Maritime labour and subaltern geographies of internationalism: Black internationalist seafarers' organising in the interwar period

Political Geography 49 (2015) 7e16

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Maritime labour and subaltern geographies of internationalism: Black internationalist seafarers' organising in the interwar period David Featherstone School of Geographical and Earth Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Available online 1 October 2015

This paper uses a focus on the relations between maritime labour and internationalism to explore the subaltern geographies of internationalism. It uses a discussion of a number of such seafarers involved in organisations such as the International of Seamen and Habour Workers Union and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers to develop an engagement with the production of forms of black internationalism 'from below'. The paper traces the following key 'agentic spatial practices' that were constituted through the political networks of black internationalist seafarers' organising. Firstly, I argue that subaltern maritime actors were able to use their, albeit marginal, position in relation to flows and trade networks creatively to bring diverse relations of power into contestation. Secondly, there are important ways in which such networks were used to generate connections between differently placed groups and to circulate, often in contexts of government repression of 'seditious' literature and ideas. Thirdly, following the political trajectories shaped by maritime workers and activists opens up important possibilities for moving beyond understandings of internationalism as the product of elite groups brokering between different left traditions in particular nations. Fourthly, it engages with the structuring effect of the racism of elements of the 'white left' on the practices of maritime internationalist politics, and recognizes forms of subaltern agency shaped through contesting such racism. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Subalternity Space Internationalism Maritime labour Agency

Introduction Writing in The Negro Worker of June 1932, George Padmore gave a report on the congress of the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers (ISH) which had taken place in Altona, near Hamburg in May of that year. Padmore complained about the ‘scant treatment given to the colonial question by the congress, due to lack of time afforded the official reporter as well as the colonial delegates’. He argued that this ‘reflected the greatest shortcoming in the whole congress’ and indicated the ‘tremendous underestimation of this problem which still prevails in the ranks of the ISH and its sections.’ He also noted that after the colonial report, which , a west African anti-colonial activist was given by Garan Kouyate based in Paris who was involved in organising ‘colonial seafarers’ in France, ‘only two colonial delegates had the opportunity of discussing the important questions raised at the congress’ (Padmore, 1931: 24).

E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.08.004 0962-6298/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Padmore was one of the major figures who shaped articulations of black internationalism in the early to mid twentieth century. At the time of the conference he was a leading figure in the Comintern-sponsored International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) and edited its newspaper, The Negro Worker. He was later to break with the Comintern and become a key figure in Pan-African political organising. Through this role he  in shaping a transcollaborated with militants such as Kouyate national network of anti-imperial activists in diverse parts of Africa, the Caribbean and metropolitan cities such as London, Hamburg and Paris. The labour of black maritime workers was central to the production of this radical anti-colonial network. This paper uses a discussion of a number of such seafarers involved in organisations such as the ISH and ITUCNW to develop an engagement with the production of forms of black internationalism ‘from below’. As Padmore's discussion of the ISH makes clear, the terms on which such organising was done were contested, but nonetheless maritime workers asserted and constructed diverse forms of subaltern agency through mobilising their unequal positions in maritime networks (see also Anim-Addo, 2014; Davies, 2013; Kothari, 2012).

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The first part of the paper engages with work in maritime ‘history from below’ which has shaped a powerful critique of ‘terracentrism’, arguing that a focus on subaltern maritime networks offers the potential to move beyond territorially limited framings of anti-colonial politics. The second section draws attention to the political trajectories of subaltern maritime actors in the 1930s, engaging with the ways in which they shaped the terms of anticolonial internationalism. The third section explores the contested racial politics of organising among the Seamen's Minority Movement in Cardiff, particularly examining struggles over attempts to shape forms of black self-organisation. The final section explores the relations between forms of working class multiculturalism, the gendered politics of place and the contested articulation of internationalisms. The paper concludes by setting out key aspects of an approach to the subaltern geographies of internationalism. Subaltern maritime networks and the formation of black internationalisms In The Many Headed Hydra, their account of the making of an Atlantic working class in the early modern period, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe the ship in the eighteenth century Atlantic world as a ‘meeting place where various traditions were jammed together in an extraordinary forcing house of internationalism’ (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2001: 151). They contend that ‘European imperialism’ created the conditions for the ‘circulation of experience’ and of radical forms of organising and ideas ‘within the huge masses of labour that it had set in motion’ (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2001: 152). Through focussing on shipboard revolts, mutinies and on the role of seafarers and their networks in forging and circulating radical ideas and practices, Linebaugh and Rediker's work offers a profound and significant challenge to existing cartographies of internationalism. They position internationalism as a practice crafted ‘from below’ and through exchanges, connections and circulations between diverse subaltern groups which refused to be confined within boundaries of nation-states. This reimagining of traditions of left internationalism has in part come from a critique of what Marcus Rediker has defined as ‘terracentrism’. Rediker uses this term in productive ways to challenge the ‘unspoken proposition that the seas of the world are unreal spaces, voids between the real places, which are landed and national’ (Rediker, 2014: 2e3). Questioning the enduring effects of terracentrism on spatial imaginations and ways of thinking about politics has the potential to destabilise some of the key categories of political geography. Thus Steinberg and Peters argue that ‘attentiveness to the sea as a space of politics can upend received understandings of political possibilities and limitations’ (Steinberg & Peters, 2015: 260). The questioning of the givenness of nationcentred articulations of internationalism has implications for other periods and contexts than the early modern Atlantic. It also offers important possibilities for reimagining some of the ways in which twentieth century anti-colonial politics has been envisioned. The anti-imperial organising traditions shaped by black internationalist organising built on and, at times explicitly referenced (eg Smith, 1942), long standing traditions of black maritime resistance (Bolster, 1997). Thus Julius Scott argues that ‘regional networks of communication’ shaped geographies of unofficial knowledge and flows of information ‘prior to, during, and following the Haitian Revolution’ (Scott, 1986: 4). Scott locates such knowledge in the ‘movements of runaway slaves, free people of colour, deserters from military service, and sailors’ and claims that their ‘traditions of mobile resistance’ assumed ‘an even wider significance when political currents swirling about the Atlantic world brought excitement and uncertainty to the shores of the American

