Indian Nationalists and the World Proletariat: The National Liberation Struggle in India and the International Labour Movement Before 1914

This translation of Horst Kruger’s book in German brings to the English reading public a pioneer work on the relationship between the Indian National Movement and the World Working-Class Movement down to the outbreak of World War I. It is an important fact that the emergence of the second international and the Indian National Congress were practically simultaneous and Kruger studied in detail how the two streams came together. His detailed work deals frankly with the vision and the limitations on both sides. This is an area to which both historians of India’s freedom struggle and of general labour history have not paid adequate attention, though the early Indian proximity to socialist thought and the importance of India for the consciences of early European socialists are important matters in their own right.