Papers by Jonathan Hyslop
This article examines the role which the "imaginary" of the empire that Germany lost in 1919 play... more This article examines the role which the "imaginary" of the empire that Germany lost in 1919 plays in the contemporary German extreme right, and especially its leading expression, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). It focuses on the symbolic importance of the former colonies in South West Africa / Namibia and East Africa / Tanzania and of the less emotionally charged, although also significant, German 'informal empire' connections to South Africa. The article highlights that the AfD draws on a considerable legacy of political activism concerning Africa stretching back through the colonial revanchist nationalism of the Weimar era, the global network of the Nazi Party's "Foreign Organisation", and the postwar populism of Franz Josef Strauß. AfD ideologues glorify the achievements of the Kaiserreich, and emphasise that Germany has nothing to be ashamed of, in relation to its record in the colonial era. With the recent demands from Namibia for the payment of German reparations for the 1904-7 genocide in that country, this past has become a very live issue in German politics, and the AfD has made much of its opposition to any admission of German culpability. The article also shows how the AfD portrays itself as the defender of the German minority in Namibia and of white South Africans, whose position is represented as a warning of what happens when white people allow racial "others" to attain political power. The analysis seeks to avoid simple "culturalist" /historicist explanations of the presence of these issues in contemporary politics, embedding its account in the continuities of significant social, economic and strategic relationships between southern Africa and Germany.
Peace and Change 48 (2023).
It brought together 174 delegates from around the world. A few of those attending went on to make... more It brought together 174 delegates from around the world. A few of those attending went on to make their marks on world history. They included the future first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru; Mohammad Hatta, the future first Vice-President of independent Indonesia; and Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who, although never attaining the highest offices, would shape the politics of his native Peru for the next half-century through his leadership of the radical-nationalist Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana. The Congress was a Communist initiative, but it brought together a wide range of anti-colonial activists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America; European Social Democrats; as well as Communists and their sympathizers. Its palpable immediate success owed a great deal to the extraordinary skills of its main organizer, Willi Münzenberg, a Berlin-based political entrepreneur working for the Communist International (Comintern). Münzenberg had already established his mastery of the techniques of using media and business enterprise to build support for broad-front initiatives. This is well illustrated in the fact that he had secured the nonattending sponsorship for the Congress of figures as renowned and diverse as Albert Einstein and Madame Sun Yat-sen. At the conference, new friendships, connections, and networks were forged between activists from the global "periphery," as well as between them and European networks. Out of it came an organization, the League against Imperialism (LAI), which was to establish branches around the world and engage in intense, though fluctuating, political agitation until its dissolution in 1937. The movement was initially run from Berlin, under Münzenberg's direction. After Hitler came to power, however, the headquarters shifted to London, where an aristocratic and well-connected Communist sympathizer, Reginald Bridgeman, managed its affairs. Scholars have long assumed that the euphoric founding moment of the LAI was an important one in the history of the global anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement. It has frequently been remarked that at the 1955 conference of the newly independent and emergent states of Africa and Asia in Bandung, Indonesia, President Sukarno made reference to the 1927
Journal of southern African studies, 2005
This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorpora... more This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. * The authors are grateful to the Crisis States Research Centre at the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics for the funding that made possible this special issue and the workshop from which the articles are drawn. Jo Beall also expresses her gratitude to the School of Development Studies at University of KwaZulu-Natal where she is a visiting research fellow. 2 relations, black economic empowerment, militarism and corruption are arenas where the same social or political processes have both promoted stability and added to the potential for destabilisation. In gender relations, HIV/AIDS and land reform, stabilisation has been limited, as linkages between state and society have not been successfully established. We conclude that despite its tenuous nature, fragile stability nonetheless represents an 'equilibrium' which is likely to persist in the short-to mediumterm, because the social forces and political organisations needed to move the society to a different position-either crisis or thoroughgoing consolidation-have not yet emerged. 'contained' for extended periods, that is, expressed in ways that do not threaten the wider social order. We are using institutions here in the 'Northian' sense, in other words, implicit codes and norms of behaviour distinct from organisations. Note also that normative concerns-whether or not an institutional framework which achieves stability also produces equity-are distinct, since equity (whether of resource distribution, voice or opportunity) may be sufficient for stability but it is not necessary. It is quite possible to imagine a 'low-level' equilibrium which is stable in that there are no dynamic forces to move society away from it, but is inequitable in fundamental respects. 15 Mann, cited in Migdal. 'The State in Society'.