colonies, as they did during the revolutionary 1790s’ (Scott, 1986: 114). Scott's work emphasises that there are longstanding ways in which subaltern actors have shaped internationalist political practices, albeit in ways which have been frequently silenced or ignored. Despite a developing, if long overdue, engagement between subaltern studies and geography (eg Clayton, 2011; Jazeel, 2014), the relations between subalternity and the spaces of internationalist politics have rarely been explored in depth. Thus Partha Chatterjee has recently argued in a discussion of the afterlives of the Subaltern Studies project that ‘subaltern histories’ have tended to prioritise engagements with ‘the ethnographic, the practical, the everyday and the local’ (Chatterjee, 2012: 49). He notes that Shahid Amin, a fellow member of the Subaltern Studies collective, has often complained that subaltern histories ‘do not travel well’ (Chatterjee, 2012: 49). These anxieties about the spatialities which have constituted the subaltern studies project speak to important debates about the relations between space, subalternity and the political. The geographical limits of the subaltern studies project have been probed directly by Brent Hayes Edwards who reflects on ‘the characteristic reluctance among scholars associated with Subaltern Studies (partly responding to the peculiarities of British colonialism) to consider contexts outside of India’ (Edwards, 2003a: 13). In consequence he considers ‘whether it is possible to speak of a subaltern studies or a “colonial studies”dto use the phrase employed by the men themselvesdthat is elaborated among colonial intellectuals in the metropole’. By doing so he questions the centrality of the nation state to understandings of oppositional forms of internationalism and outlines an ‘anti-imperial historiography’ which can be pursued ‘outside the locus of a particular nation-state and a particular colonial dynamic’ (Edwards, 2003a: 13, emphasis in original). While Edwards' account of ‘black internationalism’ is primarily focused on relatively well known writers and intellectuals like George Padmore, Paulette Nardal and Claude McKay, his account also begins to signal the importance of black maritime workers, both as objects of the writings of anti-imperialist intellectuals, and also as integral to the formation and operation of various forms of black internationalism. In drawing attention, for example, to ’s work among ‘the African and Antillean dock workers and Kouyate sailors in Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Le Havre’ (Edwards, 2003b: 255), Edwards focuses on the co-eval, potentially conflictual, articulations produced through different versions of black internationalism and signals how the terms on which such political projects were constituted was a site of struggle and antagonism. This offers an important contribution to thinking the dynamic and contested spatial practices through which internationalist political projects are shaped and generated (see also Legg, 2014). Edwards' account permits a focus on the competing, contested universalities envisioned through different articulations of black internationalism. This position can be used to recognise the diverse forms of labour through which internationalisms have been assembled from below, but to do so involves thinking about some of the limits of Edwards' project. Thus Erik McDuffie challenges Edwards' erasure of black women's involvement in the production of what he terms a “black women's international’’. He argues that although ‘black women radicals never explicitly used this term’, ‘we can see how they practiced a radical internationalist feminist politics within the US and global Communist Left that was committed to building transnational political alliances with women of colour and politically progressive white women from around the world’ (McDuffie, 2011: 17e18). Activists such as Amy Ashwood Gavey also challenged the terms of male-centred black internationalism, arguing in an intervention at the 5th PanAfrican Congress in Manchester that ‘much has been written

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and spoken of the Negro, but for some reason very little has been said about the black woman. She has been shunted into the social background to be a childebearer’ (Reddock, 1994: 248; Adi & Sherwood, 1995: 52). This emphasizes that there could be diverse struggles over the intersections of race, gender and class in different articulations of black internationalism. It also emphasizes the agency of different black radicals in shaping internationalist politics. Thus Minkah Makalani notes that radicals such as Cyril Briggs, Grace Campbell and Richard Moore from the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) came to the communist movement as ‘activist-intellectuals willing to stretch the boundaries of a political theory so that it might address racial oppression and colonialism’ (Makalani, 2011: 73). This focus on the ways that such boundaries and limits of left political theorizing were stretched and reconfigured allows a focus on the generative spatial politics of internationalism and calls into question constructions of views of internationalist politics as a mechanical scaling up of different political ambition or strategy. Attending to the spatial practices through which left internationalisms were stretched, articulated and challenged by anticolonial movements, activists and intellectuals offers productive ways of configuring the relations between subaltern politics, space and internationalism. To foreground such spatial practices involves challenging the ways in which influential accounts of space and politics exclude subaltern articulations of internationalism. Thus David Harvey assumes that forms of ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ are predominantly ‘particularistic and local in orientation’ (Harvey, 2009: 96). Paradoxically, such demarcations, which locate subaltern actors outside of articulations of internationalism, can be reworked even when the role of working class actors does impinge on the accounts of geopolitics. This tendency to routinely place non-elite actors outside of the formation of the geopolitical and international has been productively challenged by Jo Sharp and fellow contributors to a special issue on ‘subaltern critical geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2011; see also Sharp, 2013; Koopman, 2011). As Sharp argues ‘the notion of subaltern geopolitics used here both looks past the binary vision of geopolitical reasoning and much critical engagement with it, and also seeks to go beyond the endlessly critical nature of critical geopolitics, to offer alternative ways of imagining and doing geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2011: 271). This work is a useful counter to the elite and Euro-centric focus of much work on geopolitics, but retains a focus on leadership figures such as Julius Nyerere, albeit within countries such as Tanzania that have been routinely ignored in literature on geopolitics. Such a retention of a focus on political elites, albeit ‘progressive’ ones, is shared by recent histories of left internationalisms such as Vijay Prashad's fine book The Darker Nations on the emergence of a politicised conception of the Third World (Prashad, 2007). Prashad traces the ‘internationalist nationalism’ formed through anticolonial struggles, but his focus is primarily on the activity and perspectives of left elites and leaderships (Prashad, 2007: 12). As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have persuasively demonstrated, adopting a focus on the interventions of maritime workers in shaping forms of internationalism offers an alternative to such a focus on left elites (Linebaugh and Rediker, 1990, 2001; see also Cole, 2013; Ulrich, 2013; Weiss, 2013). This paper develops a specific concern with the political trajectories of ‘colonial workers’ who worked in the British merchant marine in the interwar period and negotiated the contested construction of maritime spatial relations. They laboured under particular racialised hierarchies of labour and a double marginality forged by often interlocking relations of oppression shaped by the shipping companies and exclusionary unions such as the National Union of Seamen (Hyslop, 2009a; Tabili, 1994).

