from southern Europe and Mediterranean islands such as Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Malta moved across the sea to North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant. This pattern slowly reversed during the early twentieth century due in part to European colonization along the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Berber-speaking Kabyles from the mountainous regions east of Algiers had a long tradition of migrating within Algeria and made up the vast majority of Algerians in France until after World War II. Before the Great War, French officials and businesses recruited North Africans – Algerians, in particular – as strikebreakers. Many thousands more followed during the war years, playing a vital role in the French war effort.When the conflict ended, French authorities did their best “to send every last colonial subject home.” The devastation of the war left France with significant labor needs. During the early 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Italian, Spanish, Russian, Armenian, Eastern European, and Algerian migrants sought jobs and safety in France. Roughly 10% of the population of greater Paris was born outside the Hexagon by 1926, including 27,500 Africans, the vast majority from North Africa.

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Between 1926 and 1930, close to 39,000 Algerians immigrated to France, many thrown off their land by French (and other European) settlers and wealthy Algerian landowners who had consolidated their estates. Nevertheless, while officials recruited workers from Italy, Poland, and other European countries, whom they viewed as white and, thus, culturally assimilable, successive French governments imposed strict restrictions on the entry of migrants from their North African territories.Though the number of foreigners in interwar France reached three million, the number of North Africans never rose above 160,000 before World War II. The Depression and the dramatic rise of unemployment in France slowed Algerian migration sharply and led to a precipitous rise in deportations of French Algerians and other North Africans. Some sixteen thousand Algerians moved to France in the years 1931 through 1935, a steep decline in the earlier trend. Those who were already in France had few options and encountered growing police surveillance and the threat of repatriation. A series of increasingly restrictive regulations dramatically curtailed the conditions in which they lived and their capacity to find employment, and authorities in Paris increased deportations of North Africans. Some returned to Algeria of their own accord while others stayed, hoping to make it through the bad times until things improved. They did, starting in 1936, provoking another upsurge of Algerian migration – some twenty-nine thousand entered France between 1936 and 1940. The Second World War then brought an end to virtually all trans-Mediterranean migration.23 In the mining centers of Africa, especially Northern Nigeria, the Rhodesias, and the Belgian Congo, unemployment due to crashing demand for tin, copper, and other materials led workers and their families to migrate back to their villages, leaving the cities decimated. Once home, they hoped to scrape together the means of subsistence from the land, but many of them failed. Food shortages in many places, along with a hostile reception by the occupiers of the land, reduced migrants to near-starvation in a number of areas. In order to prevent the arrival of migrants who might compete for scarce profits or prove to be a burden on the public’s purse, the metropolitan British government discontinued its postwar program of encouraging and supporting the emigration of its citizens to Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Kenya, explaining that “the pressure of an unparalleled economic depression has compelled the virtual cessation of all State-aided migration and settlement.”24 Prospective settlers who might migrate on their own initiative faced new barriers: the deposit they had to pay before being allowed to enter the colonies was increased considerably, as was the length of the probationary period they had to endure before they could be considered permanent residents. As a result of these policies, immigration dropped precipitously. Whereas nearly thirty thousand migrants settled in the Rhodesias in the years 1926 through 1931, only nine thousand did so between 1931 and 1936. Migrants to Kenya numbered nearly thirty-nine thousand between 1926 and 1931, but that number fell to twenty-five thousand between 1931 and 1936. Moreover, almost as many white settlers left these colonies in those latter years, leaving the total number of whites there virtually unchanged.

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One governmental effort to deal with the Depression, ironically, spurred a surge of internal migration in Rhodesia and Kenya: Britain went off the gold standard in 1931, causing the price of gold to float upwards. The increase in the price of gold encouraged large numbers of white settlers – put out of work, bankrupted, or otherwise economically destroyed by the collapse of global trade – to search for the precious commodity. Over a thousand new gold mines opened up in Southern Rhodesia between 1931 and 1934. In Kenya, the discovery of gold in the region north of Kisumu in 1931 attracted a thousand settlers to the area. In both cases, state aid supported and encouraged the settlers in their small operations.

The Americas For decades prior to the onset of the Great Depression many people in the Caribbean had participated in a dynamic circuit of migration that brought them to work in such countries as Panama, Venezuela, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and the United States. By 1930, Caribbeans represented roughly a quarter of the population of Harlem. The collapse of prices and high levels of unemployment led to protests against “foreign” workers in many of these receiving societies, putting pressure on governments first to curtail immigration and then to repatriate large numbers of migrants. In Panama, the “Society for National Defense” organized rallies attended by thousands of workers calling for British Afro-Caribbeans to be deported. Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic issued laws requiring employers to make sure that the majority of their workers were native-born; in some instances, the quotas reached 75% of the workforce. In the Caribbean and Latin American countries, anti-immigrant sentiment and action tended to be directed against Afro-Caribbean migrants, most of them from British-held islands. After a 1923 ban on “the immigration of negroes to work in the banana plantations” of Honduras, for example, a 1929 law appended negros to the group of “restricted races” that could not enter the country unless they possessed a labor contract from an employer or could pay a 500-peso deposit. If under contract, employers had to send them home as soon as the contract ended. By 1934, negros, along with “coolies, gypsies, and Chinese” were barred from entering the country at all. Guatemala followed suit in a 1931 law that forbade entry of any people of “negro race” “for ethnic reasons.” In 1929, Venezuela’s president prohibited the entry of any “colored” person and issued an order allowing for the expulsion of any inhabitant of color who could not produce a certificate of employment; the Immigration Law of 1936 introduced an official ban on any people of color from entering the country. British Guyanese, Trinidadians, and Jamaicans who had been expelled from countries where they had travelled to work articulated the same kind of racial intolerance against immigrants to their countries when they returned home. Chinese and Levantine immigrants faced vocal protests and threats of violence from Jamaicans and Trinidadians who had been expelled from Cuba and Panama, for

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instance. Marcus Garvey’s People’s Political Party and the offshoot formed by Leonard Waison, the Jamaica Native Defenders Committee, demanded an end to Asian immigration to the colony.Waison conceded that his organization’s anti-Asian platform derived not from the fact that Chinese workers competed with Jamaicans for jobs but from “the feeling amongst Jamaicans returning from Latin America.” One member of the Legislative Council, responding to pressure from constituents who had been expelled from Cuba, urged the government to take action. “The people were saying emphatically that they wanted no aliens in this country,” he told the council to approving cries of “hear, hear.”25 Migration to the United States, primarily of Mexican and Filipino workers – legally classified as U.S. nationals – and Caribbeans, had gone on apace during the first decades of the twentieth century. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act significantly reduced the number of Europeans who could enter the country and almost completely ended immigration from Japan. Afro-Caribbeans from the British Caribbean were counted as part of the annual quota of allowable migrants, but in practice, British administrators in the Caribbeans and immigration officials in the United States rejected virtually all of the former who sought entry. The act did not include immigration from other countries in the western hemisphere or that of U.S. nationals, and the need for laborers to replace the flow of migrants from Europe and East Asia actually increased the numbers of Canadians, Mexicans, and Filipinos who came into the country after 1924. Overall immigration fell by 45% over the course of the 1920s, but the immigration of Canadians and Mexicans increased by 12% and 29%, respectively. By the 1930s, Filipinos and Mexicans made up the largest share of agricultural workers in the western United States; Filipinos alone amounted to 18% of California’s labor force in 1930. Some forty-five thousand Filipinos resided in the continental United States in 1930, and sixty-three thousand lived in Hawaii. Regarded as competitors for scarce jobs and as responsible for the dire economic conditions during the Depression, they were frequently set upon with great violence by white Americans, as in the race riots in 1930 that targeted Filipino agricultural workers in the town of Watsonville in central California. Mexicans often moved to the States as family units, indicating that they planned to stay and establish settled households. Like other labor migrants, Filipinos, on the other hand, tended to be single young men. Back home in the Philippines, they had mixed freely with white Americans. Their expectations that they would continue to do so in the United States, especially with women in the dance halls, infuriated many white Americans. One judge in San Francisco, for example, ordered the police to arrest Filipinos, whom he called “a race scarcely more than savages,” in the company of white women.26 In 1934, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which promised the Philippines independence within ten years. It simultaneously restricted immigration from the Philippines to fifty people per year, stripped Filipinos of their status as U.S. nationals, and rendered them ineligible for citizenship. The next year, in a bid to remove them from the United States, the Filipino Repatriation Act offered Filipinos free passage back to their country until the end of 1938. Regarding a return

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like this at public expense as a shameful failure in the eyes of their families and compatriots, only 2,200 took the offer. Some 7,400 returned at their own expense between 1935 and 1937, joining the ten thousand Filipinos who had gone home between 1933 and 1935, tired of being regarded as aliens and discouraged by the hostility meted out to them by resentful white Americans. U.S. employers hired Mexican workers, seeing them as cheaper and more tractable than white Americans, and soon recognized them as essential to the functioning of the economy, especially in the Southwest. Because unions would not admit Mexicans – whether migrants or permanent residents – employers found it easy to pay them low wages and house them in despicable conditions. As the economy began to falter, however, Mexicans became scapegoats for the rise in unemployment and poverty. Anglo workers derided them as “foreign usurpers of American jobs,” while local officials, to shift responsibility for weak governmental response to the worsening economic situation, denounced them as a drain on public resources.27 Unwelcome and facing increasing antagonism and threats, some began to return home voluntarily. Soon thousands more, who were identified by local authorities as “Likely to become a Public Charge” and forcibly deported, followed them. By 1930, nearly 8,500 Mexicans had been expelled from Texas, indicating that antiMexican racism drove deportations more than concerns over unemployment due to the Depression; a year later, with formal machinery for the repatriation of Mexicans to their homeland in place, 138,000 were deported. In the end, over a million Mexicans – about a third of all those living in the United States – were expelled, leaving whole communities in the Midwest and Southwest devastated by the forced exodus. Immigration from Mexico fell sharply as well, from forty thousand a year in 1929 to just over two thousand in 1932. As in the Caribbean, repatriation to Mexico propelled a great deal of antiimmigrant sentiment. Throughout the country, associations sprang up to protest against the presence of Chinese immigrants who had settled there, married local women, and started families. Many fled the antichinesta violence against them, which included loss of jobs, seizure of property, theft of personal goods, and imprisonment. In violation of federal directives, state and local officials in Sonora and Sinaloa joined with civilians in 1931 to force Chinese out, whether through violence, arrest and deportation, or by imposing deadlines by which time they had to leave. Sonoran mobs and officials literally shoved many across the U.S. border into Arizona, where they now were classified as illegal aliens. What soon became a refugee crisis was finally only solved when the U.S. government transported the Chinese Mexicans to China. The ouster of Chinese Mexicans from Sonora, in particular, carried profoundly negative consequences for the state. Chinese stores that had supplied food and other necessaries closed down when their owners fled or were driven out, leaving other residents without access to goods and services. Chinese withdrew their capital from local banks and sent it to friends and relatives in San Francisco. Facing an “alarming decrease in State revenues from taxes,” Sonoran authorities faced near bankruptcy.28 It would be years before the state recovered.

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Within the United States, the internal movement of some 1.6 million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North – called the Great Migration – in the 1910s and 1920s slowed considerably after 1929. One group of Americans, however, defied the general pattern of reduced migration and/or deportation, embarking on a journey out of the western South to California. The press dubbed them Dust Bowl refugees, but by far the majority of them – roughly 94% – actually hailed from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Pejoratively referred to as “Okies” by unwelcoming Californians, they developed a distinct subculture in the areas in which they settled. Unlike those hit hard by the Dust Bowl, most of the migrants who went west did not engage in farming. Just more than 40% of the three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand migrants were farmers, most of them tenant farmers at that; the majority worked in the cities and towns of the Southwest, whose oil, transportation, and construction industries had suffered even more than agriculture had. Unemployment in southwestern urban areas outpaced that in most of the rest of the country. Professional, commercial, or white-collar workers represented 17% of the migrants, blue-collar workers 39% of them, and a good proportion of them had not actually lost their jobs. Just over half were men, meaning that whole families moved west. White and young (60% under the age of 35), they were looking not only for work, as most migrants we’ve discussed did, but for a new life. California, many of them told interviewers, seemed to offer “exciting opportunity and gentle beauty.”29 Jobs paid comparatively well there; many people moved to join family members who had settled in the state in the 1920s; and the trip along Route 66 by car was easy. Once in southern California, they faced hostility and hardship. The Los Angeles police set up a “bum brigade” at the state line in 1936 in order to keep Okies from entering; it didn’t last long but it gave the migrants – almost 40% of whom ended up in LA – a taste of what was to come.The most skilled among them found work, but the rest had to live with friends or family until they became eligible for relief after one year.The majority of other migrants settled in the San Joaquin Valley, hoping to set themselves up on their own small plots of land. Instead, most became farm laborers, working the cotton and fruit fields of large agricultural concerns, driving down wages, and pushing out Mexicans and Filipinos who had done the job before they arrived. They lived in poverty and squalor, in tents and shantytowns; their very name – Okies – became consonant with the image of degradation. Through the novels of John Steinbeck, the music of Woody Guthrie, and the photography of Dorothea Lange, they became the face of economic distress in Depression-era America. *** Certain images – ruined investors hurling themselves from tall buildings in New York City, the empty stares and malnourished bodies of Lange’s subjects, rainsoaked hunger marchers – recur in collective memories of the Great Depression

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in capitalist Western Europe and the United States. As evocative as such images are, they fail to capture the enormity of the economic dislocation and hardship wrought by the Depression, and they occlude the scenes of greatest suffering, which were concentrated in the global South. People did not stand by idly as forces beyond their control decimated their communities and their means of subsistence and rendered their lives meaningless. Desperate struggles for dignity and survival played out across the globe during the 1930s, and some of the most dramatic displays of collective resistance took place in the colonial and semi-colonial world. As we will see in the next chapter, the hungry thirties was also a decade of protest and insurgency, as people pushed to the brink took to the streets and, at times, set the fields aflame, demanding recognition of their humanity.

Notes 1 This section is drawn from the oral histories conducted by Nigel Gray in The Worst of Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in Britain (London: Routledge, 1986). 2 Quoted in John Stevenson and Chris Cook, Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics, 1929–1939 (London: Longman, 1994), 101. 3 Ibid., 98. 4 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 81. 5 Sarah T. Phillips, “Drylands, Dust Bowl, and Agro-Technical Internationalism in Southern Africa,” in Transatlantic Rebels: Agrarian Radicalism in Comparative Context, ed. Thomas Summerhill and James C. Scott (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 204. 6 Quoted in Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown. Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 55, 56. 7 Quoted in Holger Weiss, “Locust Invasions in Colonial Northern Ghana,” Working Papers on Ghana: Historical and Contemporary Studies 3 (March 2004): 15. 8 Martin S. Shanguhyia, Population, Tradition, and Environmental Control in Colonial Kenya (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 76. 9 Michael H. Glantz, Climate Affairs: A Primer (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), 252; David A. Pietz, Engineering the State:The Huai River and Reconstruction in Nationalist China, 1927–1937 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 61–75. 10 David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 224–225. 11 Dietmar Rothermund, The Global Impact of the Great Depression, 1929–1939 (London: Routledge, 1996), 104. 12 Quoted in Richard Lee Turits, “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2002): 599. 13 Quoted in Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 1. 14 Quoted in Myles Osborne, Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 108. 15 Quoted in John Higginson, Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 308. 16 Quoted in K. A. Manikumar, A Colonial Economy in the Great Depression: Madras (1929– 1937) (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2003), 182. 17 Quoted in Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 392. 18 Quoted in Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 196. 19 Quoted in Hardiman, Gandhi in His Times and Ours, 81–82.

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20 Naicker and Ambedkar quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 26–27, 44, 52. 21 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 46. 22 Quoted in Amrith, Migration, 94. 23 Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 29, 31, 77, 109–111, 130, 165. 24 Quoted in Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 180–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 77. 25 Quoted in Putnam, Radical Moves, 115, 113. 26 Quoted in Elliott Robert Barkan, From All Points: America’s Immigrant West, 1870s–1952 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 274. 27 Ibid., 327. 28 Quoted in Julia Maria Shiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans. Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 72. 29 Quoted in James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 21.

5 REVOLTS

The Great Depression exposed millions to the ravages of an unstable and unregulated but interconnected global economy in crisis, ruining lives on an unprecedented scale, especially those who lived on the margins socially and economically. As its duration lengthened beyond expectations and governments failed to act in effective ways, it sparked mass mobilizations, violent confrontations, and new demands on public resources, all of which gave impetus to a recalibration of relations between the state and its citizens or subjects in societies around the world.The Depression produced the greatest suffering in the colonies of the major imperial powers and the putatively independent but economically dependent countries of Latin America and Asia. In these portions of the globe, its effects cut deeper and lasted longer. Colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean were connected to the fortunes of the metropolitan British, French, Dutch, and Japanese economies and decisions of policymakers in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. Fluctuations in metropolitan employment markets, consumer-spending patterns, and currency values, which, in the case of the sterling and franc, were inflated at the start of the Depression owing to the shift to a new “gold standard” after the Great War, rippled through dispossessed colonial societies. People experienced the Depression most profoundly in terms of their inability to acquire food. Precipitous falls in export commodity prices and rising costs for imported foodstuffs translated into declining purchasing power and scarcities of goods. Imperial preferences restricted the availability of lower-cost goods from outside the empire, and corporate monopolies eliminated competition in wages and export prices. In rural Africa, southern Asia, and Latin America, already difficult lives were pushed to the brink, and poverty gave way to chronic malnourishment or worse. The Depression also devastated export-dependent countries across Latin America, where the inflow of new capital and foreign investment ceased and demand on the global market for goods such as coffee, sugar, fruit, metals, and precious

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minerals declined sharply. The total value of exports from the region between 1930 and 1934 fell 48% from their 1925–1929 levels.1 The situation was even worse in monopolistic economies of the British Caribbean where over a million people depended on seasonal agricultural work to survive. There, mass unemployment and underemployment produced deplorable living conditions and labor unrest.2 Like the women warriors in southeastern Nigeria, those who experienced the Depression most acutely – malnourished peasants, exploited miners, unemployed workers, and credit-less, cash-strapped families around the globe – resisted their fate in a variety of ways. Post–World War II social welfare programs in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere have roots in the efforts of unemployed veterans and workers to politicize hunger and hold their governments accountable for widespread privation during the 1930s. The most desperate acts of resistance and the worst examples of violent government repression appeared in the colonial and semi-colonial world. Peasant rebellions rocked the global tropical belt at the beginning of the decade. Before and after the Women’s War of 1929, women were frequently at the forefront of anti-tax demonstrations in Africa. Their protests frequently called attention to the “patriarchal bargain” between European colonizers and local African “traditional” rulers who served as their intermediaries in colonial administration and extracted revenue in the form of “tribal levies,” an arrangement that weakened women’s socio-economic position disproportionately. In November 1931, women shielded organizers of a tax revolt in Hebron, South Africa, and chased away African constables sent to arrest them.3 A wave of strikes swept through Africa and the Caribbean during the mid-to-late 1930s. Even in the most maledominated industries such as mining, women provided essential support to strikers and helped turn work stoppages in rural or remote areas into large labor rebellions that enveloped towns and cities. From the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia to the mines of West and Southern Africa to the oilfields of Trinidad, colonial officials supported the interest of metropolitan companies operating in the colonies by quelling the work stoppages and other expressions of discontent with force. Fighting communist infiltration became the justification for new policing tactics, censorship, and heightened surveillance, but the extent and effectiveness of communist organizing among colonial populations remained limited owing not only to government repression but also lack of resources and racism among rank-and-file members in the national communist parties in Europe. In Latin America, China, and Korea, communist parties sprang up in major cities, but with rare exceptions such as the rubber plantations of Indochina, these urban-based movements had shallow roots in rural areas. Nevertheless, colonial administrators, military officials, large business owners, and oligarchic elites routinely attributed peasant insurgency, labor militancy, and anti-colonial activity to the work of communist rabble-rousers in an effort to diminish the agency and suffering of those involved and to justify retributive violence and collective punishment. The line between military action and policing, like that between government and private corporate interests, became increasingly blurred in an atmosphere defined by growing labor militancy and state repression. Both Britain and France

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maintained a commitment to the “pay-your-way” approach to colonial finance. This left colonial officials on the ground endlessly searching for new sources of government revenue. Because they viewed export sectors as vital to fiscal solvency, as the Depression set in they aligned their interests, and the security forces of the colonial state, with those of the handful of foreign companies that dominated export production, leaving cultivators and agricultural employees to fend for themselves. By the start of World War II, the economic crisis and the cycles of uprisings, protest, and repression that it set in motion rendered British- and Frenchcontrolled territories from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia nearly ungovernable. In recognition of this fact, both empires eventually turned to colonial development as a new rationale for their continued existence. The Depression sparked similar patterns of insurgency and punitive violence in independent Latin America. Leftleaning populist or labor movements unseated governments or achieved significant packages of social reforms in Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela early in the decade, but the backlash to expressions of discontent, as in 1932 massacre in El Salvador, also contributed to the rise of the military authoritarianism that became a pronounced feature of postwar Latin American regimes.

Peasant insurrections and the crisis in the countryside From the Women’s War in Nigeria to the rebellion and Matanza in El Salvador, the years 1929–1932 saw remarkable levels of rural insurgency and the state-directed violence and other forms of intervention they provoked. The rapid development of agricultural and mineral export industries had integrated parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa into the world economy, creating dependence on trade with the outside world for the basic necessities and the currency required to acquire them, just in time for the global depression. In some instances, charismatic leaders with a millennialist message attracted droves of followers on the brink of starvation. In a few cases, anti-colonialism or ties to communists or other leftist intellectuals fed into rural unrest, but the most immediate sources of resistance and revolt usually came down to a need to survive, in sociocultural if not life-and-death terms. In Japanese colonial Korea, for instance, as prices for agricultural goods fell, peasant indebtedness ballooned, leading to tenancy disputes, the formation of the peasant unions, and peasant rebellions. Some left for Japan or Manchukuo. Tenancy disputes in the south forced the Japanese to adopt the Rural Revitalization Campaign (1932–1940), a set of corporatist reforms that undermined the power of the landlord class and dramatically increased state intervention. Peasants elsewhere, especially in the north, joined “red peasant unions,” which were often radical groups that staged acts of violence calling attention to unfair taxation or tenancy practices. Peasant union activity peaked in 1932.Thereafter, a mixture of state repression, mild ameliorative measures, and outward migration led to a decline in militancy in rural Korea until after World War II.4 The value of wheat exports from French colonial Tunisia plummeted by 55% during the first three years of the decade, and peasants and agricultural laborers

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(fellahs) faced shrinking incomes and growing indebtedness.To make matters worse, while the metropolitan French government acted to protect certain domestic industries with tariff and trade barriers, colonial administrators failed to do the same for the olive industry in Tunisia, which supported more than a third of the population, and the price of olives fell by 39% during the same period. High unemployment and food shortages persisted through the decade, and French officials reported a growing number of attacks on police and civil inspectors.5 In southern Asia, the global economic crisis destroyed the lives of those most affected by the transformations imposed by the new colonial economic order of plantation agriculture, private property, and wage labor in the previous decades.6 In Lower Burma’s rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta region, the number of unemployed agricultural laborers grew as the frontier for the expansion of rice cultivation in the Irrawaddy, Mekong, and Chao Praya river deltas closed. Large numbers of tenant farmers, left to the mercy of price fluctuations on the world market and rapacious landlords, found themselves deep in debt. As their access to outside sources of credit dried up, Indian Chettiar merchants called in their loans to Burmese cultivators and agricultural workers, deepening the discontent in the countryside. While the ranks of discontented, landless peasants reduced to destitute wage-laborers grew, a small local elite of relatively affluent merchants and a European-educated professional and intellectual class emerged as vocal critics of the colonial regime. In 1930, Hsaya San, a physician and former monk, led a millenarian rebellion that almost ended British rule. He interpreted the recent earthquakes in Pegu and Pyu as signs that the Burmese throne would no longer remain vacant and claimed to be a “Setkya-Min,” a figure prophesied to usher in a transformation from a period of decadence to a new order of peace and prosperity for all. Hsaya promised to expel the British, to end the hated taxation system, and to restore the authority of Buddhism and the Burmese monarchy, which he now claimed for himself as Galon Raja. The rebellion began in December in the Tharrawaddy district of Lower Burma. Rebels, predominately landless rural cultivators, seized weapons, cut telegraph lines, and destroyed telegraph equipment. They targeted not only British officials and merchants but also the Chinese and Indian immigrants who had come originally as indentured workers engaged in rice cultivation. The uprising spread across Lower Burma in 1931, growing to become the largest rebellion in colonial India since 1857–1858. The British colonial authorities in Rangoon declared marshal law and brought in troop reinforcements from the subcontinent. By 1932, the British had captured Hsaya San and crushed the rebellion through force of arms. Using weapons technology developed during the Great War, they fired off machine guns and dropped bombs from the air in spectacular and disproportionate displays of violence, often applied indiscriminately. After the rebellion had been put down, racial tensions and sporadic violence against Chinese and Indian migrants on the part of discontented Burmese continued through the decade. Unemployed Burmese artisans and merchants who were pushed into competition for menial jobs with Indian workers targeted the latter

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in a series of “race riots” in 1938. Networks of mutual support and “transethnic solidarities” also emerged, however, especially among the urban poor in Penang and other cities in Southeast Asia.7 Conditions became increasingly dire for small independent cultivators and workers in the colonial sugar and rubber industries on the Indonesian archipelago during the early 1930s. The Indonesian sugar industry collapsed and never recovered. In 1935, the value of Indonesian exports overall was only half that of 1929. Sugar factories in small towns shuttered or laid off workers, as did the railways and ports which relied on the export trade.The average income dropped so precipitously that by 1931 nearly half of the workforce in rural areas felt compelled to sign contracts of indenture. Pay and working conditions for indentured laborers were appalling, and chronic indebtedness forced many to renew their contracts. Infant mortality rates jumped to as high as three hundred per thousand. The largest single employer in the colony, the Dutch colonial government, reduced administrative staff and employees in the two largest state-run industries, the state railways and the pawnshop service, by one-third between 1930 and 1937. It spent less than 8% on education and half that figure on public health (compared to five to nine times as much on military expenses). Although the anti-colonial leader Sukarno foregrounded the peasantry and suffering in the countryside in his concept of Marhaenism, named after a peasant whom he claimed to have encountered and used as a symbol of those for whom the nationalists waged the liberation struggle, many more peasants gravitated to an organization with aristocratic roots than either the urban-based secular nationalist or Islamist parties. The charismatic Javanese Prince Pangeran Surjodiningrat, an official in the court of the sultan of Yogyakarta, founded the Pakempalan Kawula Ngayogyakarta (Association of the Subjects of Yogyakarta or PKN) in 1930. A year later, the PKN had attracted more than 100,000 members, and by 1939, it had grown to nearly 260,000. The association, although hierarchical and paternalistic, ministered to the immediate social needs and defended the interests of the poor peasantry, becoming “a virtual shadow administration” in Yogyakarta. Many of Surjodiningrat’s peasant followers believed him to be the Ratu Adil, a messianic “Just King” in Indonesian folklore who was prophesied to establish a new age of universal peace and justice.8 With the onset of the Depression, economic dependence on a few key exports such as rubber became more starkly apparent in Dutch Indonesia, French Indochina, and British Malaya, where the efforts of European administrators to respond to the crisis only made foreign business interests more dominant within colonial economies. Rubber already represented more than half of all exports from the Federated Malay States between 1915 and 1922, much of it absorbed by rapidly growing demand in the United States. When the Dutch government agreed to an international agreement to limit rubber production in 1934, it forced Indonesian producers to cut their output by nearly half, while reducing that of Europeanowned plantations by less than 10%. Colonial officials consistently privileged the interests of European settlers and companies, but as they did so, they struggled increasingly to police multiethnic workforces consisting of a mix of Southeast

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Asians and Chinese and Indian migrants, and they increasingly resorted paramilitary violence to keep order. Resistance to deteriorating living and working conditions took many forms, from individual acts of desperation to organized insurrections. Assaults on plantation managers and kanganis (overseers or foremen in Tamil, the language spoken by workers from southern India) were common. Suicide was a leading cause of death among south Indian and Vietnamese rubber plantation workers in Malaya and Indochina, respectively.9 Of these three colonies in Southeast Asia, the situation was most explosive in the French Indochina federation, where labor unrest, anti-colonial politics, and a fledgling communist movement intersected. High population density, drought conditions, and repeated harvest failures produced privation and malnutrition. French colonial officials dismissed the discontent and widespread poverty as the results of the natural environment and inherent qualities of the people of Vietnam. The decade opened with a mutiny among colonial troops at Yen Bay, a garrison town northwest of Hanoi, and a peasant insurrection from May 1930 to September 1931 in the provinces of Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh in northern Annam, known as the Nghe-Tinh soviet movement. The Nghe-Tinh soviet movement consisted of a rash of strikes, demonstrations, anti-tax riots, and attacks on government buildings in Saigon’s outlying provinces. Retribution for the mutiny at Yen Bay was swift, brutal, and often ignored the distinction between civilians and rebels. According to official statistics, French Legionnaires and police killed 345 demonstrators, wounded 124, and arrested 429.10 The French used the uprisings as a pretext to arrest and execute leaders of Vietnam’s main nationalist party, the Viêt Nam Quôc Dân Dang, and its upstart rival, the Indochinese Community Party (ICP). Fears of communist influence and anti-colonial rebellion conditioned colonial officials’ responses to labor unrest and political dissent for the remainder of the decade, but surveillance and repressive policing focused especially on the fastestgrowing export industry, rubber production. By the early 1930s, a pattern of colonial dispossession and labor exploitations, backed by state repression, and the rise of networks of organized resistance emerged in colonial Indochina. French land seizures and the shrinking availability of cultivable land in the rice-producing northern provinces had rendered independent peasant agriculture unviable. Sixtytwo percent of small landholders in Tonkin possessed too little land for subsistence farming. In 1936,Vietnamese or Cambodians still owned the majority of the rubber estates of southern Vietnam, but a handful of large European firms, including the relative newcomer to the region, the Michelin rubber company, held more than 93% of the land occupied by rubber trees. By 1939, rubber represented roughly one third of Indochina’s exports, trailing only wine, rice, and wheat. Under the terms of indenture contracts, which lasted for three years on average, employers controlled nearly every aspect of laborers lives before, during, and after long hours of backbreaking work. Seventeen percent of the coolies on Michelin’s Phu-Riêng plantation died in 1928, the last boom year before the onset of the Depression. Recurrent bouts of malaria and dysentery weakened many more. “Although we

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worked unbearably hard in . . . an inhospitable climate,” Tran Tu Binh, a communist and worker on the Phu-Riêng plantation, recalled, we still had to endure an extremely austere diet . . . The less cautious took on the appearance of skin and bones. Their bodies gradually grew more and more emaciated until they withered and died, and became fertilizer for the capitalists’ rubber trees.11 French officials discovered pamphlets and other evidence of communist infiltration among the coolie workers who launched work stoppages and engaged in confrontations with soldiers and police at Phu-Riêng and other rubber-producing areas after the Yen Bay uprising. Communist influence had traveled with the large numbers of impoverished peasants who migrated from northern and central Vietnam to the southern colony of Cochin-China as coolie laborers during the “rubber boom” of the 1920s. In response to the labor protests, police arrested more than one hundred supposed ringleaders, including Tran Tu Binh, and jailed them among the general population of common criminals at Bien-Hoa prison, where, Tran claimed, “the prison guards beat these prisoners savagely,” deprived them of sleeping mats, and fed them squid and “rice, mixed with lime, which had a strong odor and gluey texture,” like the other inmates. The protesters demanded to be treated as political prisoners and launched a hunger strike and “used the old tactic of shouting and raising a ruckus” to obtain better conditions. The ensuing trial, which resulted in convictions and jail sentences ranging from six months to five years for dozens of the accused, “inflamed public opinion.” Afterward, the nationalist newspaper Than Chung (Common Spirit) observed, “And now the time has come when the poor are engaging in politics.”12 Labor militancy reappeared on an unprecedented scale in late 1936 and 1937. Coordinated strikes froze the railways and yards in the south and the tram system in Saigon. Workers at the Saigon naval arsenal went on strike in November 1936 and April 1937. On the heels of the election of two ICP candidates and one Trotskyite to the Saigon city council, the year’s May Day festivities “became a show of communist triumphalism.” During the second week of May, there were anti-tax riots in Cholon province, and fifteen hundred coolie laborers from Michelin’s Dâù Tiêng rubber plantation marched to Saigon to express their grievances. An even larger railway strike, in which trains and tracks were vandalized and sabotaged, followed in July. Senior officials blamed the labor disturbances, which had acquired an explicit anti-colonial tone by this point, on the ICP infiltrators and the publishers and network of followers of the radical Saigon newspaper, La Lutte. After a brief respite under the Popular Front government in France, repression in Annam and Cochin-China once again reached the level of the early 1930s. From the beginning of the decade until its end, enforcing workplace discipline on the plantations and suppressing political agitation went hand in hand. By the end of the 1930s, violence and deaths had become a banal part of police work in the rubber industry, and suicides among the workforce, routine.13

