Self-Determination between World and Nation

Rejecting the rigid dichotomy between anticolonial nationalism and postnational solidarity, Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire argues that anticolonial leaders in the Caribbean and Africa did not outright reject the nation-state in their quest for self-determination. Instead, they internationalized the nation-state through the construction of new constituted powers that linked national sovereignties together in global juridical, political, and economic bodies. This essay explores a neglected question in this account: What were the constituent powers—the underlying sources of authority —that corresponded to these new global institutions? What, in other words, was the constituency of self-determination? Focusing on C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dahl shows how anticolonial constituencies are at once the referent and effect of claims for self-determination. For James and Du Bois, politically delineating the constituency of self-determination is central to the institutional project of securing nondomination against international hierarchies of empire and enslavement.

Patriots and Traitors

This chapter argues that the rhetoric of “patriotism” and “treason” that dominated nationalist politics evolved in the public poetry surrounding two seminal events in modern Iraqi political history, the Bakr Sidqi coup d’état of October 1936 and the Rashid ʿAli movement of April 1941. The chapter documents the popularity of each movement and shows how partisan support for military intervention was shaped by the shared logic of anticolonial nationalism. It documents the social and political consequences that socialist and nationalist poets faced and examines how political persecution inspired the new socialist-nationalist alliance of the “national front” politics that would dominate opposition politics in the 1950s. The chapter also shows how the relaxation of state censorship of the Left during the World War II allowed leftist poets to articulate a new political vision that fused anticolonial nationalism and socialist internationalism.

Empire’s h(a)unting grounds: Theorising violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan

This article thinks theory otherwise by searching for what is missing, silent and yet highly productive and constitutive of present realities. Looking at Afghanistan and Egypt, the authors show how imperial legacies and capitalist futurities are rendered invisible by dominant social theories, and why it matters that we think beyond an empiricist sociology in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the authors explore the ways in which portrayals of the country as retrogressive elide the colonial violence that has ensured the very backwardness that is now considered Afghanistan’s enduring characteristic. Specifically, using the example of the institutionalisation of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), they ask what alternative narratives might emerge if we take empire’s ghosts seriously on their own terms? In Egypt, the authors look at the ways in which Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anticolonial project continues to haunt present-day Egyptian political, social and economic life. In particular, they ask how anticolonial nationalism and its promises produced lingering after-effects, and how we can understand these through the figure of the ‘spectre’. The article asks what it would mean to produce social theory through (re)visiting sites of resistance, violence and contestation, proposing haunting as a means through which to understand and analyse political, social and economic change in the Middle East.

Lawyerly Luxury of Easel Painting

This chapter shifts focus from Cairo to Alexandria, away from the anticolonial nationalism of the former toward a deliberate cosmopolitanism observable in the latter. From the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1805 until Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in 1952, Alexandria was a veritable second capital to Cairo, and in many ways it was better connected with the Mediterranean world. The informal infrastructure of arts education and exhibition in Alexandria led to a subtler form of Egyptian modernism. Alexandrian artists visualized the multinational atmosphere of their coastal city rather than portraying an outward Egyptian nationalism. In the vibrant oil paintings of the aristocratic lawyer Mahmoud Said (1897–1966), I locate a visual code that echoes the transnationalism of the Mixed Courts, Said’s employer and a pioneering legal institution that adjudicated contracts between the international business communities in Alexandria. I employ this comparison to argue that late Ottoman representations of race repurpose Orientalist idioms to position the author as superior to both colonial powers and local subjects. Through this repurposing, Said visualizes multiple Mediterranean image traditions implicit in Egyptian modernism.

The Reality of Dependence

This chapter and the one that follows demonstrate how and why Britain’s strategy of energy independence failed. The initial threat came from anticolonial nationalism, initially in Iran and then in Mexico. Britain weathered both crises but emerged with a false sense of security. The second and most challenging threat came from the fascist states, particularly Italy following the Abyssinian crisis of 1935–6. Although Italian hostility would jeopardize Britain’s plan to achieve energy independence by exploiting the Middle East, British officials paid little or no attention to the Italian threat to their energy lifelines when considering whether to support League of Nations sanctions against Italy for its aggression against Abyssinia. Compounding the Italian problem was U.S. isolationism via the Neutrality Acts, which complicated British logistics by forcing Britain to import oil from the United States on British tankers and pay for it using scarce foreign exchange.

Anticolonial Nationalism From Imagined Communities to Colonial Conflict

Nationalism in the modern world began in European metropoles but spread throughout the world system in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While many studies have explored the former, this essay systematically examines the latter. Based upon an original database of 124 cases, we test multiple theories that might account for the origins and spread of anticolonial nationalism. We adjudicate between cultural-cognitive approaches emphasizing the discursive bases for national imaginings on the one hand and, on the other, theories that emphasize political-economic dynamics and elite conflict. Our time-series regression analysis suggests that while cultural-cognitive approaches best account for the initial wave of anticolonial nationalism, from 1700 to 1878, theories stressing political-economic dynamics and elite conflict explain anticolonial nationalism in the later wave, from 1879 to 1990. The analysis suggests that theories of nationalism need to be attentive to the historical specificity of their claims.

A Political Theory of Decolonization

This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with a racialized international order, anticolonial nationalists turned to projects of worldmaking that would secure the conditions of international nondomination. It argues that attention to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism. A postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.

Colonial Intimacies and Counterinsurgency

This chapter reconsiders the origins of the Vietnam War by foregrounding U.S.-Philippine colonial history. It discusses the U.S. counterinsurgency in South Vietnam in 1954–1956 that mobilized the intimacies of Filipino doctors, nurses, and veterans to help win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. Their military, affective, and ideological labor, I argue, was crucial to the U.S. effort to depict counterinsurgency as a benevolent enterprise, antithetical to a colonial race war. At the same time, these efforts could not contain the rising tide of anticolonial nationalism in the Philippines and South Vietnam that emerged by the end of the 1950s.