As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

Scholars often view America’s ill-fated military intervention in Vietnam as emblematic of the broader triumph of Southeast Asian nationalism over western colonialism. However, this chapter shows that the persistence of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia is more characteristic of the region’s history when the Cold War intersected with decolonization. Anglo-American neo-colonial designs for preserving their influence largely dovetailed with the goals of conservative, Southeast Asian nationalists seeking either US or British assistance to suppress homegrown left-wing movements inspired and sponsored by Moscow or, above all, Beijing. Indeed, Britain, America, and their Southeast Asian partners shared an anti-communist worldview undergirded by similar fears that the millions-strong Chinese diaspora in the region would serve China’s expansionist agenda. Despite Washington’s failures in Vietnam, the melding of British and US neo-colonialism with Southeast Asian nationalism would usher the region from European-dominated formal colonialism into informal US Empire by the late 1960s.

Accounts of African letters have been riven by debates about who owns modernism and revelations about covert CIA sponsorship of African cultural institutions. Rather than relitigating the question of whether modernism in Africa is always (covertly) Euro-modernist, this chapter treats modernism as inherently dialectical. It considers African literary modernism in relation to the modernist aesthetics of Uche Okeke, who illustrated Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to the Cold War-era criticism of Es’kia Mphahlele and performed poetry of Atukwei Okai, and to the chimeric category of modernity as figured in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu. At the end of the day, untethering modernism from the chimera of modernity may well enable more persuasive analyses of each. The chapter concludes with Yvonne Vera’s fiction to sketch how modernism emerges as a historical discourse and stylistic repertoire that some African writers continue to make part of practices of freedom.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

This chapter examines the drastic deterioration of US–Soviet relations from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It argues that the “cold war” was neither inevitable nor an objective reality. Instead, the shift from negotiation to confrontation was spurred by misconceptions, and the intense mutual enmity stemmed from subjective constructions as much as divergent fundamental interests. US leaders’ expectations that America’s unrivalled economic strength and monopoly on nuclear weapons would lead the USSR to go along with US plans for the postwar world collided with Soviet leaders’ determination not to be intimidated or to relinquish their domination of Eastern Europe. Journalists and propagandists on both sides worked to reshape public images of their former allies, stoking fears and inflaming ideological differences that had been set aside earlier. Key US officials, particularly George F. Kennan, exaggerated the US ability to shake the Communist system’s hold on the peoples of the USSR. through propaganda and covert action. Meanwhile, Soviet propagandists misleadingly depicted American media demonization of their country as part of US preparation for war against the USSR.

This chapter focuses on the history of human rights thinking mainly in the aftermath of the founding of the United Nations. It focuses primarily on international jurist Hersch Lauterpacht and secondarily on political scientist Arthur Holcombe. Whereas the 1948 UDHR has received much attention in human rights historiography, the chapter tells a story less told of how key intellectuals at the time grappled with international economic and social human rights. Little studied in the scholarly literature that have mainly focused on Lauterpacht’s legacy in inventing the legal concept of “crimes against humanity,” the chapter argues that his thinking on the international protection of human rights in 1950 was a nuanced, qualified, and careful, yet uncompromising defense of economic and social rights. Ultimately, while Lauterpacht’s defense of human rights mainly relied on the all-important negative principle of safeguarding individuals against the state – a protection from evil and harm that the contemporary order had blatantly failed to secure in the case of the Holocaust – it also entailed a more positive principle of facilitating human flourishing.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and its aftermath presents a challenge to systemic-level International Relations theories about the relationship between economic interdependence and war. Critiquing that literature and turning instead to the domestic level, the chapter shows how Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the relationship between economics and security – first developed in response to the crisis of nineteenth-century Western imperial coercion in East Asia, and later amplified in the context of Cold War East Asia – fused the Chinese and Japanese economies in the lead up to, during, and in the decades following the Second Sino-Japanese War. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates that economic interdependence between China and Japan has grown explosively during, after, and because of war, and that perceptions of insecurity have motivated closer economic ties between China and Japan.

