Anti-imperialist British Left thinkers missed race as a conjunctural shift

Evidence

My symbolic fathers, Edward Thompson, Raymond Williams, Ralph Miliband, Peter Worsley, John Rex—these were very experienced people. They were interested in imperialism, they were committed to the anti-imperialist struggle as part of Left politics, but they didn’t understand that the black presence within Britain would be a transformatory social and political presence, that it was going to expand, that it was part of the first tip of a wave which was going to follow in much-expanded numbers after. They didn’t see it was a change of conjuncture. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1105

Categorization

• XREF: Introduces Hall’s conjuncturalist method — a definitional tool for reading historical change carried into later work.