Workers and Empire: Learning From Early 20th Century Resistance Politics in Imperial Britain – Part One

by Christopher D. Reid

This article is based on a talk that was delivered to the Glasgow University branch of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) as part of its newly established Political Education Program. It was given on September 25, 2024 by Christopher D. Reid

My purpose is to use my knowledge of history to offer some insight into the nature of political activism.  Any specific political positions I do express will serve to illustrate a principle of the latter. This article will focus on lessons to be learned from resistance struggles in the early 20^th century British Empire. I am a historian by vocation. My ideas relate to a political-economic system that has, over the last four centuries, generated an extraordinary amount of wealth through the conquest of lands and the exploitations of peoples; that has established an imperial system and class structure; and that has invented a thing called race to keep it all going.

My primary interest, as a researcher, is in the movements of resistance against the British and American Empires. Which has brought me to the governing theme of this piece: the worker as political agent and activist. Many of the points I will make may strike you as being common sense. My task is to make connections between these ideas in a way that will give you a coherent view of what activists do, and why it’s important.

The Importance of Political Education

I define political education, in a democratic society, as enlarging and enriching the knowledge, skill, and self-awareness of anyone who has taken up a political cause. This, of course, makes for a wide range of subjects that can be used to forge a political education, including the strategy and tactics of organizing, communicating, and direct action planning, as well as borrowings from political, social, and economic theory. I choose history.

Why history? First, because it is my vocation and the only subject I have studied at length. Second, because history, as its name suggests, involves narrative and story-telling. It supplies us with a scale of values we might relate to; it also allows us to reach tenable conclusions about peoples similar to ourselves and conditions similar to our own, or at least recognizable. Through history, we learn that not every success or defeat is permanent, and that our opponents are not invulnerable and not always implacable.

I have selected moments and persons from worker movements in early 20^th century Imperial Britain that activists may take lessons from.

But before we get to that, I would like to make what is to me an obvious claim about the nature of political activism: it requires the breaking down of barriers and the building up of alliances with other civic movements. I take this to be almost an axiom—certainly in worker activism.

Now I contend—and my research suggests—that this can only be done by first breaking down the mental fences that are so often put up while doing political work. These consist of the moral absolutes that are a prominent feature of the political realm. We are all susceptible to these absolutes—which are often broken down into creeds and slogans—that cut to the emotional core of our moral being. Such propaganda is often necessary.

Given that we live in a cultural and media environment driven by images and sound-bites, everyone involved in political activism must generate content designed to jar and provoke—and this is to be distinguished from the chanting and singing that have always been used to inspire and encourage people involved in protest gatherings and marches, as we shall see shortly.

The trick for the serious political activist is not to be ruled by the moral absolute as abstraction; not to allow the abstract to become so all-consuming that all one can do when interacting with others is bait, denounce, and rage.

To make common cause with others, the political activist must be willing to square their mind with the factual relations of the world and be open to reasoning with others on this basis, even while doing their own work in their own way to attract attention to their cause.

But what about passion? Shouldn’t people express their anger at the gross injustices they see around them? I admit that my blood boils quite regularly when I see the latest thing the ruling elites have gotten away with. As you all know, this is a presidential election year in America and tempers are especially hot. I count my own among them. But when I feel ready to fly off the handle, I am checked. Not by reason, but by my sense of humility: my intuitive understanding that the world is not waiting for me to save it; and that I should be restrained and careful in my way of thinking and speaking, even if I strongly oppose what I see and support some radical turns to change it. To be sure, anger and hate can be useful sources of energy, but they can turn into the junky energy of egotistical self-indulgence if they are not checked by humility and channelled into more pragmatic forms of thought and action.

What do I mean by this? Well, part of such thought and action is not accepting any political issue in the form of sides already defined and set. If we are moved to engage on an issue, and we prefer to exercise our own judgment and articulate our view, then we must acknowledge the many-sidedness of the matter in hand. We must then work out what we are for and what we are against, given the context and in light of our moral feeling.

Let me give you an example involving a current hot button issue.

I am sympathetic to those working for America’s continued support of a basic air defence of Israel and who are at the same time working against the unrestricted and unlimited supply of arms, money, and diplomatic cover to the nation. I am sympathetic to those working for the international recognition of an independent and sovereign Palestine and who are at the same time working against religious extremists gaining power in both Palestine and Israel.

In taking these positions, I make no a priori commitment to persons or parties. I instead focus on political tendencies and desired policy directions.

In taking these positions, I also acknowledge my limitations. I recognize the fact that although I can imagine and empathize with the people doing the dying, fleeing, and suffering, I have not actually experienced these things and I should not think and speak as though I have. I live in a country, and come from a country, that together have enabled the slaughter. The best I can do is develop an actual position that is oriented toward policies and the values that inform them. It does me or anyone else any good to spend my time spewing streams of indignation and expressing my sense of grief and helplessness. It certainly does nothing to advance a political cause.

