Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

by Adom Getachew

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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Africa, Race, Philosophy, Political Science

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2019

About the author

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean.

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been waiting for this book without knowing. It was kind of a missing piece in my ‘figuring-out-imperialism puzzle’. Also, even before the latest black lives matter protests (more on this in a moment), the pretentious white woman has started to somewhat decolonize her bookshelf (yes, I am eye rolling too).

‘Worldmaking after Empire. The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination’ (Princeton University Press, 2019) by Ethiopian-American Adom Getachew filled in some critical blanks and also introduced me to the political thought of generations of 20th century black radical theorists and leaders such as W.E.B Du Bois (African American), Michael Manley (Jamaica), Marcus Garvey (Jamaica) Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Julius Nyere (Tanzania), George Padmore (Trinidad and Tobago), Eric Williams (Trinidad and Tobago) and of course CLR James (Trinidad and Tobago and author of ‘The Black Jacobins ❤). While the book focuses on the anglophone black radical tradition, there are also references to key francophone black intellectuals and radical theorists such as Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and of course Frantz Fanon (Martinique). Next on my to-read-list is the 1983 classic ‘Black Marxism. The making of the black radical tradition’ by Cedric Robinson.

Anyway, here are a few take-aways:

1. At the heart of it all, lies the question over the relationship between capitalism and race. How could the process of ‘decolonization’ succeed when global capitalism and its intrinsic racial hierarchies provided the framework for decolonization (and continue to provide the framework for ‘development’). This is where the concept of imperialism is absolutely essential: imperialism comes down to structural conditions of the global economy (and associated governance) that persistently transfer gains of productivity to the global north. It’s a four century old system that has undergone various transmutations but did not end with the process of formal decolonialization after the end of the WW 2.

2. This also explains the book title’s terminology of ‘worldmaking’: building on the framework of imperialism (qua Lenin in many instances) which theorizes empire as a structure of international hierarchy, anticolonial nationalists from Africa and the Caribbean (such as Nkrumah and Manley) insisted that true self-determination required a combination of nation-building and worldmaking. They were clear that unless there is a change in the (imperialist) world system through a new ‘world making’, formal sovereignty as granted through decolonization would not end centuries of economic enslavement and dependence. This is essentially what Nkrumah called ‘neocolonialism’ (before he was ousted in a US-backed coup). Anyway, sixty years on with billions of people living in misery while global corporations continue to plunder the global south, I don’t think there’s much to argue with that.

3. The book then develops the thesis that anticolonial nationalism was a project of world making and zeroes in on two approaches of anticolonial world making. The first one is based on the idea of a federation, specifically the ‘Union of African States (Nkrumah) and ‘West Indian Federation’ (Williams) on the other side of the Atlantic. Black Atlantic federalists such as Nkrumah and Williams envisioned federation as a spatial and institutional fix for the ‘postcolonial predicament’ whereby small postcolonial states and economies tethered to metropolitan ad global markets remain unable to achieve self-reliance. These projects were short-lived and, sixty years on, the only remaining idea of ‘integration’ is essentially based on free trade to further benefit western global corporations. The WTO is just one expression of ensuring the global status quo of net value transfer from the global south to the north. Given the increasing inequality, there’s a double movement of unrestricted movement of capital while ever more militarized and sophisticated border regimes to protect the living standards of the west (while allowing in sufficiently cheap labour to keep labour costs low and brain draining skills from the south where it benefits the west).

4. The second approach to anti-colonial worldmaking is associated with the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Beginning in 1964 and formulated through a charter and declaration a decade later (after the 1973 oil crisis), NIEO marked the most ambitious project of anticolonial worldmaking. More or less Marxist in its diagnosis of economic dependence, NIEO represents a compelling vision of what a just and egalitarian global economy required. Key figures include the two leaders Nyerere in Tanzania (‘African socialism’) and Manley in Jamaica in the early 70s (before he made a neoliberal turn twenty ears or so later). Of note within this intellectual environment is the Dar es Salam school which briefly included Giovani Arrighi and Guyanese Marxist historian and political activist Walter Rodney (author of the 1972 classic and must-read ‘How Europe underdeveloped Africa’ before he was assassinated in 1980). NIEO is based on an anticolonial critique of dependence through emphasis on the international division of labour which imperialism has engendered. Contra development based on ‘modernization theories’ Nyerere and Manley argued that postcolonial self-reliance must begin with the entrenched dependencies of the colonial economy and seek to undo hierarchical relations that facilitated domination. This vision of overcoming dependence was to be realized domestically through socialist policies and internationally in the NIEO welfare world with global redistribution of the wealth which was provided by postcolonial states but which only the West continues to enjoy.

5. You can imagine the western appetite for such kind of global welfare and redistributive justice. LOL. As more developing nations fell prey to the debt crisis and countries began to default on loans, structural adjustment programmes presented the ‘neoliberal counter-revolution’ nearly everywhere in the global south in the 1980s. While initially ‘structural adjustment’ was understood as a project of economic reforms in both developing and developed nations, it was essentially limited to the reform and disciplining of indebted nations, largely in the global south. Once imposed, structural adjustment would get rid of the idea of global justice altogether and ‘development’ would shift from inequality to ‘basic needs’ and absolute poverty. This also brought in the whole gamut of neoliberal development rubbish, starting with the micro-credits, private sector and market-led development, ‘skills and employability’ instead of labour rights and generally a fetishization of ‘young people’ and all things ‘entrepreneurial’ contra a welfarist and egalitarian vision. There’s a great new book (‘The morals of the market’) on how the once revolutionary concept of universal human rights was co-opted when neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it fundamentally to the free market, and turned it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects all over the world. Today’s development discourse and practice is thoroughly sanitized from all politics and questioning of the imperialist structure of the world – quite literally it’s based on a technocratic Mc Kinseyesque breaking down of social development into quarterly key performance indicators in lieu of analyzing the actual political economy underlying the continued process of impoverishing the global south. Imagine if I told this gang of anticolonial thinkers in the 70s that we would one day have Mc Kinsey advising African Ministries of Health or Education on reforms (funded by western ‘aid budgets’). It also makes total sense that development as such not only adopted the logic and language of the private sector but that it has now become a business by the private sector and its ‘foundations’ too. In the end, this is the ‘amazing’ thing about free market capitalism – there’s a profit to be made in any form of human misery. So, the message here, I suppose, is that there was indeed an alternative and deeply political vision of decolonization and ‘development’.

