The three titles under review examine anarchism in a trans-Atlantic context. All three focus principally on migrants to the Americas from Europe. James Baer makes a valiant attempt to study the dynamic exchange of anarchist migrants between Argentina and Spain, while Travis Tomchuk and Kenyon Zimmer focus on immigrants to English-speaking North America. The approach of examining anarchism through a transnational analysis is a useful one. All three authors demonstrate the importance of networks and the fundamental role played by the “imagined communities” created by anarchists (though surprisingly, only Zimmer cites both Imagined Communities and Under Three Flags by Benedict Anderson). The authors agree that it was this transnationalism that enabled the movement to retain its vibrancy until World War II and that anarchism’s decline was due to specific historical circumstances. In the case of Baer, it was the ending of migration between Spain and Argentina due to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. For Tomchuk and Zimmer, it was the sharp decline in immigration from Europe at the end of the 1930s. “Immigration created anarchists in America, and in its absence, their numbers atrophied”, Zimmer observes (p. 13), and this applies to all three works under consideration.

Baer argues that anarchists who had lived in Argentina had a substantial impact on anarchism in Spain, and the reverse. This is a significant attempt to demonstrate the importance of the intertwined histories of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism in the two regions (to adopt the vocabulary of anarchist internationalism). His thesis is clearly stated: “The life stories of individual immigrants allow us to explore their movements and understand how supranational links influenced the growth of the anarchist movements in Spain and Argentina.” (p. 1) Consequently, he focuses on biographies of several leading anarchists in Argentina and their origins in either Spain or Argentina.

But the book has some issues that detract from its argument. Baer too often conflates the variants of anarchism and syndicalism. The reader is not always sure exactly which ideological variant is vying for hegemony. While Italian anarchism is given mention, it is arguably too little. Gender gets some attention under the rubric of women and principally in relation to Argentina; however, there is no examination of notions of gender roles and the importance of masculinity in either nation. He appears to have a firm grasp of Argentine history and that narrative is fairly clear. But in Spanish history this is markedly less so: Here, Baer relies too heavily on work that has, despite its merits, been superseded (Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists [1998, originally 1977], Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth [1990, originally 1950], etc.) and too rarely on recent scholarship. Some of the latter he dismisses in his introduction.

Baer’s book features many more such flaws in the detail, which, taken together, tend to blemish the account: Russia’s 1917 October Revolution did not lead in Spain to the “subsequent overshadowing of the country’s anarchists by the Bolsheviks” (p. 81), at least not as quickly as he would have it. It was arguably only with Spanish Civil War that the party’s numbers and influence became significant. On page 116 he misnames the Primo de Rivera dictatorship’s comités paritarios (“parity committees” composed of equal numbers of labor and management representatives) as comités proletarios (“proletarian committees”) – significantly different. The telephone strike was launched in 1931 not 1932, while it was accompanied by sabotage, it was not what Baer calls a “guerilla struggle” (p. 132). The racist reason that there were objections in Spain to the government’s repression of Asturias in 1934 was the use of Moroccan troops (not simply “African” as on page 139), because the region prided itself in never having been, in the centuries before the reconquista, ruled by the Arabs. In a footnote, Baer asserts that “Abad de Santillán’s, Organismo económico, provides a detailed account of the Congress of Saragossa” (FN 30, p. 217); however, the first edition cited by Baer was published before the Congress. Franco became Chief of State on 1 October 1936, not January 1938. Finally, an editor should have caught the series of errors on page 138: You cannot have one party having more deputies than another but both listed with the same number: “Lerroux and his Radical Republican Party, the second-largest bloc in the new Cortes, with 110 seats, created a center-right coalition with the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (Confederation of Autonomous Parties of the Right), the largest group, with 110 deputies.” The CEDA had 115 and the Radicals 104. Later, on the same page, the Lerroux cabinet falls in 1934 because of an internal struggle over power, and not over Catalan demands as most contemporaries and historians would affirm.

