Description
As the Second World War drew to a close and the victorious Great Powers mobilised to create a new world order, anticolonial activists used numerous notions and channels of the ‘international’ to influence this new order. This paper examines an under-appreciated avenue of anticolonial and international activity in the formative 1945 moment: the work of African, Asian, Arab, Latin American, and Caribbean delegates to the World Trade Union Congress held in London simultaneous with the Yalta Conference in February 1945. While the British TUC and Soviet delegations hoped to create a new labour international to complement the nascent United Nations Organisation, anticolonial activists sought to promote different notions of international anticolonialism – including pan-Arabism, pan-Americanism, and pan-Africanism – within labour internationalism, anti-fascism, and Anglo-American liberal internationalism.
