London: Published by the R.I.L.U. Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931. First edition. Inscribed by the author on the upper free endpaper: "With comradely greetings - George Padmore - 3-9-36 - London." A Very Good copy in like dust jacket. 126 pp. Publisher's natural cloth boards titled in black. Toning and a bit of foxing to endpapers. One marginal mark in color pencil on p. 123 (next to the "What is to be done?" heading). Dust jacket with some dampstaining to spine, a bit of edgewear, and ink smudge to front flap.

A rare inscribed copy of the first book by George Padmore (1903 – 1959), a leading Pan-Africanist and socialist activist and scholar. Though Padmore's cornerstone work on British imperialism, How Britain Rules Africa (1936), is sometimes erroneously described as his first book, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers precedes the publication by five years.

In The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, Padmore tells a worldwide history of Black labor over the course of the last century. Padmore contextualizes slavery in the United States, Latin America, and colonial Africa alongside the economic exploitation of the Caribbean and the struggles of the "Black Soldiers of Imperialism" conscripted into fighting for powers like the United States and France. Chapter four of the work, "The Awakening of Negro Toilers," documents activist efforts in response to the oppression of Black workers, including "recent Revolts, Uprisings and Strikes, which have occurred in the different sections of the Black World" (p. 78). Padmore also criticizes contemporary activists whom he saw as working contrary to the goal of Black liberation: he counted W.E.B. Du Bois among "petty-bourgeois reformists...office-seekers and demagogues," and criticized Marcus Garvey as a greedy autocrat exploiting Black workers under the guise of liberation (p. 124). Ultimately, Padmore attempts to motivate further solidarity between Black labor movements and "the class-conscious white workers in the imperialist countries, as well as the oppressed masses of China, India, Latin America and other colonial and semi-colonial countries, [in order to] deliver a final blow to world imperialism" (p. 126). Writing after Padmore's death in 1959, his childhood friend C.L.R. James noted that the ideas Padmore expressed in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers were well ahead of their time: "Everybody says these things nowadays. They are commonplace in the United States. They play a role in British elections. In [1931] George was giving them currency" (Notes on the Life of George Padmore).

Padmore's thirty-year career of writing and activism in support of the Communist, socialist, and Pan-Africanist causes eventually brought him to a position as a political advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of Ghana. Upon Padmore's death, Nkrumah announced in a radio broadcast, "George Padmore was, in my view, one of the greatest fighters against colonialism of our modern times...One day, the whole of Africa will surely be free and united and when the final tale is told, the significance of George Padmore's work will be revealed" (quoted in James, Notes on the Life of George Padmore). Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. (Item #8300)