Labour History, 2019
Much current work on labour conditions is founded on the notion of precarity. This article conten... more Much current work on labour conditions is founded on the notion of precarity. This article contends that there is a lack of historical depth in the use of this concept. By looking at the case of British steamship workers, it argues that the Standard Employment Relationship (SER) which precarity theory has attributed to "advanced" economies in the twentieth century was not always the norm. The employment of British steamship workers was never characterised by a SER. They lacked labour freedom and were regularly imprisoned for work-related offences. They were never fully participant in the democratising processes that played out in liberal democratic societies. Seafarers were to an extraordinary extent subject to long-term debt relationships which generated structural poverty. They had life trajectories of a "catastrophic" character, involving difficulty in forming stable families, serious injury and early death. While British steamship workers were relatively privileged in relation to colonised workers, their case nevertheless places a question mark over the standard precarity theory narrative of the rise and fall of the SER.
International Labor and Working Class History, 93, 2018, 176-200.
in Enrico Dal Largo, Róisín Healey and Gearóid Barry eds., 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperi... more in Enrico Dal Largo, Róisín Healey and Gearóid Barry eds., 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment (London, Routledge, 2018) 76-90.
in David Forsyth and Wendy Ugolini eds., A Global Force: War, Identities and Scotland's Diaspora ... more in David Forsyth and Wendy Ugolini eds., A Global Force: War, Identities and Scotland's Diaspora (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2016),150-167.
in Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire ... more in Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (London, Routledge, 2014), 123-140.
Perla Siedle Gibson, known as 'The Lady in White', was an upper-class woman from Durban, who in t... more Perla Siedle Gibson, known as 'The Lady in White', was an upper-class woman from Durban, who in the Second World War became famous for appearing in the city's harbour and singing to the numerous British and South African soldiers and sailors who passed through. The article shows how Gibson's activities illuminate several aspects of South Africa's, and especially Natal's, role in the war. The strategic situation in the period 1940-3 made South African ports crucial to the British campaigns in North Africa and East Asia. The article demonstrates that women's volunteerism in Durban played a key part in sustaining military morale in this period, and thereby contributes to a gendered reading of the politics of the war. It also emphasises the specificity of Natal settler loyalism in framing the activities of Gibson and her co-workers: white Natalians had a particularly strong sense of connection to Britain, and an ambivalent relationship to the South African state. Finally, the article points out how racial tensions were building in this period, in ways which would lead to internal crisis in the country and international isolation by the 1960s. This would ultimately undermine the Natal-British identity for which Gibson stood.
This paper seeks to provide a new approach to analysing the crucial period of the building of the... more This paper seeks to provide a new approach to analysing the crucial period of the building of the South African state between the Boer War and 1924. Drawing on the sociology of Michael Mann, it argues that the construction of networks of military power was of central and partly autonomous importance in giving shape to the new state. It goes on to contend that this generated a legal order which was in many ways shaped by practices which derived from martial law. The paper also asserts that these questions of military power and martial law need to be analysed within a framework which does not limit itself to the boundaries of the South African state itself, but is placed within the wider context of the British Empire and the southern African region. A biographical exploration the role of Jan Smuts as the key leader is used to focus the paper's study of this process of state-making. became the chief colleague of the new Transvaal Prime Minister, Louis Botha. He was the main drafter of the constitution which made the four South African colonies into the Union of South Africa in 1910 (a constitution which provided for the franchise for black Martial Law and Military Power in South African State 235
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.... more Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmar20 'Ghostlike' seafarers and sailing ship nostalgia: the figure of the steamship lascar in the British imagination, c.