6. Crucially, this delimitation of structural adjustment to ‘the poorer countries’ was also accompanied by a rejection of the General Assembly as the appropriate site for international economic decision making. Proponents of NIEO had argued that the General Assembly was a more representative, and thus more democratic, institution to legislate on questions of trade, inequality and development. However, for critics of NIEO locating decisions about economic policy within the general assembly dangerously politicized the economy and allowed Third World states to leverage their majorities against more powerful actors in the global economy, by giving greater prominence to international financial institutions, economic questions could be insulated from majorities and depoliticized. Economic decision making was thus no longer a site of political contestation but an arena of technical and legal expertise, better left to economists and lawyers rather than politicians. This is not unique to the global south, this is the anti-democratic core of neoliberalism. The book ‘Never Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy’ (VERSO, 2019) is an excellent read on this. The EU and its response to the global financial crisis and EU banking crisis is also a prime example of systematic efforts to move economic and fiscal decisions out of democratic decision making.

7. The book also includes a very insightful account of the origins of the League of Nations and later the United Nations and shows how these presented from the beginning a framework for unequal integration. The account of the inclusion of Ethiopia and Libera, the only two ‘independent’ African states that were not colonized, in the League demonstrates how racial hierarchy was constitutive for the League and shows how for African states ‘membership’ from the beginning was a mechanism for oversight and disciplining rather than being on equal footing among sovereign nations. It’s the same structure that is today reflected in the entire discourse of ‘good governance’ and where unelected technocrats teach third world governments fiscal discipline and other reforms (privatization, economic liberalization, macro-economic stability) in exchange for grants and loans. This probably found its most hypocritical expression in the 1990s human rights frenzy where the top weapons exporting western countries after decades of supporting coups and various dictators launched a series of by all accounts illegal wars in the name of ‘democracy and human rights’. Now, 30 years after the end of the cold war, we can take stock of where this latest crazy phase of imperialism in the name of human rights has gotten us. It is no coincidence that in a somewhat full circle fascism is now on the rise in the west. There’s a link between the racialized violence a country exports and the violence at home (I am also just reading ‘Race and America’s Long War’ which analyses precisely this relationship). The fascism and concentration camps in 1930s and 1940s Europe were also a specific continuation of the genocides in the colonies. Similarly, the violence inflicted by the US in its illegal wars abroad and the violence against black Americans and immigrants are two sides of the same imperialist coin.

8. This is the book’s timely implication for today’s struggles: Black lives matter everywhere. The violence of the police and the military abroad is the same and must be thought together. It’s the same violence and ‘non-grievability of some lives’ (Butler) that allows the EU to let refugees down at its borders or outsource the ‘refugee problem’ to countries like Turkey or Libya. This is among the most powerful implication of the concept of imperialist to understand that racism (and gender of course) and capitalism are linked. When Nkrumah said “slavery was not born of racism, rather racism was the consequence of slavery” he referred to precisely to the complex relationship between these two. This is also why the Black Lives Matter movement is powerful hwre it links with other anti-capitalist struggles of oppression and exploitation. Just like gender, race cannot be looked at in isolation of capitalism or else you end up with the same kind of shitshow that is ‘rainbow capitalism’ where Amazon and the like make some big statements about how they support BLM while continuing to exploit their majority female and brown workers. There’s another ton of books on this, which comes to down critiques of identity politics in one way or another. I did like ‘Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump’ (VERSO, 2018).

9. Of course this book has also timely implications for re-thinking ‘development’ (and the associated democratic global governance) for the 21st century which must be situated within the anti-imperialist tradition or traditions, rather. There were some great hints on this by Corbyn when he linked domestic reforms to changing UK’s role in the world and mentioned the need to aspire to a ‘global NHS’ etc. Any romantic ideas about reviving the post WW2 European welfare state, including in its pro-European version, are essentially regressive and ignore that the welfare of the ’99 percent’ in the west is in its current form based on the exploitation of the global 99 percent which live outside western countries. Given social democracy’s lack of analysis of capitalism and thus imperialism, it is not surprising that despite its rhetoric of internationalism (by which it means the EU and NATO lol), it continues to promote ‘western welfare’ hoping that somehow this would translate into development in the global south. Then and now, socialism, which is inherently internationalist, provides the framework for bringing an end to 400 years of the west’s exploitation and plunder of the global south.

10. Also, I came across this book, like most of my books, through an excellent interview with the author in The Dig podcast, episode from 27 October 2019 (alerted by comrade Billie who has since been too lazy to read the actual book herself lol). If you don’t want to read the book, I recommend you listen to the episode (well, and all other The Dig episodes).

[Rob M · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Worldmaking After Empire, Adom Getachew traces the political theory of decolonisation from the perspective of the anglophone Black Atlantic, i.e. the Caribbean and West Africa.

Getachew begins her narrative with interwar Pan-Africanism and follows it through theories of self-determination, federalism, and finishes up in the realm of international political economy. The book successfully re-centres the 'Bandung' moment of Third Worldist anti-imperialism on the Black Atlantic, and away from the Afro-Asian Nehru-Nasser-Sukarno narrative axis it more usually revolves around.

The text firmly establishes the idea that European imperialism, especially during its final phase in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was built on theoretical foundations of racial hierarchy as well as economic exploitation. The central argument is that decolonisation was not a limited project of state building on traditional European ('Westphalian') lines, but rather a counter-hegemonic anti-imperial 'worldmaking' project.

You’ve probably gathered from the 2 star rating that I didn’t like the book very much. For me, Worldmaking After Empire embodies the worst tendency of political theory writing in general, and left-wing academic writing in particular. Namely, it takes a set of ideas so simple and compelling that they were perfectly understood by factory workers and peasants a century ago; and turns them into impenetrable liturgy, sealing words of freedom in a tomb of jargon.

It feels like Getachew is trying to force the heroism and tragedy of the Third World into the staid conventions of academic political theory. To which I ask: why? Why not tell the story in plain English? Why not humanise and illustrate it with historical examples? The book waves its Marxist credentials around, but it has none of the narrative energy of historical materialism. It feels much more like the interminable verbiage of someone like John Rawls than the breathless prose of C.L.R. James.

Worldmaking After Empire takes on a worthy task, but there are just so many books that make the same basic arguments in a more accessible way. I don't know that the gushing praise for this book comes from people with stacks of higher education certificates, but I can take a solid guess.

The argument of Worldmaking After Empire is that decolonisation was a bigger, better project than simple state building. I would counter that the state building achievements of the decolonial era amounted to a bigger, better story than Worldmaking After Empire has bothered to tell.

- To understand the historical interdependence between racism, empire, and capitalism you could try Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization by Immanuel Wallerstein.
- For a history of the Third World in terms of political economy, there is Vijay Prashad's absolutely thrilling The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World.
- To understand how post-colonial states developed in the context of the superpower conflict (completely neglected in Worldmaking After Empire) try anything by Odd Arne Westad.
- To get a feel for how violently imperialism foreclosed the potential of the Third World, pick up The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World.

