ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author wants to account for the extraordinary British labour response to events in South Africa by advancing the following argument. First, 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. Second, the labour movements based on this imperial working class produced and disseminated a common ideology of White Labourism. The chapter approach also derives partly from the American historical work of the 1990s on the relationship between the construction of ‘whiteness’ and the politics of class. This literature emphasises that conceptions of ‘whiteness’ are socially constructed, and therefore have histories which can be investigated. Ignatiev suggests that American labour historians had previously tended to avoid the question of the role of white labour in promoting racial divisions amongst the workforce.