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This paper contributes to work at the intersection of maritime politics and internationalism which has sought to engage productively with the terms on which maritime workers and anti-colonial politics were constructed, rather than assuming straightforward relations and equivalences between maritime workers and leftwing political projects (Davies, 2013; Høgsbjerg, 2013; Hyslop, 2009b). Thus Christian Høgsbjerg's work on the Barbadian seafarers' organiser Chris Braithwaite, aka Chris Jones, traces the ways in which Braithwaite's political organising articulated a powerful sense of ‘colonial’ seafarers' grievances with anti-imperial politics (Høgsbjerg, 2013). This positions such seafarers as actively engaging with the terms on which left politics mobilised seafarers' grievances and activity. In turn this allows a focus on the different articulations between communist and other forms of anti-colonial politics and the organizing cultures of seafarers, rather than reducing them to a ‘singular or universal narrative of anti-colonial resistance’ (Ahmed, 2011: 79). As Andy Davies demonstrates through his work on the Royal Indian Naval mutiny of 1946, examining the ways in which the sailors ‘created and inhabited a number of open political identities’ offers different ways of understanding the processes that created anti-colonial practices and identities (Davies, 2013: 25). Clare Anderson develops an engagement with such articulations of subaltern agency through positioning ‘marginality as a contingent process’ and through drawing attention to the ‘multiple articulations between race, criminality, class and gender’ (Anderson, 2012: 22, 84). In similar terms Gopalan Balachandran in his work on Indian seafarers in the early to mid twentieth century has argued that their forms of organising shaped both ‘individual and collective’ forms of ‘networked subaltern agency’ (Balachandran, 2012: 34). A focus on the construction of networked forms of subaltern agency in work on maritime history ‘from below’ has, however, often invoked the construction of such agency in a rather generic and broad way (eg Frykman, Anderson, Heerma van Voss, & Rediker, 2013: 4). This is something which the field shares with recent debates in labour geography, which has similarly been charged with adopting an overly broad sense of labour agency (eg Castree, 2007; Coe & Jordhus-Lier, 2010). Lakshmi Subramanian's work on the west Indian littoral in the early nineteenth century provides useful alternative pointers here by interrogating how pirates and other maritime actors constructed agency through negotiating differentiated legal and trading geographies. Through detailed readings of depositions of piracy trials she presents a nuanced sense of the spatial practices through which subaltern agency was crafted (Subramanian, 2014). Building on such approaches, this paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to work on the subaltern geographies of internationalism by tracing key ‘agentic spatial practices’ that were constituted through the political networks of black internationalist seafarers' organising. The term ‘agentic spatial practices’ is used to refer to particular uses of space to produce and sustain agency (Featherstone & Griffin, 2015: 12). Attending to such practices can hone understandings of the interrelations between subalternity, space and internationalist politics in the following key ways. Firstly, I argue that subaltern maritime actors were able to use their marginal position in relation to flows and trade networks creatively to bring diverse relations of power into contestation. Thus seafarers' organizing could be facilitated by the forms of subalternized mobilities that were integral to their labour. Their organising drew powerfully on their unofficial knowledges of what were strategically crucial trade routes and networks given the structure of colonial economies (Carmichael & Herod, 2012). Secondly, there are important ways in which such networks were used to generate connections between differently placed groups and to circulate, often in contexts of government repression of ‘seditious’

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literature and ideas. Such labour was integral to the production of networks like the ITUCNW, but seafarers were certainly not passive interlocutors of such materials. Thirdly, I locate forms of internationalism through particular sites and placed relations, and view various struggles over place as integral to the terms on which internationalist struggles were constituted. Following the political trajectories shaped by maritime workers and activists opens up important possibilities for moving beyond understandings of internationalism as the product of elite groups brokering between different left traditions in particular nations. Fourthly, tracing such trajectories can also give a useful sense of the dynamic spatial practices through which internationalisms were articulated and how they shaped relations between and within places. Engaging with the dynamics of particular placed internationalists allows a focus on the structuring effect of the racism of elements of the ‘white left’ on the practices of maritime internationalist politics, and recognizes forms of subaltern agency shaped through contesting such racism. To reconstruct such maritime internationalisms this paper draws on Clare Anderson's focus on recovering subaltern lives which shaped diverse ‘geographical trajectories’ which connect ‘ocean to bay, port to littoral, and river and coast to interior’ (Anderson, 2012: 9). This paper, however, offers a more explicit focus on the construction of militant political agency and trajectories. This is achieved partly through drawing together material from left wing newspapers and archives, and using official archives such as police and intelligence reports to assert the distinctive political trajectories shaped through seafarers' activism. This approach allows a focus on the diverse ways in which subaltern agency forged through negotiating, mobilizing and contesting internationalist networks. The next section explores the relations between such trajectories and black internationalist organizing practices. Seafarers' political trajectories and the construction of black internationalism In late 1921 officials in Liverpool, England apprehended Orryson N'tone Deibol, described in Colonial Office files as a ‘political negro suspect’. He landed at Liverpool from Madeira on the SS Onitsha on the 6th December, 1921 and was of interest to the authorities because he was found to have ‘a copy of the programme of the African Blood Brotherhood Association [sic]’ (Colonial Office, 1921: n.p.) Officials from the Colonial Office noted that he seemed ‘to be a member of the African Blood Brotherhood Association and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, of which Marcus Garvey is president’. They continued that he had ‘admitted that he was a delegate and associate of Marcus Garvey and referred to the differences between Garvey, President of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and Briggs, the leader of the African Blood Brotherhood Association.’ The African Blood Brotherhood was founded in New York in 1919 by Cyril Briggs and ‘advocated a mixture of emigration, separatism and socialism’ (Zumoff, 2014: 342). The document that Deibol carried, the ‘Program of the African Blood Brotherhood Delegation’, made reference to such divisions and differences between Garvey and the ABB, arguing that ‘the time has now arrived when the Movement initiated by Mr Garvey, should pass from its stage of dominant propaganda to one of constructive work’ (Colonial Office, 1921: n.p.). Deibol's engagement with the ABB and Garveyism here emphasizes both the appeal of these movements to black seafarers from different places in the diaspora, and crucially, their presence and significant roles within such movements. Thus Winston James notes that ‘Black sailors and seamen around the world served as important couriers

