George Padmore and Decolonization from Below

George Padmore, born Malcolm Nurse on the island of Trinidad in 1903, had by the 1930s become the centre-point of a global journalistic network. Via his voracious consumption of colonial newspapers, regular attendance in Parliament and personal connections with friends and correspondents across the world, Padmore accrued a vast compendium of knowledge about the colonial world—especially Africa and the Caribbean—as well as about the non-white population in Britain and America. Such knowledge was then re-packaged, parcelled up and dispatched across the globe, appearing in a network of newspapers and periodicals across Africa, the Caribbean and the USA, for whom Padmore operated as London correspondent. Generations before the Internet, Padmore comes to seem the very archetype of modern journalism. Yet to bracket Padmore as a journalist alone is to miss much of what was important. As Leslie James shows in this excellent new account, Padmore was an eminently political operator, for whom politics in both the micro and macro form were a fascination and a source of much that drove him

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