Anticolonial Dialogues on Race from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean Arena, c. 1910

This paper focuses on the role of anticolonial thinkers in two major international conferences on questions of race and empire in early twentieth-century London: the Nationalities and Subject Races Conference of 1910, and the better-known Universal Races Congress of 1911. I examine how anticolonial and anti-racist thinkers from the Indian Ocean world, particularly India and Egypt, engaged with questions of racial capitalism and extraction with delegates from the Americas and the Atlantic World. These conferences, I argue, emerged as international arenas for anticolonial conversations around race. Several key anticolonial leaders and intellectuals from India, such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Brajendra Nath Seal, and from Egypt, such as Muhammad Farid and Taha El Abd, took part in these conferences, and established relationships that continued in the years of the First World War. A close analysis of their contributions serve to demonstrate early twentieth-century attempts to create global conversations around race across the differences of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean worlds, or between settler colonies and imperial territories like India and Egypt. Particularly, anticolonial leaders from India emphasized how techniques of racial segregation were used to indirectly monopolize sovereignty and governance, even in non-settler territories. Analyzing conference proceedings, institutional records, letters, and pamphlets, I trace the anticolonial dialogues across national boundaries that helped create these spaces for racial dialogue. Particularly, I call attention to the little-noticed role of anticolonial leaders in organizing the 1911 Universal Races Congress – after frustrations with the 1910 Nationalities and Subject Races conference – and examine the multiple and competing anti-colonialisms in these international arenas.