Macedonia. Its Races and Their Future

In 1903, Henry Noel Brailsford and Edith Durham led a British relief mission to Macedonia.On his return he published the book Macedonia: Its Races and their Future.

Henry Noel Brailsford (1873–1958) was the most prolific British left-wing journalist of the first half of the 20th century. The son of a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, he was born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, and educated in Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow in Scotland. Brailsford abandoned an academic career to become a journalist, rising to prominence in the 1890s as a foreign correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, specialising in the Balkans, France and Egypt. A founding member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1907, he resigned from his job at The Daily News in 1909 when it supported the force-feeding of suffragettes on hunger strike. In 1913-14 Brailsford was a member of the international commission sent by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to investigate the conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. He co-authored its report.

He was a prominent member of the Union of Democratic Control during the First World War and stood unsuccessfully as a Labour Party candidate in the 1918 general election. He subsequently toured central Europe and his graphic accounts of life in the defeated countries appeared in his books Across the Blockade (1919) and After the Peace (1920).

Brailsford went to Soviet Russia in 1920 and again to the USSR in 1926, publishing two books on the subject. He was editor of the New Leader, the ILP newspaper, from 1922 to 1926. He left the ILP in 1932 and through the 1930s was a regular contributor to Reynold's News and the New Statesman. Brailsford was an outspoken critic of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. His books in the 1930s include the anti-colonialist classic Rebel India (1931) and the anti-militarist Property or Peace? (1934). In the late 1930s, he was one of the few writers associated with the Left Book Club, the New Statesman and Tribune who was consistently critical of the Soviet show trials.

During the Second World War, Brailsford penned a weekly column in the left-wing Reynold's News. He also continued to write books, the most important being Subject India (1943) and Our Settlement with Germany (1944). After his retirement from journalism in 1946, he wrote a history of the Levellers, which was unfinished at the time of his death.