On July 8 1903, the first Allied Colonial University Conference took place at the Hotel Cecil on the Thames Embankment in London. The development of knowledge production and university networks was meant to foster British imperial rule.
The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ protests and the campaign to change the wording on the Melville statue in Edinburgh have highlighted how many symbols of colonialism and imperialism not only remain visible in British cities, but are being contested with a renewed purpose.
Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R. James were quintessential twentieth-century intellectuals. They were born within six months of each other in 1901. Both lived to within sight of the century’s end: James died in 1989 and Lefebvre in 1991.
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