Owen Dowling
I'm a PhD candidate in History at Magdalene College, working on 'Anti-Imperialism after Empire: International Solidarity Campaigns and the British Left, 1960-1990' — taking the anti-apartheid, anti-Vietnam War, and Chile solidarity movements in Cold War-era Britain as my primary case studies. I'm interested in the novel forms of anti-imperialist dissent that developed on the British socialist left in the generation after the formal decline of British colonial empire, tracking a political transition from metropolitan support for anti-colonial national independence movements against British rule into transnational solidarities with a more diverse array of "Third World" liberation struggles opposing white minority rule, neo-colonial war, and military coups-d'etat (widely conceived as expressions of a "new imperialism" predominated by the United States — with British complicity).
I completed both my History BA and World History MPhil degrees at the University of Cambridge, producing an undergraduate dissertation on 'British Left Responses to the Coup in Chile, 1973-1985' and a master's thesis on 'Colonial Capitalism, White Chauvinism, and the Black Proletariat: South Africa and Marxism, 1917-1940' respectively. For a number of years I have worked as an archival researcher for Tribune Magazine, authoring articles on various political themes within the socialist weekly's historical print coverage (dating back to the Spanish Civil War) based on original research on Tribune's archive. I also intermittently review history books and conduct author interviews with historians for Tribune and Jacobin magazines.
I can also be found on Twitter: @owenjdowling.
My work broadly orbits themes of political internationalism, revolutionary and anti-colonial history and politics, and the intellectual and theoretical contents of the political discourse of left-wing parties and groups. Histories of the South African left, Bolshevism and the Communist International, anti-fascism, the global 1960s, Chile solidarity, the "transition debate" and world capitalism, and Marxist historiography are all of long-term interest, as is the history of British social movements — especially as relating to some (or all!) of the above. I am a faithful attendee of Historical Materialism journal's annual London conference.
‘Colonial Capitalism, White Chauvinism, and the Black Proletariat: South Africa and Marxism, 1917-1940’, paper presented at the ‘Intellectual History of Marxism in and about the Global South during the early twentieth century’ workshop at University College London (15 September 2023).
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Tags & Themes
Key publications
Book Chapters:
2025 (forthcoming), 'British Marxism and the Coup in Chile', in Daniel Frost and Evan Smith [eds.], In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British far left from 1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025).
Public Historical Articles:
2024, 'Tribune and the Civil Rights Struggle', Tribune Magazine (14.11.2024).
2024, 'When Britain's Trade Unions Fought Fascism', Tribune Magazine (13.09.2024).
2024, 'Tribune and Vietnam', Tribune Magazine (02.08.2024).
2024, 'D-Day and the Anti-Fascist Revolution', Tribune Magazine (06.06.2024).
2024, 'Tribune and Anti-Colonial Africa', Tribune Magazine (03.05.2024).
2024, 'Workers of the World United', Tribune Magazine (29.04.2024).
2024, 'An Historian Against the Bomb', Tribune Magazine (09.02.2024).
2023, 'Tribune and the Fight For Gay Rights', Tribune Magazine (08.12.2023).
2023, 'Tribune's Chile Solidarity', Tribune Magazine (24.10.2023).
2023, 'Tribune and the Battle for the NHS', Tribune Magazine (03.07.2023).
2023, 'When Tribune Backed the Boycott', Tribune Magazine (09.05.2023).
2023, 'Jack Jones' Dockworker Internationalism', Tribune Magazine (29.03.2023).
2022, 'Tribune's Alternative to the Cold War', Tribune Magazine (20.12.2022).
2022, 'Tribune vs. the Nuclear Bomb', Tribune Magazine (28.03.2022).
2022, 'Tribune and the Struggle for India's Freedom', Tribune Magazine (11.01.2022).
2021, 'When British Workers Stood Against the Pinochet Coup', Jacobin Magazine (11.09.2021).
Reviews:
2023, 'The Revolutions of 1848 Should Be a Historical Touchstone for Socialists Today', Jacobin Magazine (23.06.2024) — a review of Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849 (London: Penguin, 2023).
2023, 'The Lost World of Irish Communism', Tribune Magazine (24.05.2023) — a review of Irish-language TV film Reds! na hÉireann (Kevin Brannigan: TG4, 2023).
2023, 'South Africa’s Communists Were Crucial to the Fight Against Apartheid', Jacobin Magazine (12.02.2024) — a review of Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921–2021 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2021).
Historical Interview Articles:
2024, 'If This Is Not Genocide, What Is?', Tribune Magazine (13.11.2024) — an interview with Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
2024, 'Atomic Bomb Survivors Have A Message To The World', Tribune Magazine (08.06.2024) — an interview with Japanese hibakusha ambassadors Toshiko Tanaka and Ogawa Tadayoshi.
2024, 'Still The Enemy Within', Tribune Magazine (20.04.2024) — an interview with Seumas Milne, author of The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 1994).
2024, 'Slavery Was Crucial For The Development of Capitalism' (10.04.2024) — an interview with Robin Blackburn, author of The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888 (London: Verso, 2024).
2024, 'E.P. Thompson at 100', Tribune Magazine (06.02.2024) — an interview with Jeremy Corbyn MP, Kate Hudson of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and John McDonnell MP.
2024, 'Paul Le Blanc on the Meaning of Lenin' (21.01.2024) — an interview with Paul Le Blanc, author of Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto, 2023).
2023, 'Anti-Apartheid's International Militants', Tribune Magazine (01.10.2023) — an interview with Ronnie Kasrils, former ANC MP and uMkhonto we Sizwe military intelligence chief, and editor of International Brigade Against Apartheid: Secrets of the People's War That Liberated South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2022).
2023, 'Jeremy Corbyn: Chile's Coup Shows That Fascism Is Still A Threat', Tribune Magazine (15.09.2023) — an interview with Jeremy Corbyn MP commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Chilean military coup.
2023, 'The Chilean Coup at 50', Tribune Magazine (11.09.2023) — an interview with Mike Gatehouse of the Chile Solidarity Campaign on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Chilean military coup.
2022, 'Remembering Fenner Brockway', Tribune Magazine (01.11.2022) — an interview with Jeremy Corbyn MP at the inaugural Fenner Brockway Memorial Lecture.
Other:
2020, 'The Political Economy of Super-Exploitation in Congolese Mineral Mining' (Peter Peckard Memorial Essay Competiton — First Prize: Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, 2020).