Nations Ascendant: The Global Struggle Against Empire And The Making of our World
Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
De, Rohit
Abstract
My dissertation tells the origin story of global anti-colonialism and the rise of national self- determination by tracing how an international community of colonial activists, thinkers and campaigners came to share ideas about universal decolonization and the end of empires. At the turn of the twentieth century, the global imperial order was in peril. As the largest imperial power on the planet, Great Britain faced mass disaffection from various quarters of its empire – and it was not alone. Virtually all major empires faced political crises at the time. In cities across the world, revolutionary factions emerged where nationalists deliberated radical, even violent paths to a post- imperial world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin belonged to and wrote of this world - a world primarily defined by the crisis of the imperial order and the looming question of the future of national communities. As he and his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917, he announced the dawn of a new era when the empires of the world will eventually fall in the throes of the impending world revolution. The dissertation shows that his call resonated with all sorts of imperial decriers, who saw in his victory the possibility of a new world. From Rio Grande to River Ganges, anti-colonialists turned to Moscow to help realize their own political visions. In the process, they forged an international revolutionary movement that sought universal liberation. Drawing from twenty-five archives across ten cities, this multi-lingual and multi-archival project chronicles the political thought and practice of anti-colonialists from India, Egypt, Iran, Turkestan, Mexico, Abyssinia and their compatriots across Europe and the Soviet Union and shows how they created and connected through a kind of global public sphere. It tracks the spread of anti-imperial vocabularies across geographies through clandestine print networks and underground channels and argues that this process led to the emergence of global imagined community whose members shared a deep commitment to a radical restructuring of an imperial world. This dissertation is divided into three parts, each constituting two chapters. The first part is entitled “Roads to Moscow” and the first chapter “Lenin and his Time: Global Revolution and the Historical Case for Universal Self-Determination” reconsiders Lenin’s political thought, especially his wartime writings, by thinking through the relationship between imperialism and the question of national self-determination. Such an intervention helps to answer why so many nationalists eventually turned to Lenin and why revolutionary Russia acquired a significant stature amongst them. The second chapter “The Oppressed Assemble: The Reception of the Russian Revolution in the Colonial World and the Internationalization of Anti-Imperialism” traces how colonial thinkers from Calcutta to Java and Tashkent to Tehran read and wrote about the relationship between anti- imperialism and international socialism. The second section, “The Radical Underground 1919- 1926” demonstrates the precise role played by the Communist International in creating a global consciousness against empire. Chapter 3 “Workers, Students, and other Provocateurs: Proselytizing Bolshevism on the Nile” tells the story of the reception and spread of communist ideas in colonial cities like Alexandria and Cairo between 1919 and 1926. Chapter 4 “Dissident Letters and the Making of a Global Anti-Colonial Imaginary” examines the making of a fraternity of anti- imperialists by analyzing internationalist leftist writings of radical thinkers like M.N Roy and R.P Dutt. The final section, “Nations Ascendant”, examines the changing contours of internationalism after Lenin’s death and the rise of Stalin. The fifth chapter “From Revolution to Rights 1927-1937- The Case for the Nation-State” shows how anti-imperialists increasingly jettisoned the language of revolutionary warfare and made the case for global decolonization by claiming a universal right to self-determination and democratic rule. The final chapter, “Outlawing Empire: The Italo- Abyssinian Crisis and the Right to Sovereignty” uses print sources from India, South Africa, Britain, the West Indies and the United States to illustrate the significance of the Italian invasion of and bombing of Abyssinia in 1936 and shows how the comparison of colonial conditions with fascist regimes was a turning point in the global case against empires.
Recommended Citation
Aziz, Zaib un Nisa, "Nations Ascendant: The Global Struggle Against Empire And The Making of our World" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 755.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/755