This chapter is an overview and introduction to this book. This second volume of the project builds on the first, and we invite readers to consider them in tandem. With no self-evident historical cut points, we concluded East Asian in the World I around 1900. This second volume picks up from that point here and extends our analysis into the first fifteen years or so of the Cold War era. Part I extends the discussion of imperialism, the breakdown of the Sinitic order and the roles that two newcomers – Japan and the United States – played in the emerging regional order. Part II takes up the interwar period. We focus primary attention on Japan–China relations over a somewhat longer time frame. The US Open Door Notes and its fleeting liberal project in the wake of World War I held out the promise of a new order “after imperialism.” Yet this liberal project proved unable to forestall Soviet intervention in Chinese politics and the more fateful imperial ambitions of Japan. In Part III, we contribute to the literature – now vast – on the emergence of the Cold War order in Asia.

This chapter argues that the division of Korea has been wrongly attributed to Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead of being a result of the Cold War, the division itself was a cause of the Cold War. This chapter traces the history of US-Korean relations back to the nineteenth century, highlighting the growing interest of Americans in Korea which placed political pressure on US policymakers to support Korea in 1945. The chapter shows that American interest in Korea predated concerns over Soviet expansionism and was driven by factors such as the spread of Christianity in Korea, the desire to prevent Japanese domination in East Asia, and a sense of obligation stemming from a treaty signed in 1882. By reexamining the historical context of US involvement in Korea, the chapter challenges the prevailing Cold War narrative and offers a fresh perspective on the origins of the Korean conflict.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

This chapter examines the political economy of the hub-and-spokes alliance system in Asia during the Cold War. Focusing on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communists, it argues that state-building and development were major features of the United States’ efforts to maintain the security of its allies and partners. Because US officials exhibited a heightened concern about the risk of subversion, which could not be contained through military alliances alone, US strategy focused on addressing the perceived causes of its allies’ and partners’ vulnerability. In Northeast Asia, the United States played a significant role in the creation of the developmental state. In Southeast Asia, the United States proved to be less capable or willing to support state-led industrialization, choosing not to do so in the Philippines and failing to do so in South Vietnam. Throughout Asia, containment was as much about economics as it was about military strategy.

Chapter 5 excavates the debates leftist and socialist thinkers in Ghana had about the brand of socialism they were building and its relationship to religion, morality, Black freedom, and precolonial African history. The chapter argues that debates surrounding how to define and historicize socialism in the African context were not simply intellectual exercises and disputes over labeling rights but central to reclaiming Africans and African history within global history. It was a deliberate critique of white supremacist paradigms that situated ideas, histories, and societies emanating from Africa as operating outside the continuum and space of human history. By rethinking and (re)historicizing histories of exploitation and violence in Africa, socialists in Ghana were simultaneously decolonizing and rescuing socialism from itself. The chapter demonstrates that socialism then was more than a fashionable lexicon or moniker to curry favor with certain geopolitical groups. Instead, it also offered a tangible way, a theoretical analytic, for Africans to revisit, debate, and offer a critical appraisal of African historiography and societies and Africa’s place in world history. Not only were the socialist theorists in Ghana domesticating socialism, they were remaking it globally. They were Marxist-Socialist worldmakers.

This chapter focuses on the period beginning with the Democrat Party’s electoral triumph in 1954 and ending with its 1955 parliamentary group crisis, when the government nearly fell. In this period, economic conditions ceased to favor the party. A slump in global demand reduced Turkey’s access to foreign exchange, while the government’s expansionary monetary policies encouraged inflation. As economic challenges intensified, economic policy became as much of an electoral liability as a strength. Facing domestic criticism, Democrat-led governments limited the bounds of public dissent in schools, media, and political organizations. Prime Minister Menderes and his allies resisted calls from economic liberals in their own party (as well as the United States) to devalue the lira, increase taxes, and develop a long-term economic plan. The resulting tensions fractured the party, leading to the departure of many of its liberal members. These efforts to constrain institutions that provided checks and balances on the government constituted a policy of de-democratization. At the same time, the party’s leaders played international creditors off against one another and sought access to additional credit.