Past events

NPRG Seminar Series: Dr Christian Høgsbjerg

• Venue: ARMB.G.42.RB (Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre), Ground Floor Armstrong Building, Newcastle University
• Start: Wed, 06 Nov 2019 15:00:00 GMT
• End: Wed, 06 Nov 2019 17:00:00 GMT

Dr Christian Høgsbjerg, Lecturer in Critical History and Politics at the University of Brighton, will open this year's Seminar Series with a talk titled 'C.L.R. James, the mass strike of 1919 in colonial Trinidad and "The Case for West Indian Self-Government"'. It will be held at 3pm, 6 November 2019, at ARMB.G.42.RB (Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre), Ground Floor Armstrong Building, Newcastle University. All welcome!

Abstract

In colonial Trinidad in 1919 rising industrial turmoil culminated in a rolling mass strike that would shake this outpost of the British Empire to its foundations.  Though often located as an important part of Trinidadian or at best Caribbean labour history – a precursor in many ways to the powerful wave of labour rebellions that swept the Anglophone colonial Caribbean in the 1930s – this paper will argue that the strike has to also be located through the prism of colonial, transnational and global labour history.   In the strike's aftermath, the social democratic Trinidad Workingmen’s Association grew into a mass organisation led by the charismatic Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani.  This paper will explore how the emergence of this mass nationalist working class movement attracted the attention of the young writer and teacher C.L.R. James, who would become a leading anti-colonialist thinker, writing a biography of Cipriani, later abridged and published as The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933).   Yet the strike of 1919 itself was strangely silenced in this text, and the paper will examine how it was only with James's turn to Marxism in the 1930s that he came to appreciate its full historical significance and importance.

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