‘Real time’ collaboration in global history: the future?
Doing global and transnational history alone is challenging. Tracking flows and connections — of people, ideas, goods, whatever — across the world demands wide contextual knowledge and visits to multiple repositories in far-flung places.
Enjoyable and privileged as tackling such challenges undoubtedly are, they are also time-consuming — in building that knowledge base and, more prosaically, fitting adequate (and costly) research trips into increasingly packed academic calendars. Even then, paper trails on peripatetic individuals and transnational networks can be lost or missed as mobile historical figures flit out of one archive and into the next. It is tricky to piece together connections single-handedly, especially where bureaucratically thin associations, short-lived organisations and obscure persons evade state surveillance.
For a week in January 2016 at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in the Eastern Docklands of Amsterdam, a group of twelve young scholars with interests in Afro-Asian activism and decolonisation tested a novel approach to surmount such problems: ‘real time archival collaboration’.
IISH houses an amazing collection. Founded in the 1930s as a means to save endangered archives in Fascist and Soviet Europe, IISH has amassed an unparalleled variety of non-state sources. Now truly global in scope, Amnesty International’s Secretariat files sit next to publications by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, Greenpeace’s log books, correspondence of the International Union of Socialist Youth, the hallowed papers of Marx and much beyond. It also boasts what must surely be the world’s finest collection of protest buttons, some dating back to the late nineteenth century.
Working side-by-side in the IISH reading room the group tracked commonalities, linkages and (quite soon) cleavages between African, Asian and liberal western activists who committed to building a new post-colonial world. We used transnational networks to analyse our own regions of specialty, but also to construct a picture of that future-orientated, optimistic Afro-Asian moment of the 1940s-60s. As such, together we have started to sketch a map of individuals crisscrossing the routes of that ‘Bandung era’.
It was conceptually all very interesting of course. But what struck me too was the efficiency of this ‘real time’ collaborative archival technique.
The group dove into a dizzying array of sources — pamphlets of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO); papers of the International Council for Social Democratic Women; books by progressive writers in 1950s Pakistan; memorials of Chinese sports diplomacy in Africa, etc. Several of us ended up in the weighty archive of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) — founded in 1949 after an ideological split within the nascent World Federation of Trade Unions. Together we scrambled through maybe a hundred boxes from the collection, the tip of the iceberg.
I was thinking about how various strands of internationalism influenced the labour movement in East Africa from the 1930s-60s. Others focused similarly on Burma, Ghana, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, Trinidad and Nigeria. This proved crucial.
Carrying a document about a new trade union college founded in Kampala in 1961 over to Rachel Leow, who was working on the Asian regional files of the ICFTU, I discovered that the very same syllabi, relations with local universities and even people at the ICFTU college in Calcutta in the 1950s. Gathering references to the little known 1960s All-Africa Trade Union Federation, I walked over to Philmon Ghirmai, who presented yellowing letters from West Africa that demonstrated the importance of Ghanaian radicalism to the acrimony of early independent Kenya. More generally, I talked to Leslie James about the ‘feel’ of the ICFTU files, and we both remarked on discourses of pedagogy peppering unionism across the decolonising world.
In the Kenyan case into which I’m looking, access to this social democratic labour internationalism underpinned union leadership in the 1950s, much as connection to South Asian leftist networks undergirded the foundation of East African trade unionism in the 1930s.
But such internationalisms transformed into sources of danger under the early post-colonial state. The key leader of Kenya’s trade union movement, the urbane Tom Mboya, was assassinated in 1969, not least given the threat his promiscuous globalism posed to the increasingly authoritarian Kenyatta government. Makhan Singh, the Kenyan Sikh founder of the East African labour movement, was ostracised by the Africanising state, despite serving longer in detention during the 1950s Emergency than any other African freedom fighter.
And that’s what my first piece for this project will be about — the opportunities and perils of labour internationalism (Indian Ocean, Marxist, social democratic, pan-African) for the process of decolonisation in Kenya from the 1934 to 1964.
Having such colleagues, now friends, feet away was invaluable. It changed the way I looted the documents as I was reading them. I may have recognised connections over time — with more archival trips over months/years. But in Amsterdam I was able to make better sense of my little patch within a week by talking to others working concurrently on different regions. Real time collaboration threw up loads of interesting ideas about global connection, but it also sped up the research considerably.
Real time archival collaboration should be an attractive pragmatic prospect for those doing globally and transnationally inclined histories. Not insignificantly, it provides bang for research council buck. Two original special collections about the non-state dynamics of the Bandung era will emerge from a relatively small five-figure AHRC investment here. IISH is by its nature a particularly easy place to attempt such an experiment, but there is no reason the method cannot be tested elsewhere. It should also raise overdue questions about the desirability for historians to properly grasp the nettle of co-authorship.
And there is also an ethical consideration. Some critics have suggested that global history reinforces existing structures of intellectual privilege. Is global history yet another field reserved for those with the means to travel, network and exploit scattered resources, rather than those working within many of the regions increasingly absorbed into such big and connected historical thinking? The answer has to be yes in most cases so far.
Our group was a fairly diverse band of young academics from Asia, Europe and North America. However, such convivial ‘real time’ collaboration (and, as mentioned, for relatively little outlay) seems like one good way to quickly diversify the collaborative and participatory community of world historians. It could help encourage a flatter global academic world to study the much bumpier historical one.