of Garvey's Negro World-often, at great personal risk, defying colonial law in Africa and the Caribbean to do so’ (James, 1998: 71e2). Further he notes that ‘Sailors and the travelled made up a substantial part of the leadership of the UNIA’. The movement had a transnational impact, developing a significant presence in southern Africa, facilitated by the role of Afro-Caribbean sailors (Hill & Pirio, 1987; Van der Walt, 2007). John Maynard notes how, through contacts with international seamen from the black diaspora, Aboriginal dockworkers in Australian port cities ‘were greatly influenced by Garveyism and its message of cultural pride and selfdetermination, unpacking and remodelling Garveyism to suit their own needs and battles in Australia’ (Maynard, 2014: 267). In similar terms, Lucien van der Walt has demonstrated that the politics of the South African Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) ‘were an amalgam of two transcontinental currents’ through uniting Garveyism with the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (Van der Walt, 2007: 224). This emphasizes the syncretic trajectories and exchanges through which internationalist politics could be constituted. Rather than operating in discrete and confined spaces, different political traditions such as Communism, syndicalism or Garveyism contributed to internationalisms in ways which tended to be much more hybrid products of exchanges and mimicry of other organizations. This can be demonstrated by the formation of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, the organization behind the newspaper The Negro Worker. As Hakim Adi notes, the founding of the ITUCNW was a ‘historic decision’ shaped by ‘the political direction of the Communist International’. However, it also reflected the agitation of African American Communists', many of whom who had come from organizations such as the ABB which were informed by variants of black nationalism and autonomy and who ‘had been amongst those most critical of the slow progress that was being made on the Negro Question by the communist parties of Britain, France, the United States and South Africa’ (Adi, 2013: 45). The circuits and trajectories of black seafarers were integral to the production and reproduction of such Communist inflected black internationalisms. Such organizing cultures drew on the dynamic trajectories of seafarers. The significance of subalternised mobilities to shaping seafarers' trajectories can be illustrated by Deibol who, according to Colonial Office records, had been ‘born in 15th May, 1899, at New Brunswick, Canada, of American parents, was educated in America until he was 16, thereafter signing on a British vessel and sailing to Germany.’ On the ‘outbreak of war he made his way to Canada. He then took to seafaring life again and visited the coast of Africa, where in the Gold Coast he obtained papers. He then signed on to a ship bound for Australia, where he deserted his vessel at Adelaide and was deported by the Australian police to Colombo, whence in the early part of this year, he proceeded to New York.’ This speaks to a set of trajectories and movements scarred by deportation and desertion, which, as Marcus Rediker notes, could be used as a dynamic practice of resistance by seafarers (Rediker, 1988: 150e151). Organisations like the ISH and the ITUCNW used seafarers' access to transnational maritime networks to create shadow transnational communication networks and solidarities (Weiss, 2013). The production of such networks was itself an important achievement. The seizure of ‘seditious literature’ in the possession of Charlie Solomon, described as a ‘native seaman’ who is a ‘Fantee and belongs to the Gold Coast’ on the William Wilberforce which arrived in Freetown from Hamburg on the 2nd June 1931, emphasises the centrality of this labour (Commissioner of Police, 1931). This seizure comprised 150 Negro Workers, 100 copies of The Proceedings of the First International, 5 copies of The International SeaTransport Worker 1 copy of For Organization, for Class Struggle and parcels of papers addressed to ITUCNW contacts in Free Town,

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Bathurst, Gambia and Accra. Through activities such as this, seafarers shaped internationalist political trajectories which were shaped by experiences of, and through developing linkages between, differently placed organisations and struggles. Seafarers were in a unique position to network between differently placed struggles, as can be demonstrated through the activity of one such activist, Jim Headley, a Trinidadian radical who was involved in shaping transnational organising cultures within and between London, Trinidad and the United States. In the 1920s it would appear he had been ‘based for some years in the United States where he had been a ship's cook’ and had been active in radical maritime unionism and the Young Communist League where he had come into contact with George Padmore (Reddock, 1988: 13). In 1932 he was a committee member of the communist-led Negro Welfare Association (NWA) in London which was affiliated to the League Against Imperialism, along with the West African seafarer Rowland Sawyer, the Barbadian Chris Braithwaite and Nancy Cunard, the shipping line heiress turned anti-colonial activist (Special Branch, 1932). The NWA was an important organisation in asserting a militant black presence in the capital and was linked to the networks of the ITUCNW. In the early 1930s Headley also led a sub-committee of the Seamen's Minority Movement (part of the Communist-led National Minority Movement of left wing trade unions) which, in Padmore's terms, was ‘working in connection with the coloured seamen in London’ (Padmore cited by Adi, 2013: 145). Along with Elma Francois, Jim Barrette and Dudley Mahon, he was to become part of the ‘nucleus of the National Unemployed Movement’ in Trinidad in the early 1930s (Reddock, 1988: 12; Weiss, 2014: 651e652). The intersections of radical maritime politics, Communism and anti-colonial politics which shaped Headley's political organising are demonstrated in a letter he wrote to The Negro Worker in 1932. He noted that ‘As a Negro and a worker, born in what is known as the Commonwealth of Nations, I can say emphatically that every endeavour is being made by British Imperialism to keep us down with the aid of police and bayonets as soon as the workers try to demand bread’ (Headley, 1932: 18). He continued by ‘examining the conditions of Negro toiling masses’ observing that ‘For an African, a working day which may mean anything from 10 to 20 h. Workers engaged in water transport, taking ships down the coast are paid the miserable sum of 1/9 in return for filling the role of stevedore, sailors, firemen, cooks etc for the profit mongers of the Elder Dempster Co.’ (Headley, 1932: 18). Elder Dempster held ‘the monopoly of carrying freight, specie and mail between the UK and the west coast of Africa from about 1910 until the 1930s’ and was notorious for the ‘gross discrimination’ it practised ‘against 'coloured' seamen with the connivance of the unions and the government’ (Sherwood, 1994: 130). Headley's targeting of Elder Dempster develops a direct challenge to the unequal labour relations that were central to imperial labour geographies. For Headley it was only ‘by the world-wide solidarity of all Colonial workers and oppressed workers of all nations marching forward as a united whole against Capitalism and for the establishment of workers and peasants rule’ (Headley, 1932: 19). Such militant political persuasions shaped Headley's interventions in Trinidadian politics in important ways. Jerome Teelucksingh notes that Elma Francois and Jim Headley became ‘discontented with the refusal of Captain Cipriani’, the politically moderate leader of the Trinidad Workers Association (TWA), ‘to pay more attention to the unemployed persons in the colony’. Cipriani's ‘reservations and conservatism eventually led to the decision of the disillusioned group (including Headley and Francois) to break ranks with Cipriani and form the National Unemployed Movement