[Yngve Skogstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful antidote if you’ve taken quite a few 20th century history or international relations courses, getting bombarded with propaganda about our wonderful liberal international order (which was working splendidly until that pesky Trump got in the way!).

Adom Getachew does a terrific job of dispelling some deeply ingrained myths here. While the standard account of the rise of self-determination is that it was president Woodrow Wilson who introduced the concept during WWI and brought it into the League of Nations, thus indirectly enshrining it in the United Nations after WWII. In other words it was the Wilsonian idea that spurred on the process of decolonization, whereby post-colonial leaders came to embrace the Westphalian concept of the territorial nation state and accommodate within the liberal international order that these entities inhabit. Adom Getachew presents a convincing counter-narrative which identifies the anti-colonial concept of self-determination (i.e. non-domination) as precisely the principle that Wilson and his cohorts desperately wanted to undermine and dilute. Instead of settling with mere formal independence from alien rule, what the anti-colonial intellectuals and leaders desired was something much more ambitious: they wanted to remake the world system. Realizing that true independence was unattainable within an economic system built on racialized, colonial foundations, they attempted to remake both the political and economic structures of the state and federal institutions, as well as trying to leverage their voting power in the UN General Assembly. Post-colonial nationalism was certainly something quite different from what we think of as nationalism today.

Admittedly, the history of African federalism and similar efforts in the Caribbean was new to me, and as two of a modest number of notable attempts at worldmaking originating in the periphery, I feel it’s something I definitely should read more into. I advise anyone interested in international relations, development studies, 20th century history, Marxism or (neo-)colonialism to read this. Two possible drawbacks to this book is firstly, I found it too much of an intellectual history of post-colonial worldmaking, as opposed to a historical account of movements and political formations and their concrete battles and campaigns. I also wasn’t a huge fan of her unnecessarily academic writing-style.

Lastly, shout out to the Michael Brooks Show, which brought on Adom Getachew to talk about her book. Check them out, folks.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

One way to have advertised this book - although I understand why it wasn’t - is as a prehistory of the neoliberal world order. For if neoliberalism - roughly: the enforced reduction of every sphere of life to the logic of the market - is what emerged and consolidated after the fall of the European empires, Getachew’s book charts an almost-forgotten and short-lived moment of history wedged in-between these two markers of time: a time of ‘worldmaking’. With this epithet does Getchew aim to capture a history that brimmed and burst with the potential of a properly emancipated world, one not subject to the domination of the old colonial powers, and free to pursue as many futures as those in it saw fit. The story, in other words, of something that did not happen.

The story of what did has been told elsewhere, and in meticulous and depressing detail: privatisation, financialization, universalized precarity, and most importantly for the narrative here, the hardening of the global state-system - under the aegis of American hegemony - through which it has been all achieved. But what if this world - in whose ‘ruins’ (Wendy Brown) we now make our way - was less a matter of shrewd initiative than counterrevolution, in fact a reaction to something momentous that promised the wretched of the Earth nothing less than self-determination? This is the sense in which this book is a pre-history of neoliberalism - not because it discusses neoliberalism, which barely rates a mention to be honest, but because it details what neoliberalism in fact worked so hard to destroy. Or if not destroy, then suppress, given that self-determination was never really given a chance to begin with.

What then, is self-determination? As a start, something different from mere formal independence. If, after the dissolution of Empires, colonies were granted political control of their own territories, unequal terms of economic exchange often meant that domination could continue from afar nonetheless. It was to counter just this state of affairs that the dream of self-determination was born, one which pitched its ambitions at a level higher than mere territorial integrity, aiming instead for a transformed world in which the very conditions of international domination would be abolished. While the period of postwar decolonisation is perhaps known best for the flourishing of nationalisms that occured during its time, Getachew draws attention here to the many - sadly abortive - efforts to establish institutions of regional solidarity, federal co-operation, and counter-hegemonic blocs, all the better to right the imbalanced ship of international power relations.

A heady mix of both intellectual and institutional history, Getachew’s book manages to span the space between idea and practice, working through the endeavours of thinkers and politicians (sometimes: thinking politicians!) who perhaps did the most to try make this dream a reality: W.E.B. DuBois, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Manley, Julius Nyerere and others still. Equally a drama of institutions, so too are detailed the efforts to transform the UN into properly anticolonial bulwark, no less than efforts to set up such decolonial projects like the Union of African States, the West Indian Federation, and the New International Economic Order. Names now largely lost to popular history, only ever really existing in embryo, their energies sapped by a postcolonial world stacked against them.

While largely focused on Africa and the Caribbean, the true scope of Getachew’s interventions are not only in history, but also political theory more broadly. With the vantage point of the worldmakers in hand, Getachew recasts and reassesses entire traditions of debate: how should we think about the relation between nationalisms and internationalisms? What is the true legacy of ‘human rights’ in history? Is global hierarchy a matter of mere exclusion, or unequal and burdensome inclusion? All these questions and more are informed and reshaped by the singular moment of history studied here, with Getachew as steady guide. It doesn’t make for easy reading - every word written is a weighted one, a finely balanced mix of theory, history and research, with no space for superfluity. What it does offer though, in its best moments of promise, is a reservoir of decolonial potentials to be reactivated - would it be that we were to seize them.

[Alex Birnel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Worldmaking After Empire," Adom Getachew provides readers with an extensive resource to conceptualize the process of decolonization in the early and mid-twentieth century, both in its imagined expansiveness and in its eventual curtailment. Whereas a liberal telling of the decolonization process treats new nations as nascent members of an emerging international family of nations, in which state sovereignty renders them political equals, Getachew argues this story is wrong on the basic frame.

A liberal telling of the story casts anticolonial nationalists as nation builders seeking self determination. In Getachew's version of the history, informed by primary sources and radical black scholarship from the period, this narrative misses the political contingency of the era. Touring the reader through the arguments of thinkers like CLR James, Eric Williams, George Padmore, WEB Du Bois, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Manley and others, Getachew widens the historical frame and the liberation aspirations of these former subjects of empire. She asserts them as worldmakers in their scope, seeking reconfiguration of the planet beyond building nations. She says instead of self determination, which did not threaten the international racialized hierarchy of the world system, they sought a more far reaching principle of non-domination in their reconstructive fights over the new global order. Finally, this position left the characterization of these political actors as anti-colonial nationalists in too shallow a place. They were post-colonial cosmopolitans in what they desired to build.