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In the western highlands of El Salvador, as Hsaya San’s rebellion entered its final days on other side of the world, a little after midnight on the night of January 22–23, 1932, peasant rebels from the surrounding countryside seized control of the towns of Juayúa and Salcoatitán. As night turned to morning, rebel bands of peasant cultivators and laborers (campesinos), ranging in size from several hundred to a few thousand and armed with machetes, sticks, and a limited number of small firearms, entered Izalco and several other regional hubs. Their movement spread to the east and west as far as Colón and Tacuba, respectively. Details of the insurgents’ organization are sketchy, but local reports suggested that two respected leaders (caciques) of the local indigenous community, Chico Sanchez in Juayúa and Feliciano Ama in Salcoatitán, led the rebels. Others suggested that Eusebio Chávez, a mestizo (i.e. person of mixed ancestry) carpenter and evangelical Christian, played an important role. As with the rebellion in Burma, the rebels’ actions revealed a keen understanding of the instruments and agents of their exploitation and repression: they entered the town and made first for the telegraph office to destroy or capture it before the telegraph operator could call for help or warn neighboring towns; then they burnt the police station, a small military garrison, and the municipal hall and other government buildings. Once the rebels had taken the town, they turned to the houses and businesses of the towns’ wealthiest and most powerful residents. They often killed the mayor (alcalde) and other local politicians, military commanders, and coffee merchants or looted and burned their homes and other properties. In some cases, they put the women of prominent families to work grinding corn and making tortillas, tasks associated with poor women. But they did not kill local residents indiscriminately. Peasant insurgents killed fewer than one hundred people, including troops in combat. Only two of the towns they targeted contained large military garrisons, Sonsonate and Ahuachapán, and in both instances, army units hid behind the garrison walls and used machine guns to repel the attack. These defeats were, in fact, tactical victories because they scared military leaders into remaining within the fortifications for hours or even days, giving peasant rebels time and leaving other towns relatively undefended. El Salvador had one of the highest population densities in the western hemisphere in 1932, which meant that rural areas were closely tied to towns and villages. The two distinguishing features of the western highlands were its disproportionately large indigenous population and the coffee industry. Indigenous Amerindians represented half of the country’s total population as late as the 1880s, but the number of Salvadorans who considered themselves indigenous shrank to 20% or less during the early decades of the twentieth century. A complex mix of social and economic pressures led younger generations, in particular, to abandoned indigenous cultural practices and become “Ladino.” The highlands of western El Salvador were the exception. The affected areas during the 1932 rebellion had a majority Indian population; at the upper extreme, the town of Nahulizalco was more than 90% indigenous. Most were poor campesinos. Coffee had transformed the western countryside during the half century before the insurrection from an area of lowland

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farms producing indigo to a plantation-based system employing landless laborers. The hillsides of the Salvadoran highlands west of the Santa Ana volcano offered ideal conditions and some of the richest soil for coffee cultivation in the world. By 1932, coffee generated as much as 90% of the country’s revenue from exports.With the spread of coffee cultivation across the western highlands, socio-economic inequalities deepened, especially between Indians and Ladinos, the landless and large landholders. The coffee boom pushed Indigenous campesinos off their small parcels of land, out of subsistence farming, and into the wage-labor market. Communal Indian lands, which had been key to maintaining social and cultural cohesion within indigenous communities and political power on the municipal and departmental levels fell into the hands of private Ladino coffee growers and merchants. With dwindling resources or means of redress, indigenous and Ladino peasants were particularly vulnerable to the Depression. Between 1928 and 1931, the price of coffee fell by 54%, and wages for agricultural workers on the coffee plantations by that much or more. Food imports, which had become vital to survival as coffee pushed out subsistence farming, declined steeply as well, producing near starvation conditions for campesinos in western El Salvador. Military forces suppressed the short-lived rebellion on January 24 and 25. The central government in San Salvador dispatched thousands of reinforcements to the region from the eastern part of the country, but most didn’t arrive until January 25, by which time troops from Sonsonate and Ahuachapán had crushed the insurrection. However, the reoccupation of rebel-controlled towns was only the start of the government’s brutal campaign of vengeance. The army and local paramilitary bands swept through the region slaughtering peasants, mostly indigenous, across western El Salvador. The army lured people from areas surrounding the affected towns into municipal plazas only to machine-gun them down en masse, and mobs consisting of local elites, police, and military reservists lynched suspected insurgents. Estimates vary widely, but between several thousand and thirty thousand perished in what became known as La Matanza or “the massacre.” In the years after the 1932 rebellion, many commentators on the right and left ends of the political spectrum attributed it to communist influence. New research suggests that land issues, ethnic conflict, political marginalization, and privation were more important causes, all of which were related to the rise of the commercial coffee industry and fluctuations in the export market, and made worse by the Depression. The massacre of 1932 helped the military consolidate its control over the country following the coup that toppled the government of President Arturo Araujo two months earlier. Araujo’s former vice president and defense minister, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who orchestrated the response to the insurrection, was installed as president a few months later. El Salvador would remain under military rule for nearly a half century thereafter (1931–1979), a grim precedent to and the longest uninterrupted example of the military authoritarianism that became a recurring theme in twentieth-century Latin American history.14 Communist influence played a role in urban labor militancy and rural insurgency in Latin America, but it also provided a convenient alibi for extraordinary

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violence and increased state intervention in rural areas. In June 1934, Mapuche peasants and forestry workers rose up in southern Chile, beginning with lumbermill workers organized by a communist-led union. The military quelled the rebellion and executed or arrested hundreds of peasants in the Ranquil Massacre (la mantaza de Ránquil ); many who were detained “disappeared.” The Alessandrei government was quick to link the uprising to communist infiltration in the region, but rural neglect and peasant anger against large landowners fueled the unrest, and the Depression was the tipping point. It also reflected a longer history of oppression, expropriation, and violence against the indigenous inhabitants of the area going back to the colonization of Chile’s southern frontier during the 1860s and 1870s. The pacification of Araucanía had opened a large area of Mapuche lands to settlers and lumber companies.15 Military leaders and authoritarian governments in Latin America recognized that unremitting poverty and the abuses of large landowners were main sources of rural unrest and, in some cases, introduced limited social and economic reforms that did not always favor wealthy elites or businesses. These measures often came with an increasingly undemocratic military state and at the cost of participatory government. The Martínez government in El Salvador launched a series of programs aimed at improving conditions in the countryside by increasing the availability of affordable land and housing, lowering rents, and ensuring employers paid wages on time and in legal currency. But it also blocked more revolutionary systemic changes and ensured that export-based agriculture would remain economically dominant.

1932: year of the hunger march Mass joblessness and poverty during the hungry decade revitalized a distinctive form of demonstration – the hunger march.The year that started with the rebellion and Matanza in El Salvador witnessed thousands of poor, unemployed, and underemployed men and women in Britain and North America taking to the streets in protest marches that called attention to their malnourished bodies. Attempts to politicize hunger stretch back to the revolutionary ferment against the monarchy in eighteenth-century France and the colonial famines in Ireland and India in the nineteenth century. In the wake of the latter, humanitarian organizations publicized mass starvation to arouse sympathy in Britain, and anti-colonialists pointed to it as a part of their political critique of empire. The hunger march became the symbol of the “hungry thirties” in Britain, fixed in collective memory for many years to come. After World War I, the communistled National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUMN) took up the protest strategy to pursue somewhat new aims, to demand either employment or, in its absence, adequate social welfare – “work or full maintenance.” With its textile, steel, and coal industries in decline before the crash because of out-of-date technology and foreign competition, Britain had nearly three million unemployed workers by 1932. In 1931, the former Labour Party leader Ramsey Macdonald became head of a Conservative-dominated National Government that imposed a means test for

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unemployment benefits. Anger at the means test spilled over the following year, and police and protesters battled in the streets of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Nottingham, Wigan, Belfast, and elsewhere. Smaller hunger marches had taken place in 1922–1923 and 1929–1931 as the economy began to slump. The NUWM organized the “Great Hunger March against the Means Test,” the first coordinated nationwide hunger march which started from economic depressed regions such as South Wales, Scotland, and the midlands and north of England. When the first contingent of marchers – singing We march on starvation, we march against death, we’re ragged, we’ve nothing but body and breath; From north and from south, from east and from west the army of hunger is marching – arrived in the capital in late October, a month after they set out from Glasgow, a crowd of more than one hundred thousand demonstrators greeted them in Hyde Park. The London Metropolitan Police viewed the demonstration as a threat to public order and mobilized seventy thousand officers. Marchers and protesters clashed with police as they tried to clear the park, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of the march’s leaders. Violence, including sporadic fighting between demonstrators and supporters of the British fascist movement led by Oswald Mosley, continued for several days in the streets and public gathering spots of central London. In late November, Canadian protesters across the Atlantic staged a hunger march in Edmonton, Alberta, where average household incomes had fallen by more than half since the start of the Depression.The same year, unemployment riots broke out in Perth, Australia and Auckland, Dunedin, and Wellington in New Zealand. The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement in New Zealand launched a national hunger march in January 1934. More marches followed in Britain during 1933 and 1934. During the month-long march for “jobs and dignity” (known as the “Jarrow Crusade”), laid-off workers made the trek from the Tyneside town of Jarrow to London in October 1936. The impoverished town’s Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson declared to the crowd of fifty thousand who gathered in Hyde Park to meet the marchers, Jarrow as a town has been murdered. It has been murdered as a result of the arrangement of two great combines – the shipping combine on the one side and the steel combine on the other . . . What has the Government done? The Jarrow crusade received more publicity than previous hunger marches, and the majority of commentators interpreted it as a legitimate expression of suffering and an indication of the resilience, fortitude, and morality of working-class Britons. Through the efforts to reposition the previously unsympathetic figure of the ablebodied, unemployed man at the forefront of political debate, the hunger marchers became early leaders of the drive for social democracy and a robust welfare state that came to fruition after the Second World War.16 By 1932, industrial production in the United States had dropped by half and exports to only a third of pre-Depression levels, decimating the industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Food riots took place in San Francisco, Oklahoma

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City, and a number of other cities beginning in early 1931. Unemployed demonstrators engaged in the first local hunger marches at about the same time. On April 1, a large group of protesters forced their way into the Maryland state legislature to demand government relief. Later the same month, three thousand people marched in Columbus, Ohio; fifteen thousand did so in Lansing, Michigan, in May. By summer’s end, there had been forty hunger marches across the country, but these had little effect on the national level. Well-organized columns of jobless people of different races from Boston, Chicago, Buffalo, and St. Louis descended on Washington, DC, in time for the new session of Congress to begin on December 7. Almost as soon as this first national hunger march concluded, Father James R. Cox of Pittsburgh launched his own on January 2, 1932. As the protestors made their way to the nation’s capital, their ranks swelled from twelve thousand to more than twenty-five thousand. A hunger march of unemployed workers from Detroit to Dearborn, Michigan, on March 7, 1932, culminated in what became known as the “Ford Massacre.” Dearborn police and private security guards employed by the Ford Motor Company shot and killed five workers and injured more than sixty others.The Ford hunger march proved to be an important step on the road to mass unionization of the U.S. auto industry. In the summer of 1932, thousands of World War I veterans from as far as the Pacific coast, joined in many cases by their families, marched on Washington to demanding the “bonuses” that they had been awarded for their service but could not redeem until 1945. As the ranks of the so-called Bonus Army grew and the parks filled, Major General Douglas MacArthur allowed the marchers to erect makeshift shacks in Anacostia Flats, and a large shantytown – a “Hooverville” – was born within sight of the capitol building. An impromptu community developed, complete with a newspaper, vaudeville shows, and boxing matches. Two months after the first Bonus marchers arrived, and eleven days after the Senate defeated a bill that would have awarded the veterans’ benefits, President Hoover asked the police and the army to remove those demonstrators who remained. On July 28, 1932, a confrontation between police and some veterans ensued; officers shot and killed one man. After the incident, MacArthur used army cavalry units and tear gas to forcibly disperse the veterans and their families and burn the shantytown of Anacostia Flats before its occupants could gather their possessions. Two more veterans died of gunshots, two children from asphyxiation from the gas, and a number of others were injured. Newspapers and newsreels screened in cinemas disseminated graphic images of the violence against former servicemen and their families carried out by U.S. army soldiers.The incident further weakened Hoover’s re-election chances. Soon after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a second national hunger march took place. A large police force awaited the marchers at the outskirts of Washington in early December 1932, and held them there for three days without supplies or amenities. Ultimately, they allowed the march to proceed, and for the first time, marchers received a hearing from high-level politicians in the Congress. Labor historians believe that the grassroots mobilization in hunger marches

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and demonstrations which eventually captured headlines and public sympathy contributed greatly to the mounting pressure on the U.S. federal government to act and the passage of the New Deal reforms. At the same time, many such achievements excluded or came at the expense of racially oppressed, non-white communities: African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans in the United States; aboriginal and indigenous communities and Asian migrants in the antipodes and Canada; and the black African majority and Asian and mixed-race minorities in South Africa. In the British empire much the same can be said of the relationship between the rise of welfarism at home and exploitation in the colonies abroad.

Industrial militancy and protest in Africa Strikes, boycotts, and other forms of industrial action convulsed much of Africa in the 1930s. In Gold Coast, for instance, local cocoa producers temporarily boycotted the monopolistic buyers syndicate of British trading firms such as the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of the Unilever Corporation, in a series of actions called “hold-ups.” In a 1937 hold-up, transport and dockworkers joined the cocoa farmers, refusing to handle foreign goods while consumers boycotted British commodities and local people blocked the transport of soldiers to affected areas. In a piece published by the London-based Tribune titled “Three Million Strikers Against British Rule,” the Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore likened the cocoa hold-up and the general public’s support of the cocoa farmers to recent strikes among miners in the Gold Coast and the expressions of community discontent and solidarity it produced. “The Africans,” he observed, “having exhausted all legitimate and peaceful methods of seeking redress and goaded into desperation, have resorted to direct action.”17 For much of that year, the plight of striking workers on the oilfields of Trinidad and others engaged in labor unrest in the Caribbean and Africa had preoccupied him; now the labor protests in Gold Coast led him to think that the British empire as a whole was under siege by colonial workers. His remarks attest to the overlap between labor militancy and the politics of anti-colonialism explored in Chapter 2 during the simultaneous international political and economic crises of the 1930s. Street protests and strikes made up the “twin forms” of labor unrest, their combination increasing the disruptive impact. The decade began with a general strike in the South African port town of East London. There, the dip in the price of wool, state-sponsored segregation, worsening conditions in the neighboring townships in which Africans were forced to live, and new forms of racial consciousness informed by Garveyism amplified the effects of falling wages and growing unemployment. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and the Independent ICU (IICU), led by Clements Kadalie and Alfred Mnika, organized among the whole spectrum of the urban workforce – from domestic servants and women working in the local manufacturing industry to male employees of the harbor and railways – for months before the strike. The unions encouraged workers to view their

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grievances within the framework of colonialism and the quest for a “free black nation.” They sought the support of women in the townships in recognition of the vital role they would play in sustaining striking male workers. Work stoppages began on January 16, and on day three, ICU and IICU leaders announced a general strike. Thousands of people, urban workers as well as migrants from the Transkei and Ciskei, demonstrated in support of the strike. African women beer brewers and shebeen operators (i.e. proprietors of unlicensed bars and cafes) supported the strikers, leading the police to crackdown on the possession of alcohol and the urban informal economy. Numerous strikes erupted in mining areas, ports, railway and transport hubs, and commercial centers across Africa during the 1930s. These revealed the potentially subversive effects of rural-urban and regional migratory patterns, workplace solidary across racial and ethnic differences, and the bonds between the overwhelmingly male labor forces in key colonial industries and the female-dominated informal economies that developed to meet their social needs. Dangerous working conditions, racial hierarchies in wages, and forced labor practices lay behind labor disturbances in the homosocial world of the mines. Workers in the ore and phosphate mines of the Tunisian interior, including significant numbers of Libyan migrants, resorted to increasingly confrontational tactics during the early 1930s. In response, the French colonial government added twelve new brigades of gendarmerie forces who played the role of overseers enforcing work attendance and discipline.The first expression of the growing militancy among African miners in southern Africa was the 1927 Shamva Strike. When roughly nine hundred gold miners laid down their tools, they sparked a three-week labor action that ultimately involved more than thirty-five hundred workers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).The 1935 strike in the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) gained stream gradually, growing into what was essentially a general strike. Other workers in the towns walked off the job and women marched in streets in sympathy. The government ultimately suppressed the strike, killing several miners. Major work stoppages and demonstrations continued throughout the decade in Africa: in Tunis, Moknine, and other coastal Tunisian towns in 1934 and 1937; on the railroads and mines of the Gold Coast (Ghana) during the late 1930s; in the ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam in 1939; and again in the Rhodesian copperbelt in 1940. Strikes or the threat of them continued to confound colonial administrators during the war years and late 1940s. These examples of labor militancy, which often crossed occupational and gender lines and intersected with anti-colonial politics, forced the British and French to adopt “economic development” as the new goal for colonial rule in Africa and, for the first time, to devote government funds to infrastructure and social welfare projects in the 1940s.18 Union organizers frequently combined their industrial work with anticolonial activity, as we see in the case of I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson. Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone into a Krio family, the descendants of enslaved Africans whom British forces had freed and resettled in the colony during the nineteenth century,WallaceJohnson served as a clerk in the British army during World War I. After the war, he

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worked as a seaman, travelling to ports throughout coastal Africa, and joined the British National Seamen’s Union. He worked as a clerk in the Gold Coast in 1929. The following year, he moved to Nigeria, where he established the African Workers’ Union, one of the first major labor unions in British West Africa, with Frank Macaulay. In 1931, he journeyed to Moscow, attended the International Labor Defense Congress, and spent a year and a half studying at the University of the Toilers of the East in the Soviet Union. He returned to Nigeria in 1933, working as an editor of the Nigerian Daily Telegraph before colonial officials deported him for his anti-colonial activities. He relocated to the Gold Coast and continued working as a labor organizer and journalist, contributing to the Gold Coast Spectator and other publications. In 1935, he helped launch the West African Youth League in Accra, which became an important conduit for Marxist and anti-colonial ideas in the region and staged protests against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. British authorities arrested him for sedition the next year after the publication of a piece in the African Morning Post, edited by Nnamdi Azikiwe. Wallace-Johnson arrived in London in March 1937 to appeal his conviction before the Privy Council. While there he became a founding member of the International African Service Bureau along with the Afro-Caribbeans Amy Ashwood Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and the Kenyan Jomo Kenyatta. Wallace-Johnson viewed the organization as a platform in London to publicize the economic problems and growing government repression in Britain’s West African colonies, and to forge connection between the West African Youth League and other anti-colonial groups. Constance Cummings-John first met Wallace-Johnson during her years in London before both returned to Sierra Leone in 1938. She joined the recently established Freetown branch of the West African Youth League (WAYL) soon thereafter. Breaking from the traditional practices of the Krio elite in local politics, WAYL organized across ethnic and confessional lines and quickly attracted significant popular support. It established trade unions and satellite branches in the Sierra Leone Protectorate and included Muslims and people from the protectorate on its various committees. Wallace-Johnson served as secretary general and Cummings-John as vice president. She garnered the highest number of votes overall as one of the four WAYL candidates elected to the Freetown municipal council, becoming both the youngest and the only African woman to win an election in British colonial Africa at just twenty years of age. As a leader of the WAYL and a member of the municipal council until 1942 – and throughout a long career of public service and political activism that followed – Cummings-John focused on issues that impinged directly on women’s lives, such as education, sanitation, and regulations in the local markets, and insisted on the necessity of unity between the inhabitants of the Sierra Leone Colony and Protectorate as well as among Africans and people of African descent, more broadly.19 A resurgence of union organizing and industrial militancy also occurred in the self-governing Union of South Africa during the 1930s. Strikes grew in number as the decade went on, peaking around 1937, many of them in Durban, Natal. Unions of black workers (i.e. workers of African, South Asian, or mixed descent) or

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unions organized across racial lines with significant non-white membership staged many of these labor actions, including thirty-three in Durban alone. Miners at the Dundee coal pits, dockworkers, mechanists, stevedores, and employees of the sugar, textile, and steel mills as well as in the fish- and whale-processing plants engaged in work stoppages. The Depression pushed the majority of Natal’s South Asian ­population – the descendants of indentured coolies transported to the region during the nineteenth century – out of agricultural work in the region’s tobacco and sugar industries and into manufacturing and other forms of wage-labor in Durban by the second half of the 1930s. Thirty-four unions represented a substantial number of them by the early 1940s. On May 3, 1937, four hundred African and South Asian workers at the Falkirk Iron and Steel Company went on strike to protest wage discrimination, draconian workplace regulations, and the firing of sixteen members of their recently formed union, the Natal Iron and Steel Workers Union (NISWU). The company refused to recognize the union or the legitimacy of its claims and called in the police. After two days, when management promised that there would be more negotiations and no reprisals against the union’s members, the strikers returned to work. A week later, Falkirk terminated the union’s secretary, H. A. Naidoo, and reduced the hours of twenty-six other members, including the head of the NISWU, P. M. Harry. The workers responded to the provocation with “sanctions,” strictly adhering to the rules and “legal hours of employment” and arriving at work later than usual. When they returned from their lunch break, managers asked them to leave and closed the factory, starting a lockout. Undeterred, the workers returned everyday and engaged in “sit-down-outside” protest. In late May, the company evicted the African workers from their hostel accommodations and exploited segregationist municipal laws to expose them to the threat of arrest.The larger, more established registered unions and umbrella bodies largely ignored the NISWU’s appeals for assistance, and the industrial council that adjudicated labor disputes ruled in favor of Falkirk’s right to terminate the strikers. Other outside parties, especially the Natal Indian Congress, took more of an interest and ultimately intervened in the dispute, but in a manner that emphasized racial bias against South Asians, subordinating and straining the inter-racial solidarity that had been the most extraordinary feature of the workers’ actions. The dispute dragged on into July. In the end, the parties reached a settlement when the company agreed to rehire 119 of the 400 workers who congregated daily outside the factory. The Falkirk strike marked the first time that inter-racial cooperation among workers threatened the power of employers and the hierarchies of race and skill that structured wage scales and conditions in the workplace. Although the workers failed to achieve their aims, and many lost their jobs, the strike and others like it established a template and provided lessons for subsequent multi-racial organizing efforts and agitation.20

Race, deportations, and labor rebellions The flipside to internal segregation and other responses to rural-urban migration were border controls and mass deportations, which emerged as the analog of

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economic protectionism.The Union of South Africa enacted the first laws restricting the movement of rural African women to urban areas in 1930.This followed decades of legislative efforts to block Asian immigration and to limit South Asians’ and African men’s access to urban space. The labor needs of rubber producers in European colonies in Southeast Asia drove immigration from South and East Asia. By 1931, Chinese and Indians made up 64% of the population of the Federated Malaya States. That year, officials deported more than 150,000 Indian workers to Tamil Nadu from Penang alone. Regulating movement and the use of deportation to silence dissent or police cross-colonial ties also became more common. Officials in Malaya deported suspected Chinese communists alongside unemployed workers after the introduction of the Alien Registration Ordinance in 1933.21 As foreign capital investments disappeared and export prices plummeted, political elites in self-governing South Africa and the independent states of the Americas and Caribbean answered demands for social democracy and economic relief with populist appeals to racial nationalism. From North to South America, deportations and repatriation schemes followed the immigration restrictions imposed during the 1920s. In addition, as unemployment worsened, receiving societies across the Caribbean and Central America enacted workplace quota laws mandating that a high percentage of employees be nationals. In practice, these transformed foreign-born workers, in historian Lara Putnam’s words, into “second-class noncitizens” without seriously challenging the interests of foreign-owned companies who employed them. By 1932, Guatemala and Honduras required all companies, foreign and domestic, to employ 75% native workers, but corporations like the U.S.-based United Fruit Company continued to employ additional Jamaican laborers on their banana plantations in Honduras when it suited their bottom line. The Congress in the Dominican Republic passed similar legislation in 1934, 1935, and 1938, and the major sugar companies continued to receive exceptions. As in colonial Southeast Asian and the British Caribbean, government responses to the Depression made their economies more, not less, dependent on the markets for a handful of primary exports, the companies that monopolized them, and the economies of foreign industrialized countries who consumed those goods. This contradictory situation heightened the exploitation and precariousness of black and brown workers lacking guarantees to the full rights of citizenship.22 The United States – specifically, the Immigration Service, a part of the Department of Labor – “repatriated” more than one million Mexicans during the 1930s, more than 43% of all deportees. Among the nearly two million who remained in the United States, unemployment rates ranged seasonally from 15% to 85% because of widespread discrimination in hiring. Mass repatriation exacerbated economic problems in Mexico, only a decade removed from a divisive revolution. With a population of roughly fifteen million, the “return” of a million jobless people put unsustainable pressure on resources, jobs, and available land. Some repatriates made their way to cities in search of employment, but most eventually returned to villages and ranchitos in rural areas, where they faced poverty as bad or worse than that of their compatriots north of the border.23 The government of the ruling Partido Nacional Revolucionario, which was formed after the assassination of president-elect Álvaro Obregón in 1928, feared

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that mass repatriation, and the exposure of many returnees to radical political ideas and organizations in the United States, would create a volatile, potentially revolutionary, situation. The issue “reawakened deeply imbedded revolutionary sentiments for social justice, feelings of Mexicanismo, and a strong anti-American sentiment among the general populace.”24 In 1934, General Lázaro Cárdenas won the presidential election on a platform promising redistribution of wealth, poverty alleviation programs, and greater political influence for poor and indigenous Mexicans. Though handpicked by the PRN’s leadership, Cárdenas challenged and then displaced the party’s elite, arresting or deporting the founder and former president Plutarco Elías Calles and his closest associates in the name of eliminating corruption. Repatriation presented one of the most pressing challenges as he consolidated his hold on the party and presidency. Cárdenas envisioned repatriates as a potential resource, a workforce with agricultural and industrial skills acquired in the United States, and hoped to put them to work developing the countries land resources for agriculture as well as in the construction or repair of roads, railroads, dams, and other infrastructure projects. With few financial resources or credit at his disposal for development projects and social welfare programs, those which his government did manage to launch, such as the settlement and colonization scheme for the Baja peninsula and other subtropical portions of the country, remained too small to the meet the demand from the flood of returnees and ultimately came to little. Cardenas proved more successful at gaining public approbation by tapping into popular anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism, particularly by expropriating and nationalizing Mexican oil reserves and the facilities of American- and European oil companies in 1938. Only the start of the Second World War stemmed the influx and brought a measure of political and economic stability to Mexico. The industrial economies of Europe and the United States began to show signs of recovery by the mid-1930s, but the Depression ground on in the Caribbean.The second half the 1930s witnessed strikes and urban unrest throughout the British Caribbean in which returning migrants returning from Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and elsewhere figured prominently. Nearly every colony had been affected by decade’s end: British Honduras (Belize) in 1934; St. Kitts, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and British Guiana in 1935; Barbados and Trinidad in 1937; Jamaica in 1938. Not only did these colonial territories face the same devastating mix of falling export prices, growing unemployment and indebtedness, and shrinking real-term wages, but emigration outlets had closed abroad, and thousands of unemployed workers, compelled by need or force, returned to them. Many returning migrants had encountered trade unionism, strikes, and race-conscious political movements such as Garveyism in their travels. In sum, as one historian notes, The impact of the Depression was not only direct, therefore in terms of deteriorating conditions affecting the working class, but also indirect in so far as it caused many people, who had been influenced by ideas that were new and radical in the British Caribbean, to return home.25

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Migration politics and labor politics shaped each other during the Depression decade. Events in Cuba and Central America became models for labor organizing, strikes, and political agitation across the region. Organizing efforts among banana workers met with brutal repression in Guatemala and Honduras during the early 1930s, but a communist-inspired strike enveloped the United Fruit Company’s plantations in Costa Rica in 1934. A 1931 coup in Panama led to the election of Harmodio Arias on a reformist platform. By that time, the multigenerational British Caribbean population amounted to more than fifty thousand. In 1933, a general strike toppled Gerardo Machado and brought a coalition government consisting of nationalist and radical-leftist parties to power in Cuba, where British officials estimated there were nearly eighty thousand workers from the British Caribbean. The new government passed a raft of progressive legislation, including laws granting women’s suffrage, rural tenants’ rights, and labor protections, before Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, with U.S. backing, began consolidating his control over the country in 1934. In both of these cases, members of the English-speaking AfroCaribbean migrant community threw their support behind agents of change only to find themselves the primary targets (along with Haitian laborers) of populist racism. British officials in Barbados worried as early 1931 that returnees from Central America could become a destabilizing influence, fears that materialized on an unprecedented scale later in the decade. The history and collective memories of slavery, reawakened by the 1933 celebrations marking the centennial of emancipation in the British empire and contemporary migratory patterns and experiences of racial antipathy encouraged people to view themselves in terms of a larger Caribbean, if not pan-African, community instead of or in addition to individual island nationalities. Middle-class artistic movements, newspapers, literary journals, and political parties flowered in Trinidad, Jamaica, and elsewhere. Printed materials, musical forms and bands, and Christian revivalist and ecstatic spiritual movements circulated throughout the Greater Caribbean. Growing access to radio and cinemas disseminated news and images of events such as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Harlem Riot of 1935.Word of labor revolts and trade union demands in one colony spread to inform those in others. In local political organizations and among Afro-Caribbeans across the Atlantic in the imperial metropole calls for a self-governing Federation of the West Indies grew louder. Government policies worked in the opposite direction, compounding migrants’ difficulties by limiting their freedom of movement to returning to their natal territory.Those who were a generation or more removed could only seek refuge in the colony of their parents’ (or grandparents’) birth. As the Depression ruined subsistence cultivators and agricultural laborers, internal migration from rural areas to towns and cities continued apace but offered little relief. Because British officials viewed them as vital to the economic stability of the colonial state, they favored the export sectors and foreign business interests over small-scale agriculture and production for the local market.When labor organizing and agitation for better pay and working conditions began to spread among workers in these key industries, the ruthless responses of the colonial state and police created a combustible situation.26

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The interplay of local, regional, transatlantic, and imperial connections formed the backdrop to the labor rebellions in Trinidad and Jamaica in 1937 and 1938. Within the context of colonial societies riven by economic inequality and racial hierarchy, industrial labor disputes in export industries – oil and sugar – developed into larger movements for social and political change that shaped the subsequent course of island politics and the process of decolonization after the war. Neighboring Venezuela had a major influence on the development of Trinidadian labor struggles. Oil linked the two countries. Spontaneous rioting broke out in Venezuela after the death of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in 1935, especially near the country’s oilfields. The following year, the Venezuelan congress passed the most progressive labor code in Latin America. A major strike on oilfields in Maracaibo put this to the test in early 1937. While such labor actions provided inspiration and practical lessons, the inability of Caribbeans in the British empire to secure similar social legislation and rights threw into stark relief the costs of colonial subjecthood and the differences between it and equal citizenship. Intercolonial labor movements became increasingly constricted as unemployment worsened. In 1931, approximately forty-six thousand Afro-Caribbeans from other British colonies, especially Barbados, Grenada, St.Vincent, and other Leeward Islands, lived in Trinidad. Metropolitan and transimperial influences informed labor militancy on the island as well. In Port of Spain, the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association reached out to South Asian workers on the sugar plantations, and Tito Achong campaigned against the growing antipathy towards Chinese migrants and for unity across ethnic lines around an anti-colonial antiracism.The East Indian attorney Adrian Cola Rienzi and the Grenada-born Tubal Uriah (“Buzz”) Butler, a Spiritual Baptist preacher and former soldier and oil worker, organized workers and cultivators in the oil-producing south. In 1934, Butler led hunger marches of laid-off employees from the southern old fields to the north. The next year, he led oil workers out on strike, while unemployed and underemployed workers in the city staged hunger strikes of their own.27 The Trinidadian oil industry accounted for the majority of wealth generated from exports and provided a revenue stream for the colonial state, but it employed a miniscule portion of the population, roughly eight thousand.Agriculture, on the other hand, accounted for 33% of the overall value of exports but employed more than sixty-eight thousand people. Colonial officials favored the oil companies as a critical pillar of the state’s fiscal stability, while from the point of view of the multiethnic workforce in Trinidad, which included comparatively large numbers of East and South Asians and their descendants, agriculture remained the most important source of income and subsistence. While all aspects of the economy experienced the Depression, the agricultural industry was the hardest hit with drastic drops in prices for exports leading to mass unemployment and immiseration.Within this context, labor militancy on the oilfields depended upon gestures of solidarity from other workers and became a flashpoint and symbol of the economic exploitation of colonialism in general. In March 1937, Butler visited Barbados where he connected with local Garveyites and his collaborator Clement Payne who had arrived a few months ahead

