Revisiting Red Clydeside

This chapter asserts how revisiting histories such as Red Clydeside, during 1919, reveals complexities, tensions and possibilities that were symptomatic of UK histories of race and labour movements during this period. The archival research considered here provides a relational account of labour militancy and racialised conflicts. The chapter compares and contrasts the 1919 strike action for a shorter working week with a ‘race riot’ between local and foreign sailors. These events were connected by timing and location but also through the involvement of trade unions and leadership figures. This allows the chapter to critically examine, through comparison and cross referencing, the varying influences and activisms present within and beyond Glasgow during the early twentieth century. Importantly, this comparison also raises the longer-term trajectories of labour grievances during this period, and wider spatiality of activisms during this time, to foreground the ambivalent and contested nature of working class demands, identities and histories. By doing so, the chapter indicates how these events were not spontaneous, nor isolated, but intimately connected with each other and wider trends and events elsewhere.