In telling this nuanced history of reshuffling and reconstitution, Adom Getachew takes you through the early phases of decolonization when black radicals still conceived of themselves as an international vanguard against the crisis of white civilization, as Du Bois interpreted the European World Wars to represent, and also as revolutionaries against capitalism in the echos of both Haiti and the more contemporaneous Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution.

She masterfully unpacks and undermines the liberal reputation of Woodrow Wilson as an internationalist, comparing the structure of the League of Nations, an institution he was a key architect of, to his collegiate writings on the Jim Crow system. Jim Crow was a way of transforming formal freedom for black enslaved people into a continuation of subjugation, based on the notion that the residue of their time in enslavement left them ill suited for the existential demands of freedom. They were to be socially managed and the Jim Crow system provided the basis for that management. From this connection, she explains the United States' parallel views towards new nations expressed by Wilson. Newly decolonized nations also lacked capacities for freedom owed to colonization and needed to be managed. A narrow notion of self determination, which allowed for a feeling of political independence as state sovereigns but retained continued room to deepen economic dependence, represented a kind of Jim Crow internationalism that a wider principle of non-domination would challenge with greater depth.

Later in the text, in the post World War II period, she describes real material attempts at achieving postcolonial cosmopolitanism through experiments with political formations like regional federation. She highlights the historical references African national leaders reached for in evaluating their options. She notes that leaders like Nkrumah and Williams considered the American revolution as proof that federation was a prerequisite to political independence, as the 13 colonies would continue to experience a financial raw deal with the British Empire if they did not unite as one. Getachew also highlights the limits of their references to US history, like the absence of the particular conditions of settler colonialism in their analysis.

Continually throughout the book, as the horizon of worldmaking is tested, Getachew references the "post-colonial predicament" as a problem of central importance in understanding the incompleteness of decolonization. This predicament, she says, is the combination of weak conditions present in new states internally, leading to democratic failure and representative collapse, as well as simultaneous external pressures generated by economic dependence and military threats. One can consider the various moves, formulations, and pivots of the concepts offered by liberation thinkers in the book all as attempts to address the risks posed by this basic predicament. From a black vanguard to a federated black Atlantic.

In closing the book, Getachew takes us onward to the second generation of worldmakers in Michael Manley of Jamaica and Nkrumah of Ghana and their effort to build a "welfare world" through the New International Economic Order. Ambitious in aims, the NEIO sought to address the post-colonial predicament by calling for redistribution on a world scale in pursuit of an international egalitarian system. Such a system required the metaphor of seeing certain states as the laborers of the world, and others as the capitalists, and just as with the New Deal, in order to prevent a worker uprising of states, Manley and others demanded domestic economies be reshaped to favor more balanced interdependence and a basic redistribution of the ill-gotten gains of oppressive colonialism and the economic exploitation of neocolonialism. Unfortunately, this formulation lacked a political vehicle with the capacity to enact it. This was in part a tension and contradiction between an embrace of nationalism out of self defense and the eventual internationalism that was supposed to supplant it. The idea of a Welfare world required an international redistributive body that the United Nations was never designed to be capable of compelling or administering.

Getachew gives a quick treatment of the closure of this era of anticolonial worldmaking, briefly and pithy outlining its strategic weaknesses and fatal errors. The United States witnessed the 20th century UN develop as a site of political revolt brought on by the global South. Political voice existed in this arena but a means to exercise meaningful political power over its direction did not. Concurrent with political maturity in the articulation of world making projects in international fora was the growing influence of transnational corporations, and trade balance sheets, which without top to bottom economic reformulation, increased their leverage over weak states. The elevation of the UN as a potential presiding actor over NEIO political visions meant that the class component of equalizing states in an uneven imperial world order was supplanted by rhetorics of global justice for individuals within states. The fall of self determination was set in motion by a process moving in two lanes 1) the rise of multinational corporations and 2) the constitutionalization of international law.

The political actors with the capacity to define the contours of decolonization towards their own liberation were outmaneuvered by a movement of intellectuals seeking to suspend the economic machinery of capitalism from politics altogether, the neoliberals, and geopolitical strategists focused on a project of unipolarity centered on American hegemony.

With this book, Adom Getachew has produced a profound account of the present as the incomplete remnants of decolonization in the 20th century. In doing so, she reminds of the progress made by a previous generation of internationalists, closer in many ways to a movement of genuine global solidarity and revolution, with circuits of coordination and strategy at a world scale than we find ourselves in possession of. At last, in reminding us of political imagination combined with the evolution of ideas over time, she also reminds us of the contingency of history, that it remains open for contest. On that measure, I insist you read this book. 21st century internationalists need to learn the lessons of failure and to experience the reminder of our options to build new worlds.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good research crowned with a no-nonsense writing. Whereas Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World investigates the political history of the Third World, Getachew probes into its theories of national and international development.

Liberation wars of the 20th century gave birth to a lot of nationalist movements in the Third World which did not pursue a path of socialistic development, but nevertheless borrowed many elements from it. Getachew claims that their nationalism did not mean a narrow nationalistic view on domestic and international politics, but on the contrary, required a complete redesigning of the world order. Therefore, starting from the 1920s the political thinkers of the Third World, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Nkrumah, Nyerere and many others experimented with a series of new ideas from African federation to New International Economic Order.

The part about the struggle of the postcolonial leaders within the United Nations to impose egalitarian international regulations using their majority within the UN General Assembly was especially stimulating. Their project came to an unfortunate halt due to their internal contradictions, the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the Soviet Union.

The book is a must read if you feel like your knowledge about the 20th century political history mainly orbits around Europe until the WWII and then around the Cold War post-WWII. I already mentioned Prashad's book but if you would like to learn more about the socialist Third World post-WWII, I recommend a new book by Jeremy Friedman Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World.

[sorrowmancer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Worldmaking After Empire, Adom Getachew recasts the histories of Black Atlantic anti-colonial nationalisms (roughly between 1945 and 1975) as radical, universalist political projects that themselves refashioned the Wilsonian concept of national “self-determination” for their own ends: as a first step in an international political order that would be egalitarian and free of domination. In other words, as “worldmaking.”

The text draws out, and draws on, the thought and actions of prominent “Black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists” George Padmore, Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. DuBois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Eric Williams. Consistently present in the text is the challenge Getachew lobbies at those who would understand such anti-colonial nationalisms as inevitable end-products of Westphalian or Wilsonian political conceptualizations, merely finally putting into practice the unfulfilled promises of the latter. Instead, Getachew argues that the triumph of the nation-state, and the end of colonial “alien rule,” owed itself in large part to the painstaking efforts of anti-colonial nationalists.