For a mere writer and scholar like myself, this is only an intellectual obligation. For a political activist, it is an imperative. Yes, as a political activist, you should have a larger sense of the suffering and injustice in the world. But you should also be aware of the possibilities and limitations of what you, as an individual, can do.

Taking the proverbial weight of the world on your shoulders will leave you feeling helpless and dejected. Focusing instead on specific things you can work for and things you can work against, under present conditions, is empowering. It will give you drive and focus. Most importantly, it will help you to cut through slogans and spin—those mental fences I mentioned before—so that it becomes easier to join with others who are pointed in the same moral direction.

Of course, the onslaught in Gaza is not the only thing that pre-occupies our minds. The last decade-and-a-half has been one of continual upheaval—from the Occupy Movement to the Brexit/Trump phenomena to the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

This period has also seen the re-awakening of trade union activism in Britain and America. These worker revolts are not accidents of the times but very much of them. I am well aware that union activists have been involved in anti-racist campaigns, have stood in solidarity with migrants, organized against austerity, and, most recently, protested the unrestricted killing in Gaza.

Nearly a century ago a similar kind of worker-led popular defiance exploded into British public life. The history runs, roughly, from the turn of the 20^th century through to the Second World War. The intent is to provide a historical framework for political activism that may give you a few tools or spark a few thoughts that will help you do what you do even better.

Imperial Britain at the Turn of the Century

At the turn of the 20^th century Britain had become an emporium for the exchange of goods and services between its Empire and the rest of the world. The British state was a sophisticated leviathan dedicated to the management of its colonies and circulating the wealth they produced. Fired by the idea of liberal imperialism, ruling elites held out the promise of governmental reform, material improvement, and democratic inclusion for its subjects at home, based on the complete subjugation of its subjects—its racialized subjects—abroad. We will get to the racialized subjects in a moment; presently, I want to discuss the subjects at home.

In the early 1900s, only Britain’s financial system was more advanced and competitive than its rivals in Europe and America. The United States and Germany, in particular, were outdoing Britain in industrial production. This led to the consolidation and concentration of capital and control across a range of sectors in the country.

There were relentless attempts across industries to drive workers at a faster pace, to intensify exploitative working conditions, to assert greater managerial authority through tighter discipline and supervision, and to deny worker demands for pay increases. Merchant seamen in Cardiff, dockyard workers in London, miners in Wales, seamstresses in Glasgow—nearly all workers were affected by this move by Capital.

The move itself undermined the prevailing local or sectional nature of trade unions as they were established at the time. There were nevertheless organized worker revolts. An especially intense period began in 1910 and ended with the start of the First World War.

The strikes were driven mostly by unskilled casual labourers led by political agitators, who were themselves workers, but who were not part of trade union officialdom. Impatience with the ineffectiveness of official collective bargaining efforts sparked these popular worker uprisings. It is appropriate to call them such because most of the men and women involved in strike action were not actual members of the union and would thus not be covered by any collective bargaining agreement.

Discontent with the representation of working-class interests in parliament was a contributing factor to the uprisings. The Liberal government had enacted a string of welfare reform measures in the first decade of the 20^th century: in 1906, an act to compensate workers for industrial diseases and injuries; in 1908, an eight-hour working day in the mines and weekly pensions funded from government taxation; in 1909, minimum wage rates in a number of industries and labour exchanges for the unemployed to secure employment.

However, these programs, taken as a whole, were a mere palliative to the fundamental imbalances of the economy and society and between Capital and Labour. Wages for many workers remained stubbornly low and could not keep up with the rising cost of living. There were also all kinds of limitations to who could actually qualify for old age pension and unemployment insurance.

In short, workers were not fooled by liberal attempts at conciliation. They rose up in resistance to an unjust system.

Site One: Strike Action in the Welsh Coalfields

The first major strike of this period boiled up in the late summer of 1910. It was centred in the Cambrian Combine coalfield in South Wales. Seventy coal miners refused to accept a proposed reduction in the rates they were paid for working on an especially difficult seam of coal. The miners tried to negotiate with the owners and were rebuffed. On September 1^st, the owners dramatically escalated the dispute by locking out all 950 miners at the pit.

This led to unofficial sympathy strikes by miners employed at other pits owned by the same company. The South Wales Miners’ Federation remained committed to the agreements it had with the company, including procedures for settling disputes. However, after a ballot initiative, the Federation’s leadership was compelled to call for an official strike of the 12,000 miners working for Cambrian Combine—to begin on November 1^st 1910.

Solidarity with the Cambrian miners grew. By early December, nearly 30,000 miners were on strike or locked out in the South Wales coalfield.

Wanting to put an end to the disruption, the union leadership continued working behind the scenes among rank-and-file members. They were successful. They launched another ballot to reject a general sympathetic strike with the Cambrian miners. It passed, and most miners returned to work in mid-December, leaving their brothers at Cambrian to fight alone.