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(NUM) in 1934’ (Teelucksingh, 2014: 51). These intersections and political friendships between figures such as Headley and Francois emphasise the need to think about the multi-sited and placed internationalist cultures that were shaped by seafarers' political trajectories. In this regard seafarers were not sealed off from life ashore, but rather their trajectories intersected with and shaped placed political cultures in ways which stress the importance of not counterposing terracentricity with an equally problematic focus on ‘aquamobility’ in isolation (Anderson, 2012: 9).1 Rather it is important to think about the diverse articulations between different actors that shaped maritime internationalisms, and which unsettle the tendency to position maritime spaces as predominantly male. Thus Rhoda Reddock argues that activists in the Trinidadian National Unemployed Movement were ‘exposed much more to socialist thinking at an international level and became convinced of the limitations of “unemployment”’ as an organizing frame through the role of figures such as Rupert Gittens of Argyle Street in Belmont in Port of Spain (Reddock, 1988: 15e16). Gittens had returned to Trinidad from Europe in 1935 having been deported from Marseilles for his activities with the French Communist Party where it is likely he would have worked in  (Adi, 2013; Reddock, 1988). This collaboration with Kouyate commitment to internationalism shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the interventions of Elma Francois who became the first Trinidadian woman to be arrested for sedition, for a speech given in October 1937 which combined a focus on ‘world conditions and local conditions’. She spoke of ‘land reservations in the Kenya Colony’ alongside discussions of ‘the Negro and East-Indian workers who sleep under the Town Hall and in the Square through poverty’ (cited by Reddock, 1988: 36e37). It is significant here that Francois envisioned solidarities across the ethnic divisions of Trinidadian society which were entrenched in this period- and related to a ‘colonial ethnic division of labour’ (Yelvington, 1999: 191). From 1940 Gittens also collaborated with the Irish radicals Francis 'Frank' Cahill and Kay Donnellan in producing the publication New Dawn which was a ‘bellweather of currents sweeping across the Caribbean’, a collaboration which was based on shared anti-colonial political commitments (Campbell, 2010: 81). The trajectories of maritime workers like Headley and Gittens and their intersections with radicals such as Francois and Donnellan, then, emphasise how through their activism and organising they shaped linkages between differently placed organisations such as the NWCSA and NWA (Reddock, 1994). Thus criticism of the TWA took place in international circuits shaped by organizations such as the Negro Welfare Association in London, as indicated by a report in The Negro Worker of a meeting organized in London under the auspices of the NWA and addressed by Captain Cipriani. The report notes that ‘Comrade Arnold Ward, the secretary of the Association, presided’ and that it was a ‘well attended meeting of white and coloured workers, as well as colonial students’ (Negro Worker, 1932: 19). Ward, a Barbadian Communist, was a major figure in London black left organising in the 1930s. A Colonial Office report on Communist activities written in response to the labour rebellions in Trinidad in the late 1930s noted that Ward had been born at Bridgetown, Barbados in 1886 and had lived in Trinidad between 1903 and 1906 (Colonial Office, 1938). He resided in Germany from 1907 to November, 1915 and, like many British ‘subjects’ living there, was interned during the First World War. After Cipriani's speech the following motion was adopted, presumably in opposition to the tenor of Cipriani's intervention: ‘This meeting of British and colonial workers sends its fraternal greetings to the oppressed workers and peasants of the West Indies and pledges

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itself to fight side by side for the overthrow of British imperialism not only in the West Indies but throughout the world.’ (Colonial Office, 1938.) This suggests that politics was configured in ways which were based around solidarities shaped by an explicitly anti-colonial internationalism. The terms on which such linkages were shaped explicitly challenged some of the paternalist labour geographies envisioned by Fabian and colonial articulations of labour internationalism. In February 1939 Arthur Creech Jones, for example, the prominent UK Labour politician who would serve in the Colonial Office in the Labour administration of 1945e1950, wrote to Elma Francois noting that ‘[o]ne of the problems confronting you in the building of a trade union organization in your colony is inadequate information as to how the trade union movement in Great Britain works’. He enclosed a copy of a pamphlet noting that ‘some years ago’ he had ‘attempted to give a brief account of the British Trade Union Movement’ (Reddock, 1988: 49). This was part of a broader context. Walter Citrine, the TUC general secretary between 1926 and 1946 and a committed anti-Communist, for example, ‘was deeply involved in containing the radicalism of Caribbean union leaders after the Trinidad general strike of 1937’ in which NWCSA activists played a leading role (Silverman, 2000: 79; see Adi, 2013: 186; Bolland, 2001). This role is potentially why Creech Jones sought out Francois, but she was also engaged with more radical figures in Britain, becoming involved in opposition to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia after receiving and reading copies of the New Times and Ethiopian News edited by Sylvia Pankhurst (Reddock, 1988: 18e19). For the Saint Lucian economist Arthur Lewis writing in a Fabian Society pamphlet in 1939 in the wake of the wave of Caribbean Labour Rebellions of the later 1930s, ‘the absence of trade union traditions’ meant that ‘it is a slow and difficult task to inculcate the subtleties of trade union strategy, and it will take some time before the workers have grasped the nature of trade union functions and methods, and grown to accept trade union discipline.’ Lewis envisioned connections with trade unions in Britain as necessary for the production of disciplined forms of trade unionism, noting with concern that ‘in many of the newer unions the leaders are faced with the problem that their members, with a bitter sense of generations of injustice, are over-militant, and anxious to strike on the flimsiest pretext’ (Lewis, 1939: 40). Such Fabian inflected sentiments, however, were directly at odds with the attempts of organizations like the ISH and the ITUCNW to shape militant forms of trade unionism (Padmore, 1931). The next section explores the activity of figures like Headley in engaging with the Seamen's Minority Movement, which was central to attempts to produce such articulations of trade unionism among seafarers. The Seamen's Minority Movement and the racialised political cultures of seafarers' internationalism On 3rd December, 1931 a meeting took place at the International Seamen's Club, 233 High Street, Poplar ‘under the auspices of the Seamen's Minority Movement’. According to a Colonial Office report of the event ‘a Committee of eighteen negroes was erected to form a national Movement of coloured workers’ and the ‘meeting was addressed by the negroes, Ward, Jones and Headley’ (Special Branch, 1932). The stimulus for such a meeting was, in part, a ‘Resolution on the British Seamen's Movement and the Tasks Confronting the Seamen's Minority Movement’. The Seamen's Minority Movement had been instructed by the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers that ‘work among the colonial seamen must occupy a central place’ (Seamen's Minority Movement, 1931a, 1931b). The ISH resolution dictated that the work ‘among