Such efforts were embodied in three political projects – the long-term aims of each of which were, again, “inaugurat[ing] a post-imperial world” – without the existence of which such a meaningful yet limited, short-term victory (the end of direct colonial rule) would be impossible. They were: 1) the “ institutionalization of a *right* to self-determination at the UN, 2) the formation of regional federations, 3) and the demand for a "New International Economic Order."
 
One of the few political science/IR texts actually worth the time and effort to read, imo. Also very clearly written. Give it a read!

[YBV]

Really interesting conceptual framing and analysis of the historiography of "self-determination" from the Black Anglophone perspective. I understand that Getachew's argument is that "worldmaking" finds its roots in this specific perspective, but I find myself wondering about the dialogue between the Black Anglophone perspective and that of other NAM players.

Parts of the books are not connected very well. The economic analysis was a drag. Not to sound right-wing but I can't take political economy analysis very seriously when the undefended presumption of the text is that socialism would've fixed everything.

Writing was a bore, needed an editor.

[Juliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book cover goals

[Geoffrey Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decolonization is often thought of as the culmination of a process through which the nation-state transcended its Western European origins to become the universal, natural model of political organization. However, as Adom Getachew argues, this view overlooks the role that intellectuals from the European colonies played in shaping the postcolonial world order. Moreover, the view that post-colonial states are just copies of the European nation-state model ignores how the legacy of European colonialism and the reality of the international division of labor shaped the challenge of making self-determination more than just a formal reality. Getachew examines how intellectuals and political elites from the anglophone Black Atlantic (i.e. the anglophone Caribbean and West Africa) understood the challenge of shaping a world order in which postcolonial states could escape their dependent positions in the international division of labor, using archival research that reconstructs the worldviews of such figures as Eric Williams (the historian and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago) and Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of Ghana and a leader of the Pan-African movement). She argues that these leaders sought to construct an international legal framework of nondomination by exercising collective action in order to shape the rules of the global economic game -- for these leaders, self-determination required going beyond formal political equality in the international sphere. However, because of contradictions inherent in such projects as regional political federations and the New International Economic Order, and because of the opposition of the Western capitalist countries, these efforts ultimately failed.

This is a terrific work of intellectual history and political theory. Whereas less sympathetic histories of postcolonial states and the Third Worldist movement simply deride the first generation of postcolonial leaders' hypocrisy or naivete, Getachew's archival work allows us to see how these leaders understood the difficult positions of colonized peoples and postcolonial states. I also learned a lot about the different strands of thinking about the global political economy among postcolonial intellectuals. This work is an excellent complement to other recent historical work on the construction of the postwar international economic order, the transition to neoliberalism on a global scale, and the reduced vision of global justice that took hold beginning in the 1970s and 80s, such as The Globalists by Quinn Slobodian and Not Enough by Samuel Moyn. It provides a view from the South that is somewhat lacking in these other excellent works. Additionally, Getachew is a very clear writer, capable of communicating complex political and economic ideas in an approachable way. Overall, I would highly recommend this book for readers who are interested in global justice and international development. I also hope that it inspires similar projects that compare the approaches of these Black Atlantic leaders with their contemporaries in other parts of the postcolonial world.

[Declan Hickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of the politics of decolonisation, plus an essential corrective to the baffling and illusory figure of secondary school history textbooks: Woodrow Wilson, putative freedom-loving internationalist, whom Getachew rightly exposes as a proponent of racial hierarchy in a nascent post-imperial world.

[Brendan Campisi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very valuable account of the ways Anglophone African and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists sought to reshape the international order, with implications for understanding anticolonial nationalism as a whole. Getachew recognizes the legitimacy of critiques of postcolonial nation-states in terms of internal authoritarianism, ethnic conflict and so on, but insists that these should never be used to negate the value of the anticolonial project completely.

The most striking point in my view is that, contrary to the self-flattering Western teleology, the development of a global community of formally equal sovereign states was not the 'belated fulfillment' of the promise of Westphalian sovereignty that began in Europe and 'spread,' as if by nature, in the 20th century; instead, the early formulations of 'international society' in the form of the League of Nations and even the early UN had explicitly licensed colonialism and racialized hierarchies of unequal sovereignty. Only the active struggle of the newly independent states changed this, with the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples essentially constituting the moment when colonialism was officially delegitimized on the world scale.

[Michael Skora · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a solid read: a good past-orientated complement to Olufemi Taiwo’s “Reconsidering Reparations.” The sheer breadth of the book covering three-quarters of a century did leave out a loot of historical detail (there was a lot more political theory than I expected), but the content of “Worldmaking After Empire” is still impressively comprehensive and informative. In particular, I would have appreciated one more chapter about how the demise for calls to self-determination and UN-based sovereignty contributed to increased US militarization abroad (Andrew Bacevich’s “American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy” probably delves more into this) because a LOT of big ideas were crammed into the epilogue. Although this book is quite depressing and further reaffirms my capitalist realist political trajectory, I appreciated it, and I am looking forward to interviewing the author of this book in two days.

[Wesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting but so dense and honestly seemed like it just needed a good editor. can't say I found the economics section too much fun but ig that's a me problem.

[Commie Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

​Outside of the postcolonial world or the former socialist bloc, decolonization is conventionally understood as a process of nation-building that ends with the overthrown of alien rule in previously colonized societies and concomitantly the formation of new nation-states. Adom Getachew’s 2019 Worldmaking after Empire, however, takes a different approach. Through a careful analysis of the various decolonization projects spearheaded by Black Anglophones across the Atlantic, Getachew argues that for anticolonial critics and nationalists in the first three decades after World War II, decolonization must transcend the securing of national independence and aim at transforming the hierarchical international order into a domination-free and egalitarian system.

​The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction and an epilogue. The first three chapters lay out the theoretical framework with which Getachew analyzes decolonization, as well as the intellectual landscape of political theories concerning nationalism and international relations against which she formulates her arguments. Specifically, Getachew identifies that for twentieth-century anticolonial nationalists, empire is conceptualized as a worldmaking project that disseminates and preserves an international system underlying by racial hierarchy and unequal integration. The heart of the empire project lies in the idea of unequal integration, understood as the way in which colonies and periphery states, by virtue of their race, are given an unequal membership in international society that guarantees them with little rights yet burdened them with obligations. The result is their perpetual subjection to arbitrary power from external actors, even after having had their independence acknowledged, such as in the case of Ethiopia and Liberia. What entails is the understanding that decolonization, as the antithesis of empire, must assume the same global scale and locate its ultimate goal in the undoing of the various manifestations of international hierarchies that facilitate domination.

