Collective Security or Colonial Revolution? The 1938 Conference on Peace and Empire, Anticolonialism, and the Popular Front

The 1938 Conference on Peace and Empire was emblematic of the deep divisions within the British socialist movement over the inseparable issues of fascism, war, capitalism, and colonialism. One grouping, around the Communist Party, the Labour Left, and the India League, espoused a reformist anticolonialism tied to a Popular Front of socialists and liberals and the collective security of the democratic powers against the menace of fascism. Another grouping, around the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the International African Service Bureau (IASB), believed distinctions between 'democratic' and fascist colonialism to be flawed and instead advocated anticolonial revolution while rejecting what they saw as pleas to support colonialist policies under the guise of antifascism. This article advances three overlapping arguments. First, that the Popular Front strategy led Communists to promote antifascist alliances that necessarily diminished their anticolonialist activism. Secondly, that the IASB-ILP coalition was the most consistently militant anticolonialist force in Britain during the second half of the 1930s. Thirdly, that we need to more thoroughly integrate both the history of anticolonialism and the ideas and activism of people of colour into our understandings of inter-war British socialism.