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.

European Marxism diffused widely to other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting support from many thinkers whose contributions to Marxist thought about the international dimensions of political economy deserve to be better known. This chapter focuses on some innovative and important Marxist thinkers from Trinidad (C.L.R. James, George Padmore), China (Mao Zedong), India (Manabendra Nath Roy), Indonesia (Tan Malaka), Japan (Kōtoku Shūsui, Takahashi Kamekichi, Sano Manabu), and Peru (José Carlos Mariátegui). These thinkers were important not just because they became well known in their local contexts and, in some cases, in wider international Marxist networks. They also sometimes developed ideas that predated better-known European ones and they often called attention to issues that received less attention in European Marxist debates, such as racial discrimination, Eurocentrism, the relationship between Marxism and Islam, the nature and impact of imperialism outside of Europe, and revolutionary politics in places subject to imperialism.