Liberation Movements in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter examines debates about the use of violence and nonviolence within movements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, including labor and women’s suffrage movements in Europe, Independence in India, and the Abolitionist movements against slavery in the United States and Britain. It is important to start with acknowledging early movements that provided inspiration, including the French Revolution and Irish and British populist struggles. The labor struggle by socialists was the most significant during this era in terms of its growth and influence. Before the First World War, the women’s suffrage movement was an important catalyst for liberation, and friction between the older nonviolent suffragist advocates and the newer, younger, more radical suffragettes provided an important contrast. Using nonviolent protest techniques provided an avenue to oppose the great powers fighting the First World War. Pacifists and Independent Socialists refused to participate and agitated against the war, while the most radical, toward the end of the war, formed communist parties, and Lenin led the Bolshevik revolution in Russia with copious use of violence. Regarding Indian independence, nationalists opposed the British both through the violence of the 1857 revolution and during the First World War, working with Britain’s enemy, the Germans, as well as nonviolently through agitation and political organization through the Home Rule movement. Racial tensions continued to fester in the United States through the Abolition movement during the era of slavery, before the end of the US Civil War, violent revolts, and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as Ida B. Wells and others exposed an upsurge in lynching and race riots in the early twentieth century.