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on him. He addressed several public gatherings, telling of the labor unrest on other islands, invoking scripture, referencing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and lauding the benefits of trade unionism and pan-African unity. Soon after his return to Trinidad, demonstrations broke out on the Trinidadian oilfields. On June 18, 1837, Butler organized a peaceful sit-down strike, inspired by the ones in Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, in 1935 and 1936. The movement spread to more oil refineries and ultimately turned into a general strike as workers in the sugar plantations and processing plants and other agricultural industries joined. Police violence against peaceful demonstrators and an unsuccessful attempt to arrest Butler on sedition charges sparked widespread rioting. The government responded with greater force, using a combination of armed forces and police to quell the unrest. In the end, after nearly three weeks of violence, fourteen people were dead, fifty-nine wounded, and hundreds in jail. When the government finally did arrest and try Butler on sedition charges, money and other overtures of support poured in from other Caribbean colonies, and the International African Service Bureau, led by the Trinidadian black internationalists C. L. R. James and George Padmore, held demonstrations in London’s Trafalgar Square. The singer Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo) retold and reflected on the events in Trinidad in a series of calypso recordings made in New York: “Where was Butler?,” “The Strike,” “The Governor’s Resignation,” and “Commission’s Report.” Meanwhile, when authorities in Barbados deported Payne, who had been born in Trinidad to Barbadian parents and then raised in Barbados before returning to Trinidad as a migrant laborer, it ignited a four-day urban rising, the suppression of which resulted in the death of fourteen Afro-Barbadians and five hundred arrests.28 As the price of sugar collapsed in the early 1930s, plantation owners and large, foreign-owned corporations across the Caribbean and Central America moved to cut production costs. Layoffs, reduced wages, and part-time and piece-rate employment became the norm. The intransigence of the local legislative assemblies, which remained firmly in the hands of the white settler minority that feared and distrusted the black majority, blocked arbitration with the newly-formed unions and any government efforts to ease unemployment or stabilize sugar prices. In Jamaica, the Depression accelerated a longer-term decline in the profitability of the island’s sugar industry, but sugar production and refining still dominated the economy. Small freeholders became even more dependent on sugar producers whose operations were large enough to support refineries, forcing more into debt or to sell their land, but if they could hold on, at least they could grow subsistence crops to sustain their families. For the destitute landless majority of agricultural laborers and renters, chronic poverty descended into a battle for survival. Meanwhile, unemployment spiked in the capital of Kingston, where the return of thousands of workers from Cuba, Costa Rica, Barbados, and Trinidad exacerbated the situation. As its own sugar industry contracted, Cuba banned further migration of Jamaican and Haitian workers in 1931 and soon began deporting thousands of migrants. Under pressure from the government of Fulgencio Batista, the U.S. navy repatriated hundreds of Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders. Roughly thirty-eight thousand

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Haitians were deported between 1933 and 1939. During the first half of the decade, twenty-seven thousand Jamaicans returned from Cuba alone. As conditions deteriorated for migrant cane workers, some appealed to the British embassy for assistance returning home, while the Cuban government resorted to more interventionist measures. In 1937, the military interned thousands of Haitians and Jamaicans in concentration camps while they awaited deportation. Haitian and Jamaican migrant workers labored alongside each other in the sugarcane fields, enduring the same exploitative conditions, anti-black racism, and, ultimately, the ignominy of deportation, breeding racial consciousness among returnees. As early as the mid1930s, estate managers and colonial officials attributed strike and labor disruptions to returning migrants. Recent research demonstrates that significant spiritual and religious exchanges occurred among Jamaican workers and other Caribbean migrants, including Haitian practitioners of vodun, evidenced in the popularity of unorthodox race-conscious millennialist movements and new forms of ecstatic Christian Revival such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism among poor Jamaicans.29 Privation, lack of employment security, labor organizing, and examples of unrest across the region fueled strike and workplace demonstrations in Jamaica from 1936 onwards. Six strikes broke out in British Guiana that year, and work stoppages continued thereafter, peaking, as in Jamaica, in the summer of 1938 and involving more than half of all workers in the colony’s sugar industry. In January 1938, a work stoppage in southeastern Jamaica led to violent confrontations with police. On the morning of May 2, a crowd of three thousand protesters consisting of canecutters, construction workers, and unemployed youth descended upon a plantation owned by a subsidiary of the British sugar giant Tate & Lyle on the other side of the island at Frome. In highly symbolic acts of violence, they destroyed or damaged company property, vehicles, and personnel files. Police fired two volleys into the crowd, killing three men and one woman and wounding at least nine others. As the demonstrators scattered, they set the cane fields ablaze. The governor and other officials dismissed the incident and subsequent demonstrations as excuses for shirking, looting, and rioting. Rolling strikes spread through the month. On June 4, police and “Special Constable” irregulars shot and killed four strikers at the Islington estate. By that point, strikes and rioting paralyzed the capital. Shrinking wages, the depressed labor market, and a lack of municipal development produced alarming conditions in Kingston’s growing slums. Unemployment ballooned to nearly 50% in the city.The government’s tendency to rely on part-time employees and day laborers meant that even those lucky enough to secure public sector employment had little economic security. After several days of disturbances, troops and armored vehicles retook the streets of Kingston, and police arrested hundreds. By mid-June, strike activity dwindled on the sugar estates, and authorities had imposed a tense peace in the capital.30 During and after the labor rebellions in the Caribbean, the plight of the black working class attracted greater attention from educated middle-class artists and intellectuals, and labor militancy fed into agitation for constitutional reform. By the mid-1930s, Trinidad could boast a vibrant intellectual and cultural scene. Print

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culture, including newspapers from the island and abroad and the literary journals Trinidad and The Beacon, founded by Alfred Mendes and C. L. R. James, contributed to the politically charged atmosphere. James left for London in 1932 carrying a book manuscript chronicling the lead-up to the 1919 general strike in Trinidad that he published soon after his arrival as The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies (1932); Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s Hogarth Press published it in abridged form as The Case for West Indian Self-Government the next year.31 A thriving literary scene characterized Kingston as well. Publications such as Public Opinion had emerged as a mouthpiece of anti-colonial politics and an important counterpoint to the conservative Daily Gleaner newspaper. The sculptor Edna Manley produced works reflecting the tenor and growing race consciousness of the time, especially Negro Aroused (1935) and Pocomania (1937). The writer and feminist Una Marson called on Afro-Jamaicans to embrace their African cultural heritage in the pages of Public Opinion, wrote and staged a play called Pocomania, which depicted the cultural atmospherics and pathos of the months before the disturbances. Having witnessed the hunger marchers in Britain during the early 1930s, and now observing the suffering around her in Kingston, she penned the poem “At the Prison Gates, Jamaica, 1937”: I see weary and hungry Crowds marching – every day More hungry – every day more sad . . . On they march – must they march on forever?32 In both Jamaica and Trinidad, work stoppages and economic protests spurred broader movements that in turn contributed to the growth of trade unionism and to rise of political parties and figures that dominated local politics for decades to come. They spawned the rise of such notables as the lawyer and leader of the People’s National Party, Norman Manley, and W. Alexander Bustamante, the founder of the Bustamante Industrial Trades Union, future leader of the Jamaican Labour Party, and the country’s first prime minister.33 The labor rebellions also contributed to significant changes to come in colonial governance and imperial policy. In the future, the use of police and other auxiliaries to enforce workplace discipline and to suppress demands for political reform would become untenable. Political reforms gave the non-white majority a greater say in the legislative assemblies, even though the colonial governor retained autocratic power. Officials accepted, even encouraged, the existence of trade unions and arbitration as means of resolving industrial conflicts. However, such piecemeal reforms did not address the deep structural inequalities in these multiracial societies or the larger issue of self-government. On a broader level, the recommendations of the commission of inquiry appointed to investigate the disturbances in the Caribbean added weight to the arguments of those within the Colonial Office and other experts on the colonies who were calling for reform. In 1936, William Macmillan published Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire, in which, as

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the title suggests, he argued that the unrest in the Caribbean foreshadowed future developments in Britain’s African colonies. One of the most significant impacts of the Caribbean labor rebellions and the official responses to them was the impetus they gave to the shift to a notion of colonial development. The emerging model of development emphasized socio-economic improvements guided by an expanded, professionalized colonial service and technocratic experts, and was intended to forestall or postpone more thoroughgoing political changes and democratization. *** As the effects of the Great Depression – skyrocketing unemployment and indebtedness, plummeting wages, prices for export commodities, and consumer purchasing power – spread across the globe, they exposed the connections of interdependence, and the inequalities, among societies and economies linked by the world capitalist economy. On local and regional levels, the Depression highlighted the disparities in the lives of peasant renters and agricultural laborers in the countryside on the one hand, and urban markets and financial institutions on the other; the links between migratory circuits and patterns of working-class militancy; and the relationship between the lack of political rights and economic insecurity. The various ways that suffering populations contested their fates, including violent outbursts of protest and rebellion, frequently called attention to such interconnections. Governments that failed to act effectively or did so belatedly – or, in the colonized world, acted in ways that further undercut the position of the majority of the population – forced people in many corners of the globe to resort to desperate measures in defense of their right to exist.

Notes 1 Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 53. 2 O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934–39 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), 191. 3 Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 105; John Higginson, Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 289. 4 Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 4, 6, 55, 68–70, 76, 91, 112–114; Gi-Wook Shin and DoHyun Han, “Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization Campaign, 1932–1940,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 70–71, 96. 5 Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 121. 6 See Peter Boomgaard and Ian Brown, Weathering the Storm: The Economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s Depression (Leiden: KITLV, 2000). 7 Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 37–40, 101–102; Lewis, Cities in Motion, 6, 8; Sumit Mandal, “ ‘Transethnic Solidarities, Racialization and

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Social Equality,” in The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, Equity, and Reform, ed. Edmund Gomez (London: Routledge, 2004), 49–78. See also Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); Ian Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Delta and the World Depression of the 1930s (London: Routledge, 2005); Patricia M. Herbert, The Hsaya Rebellion, 1930–1932, Reappraised (Melbourne, Australia: Monash University Press, 1982). For more on the rural crisis in Southeast Asia, see Ian Brown, “Rural Distress in Southeast Asia during the World Depression of the Early 1930s: A Preliminary Reexamination,” Journal of Asian Studies 45, n. 5 (1986): 995–1025.. 8 John Ingleson, Workers, Union and Politics: Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 139; Merle C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200, 4th ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 [1981]), 225. 9 Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order, 175, 191. 10 Ibid., 157. 11 Tran Tu Binh, The Red Earth: Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation, ed. David G. Marr, tr. John Spragens (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 27. 12 Ibid., 80–81, 83. 13 Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order, 141–153, 173–176. 14 Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A. Lara-Martínez, Remembering a Massacre:The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), esp. Ch. 1; Jeffrey Gould, “On the Road to “El Porvenir”: Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, ed. Greg Grandin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 88–120. 15 Thomas Klubock, “Ranquil:Violence and Peasant Politics on Chile’s Southern Frontier,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, ed. Greg Grandin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 121–151. 16 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 42–43, 55–60, 236–270; Paul Harris, “The New Zealand Unemployed Workers Movement, 1931–1939: Gisborne and the Relief Workers’ Strike,” New Zealand Journal of History 10, no. 2 (1976): 130–142. 17 George Padmore, “Three Million Strikers Against British Rule,” The Tribune (December 23, 1937). 18 Burton, The Trouble with Empire, 116; Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940:The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30–31; Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order, 120–121 and Ch. 5. 19 Leo Spitzer and LaRay Denzer, “I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League,” Part I and II, International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 3 and 4 (1973): 413–452, 565–601; Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora Since 1787 (London: Routledge, 2003), 29–33, 181–184; Constance Cummings-John, Memoirs of a Krio Leader, ed. with introduction and annotation by LaRay Denzer (Ibadan, Nigeria: Humanities Research Centre, 1995). 20 Vishnu Padayachee, Shahid Vawda, and Paul Tichmann, Indian Workers and Trade Unions in Durban, 1930–1950 (Durban, South Africa: Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Durban-Westville, 1988 [1985]). 21 Burton, The Trouble with Empire, 116; Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order, 190; Anna Belogurova, “The Malayan Communist Party and the Malayan Chinese Association: Internationalism and Nationalism in Chinese Overseas Political Participation, c. 1930– 1960,” in Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence, eds. Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 125–144. 22 Putnam, Radical Moves, 108–109. 23 Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 67, 91, 151, 166, 334.

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 166. Bolland, On the March, 191–192. Putnam, Radical Moves, Ch. 6. Ibid., 196, 224. Ibid., 225–226; Samuel Charters, A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 166–167. Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order, 206; Putnam, Radical Moves, 214–215. Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order, 221–226; Colin A. Palmer, Freedom’s Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Bolland, On the March, 88–89; Christian Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James in Imperia Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Una Marson, “At the Prison Gates, Jamaica, 1937,” in Towards the Stars (London: University of London Press, 1945), 58–60. Palmer, Freedom’s Children.

PART IV

International challenges to liberalism

In November 1937, Italy signed on to the Anti-Comintern Pact, an agreement made by Japan and Nazi Germany a year earlier to oppose the Communist International’s efforts to expand communism throughout the world. A Japanese foreign ministry official hailed the event as “a natural outcome for people with a spiritual proximity to get close and seek one another,” and Japan kicked off a series of celebrations to commemorate the fascist alliance. At Tokyo’s Ko ¯ rakuen stadium and at venues in towns and cities across the kingdom, sizeable crowds of civilians and officials gathered to honor the pact. A variety of groups and individuals offered gifts to Mussolini and Hitler: a violin crafted by a violin maker from Denencho ¯ fu; a painting of Mount Fuji “wrapped in beautiful paper;” a “pure Japan-style ‘Yamato doll’ ”; a cherry tree; a suit of samurai armor; “a splendid porcelain plate.”1 The offering of these symbols of Japanness signified the nation’s growing recognition and promotion of the ideological and cultural bonds it shared with Italian fascism and German National Socialism. The government of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro made special efforts to advance what has been seen as a fascist worldview to the Japanese people. Shoppers making their way up the stairs to the eighth floor of Tokyo’s Takashimaya Department Store in February 1938, for example, found themselves in a large hall where an array of dioramas, display cases, posters, models, and wall maps showcased what the government’s Cabinet Information Division (CID) announced as the “Thought War Exhibition” in flashing neon lights. This remarkable spectacle, which combined musical and theatrical entertainment with didactic presentations through photographs, newsreels, movies, and lectures, portrayed Japan’s confrontation with its powerful ideological enemy, international communism, and instructed its visitors – 1.3 million of them over a two-week period, and many more after the exhibition went on the road to cities and towns across the islands – in the need to gird themselves mentally, spiritually, and physically for war.

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The head of the CID, Yokomizo Mitsuteru, regarded the Thought War Exhibition as the means by which the “disease of communism” threatening East Asia could be halted. He meant to provide the intellectual ammunition that would enable civilians to “strike back with the bullet of the Japanese spirit” against international communism. Just as the Anti-Comintern Pact presented “a united frontline of defense against the Comintern’s offensive” across the globe, the Japanese people must “defend the life of the nation” against “another nation’s thought-offensive.” “Each and every Japanese, even those not on the field of military battle, must be active as a soldier of the thought war, so that we can confront the extended war as a unified empire.”2 One of the most instructive elements in the Thought War Exhibition was a map that filled an entire wall of the hall. Labeled “Thought Tendencies of the Contemporary World as Seen from the Anti-Comintern Pact,” the map provided a graphic depiction of the expansion of communism from the Soviet Union outward to Europe and Asia. A red tube meant to represent the westward movement of communism extended from the Soviet Union through France – where the anti-fascist Popular Front government held power – into Spain, where civil war raged and a proxy war between fascism and communism was being fought. Another red tube ran south from the Soviet Union into central China, which Japan had invaded a year earlier. Two additional maps, “The Spanish Upheaval and the Thought War” and “The Various Forces of World-Thought that Are Assailing East Asia,” elaborated on the theme, showing the fascist countries of Germany, Italy, and Japan battling the armies of communism in Spain, Manchukuo, Mongolia, China, and Indochina, as the feeble liberal democracies of Britain, France, and the United States looked on ineffectually. As the creation of a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis established by the Anti-Comintern Pact suggests, the 1930s saw the dramatic growth of two major challengers to liberalism and liberal internationalism. In response to the social, political, and cultural crises created by the Great Depression, significant numbers of people across the world turned to communism or fascism – or first one and then the other – seeking alternatives to the liberal systems of government and economy that had proved so disastrous. From the start, communists in the Soviet Union had sought to internationalize their ideology and to set up compatible regimes abroad. Fascists in Italy originally saw their movement as particular and un-translatable to other parts of the world, but by the early 1930s, even before the rise of National Socialism in Germany, many Italians had begun to think about fascism as an ideology with universal potential. Though historians have long debated whether the militaristic and imperialist government of Japan can be regarded as fascist, recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the culturally fascist orientation of the country. Moreover, as the Anti-Comintern Pact indicates, significant elements of the Japanese government came to appreciate and promote their affinity and identification with Italian and German ways of thinking and ruling, even if they did not refer to themselves as fascists.

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Notes 1 Quoted in Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 111–113. 2 Quoted in Max Ward, “Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibition of 1938,” Critical Asian Studies 47, no. 3 (2015): 414–439, 420.

6 GLOBAL COMMUNISM

In addition to provoking the grass roots explosion of peasant insurgency and labor rebellion, the Great Depression helped to stimulate the spread of communism to significant areas of the globe. Communism found new adherents in those places where colonial exploitation and racial oppression exacerbated mass privation. Its explicit anti-imperialism and message of racial and gender equality attracted intellectuals, activists, and revolutionaries of Asian, African, and Arab descent, who, in turn, extended the reach and pressed against the limits of the international communist movement. The model of the Soviet Union, which fared comparatively well while the rest of the world’s economies suffered catastrophic collapse, offered an alternative to political liberalism and capitalism, while the Communist International provided resources and guidance to fledging communist parties that sought to implement the visions of Marx and Lenin.That model and the inconsistent and fluctuating policies of the Comintern constrained as much as they enabled would-be revolutionaries and internationalists around the world.

Stalinism in the Soviet Union By 1928, four years after the death of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin had outmaneuvered his rivals and assumed control of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. He immediately embarked on a series of five-year plans designed to industrialize the Soviet Union and enable it to compete with the capitalist powers of the West and Japan.These proved to be a remarkable success – by the time the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the Soviet Union had become the world’s third greatest industrial state, lagging behind only the United States and Germany. The dramatic progress achieved in building up the state’s productive capacities came at

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enormous human and environmental costs. People at all levels of society suffered terrible hardships; millions lost not just their freedom but their lives. Stalin’s first five-year plan aimed to industrialize in the heavy sectors – coal mining and steel, chemicals, and electrical production – without having to borrow money from abroad. Such a strategy necessitated the transformation of agriculture to pay for industrialization and to release labor from the countryside to the factories. Stalin and his planners embarked on a program of forced collectivization. This involved amassing large numbers of individual farms and turning them into one gigantic farm, ostensibly owned by the peasants. Larger blocs of land, Bolshevik officials assumed, could be farmed more efficiently than individual plots and their yield sold for profit overseas; obtaining surplus goods from a single big farm rather than many small ones would be easier and cheaper, they believed. Farmers who resisted this initiative were identified as kulaks, as enemies against the state, and were summarily killed or sent to Siberia. Collectivization turned the remainder of the peasantry into an agricultural proletariat, owning no land, no capital, no tools, and no labor, not even their own. In protest, peasants destroyed their livestock rather than turn them over to the collective farms. This and successive bad summers led to drastic food shortages in 1932 and 1933, during which 5 to 7 million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Kazakhs died in what can only be described as political famines. Though drought had struck Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, grain reserves in those regions held sufficient supplies to meet the need. The government in Moscow, however, not only refused to lower the production quotas for the Ukrainian collectives farms, it raised them, taking food that could have been used to feed the local population in order to export it abroad. Collectivization of agriculture involved more than just food. In the Soviet Union’s Central Asian empire, it focused on expanding the textile industry by growing cotton.The first five-year plan set unrealistically high targets for cotton production in the Central Asian republics in an attempt to secure “cotton independence.” A Politburo decree raised the quotas further in 1929 and declared that all suitable irrigated land should be adapted to growing raw cotton. When peasants resisted, Soviet officials attributed their hostility to the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation to “class-alien elements” and “rich peasants.” Despite a 30% increase in the acreage devoted to cotton in Turkmenistan in 1931, which reduced the amount of land for food crops, officials reduced grain shipments to the region. Mass protests, looting, raiding, and other forms of resistance to cotton and collectivization grew, especially in the predominately nomadic desert regions. Food became increasingly scarce during the early 1930s, causing chronic malnutrition, especially among children.1 By 1939, all but a very few farms had been collectivized. Agricultural output had not appreciably increased, but Stalin had achieved the second goal of collectivization – releasing labor from the land to the cities. Between 1926 and 1939, twenty million peasants moved to fast growing – and in some cases, entirely new – cities. Industry grew rapidly. Between 1928 and 1938, iron and steel production increased by 400%; coal production by 300%. Brand new industries emerged in brand new cities. Magnitogorsk appeared on uninhabited but iron-rich steppes

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as a full-blown steel town of 250,000 within the span of three years. Moscow and Leningrad (formerly Petrograd, formerly St. Petersburg) grew by more than 100% between the late 1920s and early 1930s. Overall, the urban areas of the Soviet Union grew from 20% of the total population in 1926 to 33% by 1939. By that time, the U.S.S.R. lagged behind only the United States and Germany in industrial might. Much of the industrial development took place east of the Ural Mountains, which, during the Second World War, would enable the Soviet Union to withstand the German onslaught in western Russia and ultimately to repel it. The Soviet Union did not suffer the economic devastation of the Great Depression in the 1930s to the same extent as the rest of the world. None of the bustboom cycles that characterized the capitalist west plagued the U.S.S.R. With the profound exception of the millions of Ukrainians and Kazakhs who died unnecessarily of starvation at the hands of the government, there was less absolute want there than in most other areas of the globe. However, the success of the five-year plans required that people make do without some of the most basic consumer goods, adequate housing, and palatable food. The migration of peasants to cities spurred unprecedented urban population growth, putting pressure on the already strained housing market. Families, if they were lucky, lived in communal apartments that provided one room per family. One resident recalled that the room had no running water; sheets or curtains marked off subareas where two or three generations slept and sat; food dangled out of winter windows in sacks. Shared sinks, toilets, washtubs, and cooking facilities (usually nothing more than Primus . . . burners and cold water taps) lay either in a no-man’s land between the dwelling rooms or down an unheated, laundry-festooned hallway. Less fortunate people lacked even these amenities. A worker in Leningrad lived in a corridor for five years; a family of six in Moscow shared a windowless six-squareyard space under a stairway.2 Divorced couples could not actually separate, for fear of finding themselves homeless, and some people got so desperate that they killed family members in order to gain access to their apartments. Obtaining food took up whole days. Scarcities and shortages meant that people struggled to get what they needed. In 1933, when conditions were at their worst, the average working man or woman living in Moscow could expect to eat less than half the bread, two thirds of the sugar, and only 20% of the meat or fish a worker in Petrograd had at the beginning of the century. She could expect to consume little or no fat, and little milk or fruit. People stood in lines for hours to purchase staples like meat, milk, butter, and vegetables, as well as salt, soap, matches, and kerosene. In 1936 and again in 1939, famine conditions created long bread lines in the cities and towns. One woman wrote to her husband, “Mama and I stood from 4 in the morning and didn’t even get any black bread because they didn’t bring any at all to the store and that happened in almost all the stores of the town.” Another recounted that “for bread you have to go at two o’clock at night and stand until six in the morning to get two kilograms of ryebread.”3

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As hard as it was to obtain food, finding clothing and other necessities of life became even more difficult. Production focused largely on heavy industry, not on manufactured consumer goods, so citizens had to go without the very basics. The state injected one-third of the national income into industry each year.Those commodities that did exist were poorly made and fell apart after only a little use. Clothing from state-run stores sometimes lacked sleeves or was tailored so badly that it could not be made to fit properly. Items necessary to keep houses and apartments maintained – locks, paint, nails, boards – were in short supply, contributing to the shabby condition of the woefully insufficient housing stock. Shoes, in particular, were scarce virtually everywhere, ordinary shortages were exacerbated by the lack of leather following the slaughter of farm animals by angry peasants during collectivization. Losing a shoe could be disastrous because it was irreplaceable. In 1935, in Yaroslavl, for instance, not one pair of children’s shoes could be found in any store. By the late 1930s, conditions had improved somewhat. Food rationing diminished and a few consumer goods returned to store shelves. The need to prepare for war as the decade came to an end, however, soon militated against any long-term amelioration of conditions. Prison workers, men and women who had been identified as “enemies of the revolution” on the grounds of any number and variety of infractions and imprisoned in labor camps, supplied a good deal of the labor for the industrialization of the U.S.S.R. The labor camp system, called the gulag, was not simply a by-product of oppressive Soviet politics; it constituted a core element of Stalin’s economic plans. During the 1930s, the state sent 3.6 million people to the gulag, where they endured harsh winter weather with little protection. They provided labor for some of the most difficult and dangerous projects. Tens of thousands of men and women died cutting a canal between Moscow and the White Sea without machinery, performing every aspect of the construction by hand, literally. The collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union also had profound environmental consequences, which communist planners celebrated as a measure of their progress. The transformation of the landscape became a symbol of the transcendence of the individual and her limitations through collective labor. Collectivization produced huge fields that were left vulnerable to erosion from wind and water. New factory towns like Magnitogorsk spewed tons of concentrated pollutants into the air.Timber shortages during the first five-year plan compelled authorities to round up gulag prisoners and farmers displaced from their lands and send them into the forests to cut massive numbers of trees. Deforestation became so pronounced that the eroded soil formed sandbars in the Volga River, blocking vehicle traffic on the U.S.S.R.’s largest and most-used waterway. Millions of Soviet citizens enthusiastically poured their bodies and souls into the herculean task of transforming their world into a utopian new age and themselves into new Soviet women and men. Collectivization, industrialization, and rapid urbanization, however, combined with fears of infiltration and sabotage by capitalist enemies on all sides, generated stress, anxiety, and tension among virtually all segments of society. A series of purges of party members deemed to be deviationists or oppositionists

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to the party line occurred during the first half of the 1930s. Early allies of Lenin and key architects of the Bolshevik revolution such as Leon Trotsky, Nicholai Bukharin, Gregorii Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev – Old Bolsheviks, as they were called – were first ousted from the party and then tried and executed or exiled as enemies of the state and counter-revolutionaries. In 1937, Stalin initiated the so-called Great Purge of high Communist Party officials, using the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov, the head of the party in Leningrad, to identify officers in the Red Army – especially those who had served on the side of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War – diplomats, foreign communists, writers, artists, scholars, and members of the security forces as enemies of the revolution. Mass arrests and incarceration, show trials, and executions created a state of terror within and outside the party’s ranks as Stalin sought to rid the state of anyone who conceivably could pose a threat to his power. His actions enjoyed the enthusiastic support and even participation of those who regarded his purges as crucial to maintaining the health of the country. According to official Soviet records opened to the public after 1991, 1.5 million people were arrested in 1937–38; more than 680,000 of them were shot. Historians consider these figures to vastly undercount the actual number of victims of the Great Purge; they estimate that the number of arrests reached 8 million – some 5.5–6% of the population – and that the number of deaths ranged from one million to 1.7 million souls.4

Comrades The Bolshevik Revolution brought to power a government committed to the emancipation of women. Ultimately seeking the dissolution of the family as the only true means by which women could make themselves the equals of men, the communist regime introduced a new family code in 1918 that raised women’s status to that of men’s, made marriage a civil rather than a religious matter and divorce readily available to both parties, and gave illegitimate children identical legal rights to legitimate children. Two years later, the government made it legal for women to obtain abortions legally if done by a physician. The family legislation brought more rather than less hardship to women. Easy divorce, free sexual unions, and an inability to enforce child payments from the fathers of children they bore out of marriage created distress for many, many women abandoned by husbands and sexual partners. One party member, harkening back to the slogan of the French Revolution, declared that the new laws had brought women “liberty, equality, and maternity.”5 Joblessness rates for women soared with the implementation of the New Economic Policy in 1921, forcing thousands of women into prostitution to survive; government bureaucrats did not always share the commitment to women’s freedom that Bolshevik leaders like Lenin had espoused; and factory managers turned a blind eye to the harassment of women workers at the hands of their male comrades. Feminism might have been the official policy of the communist regime, and it did help to bring about improvement in places like women’s literacy, but for many women it could mean little positive change in their everyday lives.

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With Stalin’s rise to power in the late 1920s, the commitment to women’s equality and emancipation eroded, especially as famine and political persecution killed off millions of people. In need of increased population, the state resurrected the family as an official unit of society, banned the sale of contraceptives, made abortion illegal in 1936, and introduced measures that made divorce difficult and expensive to obtain. Stalinist ideology emphasized the expectation that women were wives and mothers and that their place was in the home. At the same time, the shortages of workers accompanying the onset of the five-year plans created an enormous need for women’s labor. Urged on by state-sponsored propaganda paradoxically celebrating women’s work, more than ten million women took up wage-paying jobs in industry and the service sector, increasing their presence in those segments of the economy from 24% to 39% of the total workforce. Women had to work if their families were to survive, and the abandonment of programs designed to ease their domestic obligations ensured that they bore a double burden. Women’s increased participation in the workforce did not meaningfully change expectations that they were first and foremost wives and mothers with the nearly total responsibility for caring for home and family, nor did it do much to alter traditional ideas about masculinity. Whereas in the capitalist countries, the Depression challenged the conventions of men as breadwinners and rendered them “feminine” in their own and other people’s eyes, in Soviet Russia the dominant position of men and masculinity remained intact both symbolically and materially. Soviet representations of agriculture, the peasantry, and the countryside, for example, depicted them as “feminine” and industry and cities as “masculine” in an effort to articulate a hierarchy of value in the two realms; industry clearly enjoyed a privileged position in these representations of the economy. More concretely, managers often relegated women to unskilled, auxiliary work in factories and yards, regarding them as unnecessary and unhelpful in meeting their production quotas. “The only work for women is to wash windows and clear out boxcars,” asserted a Belorussian official in 1931. “We don’t need women,” declared the director of a ship-repair facility in Archangelsk. “Women have not proven themselves and work worse than men.”6 While valuations of women and their work diminished under the Stalinist regime, those of men and their contributions to society took on greater worth as the Soviet Union geared up for war.What communist officials regarded as constant and persistent threats from the capitalist countries of the west and from Japan led them to see virtually all men as soldiers in the making, imbued with the qualities of courage, strength, discipline, perseverance, and loyalty. The New Soviet Man as depicted in official representations did not just toil in heavy industry, wielding a heavy sledgehammer and moving vast quantities of raw materials into the maws of blast furnaces. He also carried a rifle. Universal conscription into the military for five years for men aged 19 to 40 had become law in 1928; women – who had served in great numbers during the Civil War – had been prohibited from the armed forces after that conflict ended. The whole point of the Five-Year Plans and rapid industrialization had been to prepare the Soviet Union for war, and the military and the traditional masculine values it promulgated took center stage in

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the 1930s, often quite literally. The Red Army, the preeminent masculine preserve, always led processions celebrating Soviet life and Soviet power. Gender ideology is never perfectly consistent, especially in times of strife and perceived national emergency. Moreover, Soviet efforts to return women to their traditional confines of the home and family operated along generational lines. An alternative vision of femininity necessitated by preparations for war offered women born around and after 1910 a different set of possibilities – that of the “womanfighter.”7 As portrayed by journalists, military officers, party officials, and women involved in mobilization campaigns for military defense, the woman fighter possessed qualities conventionally regarded as contradictory: motherly love and military violence; charm and discipline; domestic talents and military professionalism; physical weakness and physical endurance; meekness and courage.This androgynous character training for war combined traditionally masculine and feminine ideals. In the 1930s, the Communist Party charged the All-Union Young Communist League or Konsomol with producing a cohort of “fighters” among Soviet youth. At the same time, the state-funded Society for Promotion of Defence, Aviation, and Chemical Development offered a series of programs to train young people to shoot, fly planes, and parachute. By the end of the 1930s, the two organizations had instructed 3.4 million young men and women in marksmanship; thousands of youth – male and female alike – had learned to fly and to jump out of airplanes. They also took up instruction in driving tanks and other military vehicles and acquired the mechanical skills to keep them running. These training courses included men and women indiscriminately, and the terms used to describe them – “youth,” “young people,” “Konsomol members” – lacked gender specificity. Journalists showed young women in uniform working alongside men as they flew, jumped, sniped, and drove. All of them were expected to fight and to die, if necessary, in defense of the country. These representations ran up against the reality of bans against women serving in the armed forces or being admitted to military academies. Still, some military officers allowed women to serve in their ranks and attend their schools. In 1938, a number of memoirs began to appear telling the stories of women who had circumvented the prohibitions and through extraordinary perseverance had made their way into the ranks of official pilots. In September 1938, three women, Polina Osipenko, Marina Raskova, and Valentina Grizodubova flew long-distance from Moscow to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union in twenty-four hours. Their mission, approved by Stalin himself, made them Heroes of the Soviet Union, the first women to achieve such a status; Konsomol and the state press encouraged the youth of the nation to see them as role models. For war was certainly in the offing, these official bodies knew, and they emphasized the direct role that women would play in the upcoming conflict.Women should expect to leave their husbands and children to serve as pilots and snipers, to take up military occupations entirely at odds with the roles urged on them as inferior, subservient members of Soviet society. The training started in the early ’30s paid off: when Germany crossed the border into the Soviet Union in June 1941, thousands of women volunteered for

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active service at the front. Over the next four years, eight hundred thousand young women saw action on the front lines of the war.

