Transregional by design: The early communist press in the middle east and global revolutionary networks

Abstract

Abstract This article traces the circulation of newspapers and journals as physical objects to reconstruct Middle Eastern communists’ global connections. I argue that post-First World War Middle Eastern and North African revolutionary militancy was closely linked to global networks. The extensive transregional and transimperial circulation of the communist press discussed here traces these close connections. The Communist International represented a novelty as a self-proclaimed centralist worldwide party. Distinctively, it brought together the means and the will to centralize (much of) global radicalism. This argument also serves to locate the early and mid-1920s as a transitional period in the history of left-wing movements: the means provided by a World Party intersected with the network-like structure of the pre-Comintern revolutionary milieux. The article aims to contribute to global history by discussing a regional – Middle Eastern – political current, not as the aggregate sum of its national components, but as a product of a global process.