Between 1924 and 1933 scores of British and Irish immigrants were deported from South Africa for ... more Between 1924 and 1933 scores of British and Irish immigrants were deported from South Africa for crimes that were mainly of a petty character. Prominent in their records was the offence of supplying alcohol to black people, which had been crimi-nalised under the country's racial forms of prohibition. These deportations took place under the direction of the minister of the Interior, D. F. Malan, later notorious as the initiator of the apartheid policy. The article contends that the process of deportation is revealing of both the social trajectory of some metropolitan migrants to the Empire and of the character of the South African state. While turn-of-the-century British immigrants to southern Africa are generally thought of as upwardly socially mobile, a minority took a downward path. As 'poor whites' they constituted a threat to racial boundaries. Malan, concerned to police these boundaries, sought to remove them from society. But he was constrained by his political alliance with the British immigrant labour movement and in the end was selective in his strategy, deporting the most marginalised or lumpen proletarian, while allowing those who could claim some shreds of respectability to remain. The organisational and bureaucratic processes of deportation are traced in detail. The article endorses Robert Bickers' view that imperial history has given too little attention to poor and working class British immigrants in the Empire.
The outbreak of the First World War divided the South African Labour Party, a movement representi... more The outbreak of the First World War divided the South African Labour Party, a movement representing the country's white working class. The party's parliamentary delegation supported South African government's participation in the war effort, but many leadership figures within the party and the trade unions disagreed with this stance. The dissidents formed an organization called the War on War League. In mid-1915, the anti-war activists left the party and formed the International Socialist League, a predecessor of the Communist Party of South Africa. The War on War League has conventionally been regarded as important only for its role in the eventual formation of the Communist Party. This article however contends that it needs to be understood in its own terms, as a pacifist movement, reflecting a political moment of resistance to the plunge into global war.
Despite the enormous attention that E.P. Thompson has received as both a social historian and ant... more Despite the enormous attention that E.P. Thompson has received as both a social historian and anti-nuclear activist, relatively little has been written about the central role of war in his life and thought. The article argues that Thompson was crucially shaped by his experiences in the Second World War. It also argues that he was significantly concerned throughout his life with issues of the anti-colonial revolt. The paper contends that Thompson's understanding of military power has close affinities to that put forward by sociologist Michael Mann. It traces the neglected key role of Thompson's analysis of military power in his masterwork, The Making of the English Working Class. The paper goes on to show how Thompson's thinking about war led him to a critique of the 'Third Worldism' of the early 1960s' New Left movement and to a sceptical view of Fanonian ideas. Thompson's analysis of the 'exterminism' of the Cold War nuclear confrontation is defended as a significant contribution to the study of military power and as a concept of enduring political relevance.
This article examines the relationship between Durban and Southampton constructed by the Union Ca... more This article examines the relationship between Durban and Southampton constructed by the Union Castle Line between 1900 and the 1930s. It shows how specific, longlasting patterns of commercial organisation and labour recruitment were laid down, and how they survived the contingencies of war, working class insurgency and financial crisis. The article proposes the concepts of 'maritime capital field' and 'maritime labour field' to describe the long-lasting shapes which transnational structural relationships gave to imperial shipping enterprises. A critique is made of the work of Michael Miller on European shipping companies in this period: the article demonstrates that the Union Castle case challenges both Miller's emphasis on an expansive globalisation and his emphasis on the cosmopolitanism of the shipping industry. Political and social closures and limitations were characteristic of the relations between the two ports. Restrictive forms of political, ideological and military power within the British Empire played a great role in structuring the connections between Durban and Southampton.
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Papers by Jonathan Hyslop