these seamen must find full application and must be carried through under the slogan: “Full economic, social and political equality!”’ This section explores the dynamics of organising in Cardiff which intersected with the internationalist political cultures of the ISH. The Seamen's Minority Movement was the maritime section of the Communist-led Minority Movement of left wing trade unionists and was shaped by the multi-ethnic cultures of seafarers organizing in port cities such as Cardiff, London, Liverpool and South Shields. Led by George Hardy and Fred Thompson, the SMM sought to offer an alternative to the National Union of Seamen, a key proponent of what Jon Hyslop has described as ‘white labourism’ (Hyslop, 1999). Hardy, though originally from Yorkshire, had been a significant figure in the Wobblies in North America before becoming a Communist, and was the product of a multi-continental radical trajectory (Hardy, 1956). It is possible that his exposure to the much vaunted multi-ethnic cultures of the IWW shaped attempts to organise the SMM along multi-ethnic lines. The experiences of black seafarers' attempts to organize in the Seamen's Minority Movement offers important insights into their relations with the white Communist left. It also demonstrates how, through mobilizing such resources, and despite racism and uneven articulations, some key black activists emerged who were able to use these resources and spaces to create a presence for black internationalist struggles and identities within British port cities. The contested racialised organising and politics in the SMM emerges through intercepted correspondence of un-named SMM activists from spring of 1931. Colonial Office officials observing that the ‘suggested plan for the mobilization of negro seamen seems to have got no further yet’ noted that Frank Macaulay, the delegate of the Nigerian National Democratic Party [NNDP] at the ITUCNW conference in Hamburg in 1930, had ‘been in South Wales, apparently with the object of organizing a “Negro Welfare Association”’ there (Seamen's Minority Movement, 1931b; see also Adi, 2013: 256e257). Macaulay's work in Cardiff was to provoke comment from Seamen's Minority Movement ‘comrades’ in ways that reveal significant aspects of the dynamics between race, place and internationalism in the organising cultures of the SMM and ISH. Reporting on his speeches in Cardiff and Barry in 1931, the SMM activist notes that the ‘Comrade arrived late in the evening and some Cardiff Comrades accompanied him to the Negro quarter of the docks area. [ … ] A meeting resulted at which most of the speaking was done in the native languages’. He also notes that ‘the negro comrade had a very remarkable approach to the workers, and he was listened to very attentively’ (Seamen's Minority Movement, 1931b). At the crux of this ‘very remarkable approach’ was a struggle over the terms on which black seafarers were organized by the SMM. Thus the SMM activist continued that ‘as a result of the discussion, or that part of it in which the Negro workers broke into English, it was gathered that the line pursued was that of establishing a kind of Negro Workers Organisation. [ … ]. In any case our comrades had misgivings despite the fact that the negro comrade was receiving considerable support from the Negro workers.’ Despite the success of Macaulay's methods and his clear ability to engage with black seafarers, then, his approach was dismissed by leading SMM activists for transgressing their established organizing practices and this clearly suggests that black selforganisation was seen as a threat. The negotiation of this position was also worked out in an Atlantic frame. The letter recounts a conversation with a South American ‘comrade’ who at the Cardiff meeting had ‘pulled the negro comrade up on the policy that he was advocating on the basis that his conception of the need of coloured seamen was very narrow and separatist from the rest of the seamen, and was not very far removed from the Negro

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organization that exists at Liverpool and in the USA.’ (Seamen's Minority Movement, 1931b) Hostility to such organizing practices were not limited to Cardiff. Thus William Brown, one of the key black SMM organizers in Liverpool, ‘admitted having ‘a lot of trouble’ organizing the ‘coloured seamen’, ‘largely because of their previous experiences of racism, but also because some were critical of the ITUCNW's condemnation of Marcus Garvey’ (Adi, 2013: 261). The contested character of relations between seafarers of colour and the Seamen's Minority Movement was made explicit in a speech by the Cardiff delegate of the Seamen's Minority Movement, Harry O'Connell, a seafarer from what was then British Guiana. Padmore, in his account of the conference for The Negro Worker, noted that ‘Comrade Harry O'Connell of British Guiana’ ‘leader of the colonial seamen in England gave a very interesting speech on how “with the proper methods of work” the Seamen's Minority Movement was at one time able to rally more than 500 Negro, Arab and Somali seamen under its banner. But due to political confusion and opportunistic tactics which later developed the colonial seamen drifted away from the organisation’ (Padmore, 1931). That O'Connell used this platform to engage critically with the direction of the Seamen's Minority Movement is significant. The official rhetoric of the ISH stressed that one ‘of the most notable characteristics of the Congress, was the complete unanimity in spite of the fact that water transport workers of all persuasions were present’ (ISH, 1932: 5). O'Connell was one of four ‘colonial’ delegates who spoke at the Congress in Hamburg in 1932, along with Ada Wright, George . Ada Wright spoke at the Congress as Padmore, and Garan Kouyate part of the international organising associated with the world wide campaign to defend the Scottsboro boys. Her role in such networks drew on her position as the mother of two of the boys who had been imprisoned on false accusations of raping two white women. Wright was ‘a forceful committed fighter for her sons, and a Primitive Baptist congregant, with no political ties other than those prompted by the case’ (Pennybacker, 2009: 27). Despite the profile the Communist Party achieved through mobilisations such as the campaigns to free the Scottsboro Boys relations between black activists and Communist organisation continued to be fraught and contested (Kelley, 1996). Thus Minkah Makalani contends that O'Connell was so irritated by his treatment after the Congress that ‘he resigned and refused , choosing instead to even direct aid from Padmore and Kouyate form the Cardiff Coloured Seamen's Committee’ (Makalani, 2011: 185). Fierce criticisms of the SMM were also made by Chris Braithwaite who became a leading activist who in the Colonial Seamen's Action after leaving the Communist Party over such differences (Hogsbjerg, 2014; Weiss, 2013: 26). As Holger Weiss notes, the ISH decided ‘to send Richard Krebs as instructor on a special mission to reorganize work in the British harbours in July 1932. Hardy was accused for the “total breakdown” of the SMM, and was forced to resign.’ As O'Connell was associated with the Hardy fractions he ‘was criticized for blocking his followers to join the reorganized SMM section in Cardiff’ (Weiss, 2013: 26). The records of Krebs' correspondence and his account of his visit to Cardiff, however, demonstrate the intense racism which structured the ways in which Krebs interacted with O'Connell. Reports of the progress of his work give a sense of both his methods and his attitude towards O'Connell. Noting that an SMM conference at Cardiff would be ‘well attended’ he observed that he would use the opportunity to ‘clear up a number of queries’ through ‘a meeting of the fraction of the Communists of the elected delegates’ (Krebs, 1932: n.p.) He continued that ‘A good number of new young workers are actually employed there on behalf of the SMM but apparently they are not allowed to get into the union circle by the old Hardy disciples under the leadership of the nigger