Historians of Spain will note these issues. Baer’s focus, in any case, is the importance or significance of the Argentine experience for Spaniards and the specifically Argentine contribution to the anarchist movement in the Spanish Civil War and vice versa – a subject worthy of discussion. While Baer’s command of the movement in Spain and its historical circumstances is shaky, he still makes an important contribution that others can build upon.

Tomchuk focuses on anarchists from Italy who emigrated to Canada and the United States. He wishes to simultaneously restore anarchism to Canadian history and stress the transnational aspects of the movement. He has an extensive list of secondary sources, and has not neglected local histories of ethnicity and immigration, particularly in Canada. Tomchuk significantly expands our understanding of anarchism in Canada despite a necessary dominance by anarchists based in the United States in his narrative. This dominance is not only due to the greater amount of material on the United States, but, more importantly, the material produced by anarchists in the United States is significantly greater so the imbalance simply reflects the available historical record.

Tomchuk argues that the immigrants were already anarchists when they arrived in North America, “they carried with them their anarchist politics and experiences as activists”. To support this argument, he has mined the archives of the Casellario Politico Centrale (“Political Records Archive”, part of the Archivio centrale di stato) in Italy, as well as those of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and United States Military Intelligence reports on radicals. Tomchuk recognizes that these are fraught with problems: Anarchists are not known for being forthcoming with immigration, police, and other state authorities and these agents of the state are notoriously ready to condemn opponents using the terminology of the current moral panic regardless of real political affiliation.

One issue with Tomchuk’s book is its origins as a dissertation. Too often it still reads as a dissertation in some of the digressions into anarchist theory, debates over taxonomies and chronologies of anarchism, and particularly in the slicing and dicing of other scholars. Clearly reflected in the introduction is Tomchuk’s need to make the dissertation stand out from previous work on Italian anarchists – especially that of the late and much missed Nunzio Pernicone. But the remainder of the book so clearly stands on the shoulders of the work of Pernicone that some modification of the passages in the introduction should have been made. On the other hand, the dissertation-background of Tomchuk’s book also means that certain current concerns are more forthrightly addressed, such as gender and race. These topics are not a passing nod to mark a checklist in Tomchuk’s work, but concerns he examines seriously and more than once. This is also due to his background as an activist and his conclusion’s call for a renewed culture of resistance.

Zimmer’s study of Italian and Yiddish language anarchists in the United States presents by far the most nuanced and well-written study of transnational activists. He documents that many of his subjects became anarchists in the US because of their experience as immigrants. According to Zimmer, only “a handful” were anarchists in Europe but they became anarchists in the United States and took this anarchist identity back with them when they returned to Europe, especially the Yiddish anarchists. This echoes the arguments of Tony Michels about the similar experience of Jewish socialists.Footnote ¹

Zimmer’s study, however, is not limited to the activities of the Yiddish and Italian anarchists of the subtitle, but actually includes a much wider array of activists. When individuals leave the United States they do not fall out of Zimmer’s account, he continues to study them. Consequently, Zimmer touches on the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as well as the World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. Of the three works, his is the most consistent in adopting a transnational perspective.

Zimmer’s archival research is impressive, as is his use of a wide range of sources in multiple languages. This, too, started as a dissertation, but reads extremely well. He presents his arguments forthrightly and explanations of any ideological differences, conflicts, and similarities are sparklingly clear. Throughout the work he pays attention to questions of race and gender (not just discussing the “woman question” but also masculinity). Moving away from the dominance of the east coast in most studies, Zimmer presents a fascinating examination of the interplay of individuals of various ethnicities and involved with anarchism and its sympathizers in San Francisco. His account of activism by migrants from Asia makes San Francisco sound vastly more diverse in its activism. But he does not ignore the racism that blighted some movements and journals.

The authors under review make important interventions in the history of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism and in various national histories. Baer opens up the importance of anarchist migrants going back and forth between Spain and Argentina. Tomchuk has advanced our knowledge of anarchism in Canada and the role of Italian-speaking anarchists in North America. With Zimmer’s clear prose and attention to multiple identities and locations, Paul Avrich has a worthy successor.