Moscow and communist internationalism: the Comintern, 1928–1935 In 1919, Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders had formed the Third International or Comintern, as it was called, to promote communist revolution worldwide. At the time, conditions looked ripe for revolution on an international scale, and many Bolsheviks believed that the endurance of their achievement depended upon the spread of communism elsewhere in the world. As governments and paramilitary rightist forces squashed revolutions in Hungary, Germany, and Estonia, and the major capitalist empires rebounded following the Great War, such hopes were quickly dashed, leading the executive committee of the Comintern to encourage alliances with socialists and working-class parties and, in the colonized world, with anti-colonial and bourgeois nationalist groups. Indeed, the concern for colonized peoples and the role they would play in shaping a new global order took greater prominence in Moscow’s thinking as it became clearer that revolution in the more industrialized countries would not materialize anytime soon.The Soviet Union had few friends and even fewer allies, and nationalist and anti-colonial movements in Asia, in particular, offered one of the few opportunities to cultivate some and, at the same time, strike a blow against the Soviets’ major adversaries, Britain and France. In 1921, the Comintern established the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTVU), which attracted and influenced a new generation of anti-colonial agitators who passed through Moscow and rose to prominence during the 1930s. Its functionaries formed ties with South Asian trade unionists and activists in colonial India and followers of Wafdism in Egypt, among many others around the world. Stalin viewed the Nationalist Party in China or Guomindang (GMD), headed by Sun Yat-sen and, after 1925, his successor Chiang Kai-shek, as a valuable resource in his efforts to keep China from falling into the hands of Japan or Britain. The Comintern ordered the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in Shanghai in 1921, to ally with the Guomindang in 1923, and Soviet aid enabled Sun Yat-sen to establish his base of power near Canton in 1924. The GMD became a “sympathizing” associate within the Comintern, and Chiang Kai-shek received an honorary appointment to the presidium. But these were strange bedfellows indeed, as the Guomindang leadership, comprised of landed elites, held conservative opinions that were anathema to communists. Chiang, in particular, was rabidly anti-communist. Communist inroads among peasants in the countryside and among workers in urban areas alarmed him. Once he had used Soviet assistance to obtain the power he needed, he turned on the Communists. In April 1927, Guomindang forces and their supporters massacred their erstwhile communist allies in Shanghai, and the following month, they crushed the Canton commune. The surviving remnants of the party fled into the interior of China. In the lower Yangtze Valley and in northern Shaanxi province, they capitalized on

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widespread distress among the peasantry to rebuild their organization and marshal cadres of loyal followers. Chinese communists established a soviet at Ruijin, in Hunan, in November 1928, and created others over the next two years in Hubei, Fujian, Jiangsu, and Sichuan. They could exercise little influence in the cities, but their presence in the countryside grew – to as many as ten thousand – as men such as Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong gradually devised a more peasant-oriented philosophy and program of action. Meanwhile, the disaster of the Guomindang betrayal of Chinese communists convinced Comintern leaders, and finally Stalin himself, to cut ties with bourgeois nationalist groups and to adhere to a purer ideological line, described as “class against class” policy. The sixth congress of the Comintern, held in 1928, ordered members to focus their efforts on recruiting party members from trade unions and “in the factories and mines among transport workers, and among the semi-slaves of the plantations.” It called on communists to infiltrate peasant groups in order to build “new revolutionary peasant unions” and to eschew alliances with social democrats and non-communist anti-colonial or reformist organizations.8 The move dovetailed with events taking place inside the Soviet Union. Stalin’s demand for “socialism in one country,” which replaced Trotsky’s and a number of other Old Bolsheviks’ emphasis on “permanent revolution,” coincided with increased centralization within the Soviet Union and made it far more difficult for dissenting voices to express themselves. As we saw above, purges of the party in the early 1930s resulted in the expulsion of thousands of members, and a good many of those also belonged to the Comintern. The promulgation of the “class against class” strategy, however, undermined collaboration among leftist movements and incipient expressions of transcolonial, anti-imperialist solidarity. The achievements of the Soviet Union and especially its celebrated nationalities policy, which formally recognized national minorities and assimilated cultural difference and local languages into Soviet programs, had attracted the admiration of colonized peoples and racially oppressed minorities around the globe. The “great transformation” of 1928–1932, as Stalin termed the turn to “socialism in one country” and Soviet nation-building, coincided with “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state had ever witnessed.”9 The new emphasis on factionalism raised by the “class against class” policy bred infighting and foreclosed the opportunity created by this earlier goodwill. It divided existing groups such as the League Against Imperialism (LAI) – an umbrella association of anti-imperialists, trade unionists, social democrats, and communists from the industrialized powers and the colonial world. In China, India, Indochina, and South Africa, where communists were few on the ground but anti-colonialists numbered in some cases in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, the “class against class” policy of what became known as the “Third Period” (1928–1935) substantially reduced the potential of the Comintern to shape events on the ground. Even in the best circumstances, the Comintern’s effectiveness suffered from dogmatism and its almost complete lack of understanding of local conditions and circumstances. Increased intolerance for what one scholar has called “diverse articulations of communism,” at best complicated and at worst stymied communist organizing

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efforts around the world.10 In India, for instance, the Meerut Conspiracy trial of 1929–33 and the resulting upswelling of sympathy for the defendants in the case gave unprecedented prominence to the small Communist Party of India, but it also created nearly insuperable divisions among leftist groups that had previously found common ground and worked together to promote pro-worker, pro-peasant, and anti-colonial activities. The colonial government in India accused the leftists – leaders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (WPP), trades union officials, and British members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) – at the center of the Meerut case with fomenting a spate of massive strikes across the subcontinent, especially in Bombay. Government officials hoped to isolate individuals and groups they identified as communist – such as the Girni Kamgar Mahamandal union – from the larger anti-colonial movement led by Nehru, Gandhi, and Subhas Bose. Exposing leftists as communists, they thought, would make them far less attractive to Congress party politicians. In March 1929, police arrested twenty-eight Indian communists and trade unionists and three Britons, charging them with conspiracy to deprive the kingemperor of his sovereignty over India. The prosecution argued, in effect, that holding communist beliefs constituted a crime and made this case by trying to establish a direct link between the defendants and the Comintern. No such link actually existed, though the Comintern did contribute funds to the fledgling Communist Party of India, which had only a miniscule membership at the time. Instead, as the proceedings dragged on for years, the Meerut trial virtually created a communist party with a considered Marxist-Leninist ideology. It remained small, with only a thousand members in 1933, but it attained a stature and an admiring audience among anti-colonial leaders and the Indian populace. The Comintern officially recognized the Communist Party of India in 1930. Though the defendants were tried before a judge without a jury in a town far from the center of Indian political activity or unrest, the government went to great lengths to present the trial in the best possible light, especially as three of the defendants were British. The presiding magistrate ordered authorities to transfer the accused from the individual cells they originally occupied to barracks. He also rescinded the order restricting reading material and allowed the defendants to receive all of the information they needed to mount their defense. As a result, the barracks became a type of schoolhouse of Marxism, what defendant Sohan Singh Josh, editor of the Kirti (Worker) and head of the Punjab Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, called “Meerut Jail University.” Many of the defendants encountered the earliest translations of Marx’s writings and other communist texts into Marathi and other South Asian languages for the first time and became conversant in classic communist concepts, translating and domesticating them into local idioms. In sum, as Josh recalled, the years of the trial “benefitted the communist accused tremendously.”11 The trial broadcasted the activities of communists in India, bringing to light work they had been carrying out for years but that had garnered little notice and no approbation. Indians learned of the efforts of men such as Josh, K. N. Joglekar, P. C. Joshi, Muzaffar Ahmed, and S. A. Dange to advance the welfare of workers and

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peasants; they read about the four workers’ and peasants’ parties that had grown up in the previous decade and of the attempts of the Communist Party of Great Britain to further workers’ rights in India. The Communist Party of India, which was banned in 1934, did not win many more members in the short term, but it had made a deep impression on politically active South Asians. When the Socialist Party was formed within the Indian National Congress that same year, the socialists worked energetically to enlist communists to their side. However, the experience of Meerut had radicalized the communist defendants, who knew from their reading that the Comintern had directed communists to eschew any association with non-communist leftists, whom it denigrated as “social fascists.” Defendants repeatedly attacked the Indian National Congress and Gandhi himself in the course of the trial. Afterwards, Josh refused to join with the Congress Socialist Party in the Punjab, declaring that he was a “communist,” not a “socialist.” This kind of distinction would have made little sense prior to Meerut, but thereafter it informed Indian leftist politics in colonial India right up to the time of Partition in 1947. By the trial’s final stages, the INC had withdrawn from the defense team. The trial attracted attention and a considerable amount of sympathy in Europe as well. In Moscow and Berlin, where socialist Willi Münzenberg organized the European campaign in support of the defendants, communist leaders followed the proceedings closely.The Negro Worker, publication of the Comintern’s Negro Committee edited by George Padmore, carried news of the trial and activities in support of the accused. On Whitsunday, May 2, 1931, campaigners in Britain devoted their festivities in honor of “Anti-Empire Day” to the case, renaming it “Meerut Day.” Days later, the communist and trade unionist Rose Smith shouted “Release the Meerut Prisoners” from her seat in the women’s gallery of the House of Commons. The Manchester-based street theater troupe, the Red Microphones, performed the play Meerut in 1932.12 The government of India also worked to disconnect the international communist movement from the mainstream nationalist movement, especially after the prominent Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru organized the defense of the accused. The prosecutor at Meerut, J. W. Langford James, consistently referred to the defendants as “Bolsheviks” and compared communism unfavorably with Indian nationalism, erroneously associating communism with violence and nationalism with nonviolence. Josh observed that the prosecution worked diligently to persuade the Indian public that “communism was not the kind of movement that should receive the sympathy of nationalists.”13 The presiding judge ultimately found twenty-seven of the accused guilty and sentenced them to various lengths of “transportation” (i.e. deportation to prison colonies), although some of the convictions were overturned on appeal and the sentences of the rest later reduced. In his ruling, he distinguished the internationalist nature of communism from the distinctively Indian character of nationalist politics.This attempt to divide enemies of imperialism was nothing new: the British frequently pursued such tactics to pit one faction against another, thus neutralizing them both. It proved less effective in this case. Although communism

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remained on the margins the Indian struggle against British colonial rule, this was more due to the tensions generated by the “class against class” policy than government machinations. Nehru drifted further toward the left during the 1930s and situated the aims of anti-colonial movement in South Asia firmly within the context of a global anti-imperialist front. The Comintern’s opposition to alliances with non-communist anti-colonial groups and “class against class” policy had repercussions in other parts of Asia as ~ well. Nguyên Ái Quô´c – Nguyen the Patriot – the man who renamed himself Ho Chi Minh and led the communist revolution in Vietnam, spent the early 1920s in Paris where he collaborated with Malagasies, Afro-Caribbeans, and North Africans in the anti-imperialist Union Intercoloniale. He also mixed with Chinese workers, and his magazine, La Paria, published writings by the pan-Islamist Rashid Rada and honored Sun Yat-sen after his death, eulogizing him as the visionary behind the idea of the “Federation of Asia.” Quô´c called on Vietnamese to unite with the Guomindang in opposition to their “one common enemy, French imperialism.”14 From Paris, Quô´c traveled to Moscow in 1923 where he met Russian, Indian, and Chinese revolutionaries; he studied at the KUTVU as part of his work for the Comintern. He witnessed Chiang’s onslaught on Chinese communists first hand in 1927 and, after returning briefly to Moscow, attended the 1927 LAI Conference in Brussels and then traveled to Bangkok, India, Malaysia, and Shanghai to organize Indochinese communists in residence and in exile. Some thirty thousand Vietnamese émigrés lived in Siam (Thailand), for instance, and a fairly large group inhabited Guangdong and the southern provinces of China. Most of these exiles considered themselves nationalists – adherents of the anti-colonial Viê.t Nam Quô´c Dân Đaa? ng (VNQDĐ) – rather than communists. Quô´c tailored his message to address the colonial question as well as social and economic inequalities. He incorporated the philosophies of Confucius into those of Lenin and Marx, and urged Comintern officials to regard the peasantry as a potential revolutionary force in colonial Indochina. In 1930, a number of momentous events occurred. On February 3, Quô´c founded the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in Hong Kong. In his address to mark the occasion, he connected resistance to French imperialism and efforts “to stifle the Vietnamese revolution” to the revolutionary struggle in China, the defense of the Soviet Union, and solidary with the metropolitan French working class. A week later,Vietnamese soldiers in the French colonial army joined with civilians belonging to the VNQDĐ and mutinied against their officers at Yen Bai, in northern Vietnam, seeking to provoke an uprising to end French rule in Indochina. The rising failed within 24 hours, but two months later, communists organized a peasant revolt that over the course of the year extended from two northern provinces down through the center of the country and into the Mekong delta in the south. Tens of thousands of peasants participated, driven by poverty, famine, decades of abuse from landowners and local officials, and resentment of colonial rule. Communists in Nghe Tinh province took over a number of villages, ousted the local authorities, and established soviets in their place that then eliminated taxes on opium, salt,

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and alcohol. They planned to seize and redistribute land to the peasants, but before they could do so, French authorities moved decisively and brutally to destroy them. Units of the French air force and the colonial army, the Foreign Legion, carried out what Quô´c called “the white terror,” re-establishing French control by force. They mowed down demonstrators with machine guns, bombed them from the air, and burned entire villages. Hundreds of people were jailed, deported, or shot, and by the middle of 1931, French authorities had regained control. Colonial police obtained the names and addresses of communist and other anti-colonial leaders, and systematically eliminated the leadership of the Indochinese Communist Party through arrest and imprisonment. By 1933, the ICP had been almost entirely destroyed.The Special Branch of the British police, acting on French intelligence, took Quô´c into custody in Hong Kong. A British lawyer kept him from being extradited to Vietnam, where he would have been incarcerated and probably executed. Instead, his lawyer negotiated a settlement that involved dropping charges against Quô´c. He escaped to Shanghai, where he survived with the assistance of Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Soong Qingling. From China, he made his way to Vladivostok and thence to Moscow in 1934. Quô´c’s seemingly miraculous escape from Hong Kong rendered him an object of suspicion by the Soviets, who believed he had made some kind of deal with the British secret service. The arrests that followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934 made Quô´c’s situation even more tenuous. He kept his head down, aware that his Comintern membership and his ICP comrades’ criticisms of his “rightist” positions on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry left him vulnerable; he watched each day as friends, neighbors, and colleagues disappeared into the gulag or worse. His luck appeared to run out in 1938, when the disciplinary committee of the Comintern ordered him to appear before it, but an important member of the board defended him against the charges by referring to his inexperience. Once again, Quô´c survived to fight another day. The Soviets dispatched Quô´c to Lanzhou, in Gansu province in China, to liaise with the Red Army. After spending two weeks with Mao Zedong in Yan’an, he traveled south to Guangxi, the province bordering Vietnam on the northeast, where he set up the base from which he operated until 1945. There, he prepared for the struggle to come, having learned in June 1940 that Hitler’s forces had taken control of France. In 1941, Quô´c, now calling himself Ho Chi Minh (“the enlightened one”), founded the Viet Minh or the League for Vietnam’s Independence, which appealed to all Vietnamese to unite to defeat the Japanese and the French and to establish a democratic, independent, free nation.

The long march of communism in China By the time Ho joined up with the Red Army in China in 1938, the Chinese communists had regrouped and, after years of being harried by Guomindang forces, even joined in a new alliance with their nationalist enemies in the face of Japanese invasion. Chiang Kai-shek’s white terror had destroyed the largely urban Chinese

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communist networks centered on Shanghai and Canton during the late 1920s, and sent those who survived into the countryside. Those who stayed behind in the cities faced danger from a nationalist movement determined to eliminate them. Following orders from the Comintern to continue to organize urban workers for a proletarian revolution, communists in Shanghai and other cities exposed themselves to brutal treatment at the hands of the Guomindang. Party membership plummeted as a result. The number of party members in Shanghai fell from 2,000 in May 1930 to 700 eighteen months later, largely owing to arrests and executions. An urban workers’ revolution in an overwhelmingly rural country made little sense, but loyal communists continued to try to obey the Comintern’s misguided directives. In the middle of 1930, exhausted by months of fleeing Chiang’s troops, Mao Zedong, Zhu De, and their remaining forces settled and proclaimed a communist government in southern Jiangxi Province. Other groups of communists set up soviets in Fujian, Hunan, Hubei, and Sichuan provinces. Zhang Guotao, who would become a dangerous rival to Mao, established a soviet in Henan. Jiangxi offered the best opportunity to date for Mao to development his peasant-centered conception of revolution. This vision ran counter to the strategy of the Central Committee in Shanghai under the leadership of Li Lisan, which focused on cities in hope of sparking proletarian uprisings. The Central Committee ordered an assault on Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, to enforce its authority and reinstate the party line. It failed, though it resulted in the deaths of Mao’s first wife and sister and weakened his leadership, leaving much of the real power in Zhou Enlai’s hands. It also discredited the “Li Lisan line,” clearing the way for Mao to build a revolutionary movement and the Red Army from remote rural bases. In their local areas, the various soviets garnered significant support among the peasantry by pursuing initiatives frowned upon by the Comintern but that responded to the needs of the vast majority of the Chinese people. The Chinese peasantry had been subject to prolonged periods of warfare, economic depression, insecure tenancy, administrative abuse, and warlord rule, and was ripe for the teachings of the communist propagandists and appreciative of their pragmatic initiatives. Organizers created a variety of groups: the Red Guard, youth vanguards, children’s corps, women’s corps, and peasant associations and workers’ unions. They provided education where none had existed before. In Jiangxi, some 60% of children attended party-run schools. Adults could sign up for reading and discussion groups or gather together in sewing or other assemblages.The soviets introduced new laws that eased the economic burdens of peasants. They lowered astronomically high interest rates or cancelled debts entirely. In the social realm, they introduced new systems for marriage, in particular, upending the traditional forms that saw women sold like farm animals to prospective husbands whose families then turned them into virtual bonded laborers. In Jiangxi, for example, Mao and his colleagues imposed the Marriage Law outlawing arranged marriages and bride purchase and raising the age of marriage to eighteen for women and twenty for men. The Communists urged young men and women to choose their own husbands and wives. The new law also allowed women to divorce if they so desired, unless their husbands were away on military service.

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For all its successes in building a mass movement in the countryside, the CCP continued to face serious threats. Chiang Kai-shek sent his armies on a series of “extermination campaigns” against the Communists in the countryside. The first three failed, owing to Mao’s strategy of luring the Nationalists far into territory held by his troops and attacking them at the ideal moment. The third “extermination campaign” launched by Chiang against the communist base in Jiangxi coincided with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai early the next year to force Chiang to cede Manchuria, it gave the Communists a much-needed but brief respite from the Nationalist onslaught. By the end of 1932, Chiang had abandoned Manchuria and turned again to task of eliminating the Communists.The Nationalist forces encircled and bombarded the Jiangxi base. Most of the Red Army and party members broke through the Nationalist lines and escaped in July 1934, but few of them would survive the ordeal that followed as Nationalist troops pursued them across China. When the Nationalists arrived in Jiangxi in November 1934, they carried out “ferocious revenge.” Landlords whose land had been seized and Nationalist troops worked hand in hand to punish those who had remained. “Men were beheaded, cut in half at the waist, or had their living organs taken out and eaten. Bodies lined the riverbanks. Many women were raped and then sold to the brothels of Canton.”15 In October 1935, Mao and what remained of the Red Army arrived in Yan’an in northern Shaanxi Province after what became known as the Long March, a year-long, eight-thousand-mile trek through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the continent of Asia. Of the Red Army forces who escaped from Jiangxi, fewer than eight thousand half-starved soldiers – or less than 10% – survived. The fortitude, courage, and commitment the survivors displayed against all odds became the founding myth of Communist China. The body of marchers who set out with Mao constituted a small city. Edgar Snow, the American journalist to whom Mao, Zhou, and other communist leaders recounted their stories of the Long March, described it as a nation on the march. The 1st Army, made up of eighty-six thousand soldiers – male and female – of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 9th Corps, formed the front and rear of the procession that bracketed more than four thousand staff members of the military commission, itself comprised of communications, logistics, engineering, artillery, hospital, cadet, and political departments. Along with the military commission trudged a central column consisting of the Jiangxi soviet government and seven thousand porters and reserve soldiers carrying the collections of the Ruijin library, the Red Army’s coffers of gold and silver stashed in two hundred kerosene containers, party records and documents, storage units, sewing machines, printing presses, a huge and awkward X-ray machine requiring twelve men to manage, and all the supplies needed to keep the army and the government physically functioning. This lumbering parade made agonizingly slow progress, hampered not just by the regular rains of the fall season but by sorties from Nationalist airplanes that forced it to move only at night. On the first day of the march, the columns traveled fewer than two miles. Problems arose immediately. Porters and reserve soldiers, tasked with hauling all the paraphernalia of this small city, deserted in droves. The leadership jettisoned the

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smaller stuff first, tossing pots and pans and extraneous items by the wayside. The heavier equipment that took a dozen men to carry had to be handled by fewer and fewer porters until finally it, too, had to be left behind. Hospital officials agreed only with the greatest reluctance to part with their X-ray machine, capitulating to Mao’s reassurances that “when the whole country is ours, you will have as many . . . as you like.”16 Active-duty soldiers began to fall away as well. The 1st Army’s numbers fell by fifty-six thousand troops within six weeks of the start of the march. Later official accounts attributed the losses to the Xiang River battle in November and December and to regular Nationalist attacks from the air, but the vast majority of them simply ran away. The 2nd Army suffered similar attrition. It started with ten thousand soldiers, four thousand of whom deserted within six months. Conditions were just too difficult, and loyalties to families left behind proved too strong for many to resist. Often low on food and without sufficient clothing, including shoes, Red Army troops survived by confiscating food and supplies from the towns they captured and by kidnapping wealthy locals.When they arrived in a town, the Committee for Confiscation dispatched agents to take the merchandise of shops and eateries, and distributed the food and items – shoes were most in demand – to the marchers. They might stay for three days, resting and replenishing the physical and mental resources they had exhausted in past weeks, before setting off again. Hostage-taking often yielded handsome ransoms from the families of landlords and rich merchants. “Once we extracted over 40,000 silver dollars in three weeks” in Hunan province, remembered a hygienist named Chen. “It kept us going for quite a while! We had steamed rice three times a day, and pork and vegetables every day.”17 If families refused to pay after a certain amount of time, the Communists executed the hostages.This kind of behavior on the part of the Red Army made it easy for the Guomindang to portray the Communists as a bunch of “bandits,” and to justify reprisals by the Nationalist armies and local landlords when they retook an area. Hounded by Chiang Kai-shek’s 200,000-strong army, Mao’s troops tried to shake them in January 1935 by crisscrossing Sichuan and Guizhou provinces in southern China four times. In June, they entered the treacherous lands of Tibet where first Jiajin Mountain and then swampy, often impassable, grasslands awaited them. Chiang didn’t bother to follow, confident that the difficult natural conditions, the lack of food, and the hostility of the Tibetan people would finish them. Instead, he moved his forces to meet whoever survived the trek on the other side. He was almost right. The largest number of casualties incurred during the entire Long March took place on the Tibetan plateau. On Jiajin Mountain, hungry men and women wearing – if they had been fortunate – straw sandals and clad only in shirts struggled to reach the 12,000-foot peak. They encountered snow at 7,000 feet. Freezing and suffering from altitude sickness, many of them died. Hygienist Chen had tried to prepare for the terrible conditions by gathering up all the ginger and chili he could find and boiling it into a kind of tea. He gave some to all of the soldiers in his unit to provide some small measure of energy and to ward off the

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worst effects of the cold. He saved some of the chili for the climb and gave a small amount to anyone who fell into the snow and couldn’t go on. “It warmed them up a bit; but it was more to take their minds off the difficulty,” he explained. Everyone who received his remedy made it, but his supply was limited. “It took so little to save them,” he told Sun Shuyun tearfully in 2006. “But I had to watch them die before my eyes.”18 Upon their descent, Mao’s 1st Army met up with Zhang Guotao’s 4th Army and He Long’s 2nd Army to create a force of one hundred thousand soldiers. Wu Yuqing, who had joined Zhang’s army at the age of eleven as a member of the propaganda team, remembered her shock over the condition of Mao’s troops. “This was Mao’s army?” she cried, disbelieving. They looked more like beggars, wearing all kinds of clothes – some even had women’s trousers and shoes on, with a red scarf over their head. Their faces were covered with dust, black except for their teeth. Their hands were black too, but cracked into raw flesh, and their hair was long and straggly.With their beards unshaved, they looked frightening.19 But the worst was yet to come; the perilous grasslands, filled with swamps that took the lives of those unfamiliar with the routes of safe passage who stepped in the wrong place and drowned, still had to be negotiated. Amounting to roughly 220,000, the Tibetans who lived in the area fed themselves on grains and cattle.They harvested only once a year, and the crop had to last until the following harvest.The arrival of one hundred thousand communist troops, confiscating stores of grains and animals, threatened their very survival. In one village alone, the Red Army took 110 tons of stored barley. It killed thirty thousand yaks for the meat and hides. Soldiers also harvested what was in the fields, yielding more than four thousand tons of barley in Heishui County. Without the tools necessary to do the job it was hard going, made all the more so by Tibetan snipers whose accuracy from far off proved deadly. The Tibetans fought to protect their families from the prospect of starvation. The Panchen Lama, who, with the Dalai Lama, possessed the greatest power in the land, helped rouse them, exhorting the populace to “arm yourself, help the Nationalist troops, and prepare to defend our people against the evil enemy of our religion. Don’t believe their sweet propaganda! They will burn your house and destroy your family.” Chiang provided rifles and ammunition to the lamas to distribute and warned that anyone who aided the Communists or refused to fight them would be shot. The locals proved to be fierce antagonists, and their treatment of those they caught was horrific. Wu came upon a gruesome scene one day during the march through the grasslands: four naked soldiers hung from trees next to the river, all of them gutted, the woman’s breasts hacked off, and the genitals of the three men jammed into their mouths. The long journey across the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau reduced the ranks of the Red Army dramatically. When the 1st Corps hospital staff left Jiangxi in

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October 1934, it boasted a membership of twelve hundred; by the time it made it out of the grasslands, only two hundred of those remained. The supply unit of the same corps started with 100 and exited the grasslands with only twelve; nearly the entire company of guards lost their lives. Mao’s army entered the grasslands with ten thousand soldiers but exited with only four thousand. At the same time, the Red Army inflicted terrible harm on the Tibetans, as both Mao and Deng Xiaoping readily conceded. “When the Red Army marched north,” admitted Deng, “they really made the Tibetans suffer. It finished everything they had. They were badly done by. But we had no choice if we were going to preserve the Red Army,” he added. Mao asserted – ironically, given China’s invasion of Tibet after the Communists came to power in 1949 – that “one day, we must return to the Tibetans what we had to take from them.”20 When the Red Army came off the Tibetan Plateau on October 19, 1935, it set up camp at the Shaanxi Soviet in northern China. The situation remained difficult, and would become dire, as Chiang’s Nationalist forces continued to attack the Communists. One Guomindang ally, the warlord Zhang Zueliang (whom we met in Chapter 2, when he lost his base in Manchuria to the Japanese in 1930), sent his troops against the Communists, defeating them in a number of battles but suffering significant losses in the process. The danger became so acute that Mao informed communist leaders in Moscow that he would have to retreat from Shaanxi. In midNovember 1936, the Chinese Politburo ordered the Red Army to evacuate the area and move to either Hebei in the east or Henan and Hubei in the south. Then everything changed. Zhang Zueliang, impressed by the strength of the Communists and, more importantly, desirous of fighting the Japanese rather than fellow Chinese, switched sides, first providing resources to the Red Army and then sending some of his followers against Chiang Kai-shek. On December 12, 1936, those soldiers broke into the villa outside Xian where Chiang had taken up residence, chased him from the building, and captured the barefoot, pajama-clad, shivering Nationalist leader when they caught him hiding behind a snow-covered rock. The so-called “Xian incident,” through which Zhang had hoped to take leadership of China, induced merriment among the Communists when they learned of it shortly afterward; most importantly, negotiations resolving the hostage-taking of Chiang brought about a détente between the Chinese communist and nationalist factions. Not before Moscow had intervened, however. The Soviets reacted with fury to the kidnapping of Chiang. They continued to believe that he held the key to uniting China against the Japanese, and Stalin angrily insisted that Zhang’s “motive, whatever it was, can objectively only damage the anti-Japanese united front and help Japan’s aggression against China.” He ordered Mao to “take a decisive stand in favour of a peaceful resolution.”21 Mao sent Zhou Enlai to meet with emissaries of Zhang and Chiang, and over a two-week period they hammered out a solution. The terms of their agreement included the release of political prisoners, official recognition of the Communist Party, and the relocation of Nationalist troops from northwestern China. The abduction of Chiang marked a turning point in the

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fortunes of the Communist Party in China. Although he reneged on many of the terms of the agreement, he honored the commitment to cease operations against the Red Army, thus bringing the Long March to an end. The enemies buried their differences, and joined together in a united front against the Japanese, who issued a formal declaration of war against China in July 1937. The terms of the second United Front between the Nationalists and Communists were finalized a few months later. The remote location of Yan’an became the unlikely birthplace of one of the twentieth century’s most impactful revolutionary movements. As leftists fleeing Beijing and Shanghai poured into Yan’an, Mao studied Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism, and followed Japanese advances and events elsewhere in the newspapers. What became known as Mao Zedong Thought developed, as one historian explains, from “Mao’s simultaneous interpretation of Chinese history and China’s present through Marxist categories and the interpretation of Marxist categories through the specific historical situation of China” during the 1930s.22 The rural focus and Mao’s understanding of the relationship between theory and revolutionary practice comprised well known facets of it, but it consisted, at base, of an uncompromising anti-imperialism. At the Zunyi Conference, convened amid the Long March, Mao proposed that opposition to the Japanese, fighting the Nationalists, and transforming peasant society – in that order – should be the focus of CCP action if it survived. He continued to insist on prioritizing the struggle against Japanese imperialism and lambasted Chiang as “the most diligent trailblazer for Japan swallowing up China” throughout the dark days of 1935 and 1936. Mao placed the Japanese empire within the long view of capitalist imperialism and foreign intervention across Asia, and the CCP at the forefront of resistance against it. Stalin’s intervention in support of Chiang Kai-shek reflected yet another shift in Comintern policy. The appearance of Nazi Germany on the international stage shook the Soviets badly. They began to issue calls for collective security and to re-examine the Comintern’s “class against class” position. Beginning in mid-1934, the Comintern began to ease away from the dictates of the Third Period and to move toward a re-emphasis on building alliances with socialists and even bourgeois reformist groups that opposed fascism. In the years 1935–39, the Comintern focused its effort on creating a “united front against fascism.”

