The Red Flag of Anarchy

The Red Flag of Anarchy: A History of Socialism and Anarchism in Sheffield 1874-1900 by Andrew Lee and Terry Morgan

The story of Sheffield’s communes and communists in late Victorian Britain.

John Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Peter Kropotkin all have a part to play as socialists and anarchists hold mass street meetings, publish their newspapers, run cafés, and rally striking miners.

In the countryside just outside the city: four experimental utopian colonies sprang up. Within the city: clashes with landlords, police, and hired capitalist thugs; farcical court cases; and tragedy, as the state cracked down after the Walsall Bomb Plot.

This book traces socialism’s rise in Sheffield before the Labour Party - when the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, the Sheffield Socialist Society, and the Sheffield Anarchist Group each played a role.

This is the second edition of The Red Flag of Anarchy, first published in 2017, with a small number of amendments and additions.

Alongside the book, we have produced a poster - Radical Sheffield - which pinpoints the locations on a map from the Victorian era, where these revolutionaries, and many more, were active at the time.