Oscar Broughton holds a Masters in Global History at Humboldt Universität and the Freie Universität Berlin and a Bachelors in Intellectual History from the University of Sussex. He specialises in the Global History of anarchism and Germany as a spacial setting for the incubation, transmission and transformation of ideas, individuals and movements. His particular research interests include industrial democracy, anarchism, nationalism, libertarian socialism, the works of Gustav Landauer, A.D. Gordon, G.D.H. Cole and the Weimar Republic. He is also a co-founder and editor for Global Histories: A Student Journal and the Global History Student Blog, as well as, a co-founder of the annual Global History Student Conference in Berlin.

The Rise and Decline of Guild Socialism 1900-1926. A Global Intellectual History 

His research project examines guild socialism a rare and striking example of a radical political idea, which grasped the intellects and imaginations of theorists predominantly within the anglophone world during the twentieth century. Developing initially in Britain around a group of mostly British intellectuals, the movement began as an anti-statist response to the state socialist policies of the Fabian Society. While the development of guild socialism as both an ideology and an intellectual movement started in Britain its influence and linkages beyond this setting are numerous, and have been seldom commented upon and never understood collectively by historians. These connections include ties to Austria, specifically to Karl Polanyi and the Austro-marxists Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding; Australia where guild socialism influenced local socialists, nationalists and labour organisations, particularly in Melbourne; and in the US where multitudes of socialist observers such as Ordway Tead, Harry W. Laidler, William English Walling and the International Workers of the World, keenly discussed guild socialism in relation to the question of industrial democracy. 

This project investigates the growth and decline of the guild socialism between 1900 and 1926. It seeks to go beyond the methodological nationalism, which has defined previous historical work on this topic by examining the global entanglements between intellectuals and ideologies that fostered guild socialism. Furthermore it also aims to highlight the panoramic world view of the guild socialists themselves, who sought various optics in their search for a socialist future and were  ultimately mediated by their experiences of nation-states and empire.

contact: oscar.broughton@fu-berlin.de