Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the
twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of
colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to
one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous
with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was.
Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and
statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore,
Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere,
this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent
of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the
world.
Adom Getachew shows
that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial
nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders.
Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality,
dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers
and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and
articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an
egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal,
political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to
self-determination within the newly founded United Nations,
constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and
creating the New International Economic Order.
Using archival
sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United
Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of
decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism,
and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international
order.