The next three chapters examine three worldmaking attempts at countering empire. The first project is the institutionalization of a right to self-determination in the 1960s, an attempt at undoing the legal manifestation of international hierarchies. Black anglophone anticolonial thinkers reappropriate the empire-compatible definition proposed by Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts in order to create juridical defenses against dominations. The second project tackles the political and economic manifestations by forming regional federations in the West Indies and West Africa from the late 1950s and through the 1960s. Inspired by the US example, black leaders in the Anglophone world hope to fend the newly independent states from neocolonialism and solve the issue of economic dependence by creating a regional sphere that is free of domination. The third project, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) of the 1970s, is similar to the previous project in its concern with the issue of economic dependence. However, the NIEO distinguishes itself with its demand for a system of global economic planning that prioritizes the development of developing nations, and thus ensures a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The book ends with the displacement of the NIEO, the rise of neoliberalism and international financial institutions that are the antithesis of the socialist vision championed by the NIEO, the waves of critics of anticolonial nationalism that are often dismissive of the worldmaking vision of previous anticolonial projects, and US emergence as the sole hegemon in the post-Cold War that further limits the opportunity to challenge the international status quo.

The strength of Worldmaking lies in its rigorous and well-defined narrative. The book’s high degree of conceptual clarity must be attributed to Getachew’s interdisciplinary approach, which successfully combines historical contextualization with theoretical analyses in political science. Her dialogic engagement with a variety of political theories ranging from nationalism, globalization, to global justice, not only helps readers get a better sense of how her theoretical framework can further elucidate areas which have been inadequately treated, and consequently brings about refreshing perspective and insight that will be of benefits for a wide range of disciplines. Furthermore, it also sheds light on the American-Eurocentric orientation and the dismissive attitude towards decolonization processes as being actively initiated by postcolonial actors, which remain the standard view in most parts of the non-postcolonial world, and of which consequences go beyond the clouding of our historical perspective to having real implications for our current global decision-making. This forward-looking orientation is perhaps most expressed in Getachew’s assessments of the three anticolonial projects and the political thoughts of central figures in the book. Her in-depth analysis of the historical conditions that shape each project, their contributions and their blind spots, provide readers with a general map of the past with which to consider new strategies for worldmaking in our current time.

Despite the persuasiveness and intellectually stimulating narrative that Getachew has successfully weaved, the book’s concept of empire and decolonization is not an all-encompassing reconstruction of colonial/anticolonial experiences, as Getachew has already mentioned in her book. However, its theoretical limit is not restricted to its insufficient accountability for settler colonialism, but actually concerns with the fundamental assumption about the long-term effects of empire on postcolonial societies. With its focus on high politics, Worldmaking begins from the view that decolonization is the counterreaction against unequal international integration initiated by postcolonial actors who are fully aware of the artificiality of the underlying racial hierarchy. This means that the book’s decolonization model cannot account for empire’s psychological domination of postcolonial societies, the colonial mentality that empire creates and that potentially enables the manufacturing of a domestic consent to external intervention. An incorporation of the normalization of racial hierarchy within postcolonial societies can further rigorize the book’s framework, and perhaps can further illuminate the internal conflicts that undermine Pan-African ambitions.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 4 out of 5]

//4.5 stars//

This book focuses on the independence of Caribbean and African countries in the aftermath of colonialism and how the League of Nations and later the UN treated countries unequally and continued the use of moral high ground arguments around slavery and literacy to exclude newly emerging countries from being economic equals in the world. Particularly in focusing on Ethiopia and how it was part of the League of Nations along with Italy and yet Italy was still able to invade it.

“Significantly, the charge that slavery was practiced in Liberia and Ethiopia was mobilized not to exclude these African states from the league but instead to justify their unequal integration.”

“Following the assembly's 1922 resolution, the league investigated why slavery continued to be practiced in Ethiopia and considered whether league supervision could be justified given the country's independence.
The British Anti-slavery Society published a pamphlet arguing that the problem of slavery in Ethiopia resulted from the absence of European oversight, recommending that the league take up this role.”

“In their analysis, Ethiopia's backwardness and instability were the result of its isolation from international society and indicated an ineffective state that could not project authority over its entire territory. With its requirement of an open-door economic policy and administrative oversight by foreign advisors, a mandate was the solution to both problems. Economic integration would overcome the country's isolation and lead it toward a modern economy based on free labor, while the league's administrative assistance would bolster the state's capacity.”

“In 1923, Ethiopia submitted a request for membership, which ended plans for mandation, but enabled the extension of the leagues jurisdiction Through its inclusion as a member state.”

“International lawyers have largely overlooked the ways that membership functioned as a mechanism for extending international oversight and realizing the mandate proposal by other means. As a result, Bth-opia's entry into the league is often celebrated as an important turning Point from an exclusionary international society based on the nineleenth-century standard of civilization to a more universal membership?”

“Ethiopia's membership in 1923 thus provides a clear picture of what I have described as unequal integration. Rather than denying Ethiopia membership for having failed to meet the standards of statehood, inclusion within international society overcame the earlier problem of league jurisdiction and enlisted consent to inaugurate a program of internationa oversight. The system of oversight was designed to discipline and civilize Ethiopia so that it could raise itself to the ranks of other member states.
Membership thus became mandation by other means.”

“Accord. ing to the memo, Ethiopia and Liberia are the only two African states, which are not under some sort of European control? "Where European powers exercise control of the administration of the territory, the slave trade and large scale raids have diminished and have become practically impossible.?…European oversight and intervention was constructed as the only mechanism that could secure humanitarian norms in Africa.”

“From the perspective of the Italian government, the two special ob ligations Ethiopia had accepted as conditions of its membership-the abolition of slavery and the regulation of its arms trade-had not been achieved. Slavery and the slave trade continued unabated and often with the tacit support of government officials. The Ethiopian government was furthermore violating the arms agreement covering East Africa by selling munitions to private persons. 141 Beyond violating the specific obligations of its membership, Ethiopia had also allegedly breached other international laws and bilateral treaties. For instance, Ethiopia flouted the open-door provisions of article 23 in the League of Nations Covenant and did not adhere to bilateral Italo-Ethiopian agreements that granted Italy "most favored nation" status.”

“Assigning Italy as a mandatory power in Ethiopia could solve the league's problem of providing assistance to the backward country.

…stripped Ethiopia of the protections afforded not only by league membership but also through the laws of war. If Ethiopia was barbaric, the impending invasion and occupation was not a war between equal members of the international community that would have to follow the guidelines outlined in The Hague and Geneva conventions. Instead, it was a colonial" or "small war, which covered "expeditions against savages and sent civilized races by disciplined soldiers" These wars, unlike traditions interstate conflicts, could involve outlawed modes of warfare includins indiscriminate killings, the destruction of villages, and the torturedher tired combatants. Thus, by invoking Ethioplas barbarism a mood before is invasion, Italy prepared for the use of overwhelming violent illegal use of mustard gas, indiscriminate kilings of noncombatants * torture of captured soldiers, and other war crimes.”

