Neville Kirk's Transnational Radicalism focuses on “the connected lives” of two socialists, the British radical Tom Mann (1856–1941) and the Australian Robert Samuel “Bob” Ross (1873–1931). Kirk outlines how Mann and Ross worked, at times in collaboration, as activists and labor journalists in Australia and New Zealand in the early twentieth century.
Kirk describes Transnational Radicalism as “breaking new ground in moving beyond the national focus” by examining two “transnational radicals,” as leaders who crossed national and other boundaries in order to promote their socialism. It would perhaps be just as accurate to say that both operated in an imperial context, and Mann much more so than Ross, who never left Australasia.
Mann's experience reflects the story of a number of radicals seeking to break out of a frustrated pattern of activism and to find purchase elsewhere, as his status as a British subject allowed him to move first to New Zealand in 1901 and later to Australia in search of networks and forums to promote his ideas—and himself as a champion of them. However, the Australian labor movement resisted radical socialism and embraced parliamentary action. By 1910, Mann's options for pushing the radical cause in Australia were exhausted, and he returned to Britain.
Kirk argues that Mann and Ross “significantly contributed” to radical transnational politics in the period (6). The case for Mann's contribution might be more confidently asserted than for his Australian contemporary. Ross circulated in a smaller orbit; nonetheless, he exhibited a restless quest to provide himself with a living in his chosen field of labor journalism, while also seeking to advance his ideals—journeys that in some ways mirrored Mann's experience. Moving from Brisbane in 1903 to Broken Hill in far west New South Wales, to Melbourne and thence to New Zealand, and finally back to Melbourne before the outbreak of the First World War, Ross built associations in many locations. His radicalism led him to immerse himself in the political sectarianism of the small Victorian Socialist Party, where he shared with Mann the frustrations of attempting to wrest the broader labor movement towards direct rather than parliamentary action.
While Mann and Ross collaborated in the pre-1914 period, their ideological paths parted after the war. Ross increasingly accepted the logic of working within the labor movement and the Labour Party, seeking to push it towards socialism; yet he supported parliamentary action, arguing by 1920 that Australian workers would not embrace the revolutionary socialism transforming Russia following the 1917 revolution. Mann, by contrast, became a founder of the British Communist Party in 1920 and remained committed, as Kirk observes, to revolutionary-industrial unionism.
Transnational Radicalism is a thoroughly researched work that closely observes the lives and political context of its subjects. It also draws out a number of neglected elements of their beliefs and advocacy, including their engagements with gender and race issues. Kirk's argument that Mann and Ross “might be seen as espousing socialist feminism” may somewhat strain the historical record, not least as Kirk himself acknowledges that their support for women's emancipation was conditional: for them, “gender was both a racialised category and played second fiddle to class” (199).
Kirk also seeks to overcome scholars’ neglect of the relationship between the radicalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and globalization. Unfortunately, he assesses the historiographical arguments around turn-of-the-century globalization without really exploring their specific connection with the lives under examination. Some elements of globalization that might have been further explored, and that shaped the experience of its two subjects, include the intensifying scale of production and capital formation and the impact of new technologies, particularly of distribution and communication, that facilitated the movement of products, ideas, and human beings around the globe from the late nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth. Cable news and telegraphy, along with the advent of the steamship, allowed for forms of circulation vital for establishing radical networks. Unprecedented industrialization provided the stimulus for mass working-class mobilization that Mann and Ross sought to harness in a more militant direction.
Greater connection between radicals also exposed divergence in their local conditions and responses. Bob Ross accepted the logic of a white Australia. The internationalist Mann repudiated race. In Australia, tariff protection was embraced by the labor movement, while British Labour championed free trade. Kirk does not clarify his subjects’ position on this significant point of difference between Australian and British labor movements, yet trade policy was a key issue in global political economy in the period. Ross and Mann shared an aversion to militarism—although while Ross opposed the Australian Labour Party's introduction of compulsory military training and wartime conscription during World War I, Mann emerged as a “responsible patriot,” supporting Britain's war effort (239). Kirk tends to downplay these divergences, which are really as telling as the causes that drew the two men together. Kirk focuses on “a spirit of tolerance” that “despite differences and conflicts” enabled friendships to endure (225). However, any focus on the experiences of Mann and Ross cannot help but cast a sharp light on the divisive turmoil of the politics in which they intervened, turbulence that led to disunities and undermined both the radical cause and transnational mobilization.
Transnational Radicalism does not so much break new interpretive ground as it serves to move study of these individuals within a prevailing historiography of transnationalism and imperial connections—historiography that includes Kirk's previously published research. His earlier work generally functions on a broader scale; for instance, his Comrades and Cousins (2003) tackled globalization, empire, and labor movements in the United States as well as Britain and Australia, hence giving it some greater claim as a study of transnationalism.
Transnational Radicalism reflects a form of historiographical specialization that may interest a relatively small readership. Perhaps that is why the publisher has nominated a price of £80 or $120 for both the hardback edition and the ebook format. While Transnational Radicalism is a welcome addition to the scholarship of labor and radical lives the period, its publication seems also to highlight the difficulty of reaching out to a wider audience in another age of tempestuous globalization.
