In December 2019, as Paris was brought to a standstill by a massive public sector strike, I was happily foraging away in the backroom of the Centre for the Study and Research of International Revolutionary and Trotskyist Movements (CERMTRI). The volunteer archivist, who had ducked off from the picket line […]
VRG Menon spent a lifetime haunted by the power of this report card and attempting to use other forms of capital he had to compensate for it. But Venu – Moo – also dwelled in a world where the report card’s errors became a running joke, and, its incapacity to tell a full story, a site where the porosities in colonial authority were always evident.
Shahmima Akhtar explores a postcard from the Irish village of ‘Ballymaclinton’, a display at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London created to promote an Irish soap brand and a politically white Irish unionism.
The Black Report, a landmark critique of health inequalities that barely discussed ‘race’, turns forty today. Grace Redhead and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn investigate the legacy of the report for the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
From a fragile piece of printed tissue, Martin Plaut uncovers the forgotten story of a massive demonstration on the eve of the First World War, protesting the brutal deportation from South Africa to Britain of nine trades union leaders who had confronted the government of Generals Smuts and Botha.
What can a mid-20th century monument to two women in Hackney tell us about women’s work and experience? Laura Gowing delves into the intertwined lives and friendship of Harriet Delph and Frances Garlick.
First published in 1894 in Justice, Walter Crane’s The Workers’ Maypole declares ‘the cause of labour is the hope of the world’. Powerful yet whimsical, The Workers Maypole brings together English folk tradition and the demands of the international labour movement.