“Thus, the failure to address impe-hiel expansion and white supremacy in 1919 led to the crises of the late 1930s.”

“As a result, the critique of empire and the right to self-determination they formulated in response left unaddressed the specificities of the settler colonial experience in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. While there were important resonances between the empire-as-enslavement thesis and the critique of settler colonialism, especially in contexts where African slavery and Na-five dispossession were coconstituted, the emphasis on domination and exploitation at the hands of imperial elites had significant implications for the articulation of a right to self-determination.”

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book. My only wish is that she had included more textual evidence from the thinkers she’s discussing. She almost exclusively recounts their ideas, rather than quoting from their works. I trust her interpretations, at the same time it would have been nice to have gotten to hear more of the voices of the folks she’s engaging with.

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books I've read over the past year. More than many others, it's made me stop, think, and rethink the ways in which I understand the power structures of our international society. Fantastic book and I don't have enough positive words for it. The only drawback is that it is a dense and difficult read, the language is very precise, but in a way that requires mastering a lot of terminology in order to best comprehend her arguments.

Getachew's book is primarily about the historical and political context that led to the development of the NIEO, or the New International Economic Order, a proposed reformulation and restructuring of global economic relations that failed to gain traction in the 1970s and 1980s. The context is the 30 year era of decolonization after WW2. In this period, dozens of nations fought for freedom against their European colonizers, and later joined them in the theoretically equal playing field of international organizations such as the United Nations. But what many realized was their integration into both the global political and economic worlds was systematically unequal. And so some leaders from the new African and Caribbean nations attempted to propose alternative visions for the future of an international system that would prioritize the nondomination of powers, commitment to national sovereignty, and even forms structural adjustment that would remedy inequalities between states.

A lot of these African and Caribbean leaders were highly influenced by Marxism and analyzed that the continued economic domination of a few imperial powers in their regions would continue to worsen inequalities between states. Although the notion of a global free market sounds equal in theory, the industrial sectors of the world are disproportionately located in the imperial north, and so they are the ones who seek to financially benefit the most from a free market. Since a lot of the formerly colonized nations have had their lands systematically structured as international exporters of natural resources, they can only best benefit from this if they have full control over them. If the ownership of resources and their extraction is dominated by foreign powers, the bulk of the surplus of their local labor will flow out of the country. In other words, if these nations do not have ownership of their own resources, the use of local lands will serve more the interests of foreigners than it would themselves, just as it did when they were colonized. So the nationalization of resources is one step. But it also requires international regulations by some kind of federal state that would accommodate how trade would best work between nations. Part of this is also to protect nations from the rise of multinational corporations. They also envisioned a way to create not just international equality, but equity as well. Sort of like a welfare state but for the whole international community, in which richer countries would help poorer ones in a similar way to how many nations already do so within their own borders for citizens or cities with less resources.

The dominating idea was anti-imperialist nationalism. They wanted to be able to set their nations up in the future to be able to most benefit from the resources that have historically been one-sidedly extracted from them. This was a movement in direct opposition to the former imperialists and was a continuation of the movement for decolonization. It was influenced by socialist internationalism and predicated on the cooperation of nations with one another to help each other create a harmonious and mutually beneficial global society. It didn't pan out due to a host of different factors, the strong admonition of the United States playing no small part in it, but it was still an interesting proposal that has the potential of having a large ideological impact on our future, as more people better appreciate their points of view and arguments.

Loved reading this and learning about the many African leaders who tried to remake the world in a more equitable and just way. There are other topics in the book as well, such as exploring the movements for Pan-Africanism, and more, that are very interesting to learn about. This was a great book and I look forward to reading more about people such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere in the future.

[Erik Champenois · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I would love this book when I saw the footnotes to the introduction and first chapter reference a handful of books I've recently read and enjoyed. "Worldmaking after Empire" is a revisionary book of political theory that shows how leaders in the postcolonial world envisioned remaking the world order. The book covers the history of empire and decolonization from the creation of the League of Nations after World War II through the collapse of the New International Economic Order in the 1970s.

Getachew turns established wisdom on its head by showing that the standard narrative of Wilsonian principles of self-determinism spreading from the West to the Third World through decolonization is in error. Instead, leaders of postcolonial countries actively sought a more equitable self-determination that went against Western principles, which were themselves not as equitable as the ones the West advertises today. The League of Nations, for example, was not founded on a world order that advanced self-determination, but was instead rooted in a racial and hierarchical world order, with colonial powers at the top, followed by countries like Liberia and Ethiopia that were treated more strictly than regular members, followed by different levels mandate countries. Indeed, Italy rested its claim to invading Ethiopia in League of Nations agreements and language. The United Nations was initially designed to be similarly hierarchical in nature, but the multiplication of newly independent countries remade the institution into one that was relatively more responsive (still within limits) to the concerns and principles of developing countries.

Leaders of independence movements and postcolonial countries sought to remake the hierarchical Western world order in three ways: reinventing self-determination as a more equitable right that included the principle of non-interference, envisioning and establishing federal structures to empower postcolonial countries politically and economically in an unequal world, and advocating a New International Economic Order to overcome the economic inequality of the world order. I found Getachew's treatment of the West Indian Federation and the United States of Africa particularly interesting - I didn't realize that post-independent Ghana, Guinea, and Mali had included in their new constitutions provisions to confer sovereignty to a Union of African States. Of course, these efforts never really went far, and the developing world generally failed at achieving its objectives of a more equitable world between nations (hence "the rise and fall" part of the title).

"Worldmaking after Empire" is groundbreaking and will be a book that I'll turn to again in the years ahead - its footnotes will definitely add to my library of future reading. Post-World War II geopolitical books tend to focus on the West or the Soviet Union, and only treat the developing world in a secondary and general or selective way. Getachew's book shows how the developing world as a whole posed a potential challenge to and revision of the world order of their day. Though ultimately postcolonial countries failed to change the world order, the inequities we continue to see between countries in the world today should inspire us to look for ways to overcome these inequities and create a more just world order. The significantly uneven impacts of COVID-19, including the highly inequitable distribution of COVID vaccines and uneven health and economic impacts, continues to demonstrate how our world stands in need of a better, more equitable order.

[Simon B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative & persuasive - if a little dry - this book addresses the decades of experimentation in radical internationalism & socialist self-determination among newly independent states in the Caribbean and Africa. It's a rarely told but important episode of the 20th century: a story central to the modern history of nations such as Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Ghana and Tanzania. Although these worthy projects ultimately failed, Adom Getachew argues that these struggles for genuine self-determination and global justice can still become a starting point for new campaigns against exploitation and domination.

