Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization

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In the wake of colonial and racial exploitation, political leaders, technocrats, activists, and workers across the Third World turned to socialism to offer a new vision of post-colonial development. Against a backdrop of decolonization, white supremacy, and the Cold War, they fostered anti-colonial solidarity and created cooperative frameworks for self-reliance.

In following these actors, the contributions to this volume show that development was not merely exported from North to South: people across the Global South collaborated with each other while engaging with a diversity of socialist ideas, from European Fabianism and Marxism to tailored African, Asian, and Latin American models. They led debates on race and inequality from the 1920s and 1930s and spearheaded local, regional, and internationalist efforts to re-envision modernity by the 1950s and 1960s.

By examining the limitations and legacies of socialist development initiatives in and across the Third World, Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World offers new perspectives on the intertwined histories of socialism, development, and international cooperation, with lessons for both past and present.


The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI and Rice University, USA.

Reviews

Lewis and Osei-Opare's new edited volume is a field-changing book that shifts our view of the global history of development. It definitively grounds the history of development in the global south and irreversibly links it to stories of socialism, internationalism and regionalism that will change scholars' and students' understanding of the 20th century. * Alden Young, Associate Professor of History and Global Affairs, Yale University, USA *
Su Lin Lewis and Nana Osei-Opare have brought together a great team of scholars to explore the entanglements of socialism and development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the early 1900s to the 1980s. The volume looks at actors from the Third World who constructed and reconstructed socialist conceptions of development autonomously from the socialist world and from leftists in Europe and North America. The books remarkable geographical and intellectual breadth should be an example for all historians interested in socialism and development. * Alessandro Iandolo, Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet History, UCL, UK *

Author Bio

Su Lin Lewis is Professor in Global and Asian History at University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (2016) and co-editor, with Carolien Stolte, of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (2022).

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor of African & Cold War History at Rice University, USA. He has published articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of West African History. He has been an NEH/Ford Foundation fellow at the Schomburg Center
and an Andrew Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, USA.