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This article discusses an episode in South African history remembered as the 1922 “Rand Revolution”. The strike, involving 25,000 white miners opposed to the removal of the “colour bar”, was eventually crushed by a military operation in which 200 people were killed. Though there has been a wealth of publications on the events, little has been written on their coverage in the British metropolitan labour press. To shed new light on the rising, this study concentrates on the case of theWorkers’ Dreadnought, the paper edited by Sylvia Pankhurst from 1917 to 1924. The weekly, printed in London but circulated around the Empire and notably in the Union of South Africa, was able, thanks to its numerous correspondents “on the spot”, to provide its readers with extensive, and often provocative, information about the rebellion. Its representation of the revolt was characterised by three major features: its promotion of white–black solidarity among miners, its suspicion towards Afrikaner nationalists as allies in the struggle, and its denunciation of the South African Labour Party and South African Industrial Federation as temporisers and dividers. However, the original and courageous vision defended by the periodical had a very limited impact on the direction of the struggle, as theDreadnoughtsympathisers in the Dominion formed only a small group, on the outskirts of a Communist Party that was itself marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including an analysis of British and French activists state and anti-militarism, syndicalism and the great labour unrest on the year 1911-1914 in Great Britain.

This article aims to analyze the public support brought by Hull's labour activists between January and April 1914 to nine trade-unionists who had been deported from South Africa because of their leading role in a general strike. The speeches made at the protest meeting on 29 March 1914 as well as the articles which were published in the local labour press before and after that day are indeed most revealing as to the nature of working-class internationalism in the United Kingdom on the eve of the Great War. The study shows how intricately feelings of class solidarity were mingled with feelings of national and even racial solidarity. In spite of Hull's maritime character, in spite of their numerous transnational contacts and of their radical claims, the way the local trade-union and socialist leaders apprehended the South African events was almost unanimously shaped by an imperialistic vision excluding both Boer and African workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]