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Comrade Ryan, International Trade Unionism and White Australia: Global Communism, Trade Unionism and Empire in Interwar India

ABSTRACT This paper considers the parallels and disconnections between leftist thought in Australia and India at a key moment in the interwar era, as the Comintern transitioned from its Second to its Third Period, eschewing the united front with nationalist and parliamentary parties. It does this by tracing the movements of the Australian communist Jack Ryan, who visited India in 1928 representing the Pan-Pacific Trade Union (PPTU), a Comintern organisation that sought to build solidarities between workers in the Asia Pacific region. Arriving in Bombay at a critical time when leftist organisation in India was on the rise, Ryan was trailed by government intelligence organisations that monitored his activities, letters and speeches. Although the formal purpose of his visit – to affiliate Indian Trade Unions with the PPTU – failed, Ryan’s journey to India had a substantial political impact. Coinciding with the interventions of a number of other foreign communists in India, it escalated attempts to legislate against the movement of political dissidents in the empire, by launching the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Back in Sydney, Ryan’s transnational movement gave him an international prominence that fired domestic communist jealousies, contributing to his expulsion from the Communist Party of Australia, in 1930. Finally, by highlighting the inability of Australian Trade Unions to form lasting solidarities across boundaries of race, Ryan’s politics revealed a substantial faultline in Australian leftist thought.