The Chinese communist challenge to gender In China, the conformation of gender drew in large part from the teachings of Confucius, formulated a millennium and half earlier but still resonating in the early part of the twentieth century. Confucianism has been held responsible for elaborating a gender system that presented women as weak and irrational, qualities that restricted them to a narrow sphere of life within the confines of home and family and kept them from participating in or contributing to developments in politics, culture, economics, or society. The attributes of strength, reason, and wisdom made men, by contrast, best suited to operate in the world of politics, scholarship, warfare,

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and economy. Like all gender ideologies based on opposites or polarities, this one paints an exaggerated picture of actual realities in China, but it nevertheless provided a framework within which expected norms of behavior for men and women were articulated. During the May Fourth movement of 1919–1921,23 feminists sought to reform marriage laws and to gain property and voting rights for women. They demanded access to jobs in the public sector and the prohibition of polygamy, concubinage, and prostitution. The women sought to create a society in which relations between men and women were more equal in the family, in society, in the economy, and in politics. As was the case in Europe, feminist reforms were sometimes ancillary to nationalist or communist goals. But the leadership of both the Nationalist and Communist parties recognized that their success in creating a national government depended upon their ability to mobilize women, and they were eager to support feminist demands and help create feminist organizations. The collapse of the Nationalist–Communist coalition in 1927 and the Japanese incursions into China during the 1930s cut short the feminist movement that had developed in the mid-1920s, although its efforts to challenge traditional patriarchy and transform gender relations continued to have effect. Women participating in the Long March, for instance, defied powerful constraints that in conventional society rendered their lives miserable. To take but one example, poor rural Han Chinese women could expect to be treated as little more than slaves and producers of children. Wu Yuqing, one marcher who joined the Communists as an elevenyear-old, had been sold into marriage by her father in exchange for opium, to which he was addicted. Her mother-in-law worked her like a dog. She “tied a rope around my waist and just pulled it tighter when I said I was hungry,” Wu recalled. “She worked me from dawn to dusk, with only one meal in between. And then she complained I ate too much. They treated their pigs better.” When Wu’s cousin, who worked for the Red Army and the local Soviet government, suggested she join them, Wu hesitated. “You have nothing to lose but the rope around your waist,” her cousin pointed out, persuading Wu to rethink things. “She made me see the absurdity of my life,” the young girl explained. Far too young to use a rifle or serve as a porter, she found work on the propaganda team, one of forty other girls her same age. The propagandists tailored messages to women who suffered under patriarchy, singing songs containing lyrics such as: “Before / women suffered like being fried in a pan; / Our fate changed with the Red Army. / Feet unbound, hair cut, / We became the same as men. / As men, we follow the army and conquer the world.”24 Conditions on the Long March tested the endurance and courage of the strongest people. For women, however, even the most basic of bodily functions posed extra difficulties.With little in the way of supplies, women found themselves having to improvise when they menstruated. Woman Wang, who became the commander of the 4th Army’s Women’s Regiment, told a researcher that she “dreaded” the arrival of her period, “since there was no paper, and cloth was a luxury, though she occasionally had some after ‘confiscations.’ She made do with stuffing leaves in

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her trousers, but sometimes she just had to let it run.” The embarrassment women suffered could be acute, as when one woman crossing a river stained the water red. A soldier thought she had been wounded, crying out to her, “Sister, sister, you’re bleeding.”25 In order to prevent this kind of mortification, authorities tried to make sure that women could ride a horse during the days of their periods. Rarely did this accommodation materialize, however, given the hardships of the trek, and Woman Wang, for her part, actually envied those women who could no longer menstruate owing to hunger, cold, and exhaustion. Relations between men and women on the Long March could be fraught, exacerbated by the prohibition against marchers bringing their partners with them. Wu Yuqing recalled that “the rule was very strict. . . . Only important men like Mao or Zhu De were allowed to have their women with them. Senior officers also took their pick. But nobody else was permitted.” Her propaganda group agitated against entangling liaisons, singing “Fluttering the red flag, and carrying five-foot rifles, we’re up before sunrise. Sisters of the Revolution: don’t love boys, love guns!” These restrictions ended up putting women at risk from frustrated men. Red Army commanders worked hard to limit the incidence of rape, whether of women marchers by their comrades or of local civilians by Red Army soldiers; they made rape an executable offense and punished other forms of  “unlawful acts against women” with a variety of sanctions. One officer, for example, Wu remembered, “tried his luck, and we never saw him again.”26 Wu and her comrades appreciated the Red Army’s strict policies that kept them safe (for she and many of them had direct experience of rape at the hands of enemy soldiers when they were captured). Gradually, as authorities brought the incidence of rape under control through discipline and punishment, restrictions loosened a bit. As long as women did not complain about the attentions of male officers, and as long as they kept their activities quiet – literally – Red Army commanders tended to look the other way. Inevitably, pregnancies resulted, bringing their own special hell with them. “It was tough enough to walk without any extra burden,” noted Woman Wang. “Imagine having a belly twice as big as a watermelon and trying to keep up with troops at the same time!”27 They couldn’t, and porters had to carry them on stretchers.When the porters ran off, other women had to take up the burden of carrying them. When it came time to deliver the baby, the progress of the march did not stop, not even for the most prominent of women, such as He Zizhen, Mao’s third wife from 1930 to 1937. She gave birth to three children on the march, and in each instance had to leave the child behind with a local family. In 1935, He Zizhen declined to name the little girl she delivered, knowing she would never see her again. An old woman with whom she left the baby at first refused to take her, saying she had no milk and could not care for her. The payment of eight silver dollars and, most persuasively, a stash of opium, convinced her otherwise. The wife of the director of the secret police went into labor as Chiang Kai-shek’s troops chased the 1st Army, his airplanes bombing the soldiers as they sought cover. The labor proved difficult: the baby would not come as its mother screamed in pain and rage at her husband. He ordered a regiment of soldiers to protect his wife against Chiang’s forces. After

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two hours of intense combat, the baby arrived. It was placed in the grass and its mother carried off on a stretcher to safety. The soldiers ordered to engage Chiang’s troops lost more than ten of their fellows; when they learned that these losses came in defense of a child who was then left to die, they exploded in rage. Many, including Wang – and, it turns out, the commanders of the 2nd and 4th Armies – believed that women should be able to keep their babies on the march. But Mao’s 1st Army rules prevailed in this instance. The cries of hungry or tired babies could reveal the location of troops, placing them in danger. Moreover, the need to feed more mouths placed an additional strain on already-depleted supplies. Many men objected to the presence of women on the Long March, fearing what would happen to them should they be captured by the enemy. Others believed that if the Nationalist forces realized they were fighting women, they would redouble their efforts so as to avoid the shame and humiliation of losing to female soldiers. In fact, women shaved their heads “so that the enemy wouldn’t know they were fighting women,” as Wu recalled. But she insisted that rather than make marchers vulnerable, “we are as good as men, if not better.” The addition of women to the ranks of the Red Army made it stronger, she argued. Women took on the burdens of portage when men ran off in the initial months, ensuring that vital supplies remained available to the troops. They recruited soldiers to its ranks as it made its way across the country, and they were the ones who convinced frightened villagers to take in ill and wounded troops who had to be left behind. Moreover, Wu asserted, women did better on the march than men. True, they didn’t face the same degree of combat, but even on the Tibetan Plateau, where no battles took place, fewer women died proportionately than men. “Women knew how to look after themselves,” she explained, and always kept the four implements with them that ensured their survival: a washbasin, a hefty stick, an animal skin, and a needle. And because they were smaller in size than the men, she believed, they didn’t need as much food or oxygen on the elevated altitude of the plateau. Thousands of men – bigger and stronger than she and her comrades – died in the snows of the plateau, but only a few women did. “Most of us had what was needed to keep going,” she said, simply.28 When the Communists came to power in 1949, they acknowledged their indebtedness to women in the movement in legal codes that gave women equal rights with men.

Black Bolsheviks: communism and black internationalism From its inception in 1919, the Third International espoused a forceful antiimperialism, an ironic position given the U.S.S.R.’s constant and frequently violent efforts to maintain its control of the lands and the people of the old Russian empire. In 1928, the sixth congress of the Comintern reaffirmed its commitment to the liberation of colonized populations throughout the world and of the subjugated black masses in the United States and South Africa, directing communists to increase their outreach to “negro toilers” in “backward” areas of Africa as well as in Europe. In practice, the small size of the communist parties of Britain, France,

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Belgium, and the Netherlands, racism among rank-and-file European members, and more repressive policing practices in the colonies greatly limited communist organizing efforts among colonial workers in Africa and the Caribbean. The sixth congress’s directive that national communist parties and Comintern functionaries treat socialists and race-based organizations as class enemies exacerbated the difficulties facing those who sought to use the networks and resources of the Communist International to militate for racial and colonial liberation. Afro-Caribbeans and, to a lesser extent, Africans in the metropoles of London, Paris, and Berlin worked to organize black and Asian workers, especially colonial seamen, in Europe; they extended the reach of the Comintern in new directions. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Trinidadian George Padmore and the Barbadians Arnold Ward and Chris Braithwaite (alias Jones) from the British Caribbean played active roles in the international communist movement in Europe. They exploited the institutions and infrastructure of the Comintern, CPGB, and nonaligned elements of the radical left to forge networks among people of African descent in particular. Padmore traveled from the United States to Germany in the summer of 1929, where he met the Kenyan Jomo Kenyatta; the pair made their way to Moscow together later that year.The Red International of Trade Unions (or Profintern) appointed Padmore head of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, commonly known as the Negro Bureau, formed in Hamburg in 1930. From there, Padmore directed its organizing efforts, shuttling between Germany and Moscow, London, and Paris. As one historian of the period observes, “it is no exaggeration to suggest that Padmore himself became the Negro Committee in the few short years of its greatest prominence.”29 He edited and published perhaps the era’s most important black internationalist publication, the Negro Worker, which circulated clandestinely around the globe in the early 1930s, often hidden among Christian missionary tracts. In Paris, he developed a close friendship and working relationship with the Soudanese communist Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté. Because of Kouyaté’s influence with the organization, by 1929 the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre was accepting monthly contributions from the party to help support its journal, La Race Nègre, and underwrite its other anti-imperialist activities. Other black workers and agitators in Paris also attempted to use the French Communist Party; at least nine African or Antillean party members met regularly during the early 1930s, forming a communist cell within the recently formed Union des Travailleurs Nègres. Nevertheless, the “very unsatisfactory Negro work” of the French Communist Party dismayed visiting black communists such as the African American William L. Patterson.30 During the mid-1930s, communists in France increasingly argued that if the colonies attained their freedom immediately, they would only be more susceptible to the predations of fascist Italy and Germany, deepening suspicions among Africans and Antilleans regarding European communists’ commitment to anti-colonialism. The British branch of the League Against Imperialism became the center of a great deal of anti-colonial and anti-racist activity until 1937, representing something of an exception to the factionalism of the Comintern’s Third Period. Under

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the former diplomat Reginald Bridgeman, it collaborated with liberals, socialists, and Asian, Caribbean, and African agitators; it helped lead the campaigns in defense of both the Scottsboro boys in the United States and the Meerut defendants in India. The CPGB delegated responsibility for organizing colonial workers in Britain to the LAI. In 1931, Ward formed the Negro Welfare Association (NWA) with the support of the LAI. He oversaw its political and social welfare activities as secretary general until 1936, and he coordinated the greater part of the Scottsboro agitation in London. Braithwaite, a former dockworker who lived with his white wife in Stepney, served on the NWA’s executive committee as well and ran the LAIaffiliated Colonial Seamen’s Association. The NWA was also active among Africans in Britain, including members of the West African Students’ Union and League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) through whom Ward established contacts in West Africa. Several dozen Africans traveled to Moscow to attend the KUTVU during the early years of the decade. The Sierra Leonean trade unionist and journalist I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson spent several months in Moscow. Kenyatta made a trip to the Soviet Union in 1932–1933. Both he and Wallace-Johnson continued to publish in communist outlets through the mid-1930s. A younger group of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans, became involved in the Communist Party during the late 1930s and 1940s. The Ghanaian Desmond Buckle, who had been active in the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) in the mid-1930s, became the first African member of the CPGB in 1937. After attending Durham University, the Barbadian Peter Blackman obtained a position as a missionary in the Gambia, but he quit because of the racism he experienced at the hands of his colleagues. After he settled in London in 1938, he gravitated to Dr. Harold Moody and the LCP, becoming its general secretary and the editor of its journal, The Keys, for a time. As he moved farther to the left to the Negro Welfare Association, Blackman eventually broke with the more moderate LCP. Others, such as Padmore, Ward, and Braithwaite, ended their relationship with the Comintern and the CPGB following the announcement of the new Soviet Popular Front policy, whose adamant anti-fascist position had the effect of sacrificing anti-imperialism for anti-fascist solidarity in Europe. The French Communist Party expelled Kouyaté for pursuing a pan-Africanist approach to anti-colonial organizing, rather than following party dictates. Wallace-Johnson and Joseph Ekwe Bile from the French colony of Cameroon renounced their communist affiliations by 1938. The history of white settler colonialism in the United States and South Africa, which culminated in the creation of “white men’s countries,” presented a distinct challenge to communist anti-imperialism.The Comintern’s solution to the “Negro Question” came in the form of the sixth congress’s statement on the “Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies.” It mirrored the Soviet Union’s nationalities policy by calling for autonomous black republics in South Africa and the U.S. South. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921, enjoyed a membership of nearly three thousand predominately black or “coloured” (i.e. mixed race) members by the end of the decade. Josiah Gumede, the president

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of African National Congress from 1927 to 1930, collaborated with the CPSA; several other high-ranking ANC figures such as Moses Kotane, J. B. Marks, and Edwin Mofutsanyane also belonged to the CPSA. By 1930, black South Africans were assuming more leadership positions within the CPSA. Membership dropped significantly during the early 1930s, however, owing to internal turmoil and outside criticism caused by the “class against class” policy. In South Africa, the Comintern goal of a “Native Republic” prevailed. It entailed the creation of “an independent South African native republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ government.”31 Although this approach prioritized addressing the suffering and exploitation of the black majority in South Africa, it also divided the party’s ranks. The much larger Industrial and Commercial Union representing black African, Asian, and coloured workers denounced communists for inciting “subject races like the Natives to act unconstitutionally,” while the then-moderate ANC conceptualized freedom in terms on nonracial equality and did not endorse mass political action on the part of the black South African majority. Party membership only rebounded towards the end of the decade during the Popular Front years, when the CPSA, with fascism on the march internationally and locally, showed greater willingness to cooperate with non-communist groups. An analog to the “Native South African Republic,” the so-called “Black Belt thesis” guided communist organizing efforts among African Americans in the United States during the Comintern’s Third Period. Party leaders attempted to thwart what they deemed “racial chauvinism” and “petit bourgeois nationalism.” Nevertheless, anti-racist and black internationalist themes suffused the rhetoric of African Americans such as James W. Ford,William L. Patterson, a lawyer who joined the party in the mid-1920s amid the florescence of the Harlem Renaissance, and Richard B. Moore, an Afro-Caribbean migrant to the United States, who insinuated themselves into the party’s structure and culture. Harry Haywood, a member of the radical African Blood Brotherhood in New York, traveled to Moscow, where he met and befriended James La Guma, a coloured South African communist of Malagasy and French parentage, and Albert Nzula, the secretary of the CPSA. Unlike some other African American communists, not to mention members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Garvey movement, Haywood embraced the goal of a “Black Belt Republic” in the United States. He drew parallels between the predicament of African Americans in the United States and colonized people around the globe, arguing that the oppressed black population in the American South comprised a “nation within a nation” because of the ways that class exploitation operated through the modality of race. The “Black Belt” thesis necessitated that the “Black peasantry” in the Jim Crow South become a focus of their work. In 1933, Haywood and several other New York-based black communists toured the southern United States, meeting with local communists in Birmingham, Memphis, and elsewhere who braved the constant threat of horrifying violence.32 Communists everywhere were overwhelmingly male, but the emphasis on cross-racial solidarity and sexual egalitarianism in communist ideology made it an

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appealing alternative to the largely middle-class, white-dominated feminist and suffrage organizations for some women of color in the United States and South Africa. In South Africa, Josie Palmer (or Josie Mpama) was the first woman of color (she identified as “coloured”) to play a major role in the party. She was joined in 1937 by Epainette Moerane, a modern “New African” woman who lived in her own flat inside the hostel of the American Missionary Society in Durban.When not teaching at the Taylor Street Secondary school, she threw herself into activist work; she helped organize a rent boycott, distributed copies of the communist paper, Inkululeko, and ran the party’s night school, where thousands of illiterate black workers learned to read from teachers like herself.33 The two other influential women within the CPSA were white: Mary Wolton and Ray Alexander (born Rachel Alexandrovich, later Ray Simons). Mary and her husband Douglas Wolton lived in Moscow in 1930. When the Comintern ordered him back to South Africa later that year, she remained to study at the International Lenin School. Upon her return to South Africa, she, her husband, and Lazar Bach dominated the CPSA for a time, leading the purge of “right wing, social democratic, and vacillating elements” after the introduction of the “Native Republic” program.34 After police arrested her at a demonstration, the South African government tried, convicted, and banished her under the Riotous Assemblies Act; she left South Africa in 1933. Ray Alexander had immigrated to South Africa from Latvia in 1929 as a teenager and soon became active in left-wing and tradeunionist circles in Cape Town. In 1935, she became secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Union, and at the sixth congress of the CPSA the following year she called attention to the growing numbers of women in the textile and leather industries, urging the party to give increased attention to women workers.With Alexander and Palmer leading the way, the women’s section of CPSA seized upon issues of urgent importance to African women in the urban townships, such as the tightening of restrictions on women’s mobility and police raids on African women beer brewers and shebeen operators. It linked African women’s protests against curfews, passes, licensed canteens, and rising food costs to a wider struggle alongside communist men against the white supremacist state. A piece in Inkululeko in 1932 urged Toiling native women, white working women, realise your interests, wake up to fight for better conditions side by side with your husbands, fathers, and brothers; only by a united front can you get rid of all the exploitation which you suffer under capitalism and where you as women are the greatest sufferers.35 Although the CPSA’s leadership consistently called on women to serve as adjuncts to their male partners and colleagues, individual women played a more prominent role within it than in any other political organization, and through their labors, the party fostered the goal of organizing women across racial divisions on a broad national level during the 1930s. For many hardened communists such as Harry Haywood in the United States, the about-face involved in the new Soviet Popular Front policy was a bitter pill to

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swallow. Haywood’s commitment to black self-determination in the United States as an extension of communist internationalism soon brought him into conflict with the CPUSA leadership, which quietly jettisoned the idea of a Black Belt Republic and ousted him. At the same time, the relaxing of the previously antagonistic stance toward other anti-racist and anti-colonial groups helped bring new figures into the movement. Paul and Eslanda Robeson drifted toward communist internationalism, and Paul spent much of the late 1930s giving benefit concerts across Britain to aid the victims of fascism in Europe.The Popular Front years saw more African American women enter the CPUSA and become an active and vocal force within it. A second generation of black women, including social workers, domestic workers, and bohemian intellectuals such as Louise Thompson, Audley Moore, and Thyra Edwards, had eschewed the traditional centers of organizational life – the church, women’s clubs, and liberal civil rights’ groups – and had entered the party in the early 1930s at the height of the Depression, traveling to Moscow and participating in the Scottsboro agitation. These black women radicals interpreted the Black Belt thesis through the travails of poor, working women of color whom they argued could be mobilized into a vanguard in the struggle for socialist revolution and black self-determination, while attending to the bread-and-butter issues most pertinent to their community in Harlem. Born in Trinidad, Claudia Jones (née Claudia Cumberbatch) was among a new influx of black women into the communist left during the second half of the 1930s. By decade’s end, she had emerged as one of the CPUSA’s most energetic and promising theoreticians and organizers, helping to form what one historian calls a “black Popular Front,” combining “black civil rights and anti-colonial activists” and “anti-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-racist politics,” and injecting it with an outspoken feminist edge. If anti-fascism and anti-racism initially attracted these women to the party, they challenged the gender chauvinism of their male peers, black and white, and transformed its message and potential, extending its reach in new areas of black life. For Jones and her black women collaborators, attention to and elevating the status of working women of color would remain the litmus test for transformative political projects for years to come.36 *** The apparent successes of the Soviet project not only inspired millions of its own citizens but also captivated observers around the world, especially as the Great Depression ravaged the major capitalist powers and their empires and the rise of fascism sparked a resurgence of xenophobic nationalism and imperialist expansion which threatened to spark another global war.Yet the dramatic changes within the Soviet Union during the 1930s, from forced collectivization in the countryside and Central Asia to rapid industrialization and urbanization, came at a catastrophic price and masked Stalin’s ruthless authoritarianism and his own imperial ambitions. Relations between the Soviet state and adherents of communist internationalism and communist parties elsewhere were often tense and contradictory. The Soviets contributed greatly to the development of the Chinese Communist Party, but their

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obstinance and ignorance of local conditions then exacerbated Chinese communists’ vulnerability to the Nationalists’ campaigns to eradicate them. The Comintern remained committed to anti-imperialism and anti-racism through most of the 1930s and pressured national parties in Europe and the United States to extend their organizing efforts to non-white and colonial workers. However, the “class against class” policy of the Third Period fractured tenuous coalitions and connections with other leftist and anti-colonial movements. Stalin’s reversal of course in the Popular Front period once again opened opportunities for cooperation across political differences in opposition to fascism but at the cost of anti-imperialism, leaving many committed communists in the colonial world and the United States feeling betrayed.

Notes 1 Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 207–209; Sarah I. Cameron, “The Hungry Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Famine, 1921–1934” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2010); Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early U.S.S.R. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 2 Quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47. 3 Ibid., 43. 4 See Robert Conquest, “Excess Deaths in the Soviet Union, New Left Review I/219, September–October 1996 (https://newleftreview.org/I/219/robert-conquest-excessdeaths-in-the-soviet-union); Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5 Quoted in Beryl Williams, “Kollantai and After: Women in the Russian Revolution,” in Women, State and Revolution: Essays in Power and Gender in Europe Since 1789, ed. Sian Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 76. 6 Quoted in Thomas G. Schrand,“Socialism in One Gender: Masculine Values in the Stalin Revolution,” in Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 201. 7 See Anna Krylova, “Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professional Violent Women-Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia,” Gender and History 16, no. 3 (November 2004): 626–653. 8 Quoted in John Callaghan, “Storm Over Asia: Comintern Colonial Policy in the Third Period,” in In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period, ed. Mathew Worley (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 28–29. 9 Yuri Slezkine, “The U.S.S.R. as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 313. 10 Ali Raza, “Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Meerut and the Creation of ‘Official’ Communism in India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 3 (2013): 316–330, 327. 11 Ibid., 324. 12 Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 172–173. 13 Quoted in Raza, “Separating the Wheat from the Chaff,” 328. 14 Quoted in Michael Goebel, “ ‘The Capital of Men without a Country’: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris,” American Historical Review 121, n. 5 (December 2016): 1461–1462.

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15 Quoted in Sun Shuyun, The Long March:The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 102–103. 16 Ibid., 67. 17 Ibid., 91–92. 18 Ibid., 150. 19 Ibid., 153. 20 Ibid., 173. 21 Ibid., 215. 22 Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 53–54. 23 Kam Louie, “Chinese, Japanese and Global Masculine Identities,” in Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, ed. Kam Louie and Morris Low (London: Routledge, 2003), 9. 24 Quoted in Shuyun, The Long March, 130. 25 Shuyun, The Long March, 120. 26 Quoted in Ibid., 131. 27 Ibid., 120. 28 Ibid., 133–134. 29 Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, 68. 30 Quoted in Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 158. 31 Quoted in Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London: Onyx Press, 1982), 45. 32 Harry Haywood, A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood, ed. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 192. 33 Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki:The Dream Deferred ( Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007), 34. 34 Quoted in Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa, 50. 35 Ibid., 55. 36 Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937– 1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 19; Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), Ch. 3 and 4.

7 GLOBAL FASCISM

Together with communism, fascism put an indelible stamp on the politics of the 1930s. Appearing first in Italy in the years immediately following the Great War, fascism sought to provide a “third way” between the forces of liberal capitalism and those of communism. Fascist doctrine, its ideologists declared, offered the means to heal the societal fractures brought about by liberal capitalism’s emphasis on the individual and individual rights and communism’s stress on conflict between classes; it eschewed parliamentary democracy as divisive and trade unionism and/or socialism as theft. It promoted a revolution in society and culture – one that would create a “new man” of courage, daring, and action who rejected rational thought, materialism, and egalitarianism in favor of determination, will, and self-sacrifice for the state. Fascism focused on the nation as a whole, subsuming individuals and classes within its – often exclusively racial – framework. Authoritarian in nature, fascism demanded complete obedience to and worship of an all-powerful, even mythic leader who embodied the essence and history of a nation’s people. Whether il Duce in Italy, der Führer in Germany, el Jefe in Spain, or as many historians would claim, the Showa emperor in Japan, this superhuman figure possessed the ability simply to know what the needs of his – and this was certainly a “he” – people were and to look after them by fostering imperial expansion and war. A new “civic religion” sought to induce a loyalty to and faith in the mythic leader and the nation he personified. Fascism glorified violence and an aggressive masculinity in service to the nation; it advanced a maternal femininity charged with supplying the nation with the offspring it would need to further its racial, imperial, and military destiny against “others” defined as inferior and dangerous. It mobilized mass political movements on the basis of its ideology and promises. Though individual fascist regimes might differ in certain respects, all of them promulgated extreme nationalism, totalitarianism, racism, and expansionist war. That said, some movements and governments that promoted nationalism, totalitarianism, racism, and expansionist war probably should not be characterized as

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fascist. It is perhaps more useful to think of a continuum of far right anti-liberal, anti-communist movements that shared certain elements but not others. Authoritarian conservatism, for instance, espoused anti-communist and anti-parliamentary positions, but it also embraced the institution of monarchy, traditional religion, and traditional social structures. Unlike fascism, it sought to preserve these things, not eliminate them. The radical right, on the other hand, was more in line with fascism in its endorsement of militarism and imperialism, but, like authoritarian conservatism, relied on traditional elites and institutions such as the military to further its agenda. That said, the quintessential fascists, Mussolini and Hitler, struck deals or made accommodations with monarchy, religion, and traditional military elites in their bids for power. It is important to recognize that the differences and similarities in fascism and other far right ideologies were a matter of degree, often, and that the movements could readily cooperate with one another on the basis of shared goals. Even within the regimes we identify as clearly fascist, significant differences persisted, sometimes so much so as to get in the way of any natural alliance between them. Italian fascists and German National Socialists – Nazis – for instance, held incompatible positions on a number of issues, most especially when it came to anti-Semitism. As we will see below, anti-Semitism played a central role in both Hitler’s rise to power and his plans for Germany’s future domination of the world. Italian fascists did not, until very late in the 1930s, espouse that particular kind of racial hatred; indeed, the Italian fascist party enjoyed a level of Jewish membership proportionally larger than the Jewish presence in the population of the country as a whole. Japanese fascists and rightists similarly eschewed anti-Semitic rhetoric and doctrine till very late in the game. This is not to say that Italian and Japanese ideologies were not racist; they were. But the German emphasis on anti-Jewish action placed difficulties in the way of Nazis’ efforts to establish a relationship with the other two regimes.These would ultimately be overcome by 1936, but only because the common threats posed to German, Italian, and Japanese aims by the Soviet Union, Britain, and France outweighed their differences.

Italy and Germany In Italy and in Germany, fascists come to power on the basis of mass support. In Italy, a variety of middle-class interests gave their support to the Fascist Party. The country had been hurt badly by depression as early as 1919, and a rash of strikes exacerbated middle-class fears of revolution. Under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascists promised to defend against working-class revolution; black-shirted fascists attacked socialists and impressed many with their willingness to take action where others seemed merely to shrug their shoulders. Business leaders appreciated their anti-strike stance and supported their efforts. After winning a number of local elections by promising to end class conflict through the creation of national unity, Mussolini felt strong enough to force the issue. In September 1922, he began to demand a role in government. In October 1922, at the head of some fifty thousand Blackshirts, he marched on Rome and took the city. When the prime minister resigned, King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government. It took

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two years, but by the beginning of 1925, he established a dictatorship, abolishing parliamentary government and eliminating opposition through violent means. The Italian government ruled by decree, and now appointed previously elected officials such as mayors, but unlike German National Socialism, which we will discuss below, Italian fascism left many economic, political, and civic institutions intact. The monarch remained in place as head of state; civil servants did not, for the most part, lose their positions; the courts largely continued to operate as they had earlier. The army retained its independence and freedom of action. The Catholic Church, as the result of a concordat signed with Mussolini in 1929, regained its official place in the state in return for its tacit recognition of the fascist government. Mussolini had come to power by means of a series of compromises with a variety of state institutions, and his position depended upon maintaining those compromises. This situation helped to undermine the ability of il Duce to exercise absolute power, despite the fact that fascist leaders began to speak of the totalitarian nature of the Italian state. In the effort to unify the Italian people and in furtherance of its expansionist and militaristic goals, the fascist government promoted the so-called cult of Rome. Determined to wear the mantle of the ancient imperial giant, the regime adopted numerous Roman symbols and objects. The most ubiquitous – and that from which the term fascism derived – was the fasces, the bundle of rods surrounding an axe that was carried by the attendants and bodyguards of Roman magistrates. It represented unity – the sticks bound together – and power, and it appeared everywhere throughout the nation.The cult of Rome undergirded the cult of Mussolini himself, the genius responsible for creating and protecting the “new era” in which unity, stability, economic security, and imperial glory triumphed over the failures of the liberal past and staved off the threats of the communist present. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party enjoyed little support for most of the 1920s.With the arrival of the Depression, however, the Nazis saw a rapid growth in electoral success: in 1932, the party won 37% of the vote, commanding the support of significant portions of both the middle and working classes. Much of Hitler’s success stemmed from the failures of the Weimar government, which had from its very inception had been identified with German defeat and humiliation. Established by the military in November 1918 to negotiate an armistice with the Allied powers (because they believed a republic headed by liberals would be able to obtain better terms than a monarchy controlled by a military dictatorship), the republic was dependent upon the army for its support. Liberals and socialists from the Social Democratic party who dominated the government faced opposition from a variety of interests throughout the country. They were regarded by a significant portion of influential German public opinion as alien and unGerman by virtue of their political ideologies, liberalism being identified with revolutionary France and socialism being associated with Bolshevik Russia. The Junker aristocracy, which controlled the bureaucracy, and a broad swathe of German nationalists and conservatives were autocratic and anti-liberal by inclination; the military found it almost impossible to support a government that had signed away Germany’s military power in the

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Versailles Treaty. Large, semi-feudal landowners in the eastern regions feared that land reforms initiated by Weimar would cause them to lose their great estates and the impoverished agrarian workforce that labored on them. Large industrial concerns believed that rule by the Social Democrats would result in higher wages for workers, more activist unions, increased taxation, and even the nationalization of industry. The Nazis promised different things to different constituencies: to the middleand lower-middle-classes and farmers, they presented themselves as the protectors of small businesses against both large capitalists and labor unions; to business leaders, they offered protection from organized labor, for which they were given financial support. The upper-middle classes in Germany saw in Nazism the means by which communism could be defeated. By far the most visceral appeal of the Nazis derived from their depiction of the Weimar government as the agent responsible for all of Germany’s problems, a situation, Hitler charged, resulting from the “stab in the back” inflicted on the nation by the so-called “November criminals,” the men who had signed the armistice in November 1918. Right up until the very end of the war, military leaders had assured the country that victory was just a matter of time; defeat came as an incredible shock to the German populace. It was not difficult for them to believe Hitler’s assertions that the military effort had been undermined by the civilian government comprised of liberals and socialists, code words, for Hitler and for many other Germans, for “Jews.” The hyperinflation of 1922–1924 had the effect of wiping out the savings of the middle classes in Germany, turning them away from the government they held responsible for it and toward the nationalist conservative parties. The Depression threatened many middle- and lower-middle-class groups with a loss of status, again making the radical right much more appealing to them. Hitler won their votes because he promised to restore Germany to the greatness that had been its destiny until it was stabbed in the back – he would do so by re-fighting the Great War, only this time, in his mind, doing it right. In Hitler’s mind, this presupposed the removal of the Jews, which would restore national unity, thereby allowing Germany to expand eastward, as it would have done in World War I had not German unity been destroyed by the Jews. With a plurality – though not a majority – of votes in the Reichstag after the 1932 election, the Nazi Party could claim a wide constituent base. President Paul von Hindenburg, looking to co-opt the Nazis into the broader radical right, appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933; new elections were to be held on March 5. On February 27, a fire destroyed the Reichstag, a situation Hitler seized upon to enhance his power. Blaming the fire on communists, he issued a number of emergency decrees curtailing the rights of communists and other political parties. When the elections of March returned a majority of nationalists and Nazis, Hitler demanded and received the power to rule by decree for the next four years. This so-called Enabling Act, passed on March 23, 1933, with the support of all the political parties except the Social Democrats and the Communists, who had been barred from participating in the vote, provided the legal means by which Hitler

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and the Nazi Party disarmed all of their opponents and established the totalitarian Third Reich (“third empire,” following the first Reich of the Holy Roman Empire and the second Reich of the kaisers, from 1870 to 1918). In May, the headquarters of all the trade unions were closed down and their leaders arrested. The Social Democratic party was outlawed and its assets seized; under pressure, other political parties disbanded voluntarily. In July, Hitler announced that the Nazi Party was the only legal party in the Reich. When President Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler took for himself the office and powers of the presidency, which a plebiscite of the German people ratified by a vote of 38.5 million in favor to 7.5 million opposed. When the members of the armed forces swore their allegiance to him, as opposed to the German nation, Hitler’s power, legally obtained, was absolute. Any who attempted to challenge it would be incarcerated in concentration or slave labor camps, which had been opened up as early as 1933. The Nazis moved quickly to exclude Jews from participating in national or civic affairs, removing them from public office and professional positions and seizing their wealth. In September 1935, the Nuremberg laws defined who was and who was not a Jew and decreed what Jews could and could not do: they could not marry or have extramarital sexual relations with Germans; they could not employ German women under the age of 45 in their households; they lost the status and rights of citizenship; they could not work in civil service positions or hold jobs in professions regulated by the government such as education or medicine. Stormtroopers – the SA – set upon individual Jews in the street and encouraged others to follow suit. Evicted from their homes and forced to live with others in cramped quarters, unable to secure sufficient food, Jews suffered a kind of social death. In November 1938, systemized persecution of the Jews began with Krystallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass – when the SA set fire to thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues, killed ninety-one Jews, and beat many thousands more. These actions, a mere foretaste of what was to come, received the approbation of a broad sector of the German population, who had come to regard Jews as not deserving of life. Those who might object were persuaded by the terror implemented by the SA and the SS (secret police) to refrain from doing so. Fascists argued that only “pure” racial groups would triumph in this battle; the fact that Germany found itself defeated in war and humiliated in peace could only be attributed to racial deterioration. Nature forbade interspecies mixing, and condemned the weak to perdition, a set of natural laws, the Nazis insisted, that Germans had forgotten and violated. The degeneration that had resulted, they argued, was the fault of Jews. For the Nazis, the evidence of that degeneration was no better displayed than in the industrial cities of Germany, where rootlessness, individualism, and atomization prevailed and where the liberal policies of Weimar had allowed the urban environment to be further degraded. As Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg put it, today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the

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threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos.1 Those circumstances, people like Rosenberg argued, reflected the presence of Jews, originally a nomadic “desert-dwelling” people who had no sense of permanence on or ties to the land. By contrast, the German race, the Volk, possessed a close and unique tie to the land, to Heimat: the “essence” of the Volk could easily be regarded as their boundedness to nature. If German greatness were to be achieved, a return to nature, to the land, was necessary. A healthy racial stock of small peasant farmers would counteract and ultimately eliminate the diseased Jewish creations of industry and urbanization, and this depended upon gaining for Germany sufficient land – living space or lebensraum – on which those pure Germans could be settled. Without it, racial extinction at the hands of the Jews threatened the German nation. All this crystallized in a program promoted by the Nazis under the slogan of “blood and soil” (Blut und Bogen). The brainchild of Reichsminister for food and agriculture, Richard Walther Darré, who went on to become the Reichsbauernfuhrer (leader of the peasantry) and to head the SS’s Race and Settlement Office, “blood and soil” formulated an ideology that both lay behind and justified the worst of the Nazi actions. “Blood and soil” advocates – and there were many among the Nazi leadership – saw the return of Germans to the land as the key to restoring Germany to racial health and to power. By bringing Germans back from the unhealthy urban cesspools and establishing them on the land as small farmers, by re-rooting them, their “blood,” onto the land, the “soil,” the proper natural order could be re-established and German greatness revived. Freed from contamination from foreign, unGerman, Jewish influences, the naturally superior German stock would thrive. But Germany, especially after the depredations of the Versailles Treaty, which detached from Germany a great deal of territory and imposed upon other areas of the country a foreign occupation force, did not possess sufficient land to resettle all those people, and here is where the drive for lebensraum, for living space, came into play. Expansion to the east would eliminate inferior Slavic peoples from perfectly good land and allow Germans to settle on it. “Blood and soil,” this almost religious faith in nature’s capacity to revivify German greatness, in other words, wasn’t merely compatible with expansion to the east to obtain living space; it served also to compel and then to justify the military invasion and takeover of Eastern Europe.