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O'Connell (delegate of the World Congress).’ In his memoir Out of the Night he describes O'Connell, in similarly aggressively racialized terms, as ‘an energetic individual, very dark of skin, but with the nose of an Arab horseman and the chin of a pugilist’ (Valtin, 2004: 292). He notes that his mission ‘ended in bleak defeat. O'Connell was willing to accept the money I offered to support his organisation, but he stubbornly insisted that the West Indies were one thing, and Moscow another’ (Valtin, [1941] 2004: 292e3). This is difficult to square with O'Connell's longstanding involvement with Communism; (Drake, 1948), but Krebs' account nonetheless suggests the ways in which O'Connell was able to assert a presence within the spaces of the ISH. This account also emphasises some of the combative masculinities that were constitutive of Communist Internationalism. Contrasting notions of manliness could also be central to the way radical articulations of internationalism were demarcated (Stephens, 2005). Despite such overt racist treatment, and Krebs' attempt to marginalise O'Connell by restricting his involvement in the ISH to ‘colonial work’, O'Connell continued to act as a key Cardiff based organiser and to shape linkages with organisations such as the ITUCNW. His role was particularly significant in 1935 in shaping the opposition in Cardiff to the National Union of Seamen's attempts to force black, Arab and Asian seafarers out of the labour market through its role in shaping the Tramp Shipping Subsidy Act of 1935. He was active in bringing together ‘Malayan, Arab, Somali, WestIndian and African workers’ in the Cardiff Coloured Colonial Seamen's Committee (Cardiff Coloured Seamen's Committee, 1935:10e11). Similar alliances were forged in London. In November 1936 the first annual conference of the Colonial Seamen's Association was attended by 51 workers drawn from the ranks of ‘Negroes, Arabs, Somalis, Malays and Chinese’. It was addressed by Chris Braithwaite, the chair of the CSA, and the secretary, the ‘lascar’ leader Surat Alley, who had links to the Textile Workers' Union in Bombay and the All-India Seamen's Federation (Visram, 2002: 219). A ‘joint conference’ of Indian unions in Bombay in 1935 had expressed ‘its regret at the unfriendly attitude taken by the Parliamentary Labour Party [ … ] towards the employment of Indian seamen on British-owned ships’ (India Office, 1935). Such organising had effects; the mobilizations against the Tramp Shipping Subsidy Act made key provisions of the act unworkable (Balachandran, 2012: 193). These struggles were shaped by, and asserted, forms of working class multiculturalism which were produced through dynamic relations between place and internationalist political practices. Subaltern cosmopolitanism, black internationalism and the gendered politics of place Harold Rosen's memoirs of growing up in a Jewish Communist family in London in the 1930s give a powerful sense of how the intersections of subaltern cosmopolitanism and internationalism could both shape and be shaped by particular place-based political cultures. Rosen recalls interactions with Headley as his ‘zeider’ [grandfather] was ‘given to bringing home out of the blue people he'd run into, we never knew how’. Among these folk he recalls there was ‘improbably Hedley [sic], for instance whom Zeider had met down in the docks. And what was Zeider doing in the dangerous and hostile territory? Something political, we guessed vaguely. [ … ] I marveled at my booba [grandmother] [ … ] She was a stern and judgemental woman and didn't exactly smother Hedley with hospitality. He was not in her gast-in-shtetl class but she always found him a place and a plate at the kitchen table.’ (Rosen, 1999: 121, emphasis in original). Even if Headley was not ‘smothered’ with hospitality by Rosen's grandmother this emphasises that left political cultures and organizing could shape forms of ‘ordinary

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multiculturalism’ (Gilroy, 2004; though for discussions of racism and anti-semitism in the CPGB see Sherwood, 1996: 148). Solidarities between black and Jewish workers were also articulated in fictional terms in Simon Blumenfeld's novel Jew Boy, his novel of the proletarianised worlds of the 1930s East End (Blumenfeld, 1935). In Jew Boy, Alec, the main protagonist in the novel and an (unemployed) Jewish Communist tailor, is inspired by JoeJo, an African American Communist, to attempt to go to Moscow, through Jo Jo's tales of having seen Claude McKay and Langston Hughes in Russia. Claude McKay's autobiography A Long Way from Home itself testifies to the motley multi-ethnic cultures that shaped different articulations of left internationalism in London in the interwar period. McKay recalls sites such as the club for ‘colored [sic] soldiers’ in a Basement on Drury Lane in London to which he brought copies of radical black American magazines and newspapers such as the Crisis and the Negro World and recalls meeting Sylvia Pankhurst, with whom he would collaborate on the Workers' Dreadnought, at the ‘International Club’ (McKay, 1985: 67e68). Radical figures such as Amy Ashwood Garvey also shaped such sites of association, her ‘Florence Mills Social Parlour’ provided ‘a political and social venue where black people could find familiar food, see familiar faces, and relax away from the gaze of white Londoners’ (Makalani, 2011: 202). It also became a key meeting place for figures associated with pan-African organizing such as CLR James and Ras Makonnen, who along with Garvey herself were influential activists in the International African Friends of Ethiopia. Such articulations of internationalism and place were shaped by forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism where racialised difference was negotiated in positive, if at times contested, ways. Attempts to forge solidarities across racial difference and to forge multicultural working class communities were challenged by forms of imperial internationalism which shaped ‘white supremacist state making’ practices (Putnam, 2014a: 171). Thus the Chief Constable of Cardiff, James Mitchener, advocated banning interracial sex in dockside spaces in 1929, drawing direct links to the ‘recently passed 1929 Immorality Act in South Africa’ (Rich, 1986: 130; see also Cornwell, 1996: 443). The role of the NUS in lobbying for the Coloured Alien Seamen Order of 1925 which ‘enhanced both the powers of the police, the NUS and the Public Assistance Committees in the ports in establishing a system of control over the movements and jobseeking patterns of black seamen’ also contributed to this context (Rich, 1986: 130). The Order ‘acted as a catalyst for a political debate about the general effects of ‘mongrelisation’ and ‘miscegenation’ which had been seen as a cause of the 1919 riots' in the city where seafarers of colour were attacked as part of a transnational wave of white supremacist rioting (Rich, 1986: 130; see also Jenkinson, 2009). Such fears and anxieties were constituted by ‘the spread of ‘whiteness’ as a transnational form of racial identification’ that was ‘at once global in its power and personal in its meaning’ (Lake and Reynolds, 2008: 3). Central to such transnational white imaginaries was the continued pathologisation of areas such as “Tiger Bay” in Cardiff. Dominant representations combined ‘a negative portrayal with a sense of exoticism, danger and mystery’, especially given the area's strong association with sex work (Jordan, 2001: 12). This pathologisation intersected with struggles over politics of race, gender and place, most violently in the riots of 1919, but also though ongoing articulations of grievances against Asian and black workers. Thus in August 1912, Stephen Hamilton, a forty-one-yearold bachelor from Monmouthshire, wrote to the pan-African journal African Times and Orient Review explaining that he did not like the class of ‘coloured people’ in his colliery district: ‘I fancy we get the scum’ (cited by Bressey, 2014: 255). Caroline Bressey, arguing that ‘Hamilton could not understand was why these men did not bring black women or girls with them, but instead had to

