Pan-Africanism and World Revolution: George Padmore, 1903-1959

Peter James Hudson
African American Studies
UC Los Angeles

George Padmore was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, and activist who played a critical though understudied role in both the global labor agitations of the interwar period and the post-World War II anti-colonial struggles of African and Caribbean countries. Pan-Africanism and World Revolution: George Padmore, 1903-1959 is a book-length study that reconstructs Padmore’s biographical narrative and intellectual biography. The project has three broad, overlapping intellectual goals. First, to provide a critical reappraisal of Padmore’s voluminous written output to demonstrate the originality and importance of his contribution postcolonial theory and the historiography of decolonization. Second, to offer a reassessment of Padmore’s historical contribution to the development of anti-imperial struggles in Europe and anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the Caribbean. Third, to demonstrate Padmore’s importance – and, following this, the importance of the African Diaspora – to the formation of the post-World War II international political-economic order