Comrades against Imperialism
Comrades against Imperialism
In this book Michele L. Louro compiles the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded Jawaharlal Nehru's political vision for India and the wider world. Set between the world wars, this book argues that Nehru's politics reached beyond India in order to fulfill a greater vision of internationalism that was rooted in his experiences with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist mobilizations in the 1920s and 1930s. Using archival sources from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, the author offers a compelling study of Nehru's internationalism as well as contributes a necessary interwar history of institutions and networks that were confronting imperialist, capitalist, and fascist hegemony in the twentieth-century world. Louro provides readers with a global intellectual history of anti-imperialism and Nehru's appropriation of it, while also establishing a history of a typically overlooked period.
- Utilizes archival sources from India, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia to create a global, interpretative framework of the often overlooked interwar years
- Rethinks the histories of Nehru and India to look beyond locality, province, and nation in order to consider the solidarity across the Global South
- Offers Nehru's appropriation on anti-imperialism as a case study in the new field of global intellectual history
Reviews & endorsements
'Comrades against Imperialism takes the well-known figure of Jawaharlal Nehru and re-interprets his central role in Indian nationalist history by demonstrating the dramatic ways internationalism shaped his world view, vision, and endeavors. Through Nehru, the book convincingly shows that nationalism and internationalism were not necessarily oppositional forces in the interwar period, and that the struggle against imperialism allowed space for ideological flexibility between communism, socialism, and nationalism. Comrades provides an invaluable contribution to South Asian, international, interwar, and world history.' Heather Streets-Salter, Northeastern University, Massachusetts
'Comrades against Imperialism rescues the history of interwar internationalism from retrospective appropriation by party-line communists and from retrospective denunciation by anti-communists and Cold Warriors. It is a timely reminder both of the centrality of internationalism to those times and of the deep connections that once existed among protagonists of civil, political and economic liberties worldwide.' Benjamin Zachariah, University of Trier, Germany
'Michele L. Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism is an exceptionally well-researched, well-written and well-argued attempt to tell the history of Nehru’s experience of the interwar world 'on its own terms'.' Alexander E. Davis, Asian Studies Review
Product details
August 2019Paperback
9781108410403
325 pages
230 × 153 × 20 mm
0.5kg
7 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Part I. Mobilizing against Empire, 1927–1930:
- 1. A 'real' league of nations: the Brussels Congress, 1927
- 2. The making of the league against imperialism, 1927
- 3. Internationalizing nationalism in India, 1928–1929
- 4. Anti-imperialism in crisis, 1929–1930
- Part II. Afterlives of Anti-Imperialism:
- 5. Nehru's anti-imperialism after 1930
- 6. Peace and war, 1936–1939
- 7. The war and the fate of anti-imperialism.
