United against Capital. The IWMA and the Practice of Transnational Labour Solidarity in the 1860s and 1870s

Nicolas Delalande, Sciences Po Paris

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the fundraising practices and money transfers that occurred within the European working class, from the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 to the early 1880s. The international solidarity the First International wanted to build up was not only political, ideological or cultural: it also relied on the financial networking of local sections, and the promotion of mutual aid beyond national borders, in an age of mass migration. Money was essential to supporting the wave of strikes and social conflicts that multiplied in those years (in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the US). Local sections could help their foreign counterparts by giving money, lending funds, or launching collective subscriptions. Donations were also sent for humanitarian reasons, when workers and militants were imprisoned or forced to exile. In this regard, the First International can be seen as an attempt at mutualizing the workers’money on a European and transatlantic scale. The research explores the degree to which these practices were institutionalised, and tries to characterize the peculiar political economy they were enacting. It is based on a comprehensive analysis of the archives and documents produced by the General Council, as well as on an in-depth survey of local sources (archives of the British trade councils and trade unions, local archives in France and Belgium, papers held at the International Institute of Social History, archives of the early German social-democratic movements in the 1860s). It aims at combining labor history with the transnational history of migration, diasporas, and solidarity networks, in the age of the socalled "First Globalization" (1860s-1914).

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 Presented in Session 204. Workers' Movements, Mass Migration, and the Globalization of Radical Ideas (1860s-1930s)