Mariner, Renegade and Castaway: Chris Braithwaite, seamen’s organiser and Pan-Africanist

The author explores the political life in Britain of black Barbadian Chris Braithwaite (c.1885–1944), also known as ‘Chris Jones’, a hitherto overlooked, yet outstanding figure in the history of the twentieth-century Black and Red Atlantic. As leader of the Colonial Seamen’s Association and an important ‘class struggle Pan-Africanist’, he was the lynchpin of an anti-colonial maritime network in interwar London. Through his work in the Communist party in the early 1930s and then in the International African Friends of Ethiopia and the International African Service Bureau, led by George Padmore and C. L. R. James, Braithwaite’s talents as organiser, speaker and writer came to the fore.