Throughout my doctoral research on anti-imperialism and international solidarity politics among the British New Left of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, I have often wrestled with the question of the “umbrella” under which my research falls — ‘modern British history’, or ‘world history’.
Studying “the British left”, with archives exclusively located throughout the United Kingdom, my research might seem straightforwardly to fall under the umbrella of ‘British history’. Yet this designation grates against the insistent internationalism of the political and intellectual history with which I am concerned.
Focusing on Britain’s Anti-Apartheid, anti-Vietnam War, and Chile Solidarity movements, my work necessarily engages constantly with contemporary histories of Southern Africa, Indochina, and Latin America, as well as with the transnational diplomatic strategies of the ANC, Vietnamese revolutionaries, and pro-Allende Chileans. It charts the contributions of exiles and representatives from those overseas struggles to the solidarity activist milieu in Britain.
Another approach would be to situate it within the ‘world history’ paradigm, given the powerful influence of the now-voluminous 21st-century literature on Third World solidarity, 1960s-70s anti-imperialist internationalism, and Tricontinentalism upon my thesis. Yet however internationalist the British New Left milieu I reconstruct, can a research project whose subjects are overwhelmingly located within one, Western European country meaningfully represent a global-historical account?
Here, then, is the crux of my sense of disciplinary limbo. My research is animated by an unabashed kindred identification with my historical subjects’ dissatisfaction with the confining national bounds of “British politics”, and attraction to the global sweep of solidaristic internationalism — and by a consequent eagerness to help recover their outward-looking historical tradition for today.
On 28 October 2023 I was among the 500,000 marchers who joined a Palestine Solidarity Campaign national demonstration to Parliament Square, where Palestinian ambassador Husam Zomlot addressed his British audience:
“You — you and your parents — stood up against apartheid South Africa, remember, remember! You defeated apartheid South Africa, and you shall defeat Israeli tyranny, occupation, colonisation, and apartheid!”
Of course, Britain’s thirty five-year Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) represented only a small tributary stream to the global flood which felled South Africa’s apartheid system, compared with the revolutionary struggles of the black South African majority, decisive Cuban military intervention in Angola, and US sanctions from the mid-1980s. But in invoking Britain’s anti-apartheid history, Zomlot appealed to a (counter-)tradition of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist protest throughout modern British history. The resonance this found among contemporary activists was clear in the roar of approval Zomlot’s homage to the Free Nelson Mandela movement earned from Parliament Square’s pro-Palestinian crowd.
This is a tradition just as British as the colonial and neo-imperialist criminality it has positioned itself against. From the metropolitan outcry at British repression in colonial Jamaica following 1865’s Morant Bay Uprising, to Richard Gott’s 1966 Hull North by-election challenge to Labour over Harold Wilson’s complicity with Washington’s Vietnam War, to 2003’s 1.5 million-strong march against the invasion of Iraq, modern British history has witnessed an unbroken subaltern tradition of progressive dissent against Westminster’s pro-imperial foreign policy.
Like Karl Marx’s proverbial “old mole”, this tradition has at times been effectively driven underground, only to periodically erupt again into view. It is this subterranean internationalist heritage, deeply woven into the fabric of modern British public life and political culture, which explains the visceral purchase and staying power of Palestine solidarity among diverse layers of contemporary UK society. From Suez to Vietnam to Chile, South Africa to Iraq to Gaza, international solidarity is British history.
However, when answering in the negative to friendly queries of whether I will draw on collections in Johannesburg or Santiago to complete my studies, I have at times felt a pang of angst that my research might risk methodologically recapitulating that national insularity which both my historical subjects and I myself as a historian reject.
This may, in fact, express an inevitable paradox of writing the history of one’s own country’s international solidarity tradition from here.
This is not a novel observation, and resonates with attempts to more adequately classify the study of British histories in international(ist) perspective, such as ‘Britain in the world’, or indeed ‘global history in Britain’. Even these, however, risk reinforcing an exceptionalisation of Britain as a historical centre amidst a global periphery.
What is needed — instead of coining new sub-sub-disciplines, and short of abandoning categorisation entirely — is a historical framing of postcolonial Britain as itself an increasingly peripheralised vantage-point within wider geopolitics. Framing revolutionary events in the Third World as the centre of a global history, within which solidarity activists in the United Kingdom also participated from the Western European periphery, helps to organically integrate British “domestic” history within wider world history. The UK becomes just one of many countries; neither a centre of the world, nor somehow excepted from wider patterns. The historical study of international solidarity movements opens the door to such a conception.
International solidarity campaigns necessarily belong to the national histories both of the country in which they are active and of that with which their activists mobilise solidarity. Their history also intersects with global histories of diplomacy and networked transnational partisanship. The UK’s Chile Solidarity Campaign of the 1970s-80s, for instance, belongs to the fields of British and Chilean history, as well as to that of the Global Cold War.
Indeed, the existing academic literature on British metropolitan anti-colonialism — exemplified in pathbreaking works by Stephen Howe (1993), Priyamvada Gopal (2019), and Theo Williams (2022), among others — signals a scholarly approach which fluently integrates these ostensibly distinct historical spheres.
Such international solidarity movements are suggestive of how disciplinary segregations of British domestic history off from world history might be transcended. Indeed, such an approach opens a path to reconciling the dichotomy between British and world history without either privileging the UK on the world stage, or overlooking that which is specifically British about this corner of internationalist history.
Just as the historical borders of British society were permeated by actors and influences from without, so too are the outer bounds of ‘modern British studies’ as a historical discipline necessarily porous. To trace the history of international solidarity politics from here is to bring the study of modern British domestic history home to world history, and vice versa.
Owen Dowling is a doctoral candidate in History at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Their current research encompasses histories of the British political left, anti-imperialist internationalism, and the Global Cold War.