The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War

The white working classes in the pre‐First World War British Empire were not composed of ‘nationally’ discrete entities, but were bound together into an Imperial working class by flows of population which traversed the world. The labour movements based on this imperial working class produced and disseminated a common ideology of White Labourism. In this ideology, the element of the critique of exploitation and the element of racism were inextricably intermingled. The paper seeks to identify a few of the many ‘vectors’ along which white labourist ideology moved around the world. The paper ends with a discussion of the British labour movement response to the 1914 deportations of South African white labour leaders, which seeks to demonstrate how integral to that movement the conceptions of White Labourism had become.