“Universal fascism” Mussolini initially believed fascism to be uniquely and exclusively Italian, an ideology particular to his country and not exportable to other peoples or nations. He held this position as late as March 1932, but very soon afterwards he began to articulate a different view. “In a decade Europe will be fascist,” he declared in October 1932 in Milan, and before long he was boasting that the twentieth century would be the century of fascism. His National Fascist Party’s newspaper, Gerarchia – Hierarchy – titled

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its October 1932 issue the “Universal Mission of Rome”; in it, Mussolini laid out his plan for bringing the east and the west together in a spiritual and moral alliance. Two years later, il Duce celebrated the progress made by the movement. “Between 1929 and today,” he crowed, “fascism has evolved from an Italian phenomenon to a universal one.”2 He authorized the founding of the Center for International Fascist Studies and the Committees of Action for the Universality of Rome (CAUR) in 1933; CAUR, in the view of one prominent historian of fascism, served as a kind of “Fascist International” not unlike that of the Bolsheviks.3 A number of government publications broadcast the work of universalization, including the gathering of delegates from thirteen European countries at CAUR’s Fascist Congress in Montreux, Switzerland in 1934. This attendance constituted something of a disappointment, as CAUR had earlier in the year identified what it considered fascist movements in thirty-nine countries – all of Europe with the exception of Yugoslavia, six in Latin America, five in Asia, and a number in the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. These incipient organizations looked to Italy to provide the model for their local movements. Mussolini encouraged them in their efforts as part of his universalizing scheme. The Great Depression played a significant role in making fascism an appealing ideology to many people across the globe. Fascist movements – though not governments, importantly, which were largely in the hands of conservative authoritarians or the radical right – sprang up in countries ranging from the Americas to Europe to the Middle East and Africa to Asia: the Blueshirts of Ireland had counterparts in the Goldshirts of Mexico; the Greenshirts of Brazil; the White-, Grey-, and Ironshirts of Syria; the Blue- and Greenshirts of Egypt; the Tanshirts of Lebanon; the Whiteshirts of Iraq; Greyshirts of South Africa; and the Blueshirts of Nationalist China and Korea. Italy’s push to universalize its movement derived also from its hopes and intentions of expanding imperially, especially in Africa and Asia. It was particularly keen to strengthen ties with fascist elements in Japan, as the creation of a foreign office file on Fascismo Giapponese in 1932 attests.The Italian ambassador to Japan sent regular reports back to Rome detailing the increased support Italian fascism enjoyed among the populace. “Healthy public opinion understands the nature of Italian Fascism,” he cabled in March 1932. “It continues to gain sympathy, and the number of its supporters is rising continuously.” A year later the embassy informed the foreign office that Italian tourists enjoyed a warm reception as they travelled the country. “Japan has recently witnessed a strong increase in interest in Italian Fascism; accordingly, the country’s population generally views Italian tourists with enthusiasm and welcomes them,” it asserted.4 Fascist Party publications began to pay very close attention to developments in Japan as they sought to advance the cause of universal fascism. Sometimes they liked what they saw; other times they lamented what they regarded as Japan’s “pseudo fascism,” variations particular to Japan that bore little resemblance to doctrine and practices under Italian fascism. Mussolini’s 1932 assertions of the universalization of fascism became known in Japan within days of his speeches; they arrived to a largely enthusiastic reception,

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resonating powerfully with a public that had greeted the invasion of Manchuria with elation and would regard Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in February 1933 with only slightly less approbation. This was not Japan’s first exposure to fascist ideology – during the 1920s, Japanese had read and commented extensively on Mussolini and his movement – but it did mark a heightened interest in things fascist. Nor was fascism foreign to Japan. In early 1932, the Japanese Fascist League put out a new monthly publication titled Fasshizumu, in which it defined Japanese fascism as above all, a (popular) nationalism deriving from Japanese consciousness, a national movement and a reform movement to strengthen social justice. It also resolutely faces the world as a nationalist movement which speaks majestically to the Japanese nation, the Japanese and Japan.5 Historians have debated the existence of fascism in Japan for over seventy years. Interestingly, historians of Europe have provided the most vociferous denial of the applicability of the term to Japan, while historians of Japan have generally found it appropriate and apposite. Those who question point to the absence of a dictator, the lack of a mass movement, and the continued existence of parliamentary government. Proponents counter that Italian, German, and Japanese “movements shared fundamental ideological characteristics, influenced each other, and drew inspiration from each other’s successes.” If we insist on a Eurocentric focus when it comes to fascism, they argue, we not only miss out on “the significant parallels that seemed obvious to most contemporary observers,” but we also cannot truly understand “the power and impact of this important world political current of the 1930s.”6 Even these proponents of Japanese fascism concede that it differed from European varieties, amending the term to “military fascism” or “emperor-system fascism.” As the former suggests, the most active fascists in Japan in the early 1930s were to be found among army officers who had little interest in building up a popular political movement. Organizing themselves in such groups as the Cherry Blossom Society, they looked to the emperor to undergird an effective authoritarian government. They sought to advance their aims through assassinations of political leaders, hoping thereby to foment risings by the military rank and file. In their most consequential action of the early 1930s, they provoked the Mukden Incident in Manchuria, setting off the invasion of the province and the establishment of Manchukuo (see Chapter 2). This marked the beginning of what would be a series of aggressions against China, culminating in out-and-out invasion of the mainland in 1937. It was followed by the assassination of the prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, in 1932, commencing a period of profound political instability that would end in a virtual military dictatorship. Parliamentary institutions remained in place, but power rested in the hands of a military elite that would dictate events in the name of the emperor, who spent much of his day ensconced in the laboratory he had had built in order to study marine biology and taxonomy.With the invasion of China in 1937, the prime minister, Prince Konoye, implemented the National

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Mobilization Law of 1938, placing nearly total control over civil and economic matters in the hands of the government. Japanese who were sympathetic to fascism nonetheless insisted that neither the Italian nor the German version of fascism fit Japanese circumstances. In fact, following the invasion of Manchuria, European fascism fell so far out of favor that it could be dangerous to one’s reputation to use the term. Much of this demurral was driven by a “revolt against the West,” as two prominent Japanese historians term it; all western ideologies and principles should be avoided if a true Japanness was to prevail.7 This position led to the unusual situation of prominent officials regarded as leading fascists by their countrymen and -women denying any such affiliation. In fact, the minister of war, General Araki Sadao, who headed a faction within the military that preached kodo – “the Imperial Way” or “the Way of the Emperor” – lent his support and good offices to the coup attempt – the “Incident of March 15” – in 1932 that resulted in the assassination of the prime minister. Regarded by historians as the moment when the period of party government and democracy came to an end and that of the fascist era began, General Araki nevertheless declared that Japan could pursue and attain its national and imperial aspirations without having to adopt a foreign ideology such as fascism. Its own home-grown movements – kodo, Colonel Hashimoto Kingoro’s Great Japan Young Men’s Party, and his Cherry Blossom Society among them – not only predated Italian fascism, they provided authentically Japanese ideologies that sought to exalt the nation and its leader over the individual, to encourage military expansion, and to establish Japanese control over non-Japanese people and territory. Collective belonging, in particular, held a powerful place in government efforts to inculcate in Japanese citizens the values that would prepare them to go to war. The notion of kokutai – “the body of the state” – required that individuals sacrifice their needs and desires to the needs of the nation as a whole and its embodiment, the emperor. Kodo, the way of the emperor, incorporated kokutai. As Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro explained it, kodo combined all the elements that characterized fascism as Italians understood it. “Our nation is constituted of one ruler, in an unbroken line of Imperial descent, and his subjects,” Kiichiro declared in 1932. “It is a nation based upon the centralization of the Imperial Family, with the entire people assisting the ruler in the realization of national ideals. In other words, it is the duty of the people, under the Emperor, to exert their best efforts toward the accomplishment of the tasks allotted to them.” He praised militarism as one of the most important national practices, because it is necessary for the realization of that morality which is the highest object of this nation. It is apparent that we must use militarism as a means of self-defense against any force obstructing the attainment of our highest ideal.8

The gender of fascism The threats to masculinity seemingly posed by such phenomena as the modern girl and unemployment helped to make the alternative representations of gender that

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fascism offered attractive to many. In place of the blurring of gender lines and roles that marked so many societies in the interwar period, fascism promoted a gender system remarkable for its clear distinctions of male and female. Pronounced sexual difference, not ambiguity or androgyny, characterized German, Italian, and Japanese portrayals of masculine and feminine, even when, as in times of necessity or emergencies such as war, the actual behavior of men and women did not necessarily conform to them. Fascism placed an inordinate emphasis on manliness. As one historian notes, “never before or since the appearance of fascism was masculinity elevated to such heights: the hopes placed upon it, the importance of manliness as a national symbol and as a living example played a vital role in all fascist regimes.”9 At its heart stood the figure of the warrior: hard, brave, intrepid, single-mindedly devoted to serving the nation. The manliness of the fascist ideal stood in stark relief against his gendered – and racialized – others, who were portrayed as weak, soft, irresolute, and venal. The possibilities of being corrupted by femininity or racial inferiors required that the new fascist man stick to men of his own kind, to eschew the institutions and locales of those whose presence might compromise him with temptation or contamination. Home, school, family, the marketplace – these posed threats to manliness by virtue of the women and Jews who inhabited them. Instead, fascists promoted the homosocial environment of the military, where men bonded with each other in their dedication to the nation and remained free of feminizing influences that might taint or weaken them. Male comradeship, fascists believed, provided the scaffolding around which the building of the state should take place. The ideal new man of Italian, German, and Japanese fascism possessed a high degree of discipline and strength of will. His control over his mind and emotions contrasted sharply with the qualities associated with decadent bourgeois liberalism and modernist impulses in art and music. He engaged in rigorous physical activity to hone his body and turn it into an instrument of war. The Nazi version of the new fascist man portrayed him in terms of Nordic racial characteristics – tall, lean, with chiseled facial features, broad shoulders, and powerful arms. He glowed with health and radiated strength. He was ready and eager to take action whenever called upon. The Japanese version of fascist masculinity in the 1930s shared many of the valences found in the west, including the emphasis on racial distinctions. The warrior figure took center stage, as in Europe, but in the Japanese case, the emphasis on “martial valour,” or bu, was mediated somewhat by the value placed on “cultural attainment,” or bun. Bu and bun derived from the Chinese concepts of wu and wen (treated above), but their place in the construction of Japanese masculinity was overshadowed by the westernization of the ideal following the “opening” of Japan by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. Increasingly, as Japan modernized over the next decades and began to take colonies in Asia, it adopted western models of nation-building and development, and incorporated a vision of masculinity that resembled that of Western Europe and the United States. In the military, for instance, speech patterns borrowed from the German army took hold, with commands being made in short, sharp, guttural utterances. Western-style physical

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training replaced earlier traditional Japanese methods based on the samurai; officers began to sport haircuts and facial hair like that of Europeans. Most significantly, the Japanese began to contrast themselves against their Asian subjects, peoples they identified as weak and inferior, by casting the Chinese, for instance, as pig-tailed, effeminate, ridiculous creatures and themselves as white. As one historian observes, “by the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), images of the Japanese were virtually indistinguishable from those of their Caucasian combatants.”10 Japanese masculinity, like constructions of manliness across many parts of the globe, placed significant emphasis on power over women.“Rape came to be viewed as one of the benefits of military life,” writes the same historian, “a necessary evil to ensure that men were able to perform on the battlefield.”11 The combination of oppression of women and the value placed on physicality justified much of the sexual violence committed against local women and the creation of “comfort women” (or juugun ianfu) in the occupied areas. Beginning in China after the invasion of Shanghai in 1932, Japanese troops placed thousands of women under a regime of sexual slavery, imprisoning them in “comfort stations” and making them available to Japanese soldiers. The model of masculinity offered by fascist regimes alarmed many people and had to be disavowed if Europe was to avoid the catastrophe of another war. Amongst the middle classes of Britain, for example, a kind of domestication of life and of masculinity took place in the 1930s.12 The widely read detective literature of the interwar years offered heroes who departed dramatically from their prewar predecessors, though adventure heroes did not disappear entirely. Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Dorothy Allingham’s Albert Campion – these were protagonists who eschewed violence and even action. They were prim, even prissy, men, whose talents lay in the use of their sharp wits rather than their bodies. They behaved in ways that mocked conventional masculinity, giggling and mincing their way through situations, all the while accumulating small details and matters of fact that would enable them to solve the most impenetrable of crimes. They dressed with exquisite attention to their personal appearance, bringing a delicacy and foppishness to their demeanor that recalled the effeminacy of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “dandies.” They lacked the traditional manly qualities of physical courage and endurance: Wimsey suffered from shell shock, which occasionally reduced him to cowering in terror; Poirot, according to his rather ineffectual assistant, Captain Hastings, was a man for whom “a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.” Christie’s whodunits, in particular, took place in decidedly domestic venues: such mysteries as The Body in the Library and The Peril at End House offered homely settings in which the puzzles of what one literary critic has called “the literature of convalescence”13 – through which the reader could transform the acute anxieties of postwar society into the small, unimportant, yet pleasurable activities of private home life – played out. Fear of a renewal of war, especially after 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, gripped the British nation, and the prewar stance of aggressive imperialism hardly seemed calculated to stave it off. Instead, a far more inward-looking,

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private, quiet, “little” Englandism seemed to many to be the more correct national stance. This version of national identity in turn required a more inward-looking, private, quiet, little man as the standard bearer of peace. In 1938, the figure of Neville Chamberlain, impeccably tailored, with his bowler hat and umbrella, returning from Munich with “peace in our time,” seemed to exemplify those qualities of masculinity that would help keep Britain out of war. But the men in uniform with whom he negotiated – men whose dress asserted aggression and militarism – would in the end decide the issue.

The Spanish Civil War As was the case in Japan, Spain’s turn to fascism derived from the actions of military officials involved in colonial adventuring. Mussolini paid close attention to his Mediterranean neighbor, where José Antonio Primo de Rivera sought to rehabilitate both the reputation and regime of his late father. The latter was the oldest son of the dictator who had lost power in 1930 and was succeeded a year later by a republican government in Spain. José Antonio, as he became known, determined that a strong nationalist and authoritarian state must be established, and he turned to the example of Italian fascism to guide his thinking. To be sure, Spain differed in a number of ways from Italy, but “the magnificent Italian effort,” as he called it, offered the fundamentals from which Spain could adapt its own program. At the end of October 1933 he established what he initially called “Fascismo Español”; four days later, he renamed his movement the “Falange Española” so that it might not be seen as too slavish to the Italian model. José Antonio joined CAUR, although, when he attended its second congress in Montreux in 1935, he protested that the international nature of the gathering resembled too closely those of their communist enemies. Here lay the central paradox of the global spread of fascism during the 1930s: on the one hand, fascist movements were vehemently anti-internationalist, emphasizing the unique histories and missions – and superiority – of their nations; on the other hand, they borrowed heavily from each other and, once in power, cultivated ties with those elsewhere. The Falange would have to retain some distance from its Italian exemplar, despite its having become, as José Antonio told the Italian embassy in Madrid, “the sole Fascist movement of Spain.”14 In early 1936, following an election that returned a popular front government made up of a coalition of center-left parties, Spanish authorities in the new government outlawed the Falange. The banning of the Falange had the effect of increasing rather than squelching the influence of the party. In the midst of a period of unprecedented political, economic, and social unrest during the first half of 1936, young rightist and nationalist activists saw in the now-underground fascist movement an opportunity to attack the leftists of the republican government. Membership in the Falange soared to levels the legal organization had never enjoyed, and violence between its adherents and leftist operatives increased concomitantly. In early July 1936, shootings by right and left escalated into a tit-for-tat series of murders that spiraled into civil war.

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The first took place on July 2, when socialists murdered two Falangist students. The following day, Falangists murdered two trade unionists and injured a number of others. Socialists responded on July 4, by killing a Falangist sympathizer and stabbing another.The government did nothing to apprehend the killers, but it did crack down further on the Falange, arresting three hundred members in the area around Madrid. This sparked outrage among Falangists, who on July 12 shot and killed a prominent Socialist army officer, Lieutenant José del Castillo, who had been a vocal critic of the Falange. Republicans then retaliated against José Calvo Sotelo, a monarchist and leader of the opposition in parliament. Officers of the constabulary, the Civil Guards and the Assault Guards, shot him in the back of the head two times, and dumped his body at the morgue of Madrid’s main cemetery. The Sotelo assassination galvanized army officers, especially those stationed in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco in the Army of Africa, who for months had been contemplating a coup against the Republican government but feared they could not be successful given that most generals remained loyal to the government. But now it became clear that government authorities had been involved in the assassination of their allies, and a coup looked necessary for self-defense, even if it was a long shot. On July 17, 1936, Brigadier General Emilio Mola determined to act. Mola had commanded the Army in Africa until the Popular Front government transferred him, along with other senior military men they had suspicions about, to stations as far from strategic locations as possible in the spring of 1936. Until that time, he and other generals who would rebel against the Republicans – Francisco Franco, in particular – had spent much of their careers in the Spanish Foreign Legion, the unit that made up a significant element of the Army in Africa. The Legion carved out a special niche within the larger colonial army; its members reveled in their sense of separateness from and superiority over other Spanish units in Morocco. They espoused an ethos of total obedience within a fiercely hierarchical structure and demanded the subordination of the individual soldier to the larger collective. They goose-stepped on parade, wearing idiosyncratic uniforms and swinging their arms high in the air. They prized martial prowess over strategy or planning and engaged in acts of extreme violence against their enemies, which in the context of North Africa meant all Moroccans, young or old, male and female alike. They enjoyed a reputation for hideous brutality, whether for their drunken behavior while on leave in the markets and bazaars of Moroccan towns or for their actions in combat. The rape and abuse of young Moroccan women, beatings of elderly Moroccan men and women, shootings and burnings of Moroccan civilians during campaigns against guerrillas seeking to rid their territories of Spanish imperialists, the taking and display of body parts of the enemies they killed as trophies – these were the hallmarks of the Legionnaires. Politically, they tended to be drawn to an extreme form of Spanish nationalism not unlike that of Italian fascism or Nazism. They embraced a cult of violence and promoted a virile masculinity that would bring about a regeneration of a Spain that had become degenerate and debased. One supporter of the Legionnaires voiced these elements of their ideology in his description of a meeting between an exemplary officer – “the leader,

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who incarnates . . . the whole of military discipline and spirit and virile vigour and energy” – and his new recruits, “men who want, falteringly, to shake off from their shoulders the imponderable weight of the decadence of a race.”15 The Army of Africa had fought a long war against a determined Moroccan anticolonial insurgency. From virtually the start of Spanish colonizing efforts in 1912 up to 1927, the army, and especially the Legion, had been involved in irregular combat with guerrilla forces. Its members came to see themselves as the defenders of an authentic Spanishness; after the creation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, Legionnaires believed strongly that they had a sacred duty to return Spain to an earlier time and an earlier culture, one that was not contaminated by the decadence of modernity or leftist politics.This sense of mission became especially intense after the election of the leftist Popular Front government in 1936. As Ortega y Gasset, the prominent philosopher and social theorist, noted, “Morocco turned the scattered soul of our Army into a closed fist.”16 It was this closed fist of the colonial Army in Africa that determined the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. The war broke out in July 1936, when army officers tied to Mora and the Army in Africa rebelled in Morocco and then declared in El Pronunciamiento the failure of the Spanish Republic and its president, Manuel Azaña. The rebellion in Morocco succeeded almost at once, but the revolt of anti-Republican groups in Spain – monarchists, Falangists, and other rightists – unfolded slowly and unevenly, as the Republic’s support in Madrid held firm against attacking troops. In the south, troops under the leadership of General Francisco Franco arrived from Morocco and established a base from which to launch their assaults on Republican forces. As Nationalists moved ever closer to Madrid, Franco consolidated his power by uniting the various rightist factions; in April 1937, he declared the formation of the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET) with himself at its head – el Jefe Nacional. Inspired by the Italian model, Franco’s Falangists adopted Mussolini’s raised arm as the “national salute” and copied other fascist symbols and emblems from their Italian friends. Franco told reporters that he planned to establish a “totalitarian state” like that in Italy, though one informed by Spain’s own “historic institutions” such as the Catholic Church.17 Historians have described Falangist Spain as “semi-fascist,” largely owing to the continued influence of traditional religion and of older rightist authoritarian influences. In fact, Franco enjoyed a degree of dictatorial power that even Hitler and Mussolini could not match, at least theoretically. Hitler still had to contend with a parliament, however toothless, while Italy’s constitution hemmed in Mussolini to some extent. No such hurdles confronted Franco as he went about ruling the country. As the FET’s party statutes put it in 1938, The Jefe Nacional of F.E.T. y de las J.O.N.S., supreme Caudillo [leader] of the Movement, personifies all its values and honors. As author of the historical era in which Spain acquires the possibilities of realizing its destiny and with that the goals of the Movement, the Jefe assumes in its entire plenitude the most absolute authority.The Jefe is responsible before God and before history.

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In August 1939, a Law of the Leadership of the State enlarged Franco’s power to include “in a permanent manner the functions of government.” A clause similar to the Enabling Act that gave Hitler the right to rule without the Reichstag in Germany released Franco from the necessity of consulting his cabinet about laws or decrees “when urgent demands so require it.”18 The addition of more than 250,000 Moroccan soldiers (along with considerable Italian and German assistance, which we will discuss in the Conclusion) made the victory of Franco’s forces possible. By themselves, the Spanish members of the rebel force would not have been able to defeat the Republicans; they simply lacked the numbers necessary to overcome the great popular base of loyalist support. Moroccans had no great love for their Spanish conquerors, but the offer of large amounts of cash to men whose families lived in deep poverty, and whose lands had been devastated by a recent drought, made service with the Spanish Nationalists attractive. The Republic had shown little inclination to concede rights or independence to Moroccans after 1927, nor did it go out of its way the address the significant problems they faced. The Nationalists, by contrast, along with the money they paid to mercenary soldiers, hinted that greater freedom and autonomy awaited those who helped them in their struggle. Their efforts succeeded in recruiting large numbers of Moroccan fighters over the course of the three-year war. The Nationalists, however, faced the problem of reconciling themselves to relying upon people whom they regarded as primitive, filthy, uncivilized savages in a war against fellow Spaniards. Ideologically, this took some doing, but they managed it by representing Moroccans as noble adherents of an ancient and venerable faith – Islam – and by turning the leftist forces in Spain and their international allies into internal enemies under the sway of foreign influences. In joining the struggle for Spain, Moroccans had become “patriots,” “gentlemen of faith and ideals” who gave their support to ridding the country of international mercenaries and inauthentic Spaniards who needed to be redeemed from the evils of godless communism, freemasonry, and international Jewry. Franco went out of his way to build ties with Islamic leaders in North Africa and the Middle East, going so far as to organize and subsidize a hajj to Mecca. He sent high-ranking officials to Morocco to point out that the leftists in Spain “wish to destroy all religions: not just Catholicism which is that of the Spaniards, but also the Muslim religion, and in general, all the religions of the world.”19

The Arab revolt The Spanish Civil War excited reactions among people all over the world. As we will see in the Conclusion, it turned into a proxy war between fascism and communism; volunteers from many countries flocked to the battlefield to offer their sword in the attacks on or in defense of the democratic Republic. In Palestine, the initial response of many Arabs was to support the Nationalist army of Francisco Franco. Only later, once it became clear that Franco’s forces were pursuing a fascist agenda and had the support of Germany and Italy, did Arab opinion shift to Republican

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Spain. The initial expressions of support for Franco derived from the situation in Palestine in 1936: Palestinians were engaged in their own independence struggle against the British mandate government and the influx of Jewish settlers into their country, a conflict that became known as the Arab Revolt. Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine had continued steadily for over a decade by the 1930s, encouraged by Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration promising a homeland to Jews in Palestine. The numbers of settlers spiked as first the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent civil war gave rise in Ukraine to a pogrom against Jews that killed as many as two hundred thousand; Russian Jews saw the writing on the wall and left in large numbers as well. Then Poland instituted laws to bolster its currency, laws that hit merchants in the city, most of them Jewish, very hard, and many middle-class Polish Jews emigrated. After the United States in 1924 and then the Soviet Union at the end of the decade imposed significant restrictions on the immigration of Jews to their countries, Palestine became the destination for most Jews seeking to leave Europe. The vast majority settled in the urban centers of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, despite the Zionist Movement’s intentions of settling Jews on the land. The British controlled immigration into Mandate Palestine, categorizing people into four groups that would determine their legitimacy as migrants. In the first, “people of means,” those who could deposit £1000 Palestinian in local banks, moved freely into the country. Students and religious officials who could demonstrate that they had positions awaiting them likewise suffered no restrictions on their entry. Relatives of those already there and those returning to Palestine experienced little difficulty of movement. It was the fourth group, workers who sought employment in the mandate territory, that Britain regulated carefully. The Zionist Executive, which guaranteed work for laborers, put forward a request for a certain number of immigrants every six months. The British always reduced the quota dramatically. The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933 set off a new wave of immigration (the so-called fifth aliya) to Palestine. Between November 1931 and December 1936 more than 210,000 Jews left Europe for Palestine; by December 1939 another 90,000 arrived. Most of these migrants did not hail from Germany, but from Poland. German Jews accounted for only slightly more than 50,000 of the immigrants, in large part because as inhabitants of Germany for many generations and as citizens who had long enjoyed equal rights they did not believe that the Nazis’ anti-Semitism could apply to them and did not leave the country in time. Many Jews, communists, and homosexuals who did emigrate sought refuge in Paris and London. Those who chose to go to Palestine were often “people of means” who had the funds to invest in land or in industry. Their money – they brought some fifty million Palestine pounds into the country – and their education, skills, tastes, and expectations transformed the urban areas of Palestine, and spurred economic growth. German immigrants used a mechanism called the Transfer Agreement to move their assets to Palestine. The deal, struck by the German government and unofficial Zionist organizations in 1933, allowed Jews to purchase German goods that then

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would be exported to Palestine, sold, and the money returned to those Jews in Palestine pounds. The Nazis liked the scheme because it both increased German exports, while seizing a portion of Jewish capital, and facilitated the removal of Jews; Jews used it to help them escape an increasingly intolerable situation. The official Zionist movement knew of the arrangement and unofficially approved of it because of the wealth it brought into Palestine: some eight million Palestine pounds, or 1% of the assets held by Jews in Germany in 1933. Palestinian Arabs regarded it with alarm. Al Jami’a al-Islamiyya, a local Jerusalem newspaper, reminded readers that Hitler’s plans to expel the Jews from Germany bode ill for Arabs. “We will have waves of refuges [sic] to [Palestine],” the paper editorialized. “The German Jews are rich industrials and they will be the first, who will take the land from our hands.”20 The Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland envisioned a society made up of free and equal Jews who settled on and farmed the land. To that end, even in the 1930s when most settlement took place in cities, the Zionist organization directed 30% of its budget toward agricultural development (as opposed to 10% to urban use). The strategy sought not just to create a new Jewish people who lived on the land but also to establish Jewish control over Palestinian territory and to build a series of agricultural communities that would form the basis of Jewish sovereignty in the yishuv, as the Jewish community referred to itself. But owing to limited funds with which to purchase land, agricultural development took place slowly. Nevertheless, the impact of the transfer of land from Arabs to Jews was profound. Palestine’s Arab farmers, the fellahin, who made up some 70% of the local Arab population in 1920 and who were experiencing a dramatic demographic upsurge, found themselves squeezed by taxes levied by the British and expulsions from plots they had worked under Arab landlords. Unable to earn a living in the countryside, they flocked to the cities and crowded into slums where they faced poverty and alienation. In Haifa, they turned to the preachings of Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al Qassam, the mystical and charismatic imam of the Istiqlal mosque, whose messages of hope, encouragement, and faith began to mix with calls for Palestinians to organize into cells of armed insurgents in order to fight the British and Zionists. Armed with rifles, revolvers, and homemade bombs, his followers began to attack individual Jews, British infrastructure, and hated symbols of Zionism like trees planted on the edges of now-Jewish fields. The yishuv, as we have seen, grew dramatically in the 1930s until it appeared that a Jewish majority might emerge and following that, a Jewish state. As one Palestinian put it, Every day the ships bombard us with hundreds of Jewish immigrants. If this immigration continues, Palestine’s future is very black. . . . there is no choice but to rouse ourselves, there is no choice but to shake ourselves, there is no choice but to act.21 Many Palestinians accused the British, who controlled immigration and set policy that affected people’s daily lives, of favoring and protecting Jews at the expense of

