Michele Louro is an associate professor of history at Salem State University. She received her Ph.D. from Temple University and is broadly trained in the fields of modern South Asian history, British imperial history, international history, and world history. She is author of Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden University Press, 2020). Her new book project, The Red Scare in India: The Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929-1935, is supported by an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship. Louro also serves as treasurer of the World History Association.
Abstract
In February 1927, more than 170 delegates representing anticolonial and working-class movements convened in Brussels and established the League against Imperialism (LAI), a rarely studied yet significant institution that coordinated a worldwide resistance to imperialist powers and capitalist classes. It attracted high profile activists and anticolonial revolutionaries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, who collectively imagined an alternative world order built on anti-imperialist solidarity and the eradication of colonialism globally.
This talk draws upon Louro's recent book, Comrades against Imperialism, and her forthcoming co-edited volume, The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives, to reveal the history of the LAI and those who joined the anti-imperialist movement, particularly India’s future prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In centering Indian anticolonialism in the global history of the LAI, Louro considers the significance of anti-imperialism as an alternative vision of internationalism that shaped anticolonial struggles of the interwar years and later inspired the global south in the era of decolonization.
This event is part of the Mershon Center's International History Speaker Series.