By attending to the animating role the problem of international hierarchy played in anticolonial thought and excavating the worldmaking projects it inspired, this book recovers the universal aspirations of anticolonial nationalism. Neither mere mimicry nor dangerous parochialism, anticolonial nationalism envisioned a world where democratic, modernizing, and redistributive national states were situated in thick international institutions designed to realize the principle of nondomination. While distinct from the liberal universalism to which nationalism is frequently opposed, we find here another universalism propelled by the effort to institutionalize the international conditions of self-government. In this project of worldmaking, rather than foreclosing solidarities beyond the nation-state, the quest to secure national independence propelled robust visions of internationalism. The road to a universal postimperial world order was in and through rather than over and against the nation.

[Idowu Odeyemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adom Getachew offers a novel reading of the anticolonialist decolonization project. Though for political decolonizers self-determination is important, as Getachew sees it, the broader goal of decolonization is to build a domination-free and egalitarian international order, and Getachew locates this in primary sources of immediate political decolonial theorists like Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B DuBois, Kwame Nkrummah, etc.

Getachew's reading is an interesting one, and it is novel. But I wonder if it is the accurate reading of the broader decolonial project we "should" aim for. We share a very interesting aspect of our human nature with the people before us. 20th-century and contemporary anticolonial and antiracial calls for an egalitarian world that is domination-free don't seem to have this as their end goal but conceive of this as a step towards the end goal. The end goal, it seems quite clear, is that we have a world that respects the humanity of others no matter their race, ethnicity, or gender. If we agree with Getachew that the project of worldmaking after political decolonization is to build a domination-free and egalitarian international order, we might still be left with intracommunal (and even intercommunal) marginalization and oppression. This, I think, is not so much of a progress. Our worldmaking after empire must take into account the basic principle of relational equality. Hardly can we say we have made social and political progress if, like Getachew, such a project fails to do this.

[JRT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told through the lens of various Black revolutionaries across the Atlantic, this book provides an alternative framework for analyzing the efficacy of decolonization and third world self-determination. Author Adom Getachew precisely traces the history and development of the political and socio-economic theories underlying anti-colonial statecraft and worldmaking. Although at times the focus on political theory stifles the historical narrative, Getachew does an excellent job synthesizing the various theories at play and explaining their applications and limitations. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Michael Manley of Jamaica, who advocated for an innovative form of statecraft (African Communalism and Democratic Socialism) and worldmaking (international egalitarianism). Great book for anyone who wants to learn about how “decolonization” failed to bring about a level playing field in the global economy.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that recovers lost episodes of the late colonial and early post-colonial period in which anti-imperialists imagined different possible worlds that might replace the dominationist model of the imperial order with true self-determination, rather than continued dependency. The nation-state was not yet seen as the sole proper form of governance structure, and indeed was often seen as limiting the possibilities of post colonial countries, given that these states were small and weak. (Especially good is the chapter on federalist, federational, and confederational models that would bring multiple postcolonial states into conjoint political structures to represent their shared interests.)

While Getachew is clearly sympathetic to the “nondominationist” objectives of these scholars and statesmen (and they are almost all men), she is also attentive to the contradictions within their worldviews, and the tensions between objectives that ultimate led to the failures of their ambitions, culminating in the grandest scheme (and failure) of them all, the New International Economic Order of the 1970s. As Getachew concludes, “the fall of self-determination and the origins of our contemporary international order can be found in the ideological and institutional transformations that began in the 1970s.” (179) Today, we live amidst the “ruins of anti colonial worldmaking.” (181)

[Will Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really rich and thoughtful book which shone a light on a part of international relations which has been almost completely ignored by most of the modern commentariat of our time but which is absolutely fundamental to understanding how we got to where we are today and also which is more impactful to the majority of the global population.

It doesn't make for uplifting reading but the balance struck between factual discussion and analysis is excellent. I would recommend this book heartily. Infinitely more enlightening than much of what the mainstream publishers churn out on a monthly basis.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intellectual history with interesting insights, but which suffers from its focus on the theories of political leaders in abstraction from the concrete conditions of the movements they attempted to represent on the international stage. To make a causal claim about self-determinations rise and fall requires more attention to social and economic history, per my reading of the text. Would also have liked to see more development regarding what "worldmaking" signifies. Examining the terms usage, it seems to be synonymous with "policy proposing" but the grander term gestures to something less prosaic occurring, which I can't pinpoint.

[Brayden Stalcup · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe Getachew offers many profound arguments around the presence of imperialism in our modern world. While occasionally repetitive and overdone, I believe she traces the complex story of decolonizing the world.

She offers a more complex story of decolonization which we are taught in school and suggests that we are still in a process of decolonizing the world and the mind.

The epilogue was poignantly written and discusses how the United States has largely disregarded internationalism, which it created, when it doesn’t suit its needs. The consistent rejection of an equitable economic and political order is something I believe Getachew expertly highlights.

[Jakob Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really clearly written, challenged a lot of my preconceptions about the development of nationalism and made a convincing case for the centrality of projects like the East Caribbean Federation and interwar Trotskyite formations. I especially liked the chapter on the granting of League of Nations membership to Liberia, Ethiopia, and Haiti functioning as a Trojan horse for reintroduction of white rule there. An important work for understanding the black Atlantic in the 20th century and the history of international relations as a whole.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked learning about the specific ways postcolonial leaders set out to tackle the challenges of separating from imperial powers, but down two points for the dusty, repetitive, self-satisfied language. Either this is political theory for its own sake, in which case, what is the point??? (clearly I'm not a theorist), or it sets out to convince some people about how to do things better, in which case, come on lady, know your audience and use "ignore" the tenth time you're tempted to write "elide". Why write theory that practitioners can't read?

[Griffin Barriss · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY academic and dense, but super interesting coverage of a historical debate I never really knew much about. Very heady discussion of anti-colonial self-determination among Black nations from the 1920s-1970s. Lots of discussion of how the American Revolution informed black anti-imperialists, the role of economic development in self-determination, and the rise and fall of regional anti-imperial federations in the Caribbean and Africa. Only giving the 4 stars because of its density, but maybe I just need to read more political theory/economics lol.

[Peter Loftus · Rating 1 out of 5]

A couple of interesting ideas and a worthy cause, but ultimately too abstract and theoretical for my tastes - I'd have liked to hear more of the narrative on how the ideas involved impacted on nations and regions, and what their experience and response was. I quickly found that the point had been made early, so I had little need to be here. Vijay Prasad and Mark Mazower were more useful to me in my studies than this one, I'm afraid.