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Arabs; contravening its duties under the auspices of the League of Nations, the mandate government had allowed the “judaization of this Arab country, depriving the worker of his job and the peasant of his land,” declared one labor organization.22 Tensions rose in the second half of 1935, as labor strikes and the occasional terrorist incident escalated fears and anxieties. British authorities intercepted a shipment of arms headed for the Hagana, a Jewish self-defense group that had grown into a highly organized small army by the early 1930s, sparking Arab rumors that Zionists were planning a military takeover. In November 1935, Qassam and about a dozen followers left Haifa and set up camp in the hills near Jenin, about twenty miles south of Nazareth. When police looking for fruit thieves stumbled upon some of Qassam’s men, a gunfight broke out and a Jewish policeman was killed. Military forces sent out to capture the guerillas found Qassam in a cave a few days later. Once again gunfire erupted, and this time, Qassam died. His funeral marked a turning point. Thousands of Arabs thronged to it, transforming the occasion into an unmistakable expression of Arab unity and protest. Qassam became a martyr, inspiring thousands of young Arab men and women not just to join together to declare their independence from the British but to take up arms in the fight against their colonial masters and against Jewish settlers. In April 1936, a number of Qassam’s guerrilla group killed two Jewish passengers in cars and buses they held up; a Jewish paramilitary band responded with the murder of two Arabs. Violence spread as Arab protestors took to the streets in a wholesale anti-colonial and anti-Zionist revolt, compelling Arab nationalist leaders to step in and declare a general strike throughout the country as a means of establishing control over the popular rising. Arab politicians, in turn, pushed by the events from below, formed an Arab Higher Committee (AHC) and declared their support for the general strike. The mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, became its president. For six months the general strike brought industry in the country to a standstill, while, in both the cities and in the countryside, attacks on British and Jewish people and things continued. By October, British talks with and concessions to local Arab leaders and Arab notables throughout the Middle East, along with threats to impose martial law, succeeded in bringing the strike to an end, as workers who needed to feed their families went back to work. But less than a year later, a new round of violence erupted in late September 1937, when Arab guerrillas assassinated the district commissioner of Galilee. British authorities moved decisively to ban the AHC and to arrest its leaders and those of Arab labor unions, seeking to decapitate the movement before it could get any larger. This displaced the center of the revolt from the cities and to the countryside, where guerrilla bands of peasants formed and acted out their grievances and rage with disciplined and effective force. “We sleep to the sound of whistling bullets and wake to the sound of whistling bullets,” wrote one Arab to his son as he sought to describe the rebels. “They throw bombs, shoot, burn fields, destroy Jewish citrus groves in Jaffa, blow up bridges, cut telephone cables, topple electric poles. Every day they block roads and every day Arabs display a heroism that the government never conceived of.” Indeed, David Ben Gurion, until 1935 the general secretary of Histradrut, the Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine,

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and then the chair of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency, who would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister, admired the way Arabs had transformed themselves from a “wild and fractured mob, aspiring to robbery and looting,” into “an organized and disciplined community, demonstrating its national will with political maturity and a capacity for self-evaluation.”23 He understood and even sympathized with their grievances even as he urged his Jewish comrades to take their Arab foes seriously. British authorities, for their part, responded to the second phase of the Arab Revolt, as it came to be called, with ferocity.Where they tended to exercise restraint and emphasize dialogue and diplomacy during the first, general strike phase, of the rising, now they unleashed a brutal campaign designed to stamp out any manifestation of rebellion. Emergency measures put in place in late 1937 allowed mandate officials to censor the press, impose collective fines on groups for the infractions of individuals, demolish homes, and arrest and jail people without cause. Newly established military courts had the power to levy the death penalty against perpetrators of arson or sabotage.The military built a wire fence along the border with Syria and Lebanon and constructed a series of forts from which to cut off the movement of arms and men into Palestine. A frontier force of mounted police with dogs patrolled the countryside, meting out collective punishments on villages and towns. After the negotiation of the Munich Agreement in September 1938 (see Conclusion), Britain felt secure enough in Europe to send an additional division of troops to Palestine; by the end of 1938, twenty-five thousand British troops and a significant RAF presence operated throughout the mandate territory.24 They ruthlessly suppressed the revolt. Believing, as General Haining put it in 1938, that “every Arab in the country is a potential enemy of the government,” they imposed 22-hour curfews in the countryside, forbidding peasants to work their fields or tend their livestock. They levied fines on villages thought to be supporting rebels with food or other forms of sustenance; they demolished property – some two thousand houses between 1936 and 1940; they destroyed women’s Singer sewing machines to keep them from aiding the rising; they spoiled food supplies of sugar, olive oil, and flour. As one civil servant told the Colonial Office, “Practically no search carried out by troops is not accompanied by . . . smashing up of property, mixing of grain (which naturally makes all of it useless) and, worst of all, extensive robbery and looting.” The behavior of the troops increased local support for the Arab rebels and made it far more difficult to squash the rising, which in turn infuriated the soldiers and hardened their attitudes. Reprisals for the deaths of their comrades reached horrific proportions. When a land mine killed two British soldiers of the Ulster Rifles, the troops reacted in fury. They destroyed 150 houses and all of the food in the nearby village, and killed twenty-five inhabitants. Had the district commissioner not shown up, one police officer reported, the troops would have killed “all and sundry.” Soldiers increasingly dehumanized the Arab peasantry, a situation that enabled them to commit atrocities with seeming casualness and even jocularity. One soldier from the Royal Hampshire Regiment recalled how they placed Arab prisoners on the front of trains and military trucks so that if a land

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mine went off it would hit the prisoner. “Rather a dirty trick,” he mused, “but we enjoyed it.” Another soldier recounted a tactic his unit used on any Arab prisoners who survived the day strapped to a lorry. The driver would sharply swing the vehicle to one side, and the poor wog on the front would roll off onto the deck. Well if he was lucky he’d get away with a broken leg, but it he was unlucky the truck coming up behind would hit him. But nobody bothered to go and pick the bits up.25 The overwhelming military force, the capture of rebels, and the constant surveillance of the local inhabitants made it impossible for the rising to succeed. By 1939, three years after the start of the Arab Revolt, the British had regained control. But not before it had excited the sympathies of Arabs across the region: in places like Egypt, for instance, where it appears to have stimulated the development and growth of the Society of the Muslim Brothers – the Muslim Brotherhood – from a small social-religious group into a wide-ranging and powerful Islamic political organization. Britain understood that it had to make some concessions to the Arab majority, and tried to broker talks between Arabs and Jews to arrive at a solution. Their efforts came to naught, however, so the British government issued a White Paper in May of 1939 that went a long way toward propitiating the Arab community, at least politically speaking. It promised the creation of a separate, independent Palestinian state within ten years; it restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine; and it placed severe limits on the amount of land Jews could purchase. Zionists cried foul, accusing the British of reneging on their promise of a national home for Jews in Palestine, and decrying the White Paper as a betrayal of Jewish interests. The White Paper did indeed mark the end of the British-Zionist alliance that had been formed during the Great War, but by then Jews had built up a sufficient economic, political, military, and demographic presence in Palestine that they no longer needed British friendship to sustain the yishuv.The Arabs, on the other hand, had been badly defeated by British force of arms in 1938 and 1939; Palestinian nationalism emerged from the Arab Revolt in tatters, its proponents demoralized and without leadership.

Response to fascism in Arab countries As mentioned earlier, Palestinians initially favored Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. They hoped that their support would persuade the Italian government in particular to lend aid and assistance to their own efforts against the British. In fact, Mussolini’s regime was eager to help any group seeking to embarrass or inconvenience the British in the Mediterranean area, and the Arab Revolt provided the perfect opportunity to both harass Britain and further Italy’s intrusion into the Middle East. When the mufti of Jerusalem requested arms – ten thousand rifles with cartridges for each one and six anti-aircraft machine guns – and other material support, he received a warm reception. Difficulties in transport and shipping and

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British efforts to close off the Palestinian border often hampered the actualization of sending arms and personnel, but it was not for lack of trying that the Italians couldn’t help very effectively in that area. Certainly they provided funds to the mufti, who acknowledged their generosity by asking officials to “Tell Segnor Mussolini that I have committed myself to the struggle because I believe in his promise and in his support.” The Italians helped out in other ways as well. Radio Bari, Italy’s propaganda organ in the Mediterranean, for instance, broadcast anti-British and pro-Palestinian messages regularly throughout North Africa and the Middle East. One such announcement in September 1936 declared that “Palestinian Arabs were being killed by the local British authorities in order to protect the Jews.” In late December 1937, the station reported on “the Palestine policy of Great Britain, who intend to set up a Jewish state under British protection.”26 This kind of Italian-Palestinian cooperation conforms to and upholds the standard account of Arab sympathy for and collaboration with European fascism in the 1930s. This narrative emphasizes the affiliations between Nazism and anti-Zionism and points to the increasing authoritarian political and religious movements in places such as Egypt. Certainly fascist and anti-Semitic impulses arose in the towns and cities of virtually every Arab country – as they did, indeed, across the globe – and politicians and religious leaders seeking ties to Italy or Nazi Germany made their views known unabashedly. But this narrative of overwhelming, even monolithic fascist and Nazi sympathy in the Arab world does not hold up to careful scrutiny. Numerous and vibrant anti-fascist voices were raised and heard in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Morocco; often, they overrode the pro-fascist and pro-Nazi side in both number and volume. As it became increasingly clear that Mussolini and Hitler promoted not just fascism in Spain but a broader imperialism in North Africa and the Middle East, for example, Palestinian enthusiasm for the Spanish rebels waned considerably until newspapers began to articulate not simply rejection of fascism but out-and-out hostility toward the Falangist regime. Stories about the atrocities committed by the Nationalists appeared toward the end of 1938 and into 1939 alongside accounts of Franco purging his ranks of potential rivals for power. They refused the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and profascism, pointing out as early as 1934 that “the Arab Palestinians don’t need Fascists or Nazis to be motivated against the Zionists. The hatred against the Zionist plan in Palestine grew long before Nazism and Fascism.”27 In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood rejected the nationalist, racist, imperialist assaults on Islam and the Middle East promulgated by Germany and Italy. Political elites in Syria such as ‘Adil Arslan, who served as ambassador to Turkey from 1937 to 1939, saw some things that they liked in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, but these were overshadowed by the crimes committed by the regimes. “I must admit that I had some special sympathy for Germany,” Arslan confided to his diary in 1939, because I viewed them as a distinguished people, and in the past I thought that their humiliation (after World War I) was a kind of crime and betrayal. But now, after they have become strong and powerful, they have begun to

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attack peaceful nations. . . . every person of conscience must feel discomfort from, and even disapproval of Hitler’s deeds.28 Iraqi intellectuals and religious leaders castigated the anti-Semitism of Germany, calling it an insult to Islam. When war broke out between the Allied and Axis powers in 1939, Arab nations overwhelmingly gave their support to the Allies, despite their pronounced anti-colonialism and powerful independence movements. The exceptions to this rule – the mufti of Jerusalem, for instance, who collaborated vigorously in the extermination of Jews – proved to be few in number and unrepresentative of Arabs across North Africa and the Middle East. *** Fascism arose as a reactionary response to some of the most striking features of the 1930s: the perceived blurring of gender roles, economic dislocation, the ubiquitous presence of foreign bodies and cultural artifacts, visions of community that extended beyond the horizons of the nation. But if fascists everywhere violently rejected these aspects of modernity, they paradoxically embraced modern technology as the means of national rebirth – the fiery furnaces that hardened steel. Fascism looked both forward and back. The rabidly nationalist nature of fascist ideology has effaced its global dimensions. Avowedly anti-internationalist, fascism was nonetheless international and in nearly every case imperialist. Though fascist governments first emerged in Europe, even there, the history of fascism, from Mussolini’s grab for the African horn to the Spanish Army of Africa and Franco’s triumph in the Spanish Civil War, is a Mediterranean story as much as a European one whose postscript continues to the present. In Japan, fascism gave voice to the most militaristic expressions of similar imperial ambitions and, at the same time, lingering resentment at the pretensions of the major western imperial powers to hegemony in the Pacific.

Notes 1 Quoted in Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1995), 15. 2 Quoted in Daniel Hedinger, “Universal Fascism and Its Global Legacy: Italy’s and Japan’s Entangled History in the Early 1930s,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 2 (2013): 141–160, 145, 144. 3 See Stanley G. Payne, “Fascist Italy and Spain, 1922–45,” Mediterranean Historical Review, 13, no. 1–2 (1998): 99–115, 105. 4 Quoted in Hedinger, “Universal Fascism and Its Global Legacy,” 150. 5 Ibid., 149. 6 E. Bruce Reynolds, “Peculiar Characteristics:The Japanese Political System in the Fascist Era,” in Japan in the Fascist Era, ed. E. Bruce Reynolds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 156. 7 See Harry D. Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita,“Japan’s Revolt against the West,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 207–272.

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8 Quoted in Marcus Willensky, “Japanese Fascism Revisited,” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 5, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 58–77, 66, 69. 9 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 155. 10 Morris Low, “The Emperor’s Sons Go to War: Competing Masculinities in Modern Japan,” in Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, ed. Kam Louie and Morris Low (London: Routledge, 2003), 83. 11 Ibid., 92. 12 This discussion relies upon Alison Light’s wonderful Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991). 13 Light, Forever England, 69. 14 Quoted in Payne, “Fascist Italy and Spain, 1922–45,” 105, 107. 15 Quoted in Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 175. 16 Ibid., 183. 17 Quoted in Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1999), 269, 271. 18 Ibid., 277, 310. 19 Quoted in Balfour, Deadly Embrace, 281. 20 Quoted in René Wildangel, “More than the Mufti: Other Arab-Palestinian Voices on Nati Germany, 1933–1945, and Their Postwar Narrations,” in Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion, ed. Israel Gershoni (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 108. 21 Quoted in Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 1999 [1990]), 361. 22 Quoted in Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 241. 23 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 367, 370. 24 Matthew Hughes, “From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” Journal of Palestine Studies XXXIX, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 6–22, 6. 25 Quoted in Jacob Norris, “Repression and Rebellion: Britain’s Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936–39,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 1 (2008): 25–45, 35, 33, 34. 26 Quoted in Nir Arielli, “Italian Involvement in the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–1939,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35, no. 2 (August 2008): 187–204, 204, 201, 202. 27 Quoted in Wildangel, “More than the Mufti,” 109. 28 Quoted in Eyel Zisser, “Memoirs Do Not Deceive: Syrians Confront Fascism and Nazism – as Reflected in the Memoirs of Syrian Political Leaders and Intellectuals,” in Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism, 89–90.

CONCLUSION The road to war

In early July 1938, Lady Kathleen Simon, the Irish wife of Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer and stalwart of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, presided over the official opening of Africa House, the new hostel and headquarters of the West African Students’ Union in London. As she spoke, her husband, Sir John Simon, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and the rest of the cabinet were meeting to discuss the prospect of relinquishing African territories in order to placate Adolf Hitler. Hitler, for his part, had shown little interest in the matter of colonial transfers, as they were called, entertaining a British proposal only because he needed to mollify the imperial lobby in Germany, but the issue remained high on the agenda of British officials hoping to appease the increasingly aggressive German dictator. Chamberlain had offered up other countries’ African colonies in March 1938, only to be rebuffed, which allowed Simon to tell Parliament in November of that year that “His Majesty’s Government are not contemplating the transfer of any territories under British administrations.” In a statement that undercut his assertion, he went on to assure MPs that “in this matter His Majesty’s Government must, of course, give full attention to the views of the populations of any territory concerned.”1 The role of colonial transfer in the appeasement of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy has only recently received attention from historians, but contemporaries were fully aware that the prospect was on the table for serious discussion, at least in Britain, as a means of avoiding military conflict in Europe. Certainly the failure of Britain and France to take effective action against Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia – indeed, their agreement to lift the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy in 1936 and Britain’s recognition of Mussolini as “Emperor of Abyssinia” in 1938 – made it clear that imperial dynamics shaped in the diplomatic and political efforts to contain fascism. As early as 1936 rumors of overtures offering part or all of the southern Gold Coast, the Gambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, or Togoland to Germany sparked a

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flurry of accusations in Parliament and a series of scares among Africans in Britain and the colonies. Lady Simon’s colleagues in the Anti-Slavery Society urged that former German colonies now held by the mandate powers and other territories in Central Africa be placed under a joint administration that would include Germany. Charles Roden Buxton, a founding member of the pacifist organization the Union of Democratic Control, pleaded with the Nazis to accept African colonies in return for halting their expansion on the European continent. These initiatives to conciliate Hitler and render him a more responsible citizen of the world included provisions to safeguard the lives of the indigenous peoples in the territory in question. African and Afro-diasporic anti-colonialists, along with a number of Labour MPs, would have none of it. George Padmore, a close associate of Lady Simon in the cause of anti-slavery, published an article in the New Leader titled “Hands off the Colonies!” I. T. A.Wallace-Johnson’s “ ‘No Sir! No Colonies Back’ for Germany” appeared in the Negro Worker. The West African Students’ Union’s 1938 annual report noted that the prospect of colonial transfers to Germany “caused so great a consternation and unrest among the students that they took every step, in their power and in cooperation with . . . peoples in West Africa, to protest against . . . any such scheme.”2 Newspaper editors across West Africa and students, intellectuals, and activists in the metropole refused to go along with the British government’s attempts to sacrifice Africans’ rights to secure its interests. For anti-imperialists as diverse as Padmore, Wallace-Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Jawaharlal Nehru, Una Marson, and Claudia Jones, appeasement, which we usually identify with the surrender of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938, began long before with the betrayal of Ethiopia; its roots lay in the deep affinity between imperialism and fascism. According to Du Bois, even the limited sanctions imposed by the League against Italy amounted only to artifice. As he observed in 1936, “The war between Italy could be stopped in a day by closing the Suez Canal. It is not stopped because the League of Nations has other interests beyond the integrity of this last land of blacks.”3 Those “interests,” Du Bois understood, were imperialist to the core and diametrically opposed to those of the “colored” races of the world. From this perspective, even if appeasement proved successful in the short term, it would “only delay . . . the threatening conflict,” for, as Padmore put it, “empire and peace are incompatible.”4 As we will see, the world embarked on the road to war even earlier than 1935, as Japan, Italy, and Germany set in motion events that would culminate in the outbreak of a global conflagration, beginning in the Pacific in 1937. *** In Mein Kampf and elsewhere, Hitler detailed his design for a new world order. Fully completed by 1928, Hitler’s program rested on two distinct bases. The first, revealed in public in 1919, was anti-Semitism. Hitler believed that Germany’s defeat in World War I resulted from national and spiritual disunity caused by the presence of the Jews. The so-called November criminals, who had signed the armistice with

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the Allies – socialists and Jews, synonymous terms for Hitler – stabbed Germany in the back, preventing it from achieving victory. Remove the Jews, he asserted, and the effect would be to reverse the defeat. National and spiritual unity being restored, Germany could go on to win the war it had lost because of the Jews. Implicit in this message was not simply a call for the re-conquest of continental Europe but of the world as well. Hitler regarded the Jews as a world menace, not just a German one. Elimination of the Jews, therefore, would have to be undertaken on a world scale, requiring German domination of the world. The second basis of Hitler’s program, articulated by 1924, involved rational power politics. Germany was a vital nation. Its birth rate was high, its population full of energy. It either had to expand or remain frustrated and stunted. The attainment of lebensraum – living space – which offered the only means for the realization of German greatness, necessitated expansion to the east. The conquest of land and soil in the east would supply Germany with foodstuffs and primary materials for industry. Hitler recognized that to secure lebensraum and world conquest the mistakes of World War I would have to be avoided. Rather than achieving world power by confronting its enemies together on land and sea, Germany would isolate them by turns so as to take them on one by one. In the first of three stages, Hitler hoped to colonize the European continent by isolating France with British cooperation on the basis of assurances that Germany sought only continental, not maritime power. In the second stage, Germany would turn on the British empire. British defeat in hand, Germany then would confront America in the final struggle for mastery of the world. Hitler began to implement his plans for world domination soon after he consolidated his power. Germany had secretly begun to rearm in the 1920s and early 1930s, in violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty; Hitler ramped up the effort, re-instituting conscription and building up the armed forces, including creating an air force. Emboldened by the lack of response from the Allied powers, he embarked on the first step to incorporate all ethnic Germans living outside the borders of Germany within the Third Reich, sending troops to occupy the Rhineland in 1936. Neither France nor Britain responded with military force; their inaction convinced Hitler that he would encounter little serious resistance as he returned Germans to the Reich and established the groundwork for war. The 1936 Four-Year Plan designed to prepare Germany for war entailed huge public works and land reclamation projects; these projects both put unemployed Germans to work and mobilized German resources for a coming military confrontation with Germany’s enemies. The drive to make Germany independent of the need to trade with foreigners – the achievement of “autarky” – required the draining of swamps and the building of dams in order to create enough arable land on which to grow sufficient food to feed all Germans. Far from being the purview of small peasants, farming under the German imperative toward war became largescale and even industrial. Such public works projects as the building of the Reichsautobahn system served the dual purposes of providing employment and preparing for war. Between 1933 and 1939, 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) of concrete highway

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were constructed. The autobahn project stimulated the production of German automobiles; production levels were five times higher in 1936 than they had been in 1933. The autobahn project put millions of Germans to work, it energized the automobile industry, and it created a speedy, efficient transportation corridor across the nation that would not simply facilitate economic development but would also enable the speedy and efficient transport of troops and war matériel. The civil war in Spain provided Hitler with a chance to deploy his new weaponry. Along with Italy, which in fact provided the vast majority of the assistance that went to Franco’s Nationalists, the Germans sent advisors, trained soldiers, armaments and ammunition, and funds to aid the rebels.They were driven by a powerful anti-communist animus and by the hope of distracting British and French attention from their expansionist efforts elsewhere. In late July 1936, German and Italian transport planes arrived in Morocco to help move rebel and Moroccan troops to Spain.Their assistance proved crucial to Franco’s ability to advance on Madrid. Italy, in particular, continued to pour in aid, contributing significantly to the outcome of the war. Italian and German intervention violated a Non-Intervention Agreement brokered by the League of Nations a month after the outbreak of civil war in Spain. Britain and France hoped that a declaration of non-intervention would keep the conflict local and prevent its escalation into a continental-wide war; their strict refusal to support either side, including the elected Republican government, forced the beleaguered Republicans to seek aid elsewhere, specifically from the Soviet Union. Thus a domestic civil war between democratic and fascist forces became transformed in a matter of weeks into a proxy war between fascism and communism. The war in Spain sparked a dramatic anti-fascist response in many countries across the world. Mexico, where public sympathy for the Republican government ran high, sent twenty thousand rifles and twenty million cartridges to Spain in August 1936. It hoped to also send a fleet of new aircraft, machine guns, and heavy artillery, but the U.S. government pressured President Lázaro Cárdenas to cancel the deal in November. Three Lockheed planes did make it across the Atlantic in December to assist in the fight against Franco’s rebels. The Comintern had revised its “class against class” policies in 1935 (see Chapter 6) to embrace a new popular front strategy that permitted communist parties around the world to collaborate with socialist, liberal, and elements against fascism. (The election of the Popular Front government in Spain was only one example of the victories of new coalitions; the Popular Front government of Léon Blum was another, though it lasted only a year. Chile’s Popular Front government, by contrast, endured from 1937 to 1941.) When the Republican government requested help from the Soviet Union at the end of July 1936, the Comintern mobilized its resources to respond. It issued a call for volunteers from across the world to come and defend the Republic in Spain. A number of “International Brigades” recruited some forty-one thousand volunteers, many of them hailing from communist parties in France, Germany, and other European countries, but also from the United States and Latin America. Harry Haywood, the African American communist, joined the more than three thousand

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American men and women who crossed the Atlantic as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to come to the aid of Republic forces. More than half of them perished. Blocked by their government from entering the fray in Ethiopia in 1935, many African Americans who volunteered considered fighting fascism in Spain to be the next best thing. “For me, as a communist,” Haywood recalled, “Spain was the next logical step. . . . The Spanish Civil War was part of the worldwide drive for fascism.”5 Per capita, Cuba sent the most fighters, roughly some 1,225 volunteers, not counting the Cubans in New York who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The brigades arrived in time to help defend Madrid in November. Officered by Red Army and Soviet military intelligence personnel, they fought hard and courageously. Like the fascists, they also committed atrocities against their enemies. In mid-September, Stalin sent significant military matériel to Spain. New tanks, armored vehicles, and state of the art airplanes – in greater quantities and quality than those provided by Italy and Germany to the rebels – made the difference in the defense of Madrid through November and December. Soviet assistance to the Republicans in Spain persuaded Italy and Germany to bury their considerable differences and to form an alliance that Mussolini named the Rome-Berlin Axis. The two fascist leaders arrived at their entente on October 23, 1936, the very day that Germany and Japan signed their Anti-Comintern Pact. Italy formally joined the Anti-Comintern Pact the following year. This communist-fascist proxy war exposed the weaknesses of the French and British empires and the unwillingness of their leaders and metropolitan populations to take action against fascism. Despite heading the Popular Front government, France’s Blum joined with the British governments of Stanley Baldwin and, in 1937, of Neville Chamberlain, to help enforce the Non-Intervention Agreement. Their reluctance to assist the Republicans in Spain, combined with their failure to respond to Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland the same year, emboldened Hitler to pursue his plans for expansion on the continent while it convinced the Japanese that western actions to counter their aggression would not be forthcoming. On July 7, 1937, Japanese forces attacked China, bringing Beijing, Tianjin, and other cities along the East China Sea under their control.The Japanese navy blockaded the Chinese coast, and in October, the government formed the Central China Expeditionary Army to take over the campaign against Shanghai, where Chiang Kai-shek led a sizeable army. Between August and November, Chinese and Japanese troops fought a series of brutal battles in what turned out to be the biggest campaign of the war. Japanese forces dropped poison gas on the inhabitants of the city; the fighting destroyed 60% of Shanghai’s factories. When Shanghai finally capitulated, more than nine thousand Japanese soldiers had been killed and another thirty-one thousand wounded. These numbers paled in comparison to Chinese losses, which totaled 187,000 died or wounded soldiers. Chiang lost 70% of his officer corps in the fighting. With Shanghai in hand, Japanese forces journeyed up the Yangzi River to Nanjing, arriving on the first of December. Within two weeks they had captured and occupied the city, whereupon they massacred thousands, if not hundreds of

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thousands. In Nanjing and other cities, troops raped women and girls; they burned Chinese soldiers alive and set fire to as much property as they could. When local civilians tried to put out the flames engulfing their homes and possessions, Japanese soldiers shot them. Japanese forces continued deeper into the country, using poison gas and germ warfare – anthrax, plague, typhoid, and cholera – to quell the local population. Troops had to live off the land and goods seized from the area’s residents as they moved ever farther from supply lines at the coast. Their depredations fomented deep Chinese hatred, abetting the tenuous alliance between Chinese nationalist and communist forces against the Japanese.The worst atrocity against the Chinese, however, occurred at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek. Frantic to stop Japan’s relentless march inland, in June 1938, he directed his troops to rupture the dams and dikes controlling the Yellow River near Zhengzhou in Henan province. The resulting floods engulfed twenty-seven thousand square miles of farmland, taking the lives of nine hundred thousand Chinese, far more than the Japanese had killed up to that time. Some 3.9 million people survived but lost their farms and their homes. The following month, Russia sent planes and troops to the Korean-RussianManchukuo border to interrupt Japanese progress in North China. In August, outgunned and outmanned, the Japanese agreed to a ceasefire, but the Soviets levied a heavy price for an end to the fighting. Japan ceded a large chunk of Chinese territory to the Russians, who proceeded to deport two hundred thousand Koreans who lived in the area to Kazakhstan. Preoccupied with their own economic problems and colonial troubles and trying desperately to deal with German aggression in Europe, Britain, France, and the United States did little more than protest the actions of the Japanese in 1937, 1938, and 1939. In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria to Germany in the so-called Anschluss, an operation that exposed the newly created and vulnerable Czechoslovakia to further German aggression. Czechoslovakia contained a large ethnic German population in its southern region; Hitler’s declaration that the Sudetenland, as that region was called, constituted an integral part of the Reich compelled France and Britain to call for a conference to adjudicate the question. On September 29, 1938, Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, along with Mussolini, met Hitler in Munich, where they negotiated away a significant portion of Czech territory while representatives of the Czech government waited outside in the hall. The new country was forced to give up not just the Sudetenland, but military installations as well. After Léon Blum resigned from the Popular Front government in France in June 1937, the value of the franc declined precipitously, and government expenditures and debt ballooned. Belgium reverted to a stance of official (if ultimately meaningless) neutrality, and with that, the veil of security represented by so-called Little Entente evaporated. France became increasingly passive on the diplomatic front, allowing Neville Chamberlain and the British to take the lead in vigorous efforts to appease the Nazis. Declaring that he had achieved “peace in our time,” Chamberlain returned to London from Munich convinced that by giving Hitler what he wanted in this case he had satisfied the Fuhrer’s appetite for expansion.