And fight they did. They had already set up a strike committee composed of representatives from the pit lodges; and they won mass support at mass meetings of up to 10,000 miners to mount pickets and demonstrations. This was done to prevent scabs from entering the pits. It was not a gentle business. Striking workers, or it is better to say striking families, as women and children were also involved, verbally and physically attacked scab workers and vandalized their homes.

However, it is important to note that there was no widespread disorder and rampant violence. Such attacks were targeted and controlled. And far from there being anarchy, the sense of being under siege from the coal owners strengthened social bonds and created a space for autonomous self-governance within the coal mining community.

The intensity of the picketing eventually halted production in most of the pits. The local police were not able to contain the strike and the actions that followed from it. The Chief Constable called the War Office to request two companies of soldiers. Home Secretary Winston Churchill countermanded the orders for deployment, but insisted they be kept in reserve. Eventually, matters did come to a head, and Churchill did deploy two squadrons of armed cavalry and two companies of infantry to intimidate and overawe the miners. This had the desired effect. The coalfields were under military occupation for months, which prevented the strikers from using mass picketing to prevent scab labour from entering the pits.

There were various attempts by the regional South Wales Mining Federation and the Mining Federation of Great Britain to end the strike. But the miners went on, in defiance of union leadership. Eventually, in August 1911, the strikers went back to work on terms which were no better than those offered at the beginning of the strike, and with some 3,000 men having lost their jobs.

Was this a defeat? Not totally. The special payments for difficult work issue—the original cause of the strike—grew into a larger campaign for a guaranteed higher national minimum wage. This became the rallying cry for miners across Britain’s coalfields and paved the way for a national miners’ strike in 1912.

Site Two: Women Cloth Workers in Scotland

The National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW) was founded in 1906. It was an all-female organisation dedicated to organising women in predominantly male-dominated industries, in places where they were refused admission to existing unions, and in trades where there was no union at all.

One of the first great tests of the NFWW was in Scotland in May of 1910. At this time, there was a strike over pay rates by 150 non-union women textile workers in the copwinding department of the English Sewing Machine Company, located in East Renfrewshire. Local women organisers of the NFWW and the Glasgow Trades Council had been instrumental in establishing a branch of the union in the factory. Once the dispute kicked off, the Federation charged the local organisers with assisting the textile workers in negotiations with management. These activists also organised other women in the factory, so that within days the majority of workers in the mills were NFWW members.

When company directors refused to speak to the NFWW, other departments in the East Renfrewshire factory struck in sympathy with their sisters in the copwinding department. The employers initiated a lockout. Angry strikers attacked the mill manager and vandalized the mill itself. By the first week of June 1910, the foremen of the mill were forced out by the strikers, bringing work to a complete halt.

But these instances of limited and targeted violence did not constitute the entirety of strike action. As the dispute went on, demonstrations of mass solidarity sprung up in the area, involving not only the women themselves, but their families and local supporters. These included marching, singing, dancing, piping, and banner waving. Meetings were held in the afternoons and evenings in which a range of representatives from the Scottish labour movement spoke to large audiences. The strike continued gaining momentum. In mid-June, the employers capitulated. They accepted Board of Trade intervention, which went in the women’s favour. The latter were given a guaranteed increase in wages.

In this instance, a complete victory for labour.

Taking Stock of Histories of Resistance

There are a few conditions we can highlight and themes we can ascertain from this period of revolt that will serve as sign posts for when we delve into possible lessons learned later on.

First, though the unorganized element was crucial to the worker uprising; they did not seek to end trade unionism or overthrow union bosses. They were striking to compel the unions to recognize their grievances and to gain collective bargaining rights themselves. In short, they believed in trade unionism, but wanted it to operate in new, more inclusive, and more democratic ways. 

Second, organized workers made common cause with this unorganized element. Together, they bent union leadership to their will. This put the numerical and organisational strength of the established unions at the service of a militancy that proved effective and ensured a greater likelihood of victory.

Third, this period of uprising took place at a time when the Irish national liberation movement and the women’s suffrage movement were in full swing. However, there was no nationwide coordination between these movements and the worker rebellions. It was not that the leaders of the different groups did not comprehend a common enemy and obvious points of agreement and possibilities for solidarity. It is that they did not really have the means to coordinate their efforts; and they had the wisdom to focus most of their energies on the immediate aims and purposes of the people they represented.

Fourth, the violence employed by the state cannot be made equivalent to the sporadic and limited violence of striking workers. The use of military force to suppress strike action or dissent of any kind was common throughout the empire. And it is important to point out that non-white workers in British-controlled Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean also organized strike actions. We should not conclude from this, however, that the deployment of the military in Wales was the same as what occurred during strike actions in Egypt, for example.

Part two will be published next week...

Christopher D. Reid is an independent researcher. He has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and graduate degrees in Human Relations and Philosophy. For the last ten years, he has studied the history of race, resistance, and political economy in the British and American Empires.