This essay explores the so-called ‘Bomb Plot of Zürich’, in which the Indian nationalists Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Abdul Hafiz of the Indian Independence Committee collaborated with the German Foreign Office and a band of Swiss-based Italian anarchists led by Arcangelo Cavadini and Luigi Bertoni to smuggle German-manufactured bombs, weapons and poison into Switzerland and Italy in the summer of 1915. This was a prime example of the solidarities and overlaps between, in principle, conflicting ideologies of Indian nationalism, German imperialism and Italian anarchism. The essay draws primarily on proceedings from the Swiss Federal Court and aims to situate the event within both the histories of the Indian nationalist movement abroad as well as the Italian anarchist movement. It argues that, during the geo-political context of the First World War, the Indian nationalists forged strategic alliances with strange bedfellows to overthrow the British Empire.
This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the decolonization of nation-states through acts of subversion, mimicry and criminality in the colonial and postcolonial world. Since the birth of nation-states, emerging in conjunction with the first wave of globalization and the height of European colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, avant-gardists have problematized the role of the nation-state. With the split between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin in the First International in 1872, anarchism's challenge to parliamentary politics and the nation-state rapidly spread across the colonial world. i For instance, during the 1870s, Jewish, Italian and Spanish labour migrants to Egypt brought with them discourses of radical social emancipation, merging with local labour movements and promoting internationalist activism that resisted the nationstate as an organizing principle. ii Meanwhile, in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of South America, railway and maritime workers confronted formations of state bureaucratization with autonomous union democracies, contributing to working class solidarities across ethnic and national divides at the end of the nineteenth century. iii In Europe's southern gateways to overseas colonies, other challenges to the state emerged in the shape of criminal underground organizations such as the Italian Camorra. Structured much like the Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triads and organized around ethnic and national identities, such organizations simultaneously subvert and mimic the state, presenting problems for our understanding of legal regimes and their vested interests. iv Across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, anti-colonial rebellions, labour strikes and boycotts during the interwar years contributed directly to the decades of formal decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. v
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.