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He was wrong, as Germany’s invasion of what was left of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 demonstrated so poignantly. Hitler could not portray the conquest of a non-German people as a move to reunify Germans, and the invasion was seen for what it was: the first act in a war to dominate Europe. Britain and France began to rearm seriously, and issued a guarantee of sovereignty to Poland, the country next in the path of the German war machine. The U.S.S.R., fearing that the appeasing western empires might negotiate a deal with the Nazi government that was inimical to Soviet interests, signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany known as the Nazi-Soviet pact. Under its terms the Nazis promised parts of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states to the Russians. Having neutralized the Soviet Union, Hitler then invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, obliterating the Polish army. Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the Second World War, which already had gone on for two bloody years in the Pacific since the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, now engulfed Europe. The policy of appeasement, whereby France, Britain, and even the United States acceded to Italy’s, Germany’s, and Japan’s aggressive actions, flowed not from the craven nature of clueless and weak politicians, but from the clear-headed realization that the British, French, and American people could not be induced to go to war, not after the devastations they had suffered during and since the Great War. The elected leaders, including the American president Franklin Roosevelt, whose people remained firmly of isolationist opinion, could not simply take their countries to war; they had to respond to public opinion, which was overwhelmingly in favor of peace and disarmament. Rearmament in preparation for war took place very slowly, as political leaders acted, frequently behind the scenes, to defend their interests as best they could. Jean Renoir’s cinematic masterpiece, La Grande Illusion, released in France in 1937 to great acclaim, suggested the degree to which the French people hoped to maintain peace, even in the face of obvious German and Italian aggression. The story of a small group of French POWs who escape their German captors during the final days of World War I, its title is a reference to the British journalist and peace activist Norman Angell’s book, The Great Illusion (1909). Angell had advocated disarmament and internationalism and argued that war among the European powers was futile and self-destructive because of their economic interdependence – themes which Angell reiterated after he received the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize. Renoir’s film reflected the commonly held view that the suffering wrought by the Great War had been pointless and based on largely fictitious notions of national difference. It captured the widespread pacifism of French citizens confronted with the prospect of another war. Historians recently have shown that outsized confidence in French imperial strength buoyed unrealistic civilian hopes that war could be avoided, even as some in the French army, such as Charles DeGaulle, fruitlessly pushed to modernize the military with more tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery. Only weeks after signing the Munich Pact, the French prime minister and leader of the Radical Party, Édouard Daladier, embarked on a triumphant tour of Tunisia and Corsica, which the French

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and international press covered extensively as a “hands off demonstration” directed at Mussolini’s Italy. It was in colonial North Africa, Daladier exclaimed in Tunis, “that one comes to understand the true grandeur of France.” Popular films from the late 1930s, such as Unité française, which hit theaters soon after Daladier’s tour, reiterated French strength and unity, while others, including SOS Sahara and La Piste du Sud, located the source of both in the empire, suggesting that the colonies would more than compensate for the inadequacies of metropolitan in comparison to Germany.The positive press coverage of and public reaction to Daladier’s visit to Tunisia reassured the British of French resolve as well. As Eric Phipps, the former British ambassador to Germany who had been transferred to France in 1937, noted, “his journey is regarded by the French press, without distinction of party, as an encouraging demonstration . . . of the unity and devotion of the French Empire.”6 As anti-colonial internationalists had known from the beginning, the appeasement of fascism would not be possible in a world in which imperialism remained a legitimate form of statecraft. This had become clear to many of them in the example of Japan, a country with which they had identified as brothers and sisters in arms against racism and global white supremacy but that had betrayed their ideals in the conquest of Manchuria and then China. And what, after all, were Italy and Germany after if not an empire, as the invasion of Ethiopia had borne out? Germany might not seek colonies in Asia or Africa, at least for the time being, but its plans for the colonization of Eastern Europe surely qualified as imperialism. As Nehru pointed out in a speech before the “Peace and Empire” conference in London in July 1938, “anti-Fascist British people should realize that it is not possible to conduct the anti-Fascist struggle successfully, if the anti-imperialist struggle is ignored.” He and other anti-colonialists believed that internationalist solidarity and colonial liberation offered the best option for peace in the world. “[O]ur problem,” Nehru insisted, “is to work for the independence of all subject peoples, not to make them narrow-minded nationalist units, but free partners in this larger order.”7 When it became clear that war would come, anti-colonialists faced a dilemma. Most conceded that British and French colonialism was better than fascism, if only slightly, but the question of whether or not to support the French and British empires in another inter-imperial conflict divided them. In September 1938, Padmore and the International African Service Bureau in London published a pamphlet titled Europe’s Difficulty Is Africa’s Opportunity, which implored “Africans, people of African descent, and colonial peoples all over the world . . . not to be caught by the lying promises” and “to organize yourselves and be ready to seize the opportunity when it comes.” The issue split the Gold Coast Students Association. In October 1938, Desmond Buckle proposed a motion stating “that this Association refuses to fight for the British Empire” and, a month later, helped defeat another, put forward by William Ofori Atta, to the effect “that the salvation of the Gold Coast lies in close co-operation with the British Labour Party.”8 The question similarly divided anticolonial agitators in France, and here again, the majority ultimately opted to go with the Allies. In contrast to his friend Padmore,Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté softened his criticism of French colonialism and advocated for a transformed federal system

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encompassing metropolitan France and the overseas empire in which France’s African colonies would receive a measure of self-government over their internal affairs. Emile Faure, an engineer and activist from Saint-Louis, Senegal, adopted a more critical stance. In the spring of 1937, a group of organizations representing Africans and other colonial subjects of the French empire formed the Rassemblement Colonial to press for reform “within the framework of republican institutions,” and Faure served as secretary general. Echoing Padmore and others in London, at year’s end, Faure declared, “the Rassemblement Colonial believes that emancipation of the colonies is the primordial condition for peace.”9 As soon as Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, the selfgoverning dominions followed suit. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand never hesitated, but in South Africa, where Afrikaner hatred of Britain and a positive disposition toward the Nazis created resistance to aiding in the British war effort, the government won the motion to go to war by only thirteen votes. Ireland, which did not consider itself a dominion, despite what the British thought, declared itself officially neutral, though Eire’s actual behavior during the war softened this stark assertion of separateness. South Africa, despite its initial resistance to supporting Britain, produced tremendous amounts of war matériel and ancillary supplies, undergoing a dramatic industrial transformation in the process. As it turned out, however, white South Africans would only go so far in assisting the Allies. They opposed training African soldiers to use advanced weaponry and other technology. As a result, the segregated branches of the non-white military – the Cape Coloured Corps, Malay Corps, and Native Military Corps – did not carry guns until February 1944. The recruitment of South African blacks into the army, consequently, fell short, for they hesitated to accept the low pay and discrimination they would encounter if they enlisted. Even so, 123,000 non-white South Africans served during the war. Unlike the dominions, the colonies had no choice in the matter. They went to war on the command of the British government, a fact that particularly rankled anti-colonialists in India. The Indian viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, conferred with no one before he declared that India was at war because Britain was at war. Responses to his unilateral assertion were mixed. The princes and the Indian army wholeheartedly supported the war effort; the Muslim League tried to stay on the fence, seeing in the conflict opportunities to further Muslim interests against those of the Congress Party; and Congress leaders held a variety of positions. Gandhi, whose influence within Congress had waned in recent years, originally urged Indians to line up behind their imperial masters to oppose fascism. (He later changed his position.) Nehru adamantly opposed assisting the British, arguing that fascism and imperialism had little to distinguish themselves from one another and that a British victory would be no better than a defeat. Subhas Chandra Bose advocated that Indians take advantage of the war to revolt against British rule. (As it turned out, he formed an Indian National Army made up of sixty thousand men and women who had surrendered to the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. Seeking independence for India, they fought on the side of the Japanese against Britain in Burma.) Nehru wouldn’t go that far, and was willing to make a deal with Linlithgow that

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he would rally INC support if the British promised independence immediately following the war. Outraged by Nehru’s cheek, the viceroy turned him down. Instead, he proceeded to arrest and jail thousands of Indians, including much of the INC leadership. Preemptive crackdowns on anti-colonial dissent occurred elsewhere across the empire as well. During the first year of the war, the governor of Sierra Leone ordered the arrest and internment of Wallace-Johnson, exercising new powers granted to him under the recently instituted Wartime Emergency Defence Regulations. He was held at the internment camp for “enemy aliens” before being moved to the Freetown jail. After four months, colonial officials transferred Wallace-Johnson to the Remand Prison, where they placed him in solitary confinement for forty-five days. His health began to deteriorate, and he was relocated to the prison’s hospital ward, where he remained for the next eleven months. Finally, the governor moved Wallace-Johnson to the internment camp at Bonthe on Sherbro Island, where he remained until late 1944, despite his worsening physical state and his repeated appeals for assistance from well-placed friends in Britain such as the Labour MP Arthur Creech Jones. The Nazis’ swift defeat of France prevented colonial forces from playing as large of a role in the fighting as they had in the First World War – at least, initially. The forty thousand African soldiers stationed in France at the start of the war, the majority of which hailed from West Africa, fought hard and perished in large numbers during the brief Battle of France. In the face of Nazism, Léopold Sédar Senghor moved away from his earlier emphasis on a distinctive “African personality” and increasingly celebrated the benefits of cultural métissage; after 1935, as he later put it, he “moved from ghetto-negritude to open-negritude.”10 Having previously completed a mandatory period of military service in order to stay in France and continue his studies, Senghor eagerly took up arms in defense of the Republic when he was called up and assigned to a regiment of other colonial soldiers. After several days of fighting to defend a bridge at La Charité-Loire, his company surrendered on June 20, 1940, and Senghor spent the next two years as a prisoner-of-war in seven different camps in France. Following his release, he joined the underground French resistance movement. After the fall of France, French colonial rulers in North and West Africa joined their metropolitan colleagues in supporting the Vichy government and collaborating with the Nazis. General Charles de Gaulle seized the colonies of Cameroon and French Equatorial Africa (or Congo-Brazzaville), where, as one historian phrases it, an “improbable military and institutional rebirth” began. Under the black governor Félix Éboué from French Guiana, Chad was the first French colony to pledge itself to the resistance effort, expanding Free French territory to the Libya border. French Equatorial Africa, the site of some of the worst colonial abuses and repression in French colonial Africa, became the cradle of the French resistance from which de Gaulle and his Free French forces pushed northward toward the Mediterranean. In sum, as one commentary noted after the war, “Free France was African.”11 During the four years between de Gaulle’s declaration of “Free France” in August 1940 and the symbolic liberation of Paris in August 1944, during which French, British, and American military commanders

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insisted that African troops remain in the background, colonial soldiers once again played a tremendous part in deciding the final outcome of the war. The reluctance of Indian nationalists to aid Britain in its war against the Axis powers proved the exception to the rule. From all over the empire, subjects offered their support and their lives to British war effort.Twenty thousand Afro-Caribbeans, for example, served as laborers, soldiers, and members of women’s auxiliaries, many in the Royal Air Force; five hundred men from Honduras worked in the forestry units in the Scottish Highlands to provide timber to the war effort; members of the King’s African Rifles and the West African Frontier Force fought against Mussolini’s troops in northwest Africa; after the Japanese defeat of Singapore and Hong Kong and its invasion of Burma, African troops drawn from practically every British colony on the continent formed a sizable portion of General Slim’s Fourteenth Army, the force ordered to advance into central Burma and retake it from the Japanese. *** As we have argued throughout this book, internationalist hopes, designs, initiatives, and movements flourished throughout the decade of the 1930s, especially among colonized peoples and oppressed racial groups. Historians have tended not to see the decade of the 1930s as the international decade, as we do, in large part because they have focused predominately on the United States, Europe, and Japan and have paid far less attention to connections across the Afro-Asian world. Though Afro-Asian solidarity remained an elusive dream harbored predominately by well-travelled, well-connected anti-colonial intellectuals, there were also signs of an incipient sense of unity in opposition to empire, the roots of what would later be called “Third Worldism” in the context of decolonization during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Nehru made the acquaintance of African American leaders such as Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and the president of Fisk University Charles Johnson; he mixed with Caribbean black internationalists in the imperial metropolis, ranging from the radical pan-Africanist Padmore to the more moderate president of the League of Coloured Peoples, Dr. Harold Moody. As a consequence of such connections, Nehru, like Gandhi, had become much more attuned to struggles across the African world than ever before during the 1930s and incorporated his new understanding and appreciation in his thinking about independence for India. The mahatma, for his part, became a “colored” hero to African-American newspaper readers and contemporaries across the colonized world, and a significant influence on the tactics of the anti-colonial movement in Ghana, the civil rights movement in the United States, and anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa after World War II.12 The gesture toward “Third Worldism” that marked the internationalism of anticolonialists in the 1930s stands in marked contrast to the liberal-imperial internationalism of the United States and Allied powers of Europe, which displayed a pronounced cynicism, if not hypocrisy.We saw this at work in 1931 with the failure of the League to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; in 1935 with the League of Nation’s response to the invasion of Ethiopia; the following year with the

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Non-Intervention Act that prevented the Spanish Republican government from defending itself against fascism; and again, in 1938, with the dismemberment the Czechoslovakia, one of the new nation-states created by the Versailles Treaty. Yet another example of the failures of liberal internationalism occurred that same year in July, at the Evian Conference in France. Franklin Roosevelt called the conference in order to deal with the mass emigration of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. Thirty-two nations participated, including the founding members of the League of Nations. The majority failed to commit to any solution that would involve taking in Jews. Only one, the Dominican Republic, under the dictatorship of President Rafael Trujillo, made any concrete offer to accept Jews. This was the man, as we saw in Chapter 4, who had ordered the murders of thousands of Haitians in the course of colonizing the areas of his country that bordered Haiti. At Evian, he proposed to exchange asylum for agricultural labor – to establish a Jewish colony of one hundred thousand workers. In the end, the community of Sousa provided refuge to only 750 Jews. This farcical display of internationalism, with all its inadequacies and contradictions, also gestured toward the future, but one that had a decidedly more tragic outcome.

Notes 1 Quoted in Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, 243. 2 Quoted in Matera, Black London, 94, 95. 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, Newspaper Columns, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 2 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thompson Organization, 1986), 1: 37. 4 Quoted in Matera, Black London, 97. 5 Haywood, A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle, 216, 228. 6 Daladier and Phipps quoted in Daniel Hucker, Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016 [2011]), 101–102. See also Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 204. 7 Quoted in Matera, Black London, 96. 8 Ibid., 98–99. 9 Quoted in Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators,’ 411. 10 Quoted in Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 52. 11 Eric T. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. 12 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism:The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 78–87; Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, Ch. 9.

INDEX

4th Army’s Women’s Regiment 176 – 7 1930s 5 – 11, 209 – 20 Abby, Leon 32 Acchut Kanya (Rani) 40 Africa 119 – 21, 128, 139 – 42 African National Congress 181 Alex, Joe 15 Algeria 20, 119 – 20 Ali, Husayn ibn 6, 50 Alien Registration Ordinance (1933) 143 All-India Anti-Untouchability League 115 All-India movement 73 All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) 88 All-Union Young Communist League 163 Ambedkar, B.R. 115 – 16 American-Cuban relationship 57 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 50 antichinesta violence 123 anti-colonial internationalisms: anti-imperialisms 75 – 82; black internationalism in Ethiopia 82 – 7; conclusion 95, 216; feminist internationalism 87 – 95; imperial internationalisms 65 – 7; introduction 70 – 2; Latin America 128; nationalism in South Asia 72 – 5 Anti-Comintern Pact 153 – 4 anti-imperialism 75 – 82, 178, 210 anti-Semitism 187, 190, 206 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society 209, 210 anti-slavery movement 63

anti-Zionism 206 Arab Higher Committee (AHC) 203 Arab revolt 200 – 5 Araujo, Arturo 135 Armstrong, Louis 29 Army of Africa 199 Art Deco style 22, 25 Ashkenazi Jewish settlement 78 Ashwood Garvey, Amy 84 – 5, 141 assimilationism 54 associationism 54 al-Atasi, Hashim 79 – 80 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 93 autobahn project in Germany 212 Azaña, Manuel 199 Azikiwe, Nnamdi 85, 141 Baker, Josephine 15 – 16 Baldwin, Roger Nash 65 Balfour, Arthur 2 Balfour Declaration 201 al-Banna, Hasan 80 Bantu Dramatic Society 25 Bantu Social Centre 26 Barua, Pramathesh 40 Ba Thaung  78 Batista, Fulgencio 147 Baúza, Mario 29, 30 Bengali nationalism 77 Ben Gurion, David 203 – 4 Benjamin, Walter  23 bilateral trade agreements 109 black blizzards 106

222 Index

Black Bolsheviks 178 – 83 black internationalism 82 – 7, 178 – 83 Blum, Léon 80, 214 Bolshevik revolution 5 – 6, 8, 20, 47 – 8, 161 Bose, Subdas Chandra 74 Breton, André 36 Bridgeman, Reginald 180 British Caribbean 128 British empire 48 – 55 British League of Nations Union 52 British National Seamen’s Union 141 Buddhism 116, 130 bum brigade 124 Bunche, Ralph 26 Burmese monarchy 130 Bustamante, W. Alexander  149 Bustamante Industrial Trades Union 149 Buxton, Charles Roden 210 Cabinet Information Division (CID) 153 Cai Chusheng 39 Calles, Plutarco Elías 144 Caluza, Tholakele  31 Cárdenas, Lázaro 144 Caribbean 121 – 4, 128, 148 – 9 Carnegie Corporation 59 Case for West Indian Self-Government, The (Woolf ) 149 Chamberlain, Neville 209, 213, 214 Chávez, Eusebio 134 Cheng Bugao 39 Cherry Blossom Society 194 Chiang Kai-shek 60, 164, 171 – 4, 171 – 5, 214 Chicago World’s Fair (1934–1935) 23 China: communism in 143, 169 – 75; communist challenges to gender 175 – 8; imperial internationalisms 76 – 7; Japanese attacks on 213 – 14; natural disasters 108; poverty concerns 75 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 21, 143, 164 Christianity 77 – 8,  83 “class against class” policy 165 collectivization 158 – 60 Colombia 110 Colonial Development Act (1929) 50 colonialism see anti-colonial internationalisms Colonial Seamen’s Association 180 comfort women in Japan 196 Comintern 164 – 9, 178 – 9 Committee on Intellectual Cooperation 47 Committees of Action for the Universality of Rome (CAUR) 191

communism: Anti-Comintern Pact 153 – 4; Black Bolsheviks 178 – 83; challenges to gender 175 – 8; Chinese communists 143, 169 – 75; the Comintern 164 – 9; conclusion 183 – 4; global communism 157 – 64; influence in Latin America 135 – 6; internationalisms 47; introduction 12;Yen Bay uprising 133; see also global communism Communist International 55 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 166, 167 Communist Party of India 166 Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) 180 – 2 Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTVU) 164 comrades 161 – 4 Confucianism 175 Congress of the International Federation of League of Nations 52 Cook, Will Marion 29 cosmopolitanism 21, 29, 35 Council of Four 1 Council on Foreign Relations’ War-Peace Studies Project 59 Cox, James R. 138 Cuban negrismo 37 Cubism 35 – 6 Dai Ajia Shugi journal 77 Daily Gleaner newspaper 149 Dakar-Djibouti, Mission 36 Daladier, Édouard 215 – 16 Darré, Richard Walther 191 Das, Bina 75 decolonization 12, 60, 73, 146, 219 DeGaulle, Charles 215, 218 Deng Xiaoping 174 Devdas (Barua) 40 dharmaantar (conversion) 116 Diagne, Blaise 4 diasporic Asia 118 – 19 Dietrich, Marlene 38 Dominican Republic 110, 220 droughts 107 Du Bois, W.E.B. 26, 40, 82, 86 – 7 Durban Bantu Social Club 27 Dust Bowl 105 – 7, 124 Dutch colonial government 131 earthquakes 108 Eastern Women’s Congress 91 – 2 École Coloniale 54 economic nationalism 11

Index  223

Egypt 90 – 1 Egyptian Feminist Union 91 Electric and Telephone Company 4 Ellington, Duke 29, 32 El Salvador 134 – 5 Emmanuel,Victor  63 Empire Marketing Board 50 Enabling Act (1933) 189 – 90 Ethiopia 46, 63, 64, 82 – 7 Ethiopia Defence Fund 85 Ethiopian Research Council 83 Europe, James Reese 29 exposé of modernity 23 – 7 Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET) 199 Falkirk strike 142 fascism see global fascism Fauvism 35 federalism 65 feminism: communism and 161; India 88 – 90; Japan 93 – 4; maternal femininity 186; Syria 91 – 2; Turkey 93 feminist internationalism 87 – 95 Filipinization policy 56 Filipino Repatriation Act (1938) 122 – 3 film culture 38 – 41 First Opium War (1842) 21 Five-Year Plans 162 food riots 137 – 8 food shortages 159 – 60 Ford, Henry 106 Ford Foundation 59 Ford Motor Company massacre 138 Fortune Magazine 38 Four-Year Plan 211 Franco, Francisco 200 – 1 French colonialism 24 French colonization 19 French Communist Party 24 French Concession 21 French empire 48 – 55 Fumimaro, Konoe 2, 3, 153

Germany: exclusion from League of Nations 63; global fascism 187 – 91; imperial internationalisms 59 – 65; preparing for war 209 – 15 Ghana 107 – 8 Girni Kamgar Mahamandal union 166 global communism 157 – 64; see also communism global depression 51; see also Great Depression global fascism: Arab revolt 200 – 5; conclusion 207; gender of 194 – 7; introduction 186 – 7; Italy and Germany 187 – 91; Japan 153 – 4, 186 – 7, 192 – 4; response to 205 – 7; Spanish Civil War 197 – 200; universal fascism 191 – 4 Gold Coast Spectator 141 Gold Coast Students Association 216 Goldwater, Robert 36 Gómez, Juan Vicente 146 Good Neighbor Policy 58 Government of India Act (1935) 89 Great Depression: Africa 119 – 21, 142; Caribbean and Latin America 121 – 4; communism and 157; conclusion 124 – 5; cultural crises from 154; diasporic Asia 118 – 19; economic devastation of 159; effects of 150; fascism and 192; gender differences 103 – 5; government assistance 108 – 17; introduction 11 – 12, 103; Mediterranean islands 119 – 21; natural disasters 105 – 8; onset 18 – 19, 70; recording industry consolidation 34; reverse migrations and repatriation 117 – 24 Greater Asia Association 77 Great Migration, United States 18 Griaule, Marcel 36 Grier, Selwyn 84 Grimm, Hans 64 Grizodubova,Valentina  163 Guatemalan indigenismo 37 Gumede, Josiah 180 – 1 Guomindang (GMD) 60, 164 – 5, 170

Gandhi, Mohandas 72 – 4, 167 Garvey, Marcus 82, 122 Garveyite movement 88 gender differences/ideology: communism and 163, 175 – 8; fascism 194 – 7; Great Depression 103 – 5; introduction 12 – 13 General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem 78 – 9 General Union of Syrian Women 91 German National Socialists 186 – 91

Hadj, Messali 66 Haiti 147 – 8,  220 Haitian-Dominican relations 110 – 11 Hamada, Nour 92 Hara, Muhammad 77 Harlem Renaissance 23 Harlem Riot (1935) 145 Hashemite dynasty 79 Hawkins, Coleman 32 Hayes, Roland 36 – 7

224 Index

Haywood, Harry 182 – 3 Herrera, Enrique Olaya 110 Herzog, J.B.M. 113 He Zizhen 177 Hirohito ( Japanese emperor) 1 His Majesty’s Voice (HMV) 34 Hitler, Adolf 62 – 5, 187, 188 – 91, 206, 209 – 15 Holiday, Billie 33 Howell, Leonard 83 Hsaya San 130, 134 Hull, Cordell 58 hunger marches 136 – 9 imperial internationalisms: anti-colonialism 65 – 7; British and French empires 48 – 55; conclusion 67 – 8; Germany 59 – 65; introduction 47 – 8; Italy 59 – 65; Japan 59 – 65, 76 – 7; Soviet Union 55 – 9, 77; United States 55 – 9 Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (IICU) 139 – 40 India: colonial rule 115 – 16; earthquakes 108; feminism in 88 – 90; film industry 39 – 40; war and 217 – 18 India Act (1935) 114 Indian National Congress 4, 72 – 4, 114, 167 indigenismo movement 37 Indigenous Amerindians 134 – 5 Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) 132, 133,168, 169 Indonesian National Party (PNI) 81 Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) 139 – 40 industrial militancy in Africa 139 – 42 International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) 84 International African Service Bureau 216 International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAW) 87, 91, 93 International Congress on Native Society 54 International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples 54 internationalism 25, 31, 45 – 6, 65, 87 – 95; see also anti-colonial internationalisms; imperial internationalisms International trade 11 invernadores 109 Iraq 50 – 1 Isaacs, J.R. 36 isolationism policy in the United States 57 Italo-Ethiopian War  46

Italy: fascism in 187 – 91, 192; imperial internationalisms 59 – 65; sanctions against 209 al-Jabiri, Saadallah 79 Jamaica 148 Jamaica Native Defenders Committee 122 Jamaican Labour Party 149 James, C.L.R. 149 James, J. W. Langford 167 Japan: airpower of 21; attacks by 213 – 14; depression in 116 – 17; export growth 81; fascism in 192 – 3, 195; feminism in 93 – 4; foreign relations 82; imperial internationalisms 59 – 65, 76 – 7; invasion of Manchukuo 61; post-WWII 1 – 3 Japan Young Men’s Party 194 jazz age 28 – 35 Jewish immigration to Palestine 201 – 3 Jim Crow laws 54 – 5 Johannesburg 24 – 7 Johannesburg Empire Exhibition (1936) 24 – 5 Johnson, Ken 29 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) 122 Jolson, Al 38 Jones Act (1917) 57, 67 Josh, Sohan Singh 166 Joyce, James 22, 26 Kadalie, Clements 139 Karachi Resolution 114 Kenyatta, Jomo 141 Khilafat movement 74, 78 Kingoro, Hashimoto 194 Kirov, Sergei 161 Klennerman, Fanny 26 Korea 77 – 8,  129 Korean Independence Movement 76 Kouyaté, Tiemoko Garan 179 Krystallnacht 190 Kwantung Army 60, 117 labor rebellions 142 – 50 la danse sauvage 15 – 16 Lagos Ethiopia Defence Committee 84 La Matanza massacre 135 Land Act (1926) 113 Latin America: communist influence in 135 – 6; depression in 121 – 4, 127; jazz 30 League Against Imperialism (LAI) 165, 179 League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) 180

Index  225

League of Nations: anti-slavery movement 63; creation of 47; Germany exclusion from 63; introduction 1, 4, 7; invasion of Ethiopia 46; Japanese invasion of Manchukuo 61; Japan’s withdrawal from 77, 81; mandate system 48; sanctions against Italy 209; support for 51; trusteeship concept 116; US membership in 57 – 8 League of Nations Commission 2 Léardee, Ernest 33 Leiris, Michel 36 Lenin,Vladimir 5, 55 – 6, 157 Leslie, Lew 29 liberalism: alternatives to 157; fascism vs. 195; international challenges 153 – 4; revolutionary France and 188 Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, The ( James) 149 Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre 179 Li Jinhui 32 Li Lisan 170 Lindy Hop dance 30 Locke, Alain 36, 37 London Metropolitan Police 137 London Passenger Transport Board 19 London Underground 19 Long March 176 – 8 López Pumajero, Alfonso 110 MacArthur, Douglas 138 MacDonald, Ramsay 73, 136 – 7 Machado, Gerardo 31 Macmillan, William 149 – 50 Maher, Kenneth 104 Makonnen, T. Ras 84 Manchuria 118 Manchurian Incident 61, 77 Manley, Norman 149 Mao Dunn 21, 22 Mao Zedong 77, 170, 173, 175 Mardam, Jamil 80 Martínez, Maximiliano Hernández 135, 136 Mason, Charlotte Osgood 37 May Fourth movement 176 Mediterranean islands 119 – 21 Meerut Conspiracy trial 166 Mein Kampf (Hitler) 210 Mendes, Alfred 149 Messali, Hadj 84 Mexican indigenismo 37 Mexico 123, 212

Mitsuteru,Yokomixo  154 Mnika, Alfred 139 modern girl 27 – 8 modernization/modernity (modern culture): exposé of 23 – 7; introduction 17 – 18; jazz age 28 – 35; modern girl 27 – 8; primitivism and 35 – 8; talking pictures 38 – 41; urban space and 18 – 23 Mola, Emilio 198 Moody, Harold 180, 219 Moroccan anticolonial insurgency 199 Mthethwe, Esau 25 Munich Agreement (1938) 204 Musha Incident 76 Mu Shiying 32 Muslim Brotherhood 80 Muslim League 4 Mussolini, Benito: fascism and 187 – 8, 191 – 3, 206; internationalism and 45, 62 – 3, 74; Rome-Berlin Axis 213 Myers, Ruby 40 Nabarawi, Saiza 91 Naidu, Sarojini 73, 89 naisen ittai phrase 76 Nanri, Fumio 32 Nardal, Paulette 84 Natal Indian Congress 142 Natal Iron and Steel Workers Union (NISWU) 142 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 181 National Fascist Party 191 nationalism 65, 72 – 5 Nationalist–Communist coalition 176 Nationalist Party in South Africa 113 National Mobilization Law (1938) 193 – 4 National Party in Puerto Rico 67 National Peace Council of Britain 51 – 2 National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUMN) 136 – 7 Native Trust and Land Act 113 natural disasters 105 – 8 Nazi party 10, 187, 188 – 91, 209 – 15, 218 Negritude movement 54 Negro Welfare Association (NWA) 180 Nehru, Jawaharlal 46, 72 – 3, 114, 167 – 8 New Deal reforms 139 New Economic Policy (NEP) 6, 161 New Women (Cai Chusheng) 39 Nghe-Tinh soviet movement 132 Nigeria: depression in 111 – 12; international crisis and 99 – 100; pest invasions 107; Women’s War 112, 128, 129

226 Index

Nigerian Daily Telegraph 141 Nigerian Youth Movement 84 Non-Intervention Agreement 212 nonviolence (ahimsa) movement 72 – 3 Nuremberg laws 190 Nyabongo, Hosea Akiiki 86 Obregón, Álvaro 143 O’Neill, Eugene 25 – 6 Orlando Brotherly Society 26 Orwell, George 105 Osipenko, Polina 163 Ottawa Agreements 109 Padmore, George 139, 141, 167, 210 Pakempalan Kawula Ngayogyakarta (PKN) 131 Palestine 4, 7, 49, 78 – 80, 200 – 5 Palmer, Josie 182 Pan-African Congress 4 – 5, 82 Pan-Arab Conference in Syria 79 pan-Arabism 75 – 82 pan-Asianism 75 – 82 pan-Islamism 75 – 82 Pankhurst, Sylvia 85 Paris Peace Conference 1 – 3, 5 Patterson, William L. 179 Payne, Clement 146 – 7 peasant insurrections 129 – 36 People’s Political Party 122 Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) 7, 48 Perry, Matthew 195 Persatoean Muslimin Indonesia (Permi) 81 Phu-Riêng plantation 132 – 3 Pittsburgh Courier 40 political famines 158 Popular Front government in France 212 primitivism and modernism 15 – 16, 35 – 8 Primitivism in Modern Art (Goldwater) 36 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio 197 Puerto Rico 30, 67 purna swaraj (complete independence) 72 al-Qassam, Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din 202 – 3 Quoc Dân Dang 168 – 9 racially-motivated violence 2, 8, 142 – 50 Rani, Devika 40 Raskova, Marina 163 Rastafarian movement 83, 148 Red Army China 169 Reddi, Muthulakshmi 88 – 9 Red International of Trade Unions 179

Renoir, Jean 215 repatriation 117 – 24,  143 reverse migrations 117 – 24 revolts: Arab revolt 200 – 5; conclusion 150; hunger marches 136 – 9; industrial militancy in Africa 139 – 42; introduction 127 – 9; peasant insurrections 129 – 36; segregation and labor rebellions 142 – 50 Rhodesia 112 Robeson, Eslanda Goode 27 Robeson, Paul 25, 26, 37, 83 – 4 Roca-Runciman Pact (1933) 109 Rockefeller Foundation 59 Rome-Berlin Axis 213 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 58, 138, 220 Rural Revitalization Campaign in Korea 129 Russo-Japanese War 60, 196 Sadao, Araki 194 Salafism 80 Salt March 72 – 3 Seediq aboriginal group 76 segregation 142 – 50 Selassie, Haile 45, 62 – 3, 85 self-determination of nations 7, 71 self-government 71 Sen, Surya 74 – 5 Shamva Strike (1927) 140 Shanghai 21 – 2, 40 – 1 Sha’rawi, Huda 91 Shidzue, Ishimoto 94 Simon, Kathleen 209, 210 Sing-Song Girl Red Peony (Zhang Shichuan) 38 Sissle, Noble 29, 30 Sisulu, Walter  26 skyscrapers 22 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930) 109 Smuts, Jan 113 Snow,Valaida  29 Society for Promotion of Defence, Aviation, and Chemical Development 163 al-Sohl, Riad 80 Sotelo, José Calvo 198 South Africa 112 – 13 South African Party 113 South Asia 72 – 5 Soviet Popular Front 182 – 3 Soviet Union or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): fleeing of Tatar Muslims 81; imperial internationalisms 47, 55 – 9, 77; introduction 6, 9; Stalinism in 157 – 61

Index  227

Spain 212 Spanish-American War  57 Spanish Civil War 161, 197 – 200, 213 Spring Silkworms (Cheng Bugao) 39 Stalin, Joseph 6, 55 – 6, 162 Stalinism 157 – 61 Steele, Clifford 104, 105 Sumatra Thawalib of Padang Panjang 81 Surjodiningrat, Pangeran 131 surrealist movement 36 Syria 91 – 2 Tagore, Rabindranath 86 Tatar Muslims 81 Theatre Arts Monthly magazine 36 Third Worldism  219 Tibet 173 – 4 Tokyo earthquake (1923) 20 Transfer Agreement 201 – 2; see also Palestine Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 5 – 6 Treaty of Locarno 64 Treaty of London 61 Treaty of Nanjing 21 Treaty of Versailles 5, 10 Trinidadian Workingmen’s Association  4 Trotsky, Leon 6, 23 Trujillo, Rafael 110, 220 Tunisia 129 – 30 Turkey 93 Turkish Women’s Union 93 Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934) 122 unemployment rates: Great Depression 105; introduction 11; Jamaica 148; Soviet Union communism 161 Union and League of Coloured Peoples 66 United Fruit Company 143 United States (US) 55 – 9, 56 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 82 urbanization 19, 78 Vanity Fair magazine 18 Vargas, Getulio 109 – 10 Venezuela 146 Versailles Treaty 63 – 4 Vietnam (or Indochina) 132 – 3, 169

Vodery, Will  29 Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space) (Grimm) 64 Wallace-Johnson, I.T.A. 85, 180, 218 Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire (Macmillan) 149 – 50 Weimar Republic 87 West African Students’ Union 180 West African Youth League (WAYL) 141 Wilkinson, Ellen 137 William E. Harmon Foundation 37 Williams, Henry Sylvester 82 Wilsonian movement: aftermath of 47; anti-colonialism and 70; failure of 61; imperial peace 3 – 5; introduction 1 – 3; 1920s 5 – 11 women in the Long March 176 – 8 Women’s Enfranchisement Act (1930) 87 Women’s Indian Association (WIA) 88 – 9 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) 87 – 8, 89 Women’s War in Nigeria (1929) 112, 128, 129 Woolf, Leonard 149 Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (WPP) 166 World War I (WWI): British/colonial India relations 51; cinemas in Egypt 39; international dance craze before 31; international order following 47 – 8; introduction 20 World War II (WWII): drive for social democracy after 137; economic crisis 129; introduction 12; pan-Asian liberation 76 Wu Yuqing  176 Xiang River battle 172 Yen Bay uprising 133 Zhang Guotao 173 Zhang Shichuan 38 Zhang Xueliang 60 Zhang Zueliang 174 Zionist Labor Federation 203 – 4 Zionist Movement 78, 201 – 2 Zunyi Conference 175