2024-03-29T12:46:45Zhttps://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/oai2oai:scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl:item_32039322024-01-29T17:11:00Zhdl_1887_4539hdl_1887_26883open_access
Money, D.J.
Zyl-Hermann, D. van
Revisiting white labourism: new debates on working-class whiteness in twentieth-century Southern Africa
en
20212021-07-14
Article / Letter to editor
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Text
Southern Africa
race relations
social history
Whites
1900-1999
<p>This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.<br></p>
International Review of Social History
ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonden
doi:10.1017/S0020859021000407
lucris-id: 427395398
https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3203932https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/application/pdf