‘demoralise’ white girls by marrying them’ notes that he ‘clearly did not appreciate the multicultural working class culture of his home town’. Indeed it was to Risca in Monmouthshire that Deibol, after landing in Liverpool, was ‘shortly proceed to South Wales where he is going to marry a negress named Peggy Bailey employed at the High Field Hospital, Bassleg, South Wales’. Such struggles over multicultural working class cultures and gendered relations produced through them could become central to place-making practices shaped through black internationalist organizing. In this regard it is significant that as well as challenging the exclusion of seafarers of colour from the labour market O'Connell also challenged dominant representations of the intersections of race, class and gender in Butetown. Thus O'Connell responded to a report prepared by Capt FA Richardson, published in the Western Mail by writing that ‘I would like, as a coloured seaman, to say that we believe we do understand the white standard of civilization and its conventions. We do not agree that the white women with whom we come into contact are of loose moral character, and believe that the moral standards of the coloured people compare favourably with those of the white.’ (O'Connell, 1935a). That this letter was reprinted in the Daily Worker of July 13 1935 under the headline ‘Black Seaman Answers White Captain’ further emphasises O'Connell's ability to use Communist networks to circulate resistance to dominant representations of Butetown (O'Connell, 1935b). This letter can usefully be positioned in relation to what Lara Putnam has described as a transnational set of discourses around Caribbean family structures and kinship relations which were shaped by ‘assumptions about the cultural coordinates of responsible citizenship, and its necessary anchor in particular domestic practices’ (Putnam, 2014b: 509). This does not mean, however, that the relations between masculinities, place and community articulated by O'Connell and his associates were uncontested. Older left men such as O'Connell, Jim Nurse and Alan Sheppard were viewed as ‘too serious and intimidating’ by local girls such as Olwen Watkins and Vera Roberts who noted they ‘were old fashioned, and very critical, so you avoided them. They were always asking serious questions, like “What are your ambitions for the future?”’ (Sherwood, 1991: 63). Such gendered relations, particularly in relation to politics, also come through St Clair Drake's (1948) ethnographic work in Cardiff, where he noted talking with the panAfricanist Alan Sheppard about politics and gambling, only after his wife had gone to bed! These accounts emphasise the contested terms on which struggles over place were generated and signal the importance of attending to differences within subaltern groups over the terms on which place making practices were negotiated and produced. As Laura Tabili notes, such struggles were central to the emergence of a ‘multicultural Black political identity [that] emerged among working men in interwar Britain’ which ‘coexisted with but transcended religious, cultural and linguistic diversity’ (Tabili, 1994: 159). Conclusions This paper has engaged with the contested spaces of maritime organising in the interwar period and has considered their relation to various articulations of black internationalism. It has used an engagement with the work of maritime historians such as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker whose critique of the centrality given to land and nation in shaping forms of internationalist politics problematises some of the foundational categories of political geography. By drawing attention to the diverse modalities through which internationalism was articulated and negotiated by subaltern actors the paper has sought to enrich understandings of the relations between space, politics and subalternity. I have used

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an engagement with the different ‘agentic spatial practices’ shaped through the struggles of maritime workers and organisers to assert different subaltern presence and agency in the labour of assembling internationalist politics. Further, I have argued that such actors mobilised and engaged with the terms of left internationalist political networks in ways that were both productive and critical. Through tracing struggles over the racialised politics of seafarers' internationalism I have brought together literatures and concerns which have frequently been held apart. In particular I have sought to combine insights from work in political geography, subaltern studies, labour history and labour geography and work on maritime studies and racial politics and to articulate a conversation between such work. By engaging with the different racialised, gendered and classed spaces produced and negotiated through subaltern maritime organising I have sought to intervene in understandings of who/what counts in the production of left internationalism. Foregrounding subaltern articulations of internationalist politics has de-centred the role of left elites in shaping the spaces of internationalist politics and has asserted the diverse processes and antagonisms through which internationalist politics was assembled and mobilised. Through these contributions this paper has sought to outline elements of an approach to the subaltern geographies of internationalism. Firstly, it has sought to problematise the rather circumscribed sense of subaltern agency that has shaped diverse work in subaltern studies. It also offers insights for understanding the ways in which particular processes and relations were impacted upon by such organising. Secondly, I have sought to position subaltern political trajectories as constitutive of internationalism. Through doing so I have emphasised that these were forms of mobility scarred by techniques such as deportation and desertion, but despite such pressures subaltern actors used such marginal mobilities to craft important internationalist movements and imaginaries. This has allowed a focus on the diverse ways in which subaltern agency was forged through negotiating, mobilizing and contesting internationalist networks. Thirdly, by thinking about the structuring effects of racism on the politics of left internationalism I have argued that subaltern maritime actors were able to forge particular spaces of opposition and to circumvent some of the uneven relations of power that structured such organising. What is significant here is the ways in which such forms of working class multiculturalism were shaped by, and in turn shaped, particular articulations of left internationalism. In this regard internationalist connections were mobilized, often strategically, and always critically, by actors such as Francois, Headley and O'Connell as resources to both defend, but also to assert, the making of diverse communities. That these struggles were forged in the shadow of ‘white supremacist state making’ and in opposition to the white labourism of unions such as the NUS only makes the forms of subaltern agency they shaped more significant. Conflict of interest statement I declare there is no conflict of interest pertaining to this work or to my relationship with Political Geography. Acknowledgements This paper draws on research in part funded by a British Academy small grant on ‘Black Internationalism and the Spatial Politics of Anti-fascism’ (SG090915). It was originally drafted and presented during a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Centre for Studies of Social Sciences, Kolkata which was funded by a British Academy IPM grant ‘Subaltern Maritime Networks and Transnational Spaces’

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and developed in collaboration with Lakshmi Subramanian. The paper benefitted immensely from comments arising from a seminar and workshop held at the Centre. The paper has also benefited from feedback from audiences at the Practicing Historical Geography Conference in Preston, the 2014 Society for Caribbean Studies Conference and the Port City Lives Conference at Liverpool University and the helpful comments of Andy Davies, three referees and the useful editorial guidance of Phil Steinberg. The responsibility for the arguments and any substantive errors is of course my own. Endnotes 1 The phrase ‘aquamobility’ was used in the context of discussions of terracentricity by Dwaipayan Bhattacharya in a workshop on Maritime Networks and Transnational Spaces at the Centre for Studies of Social Sciences, Kolkata, 12the13th December, 2014.

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