The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War

Abstract

The white working classes in the pre‐First World War British Empire were not composed of ‘nationally’ discrete entities, but were bound together into an Imperial working class by flows of population which traversed the world. The labour movements based on this imperial working class produced and disseminated a common ideology of White Labourism. In this ideology, the element of the critique of exploitation and the element of racism were inextricably intermingled. The paper seeks to identify a few of the many ‘vectors’ along which white labourist ideology moved around the world. The paper ends with a discussion of the British labour movement response to the 1914 deportations of South African white labour leaders, which seeks to demonstrate how integral to that movement the conceptions of White Labourism had become.

The Political Histories of Modern Scotland

“…Such were the extremity of his views on South Africa and other imperial questions that he was regarded as a 'bungler' and an embarrassment to the cause by the very advanced Edinburgh Evening News (12 Oct. 1900). Clark's position became even more difficult when British forces captured Bloomfontein and his correspondence with Paul Kruger was among the documents that they discovered (Davey 1978, 74-5) despite their radicalism, complicit in the defence of white labour rights based on racist attitudes to black workers (Hyslop 1999(Hyslop , 2002(Hyslop , 2003(Hyslop , 2004(Hyslop , 2006 Some of these questions can be followed up at the western edge of the Empire. In British Columbia issues of race and economic control were also present in the network of Scots who were active in the fishing industry in both the business side and in the trade unions.…”

From British subjects to Australian values: a citizenship-building approach to Australia–Asia relations

“…Indeed, the general tenor of these labourist notions -in particular the relationship of labour identity, populism, and the racial order -were echoed in settler societies such as South Africa and Canada. In part, this arose because the flows of people and ideas in settler societies created a particular kind of political identity (Hyslop 1999). Hence, the populist notions of 484…”

Introduction: comparing race and labour in South Africa and The United States

“…Mainly this was a consequence of these structural factors, but partly it was related to the movement of particular individuals across the Atlantic. 20 In the United States, the largest working-class organisation of the 1870s and 1880s was the Knights of Labor, a general union that recruited all grades of workers regardless of ethnicity, gender and race. At its height, in 1886, it had more than 700,000 members, at least 60,000 of whom were African Americans.…”