Crises of Empire: Colonial Economies, Labour, and Post-War Protest, 1945-1966.

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Using Malaya, the Gold Coast, and British Guiana as case studies, this project will investigate the causes and consequences of the industrial unrest that affected the British Empire in the period 1945 to 1966. This project will address two broad research objectives. Firstly, it examines the causes of the industrial unrest, investigating the relationship between economic conditions, social organisation, and labour protest. Secondly, it analyses what factors conditioned the 'Imperial response' to the strikes, focusing on how metropolitan ideas relating to Keynesian economic management and social welfare influenced colonial labour policy. The first part of the project investigates the causes of the post-war industrial unrest. The study will focus on the war-time legacy of austerity, investigating how low wages and increased labour demands contributed to the outbreak of the post-war protests. The study will also investigate the relationship between the unrest and the particular structure of the colonial economies, examining why workers in key strategic industries often played prominent role in the protests. The study will contend that key sector workers, such as transport employees in the Gold Coast, plantation labourers in Malaya, and bauxite workers in British Guiana, gained considerable industrial power in the post-war period. As the demand for primary commodities increased, sites of strategic economic importance, such as the mining, railway, and port cities, emerged as potential bottlenecks, where strike action could bring an entire economy to a halt. The second part of the study will investigate how in the wake of the strikes, colonial administrations, influenced by domestic policies in post-war Britain, came to regard economic development and social welfare as solutions to the labour protests. It was hoped that better infrastructure and improved social services would produce not only a more efficient workforce but a less combative one. The limitations of these development and welfare-orientated policies were quickly exposed. Having demanded that colonial subjects live and work like Europeans, the trade unions insisted that the colonial governments pay them like Europeans. It was in this way, as this study will document, that the post-war justifications for colonial rule - development and welfare - served to undermine the very project they were supposed to consolidate. The study will be of relevance to those historians and social scientists working on the social and economic aspects of colonial history. The study will challenge the assumption that the post-war industrial unrest was simply a product of imperial decline or nationalist struggle. Having documented the economic and social inequities that served as the catalyst for the post-war industrial unrest, the study will contend that the labour movements had their origins in specific patterns of mobilisation that combined emerging forms of corporate identity with existing forms of affiliation relating to class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Academic outputs will include a monograph, an international conference, peer-reviewed journal articles, and the creation of a Colonial Studies Network. The study will also be of significance to policy makers and civil society organisations. This study will equip organisations, such as the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team at the Institute of Development Studies and the Trades Union Congress, with the contextual knowledge to make evidence-based policy decisions regarding labour rights and the capacity of trade unions in developing countries. Research results will be communicated to non-academic users through the Colonial Studies Network's website, seminars and workshops, and a public exhibition: 'Crises of Empire: Trade Unions and Decolonisation'. The exhibition will be held at the University of Exeter from January to March 2016 and will then be transferred to the TUC in London.