The participants in the League Against Imperialism's founding conference professed solidarity across their respective struggles, an aim to coordinate their campaigns, and the ultimate goal of bringing about an end to empire. Empire's sites included European overseas possessions in Asia and Africa, mandate territories in the Middle East, the international black population de-territorialized by slavery, Latin American victims of American “semicolonialism,” and European workers exploited by the elite in their own nations. If all this was what the League's members recognized as oppression, what could it mean to overcome it?

In the following essay, I venture an attempt to grasp at this elusive object through the language of the League's conference proceedings and printed materials. Identifying the ways in which imperialism and capitalism made someone unfree meant making explicit the contours of that other condition. The shared condition of unfreedom had its elusive antonym in the political and intellectual object of many (if not all) political projects since the Atlantic Revolutions of the eighteenth century. And indeed, the condition of unfreedom appears all over the League's archive. It was in the specific activities endorsed, the kind of subject pre-supposed, and the political form called for that the League laid out its intellectual world.

The League's inaugural conference in 1927 bore the marks of the period's prominent political vocabularies for discussing this object (save the fascist one), from the liberal anti-imperialism of metropolitan humanitarians, to the trade unionists’ aspirations for an international workers’ movement, to the pacifists’ anti-war anti-imperialism, to the colonial nationalists’ desire for independence, to the Communist vision in which national independence was a precursor to world revolution. The initial excitement about the League was in large part due to the unprecedented participation of so many people of colour, and the sense that a true alliance between peoples against imperialism was being forged, with great promise for the future. In an article in The New Leader, the British socialist and International Labour Party politician Fenner Brockway praised what he considered the truly international character of the League. His piece was entitled “The Coloured Peoples’ International,” a reference to the socialist Internationals of Europe. These “Internationals” were here writ larger than ever due to the involvement of “26 associated organizations [that represented] Nationalist or working class movements from Korea to South America.”