Owen Dowling

Thesis Title: ‘Anti-Imperialism after Empire: International Solidarity Campaigns and the British Left, 1960-1990’.

Supervisor: Professor Saul Dubow.

I'm a PhD candidate in History at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. I completed both my History BA and World History MPhil degrees at the University of Cambridge, producing an undergraduate dissertation on 'British Left Responses to the Coup in Chile, 1973-1985' and a master's thesis on 'Colonial Capitalism, White Chauvinism, and the Black Proletariat: South Africa and Marxism, 1917-1940' respectively.

I'm interested in the novel forms of anti-imperialist dissent that developed on the British socialist left in the generation after the formal decline of British colonial empire, tracking a political transition from metropolitan support for anti-colonial national independence movements against British rule into transnational solidarities with a more diverse array of "Third World" liberation struggles opposing white minority rule, neo-colonial war, and military coups-d'etat (widely conceived as expressions of a "new imperialism" predominated by the United States — with British complicity). My PhD project takes the anti-apartheid, anti-Vietnam War, and Chile solidarity movements in Cold War-era Britain as its primary case studies.

My work broadly orbits themes of political internationalism, revolutionary and anti-colonial history and politics, and the intellectual and theoretical contents of the political discourse of left-wing parties and groups. For a number of years I have worked as a writer and archival researcher for Tribune Magazine. I also intermittently review history books and conduct author interviews with historians for Tribune and Jacobin magazines.