This book is a study of non-alignment as it was conceptualised and developed in the context of modern India, particularly in the period immediately after independence. The main architect of India’s external affairs at this juncture was the first Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book is restricted to events that took place during the time he held office, between the years 1947 and 1964. In particular, this study aims to study non-alignment as an approach to security and as an approach to politics. There are three themes along which the book proceeds. First, the book contends that non-alignment is understood vaguely and inaccurately, leading to protracted debates about its past relevance and continued significance; secondly, that non-alignment frames politics innovatively; and thirdly, that this is an immensely precarious wager that encounters many points of resistance, which are not adequately engaged with in a sustained theoretical manner in literature on non-alignment. Thus, the book will argue that there has yet to emerge a serious critique of the political nature of non-alignment.

Before the summer of 1914, there were seemingly few indicators that British colonies would be represented on the international stage as nominally separate entities, as they would be five years later. Chapter One charts the changing patterns of British rule that constituted the ‘Third British Empire’, and how new patterns of imperial governance were beginning to emerge in the newly formed Dominion of South Africa, that would put the Empire on a trajectory towards separating its international personality. This chapter will also examine how India, a colony with comparatively fewer of the self-governing institutions of the Dominions, would also accede to the Imperial Conference alongside the Dominions, a significant step towards membership of the embryonic League. Finally, this chapter will assess to what extent the participation of colonies at international organisations and conferences was normalised, and what precedents were employed to justify the presence of colonies after the War ended.

Drawing on primary sources and moving beyond traditional diplomatic history, this chapter approaches the Belgrade Conference of non-aligned states in an original way, informed by methods of cultural history of diplomacy. A black and white photograph showing presidents Sukarno of Indonesia and Tito of Yugoslavia, hosts of the 1955 Bandung and 1961 Belgrade Conference (events that defined the non-alignment), respectively, serves as a departure point for analysis. Essentially, the chapter asks, What can the image, created by a Yugoslav news agency photographer on the eve of the conference, tell us beyond ‘obvious’? The photograph shows the two statesmen in an open-roofed car in front of the Yugoslav parliament building, the conference venue; the motorcade is secured by uniformed guards on motorcycles, and is observed by citizens, standing still in the background. It allows us to imagine the conference as a piece of diplomatic theatre, with actors, stage, audience, and security. And it urges us to zoom out further to explore the context in which the event captured by the photographic lens took place.

The history of Sino-American relations since the eighteenth century has been powerfully influenced by a series of ad hoc, one might say grassroots American actors, often only loosely bound to the United States government. This insight is the central theme running through this introductory chapter which seeks to offer a new window onto Sino-American relations. While these ad hoc relationships had a powerful influence on US-China relations since the earliest interactions between the two countries, World War II marked a turning point as these ad hoc actors were subsumed into a larger state-centered system of engagement.

Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

Standard narratives of the American war in Vietnam contend that the US Army squandered its chances of victory because of misguided strategy. Such works claim that once President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed American ground combat troops to South Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, the US military commander in Vietnam, pursued an ill-advised strategy of attrition. Worse, these narratives continue, the general implemented this strategy despite being presented with a clearly better alternative from US Marine Corps commanders operating in the northern provinces of South Vietnam. Such conventional wisdom, however, presents a flawed understanding of American strategy under Westmoreland, who never subscribed to an “either–or” approach to confronting the political-military threat inside South Vietnam. At no point did Westmoreland concentrate solely on conventional battle at the expense of counterinsurgency. Likewise, the general never believed local civic action or pacification programs to be a panacea. In reality, American strategy from 1964 to 1968 rested on a belief that South Vietnam was facing a dual threat – both conventional and unconventional – that required a similarly comprehensive response. By reexamining American strategy under Westmoreland, one finds no “missed opportunity,” a conclusion that raises important questions about the limits of American military power abroad in the mid-1960s.

The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war’s end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos. After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migration changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended.

The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

Examines the growth of the early US consular system, why individuals became consuls, and how they were appointed.

This chapter considers the process by which an intelligence transfer of power took place in British India. This event ran parallel to, but was conducted in a very different manner and resulted in quite different outcomes from, the political decolonisation of South Asia. The chapter examines plans hatched by the British Security and Secret Intelligence Services to maintain an intelligence foothold in the subcontinent and unpicks how such schemes fostered a bitter and protracted struggle for bureaucratic power and influence between MI5 and MI6. It probes debates held at the highest levels within the British government over whether covert action should be undertaken in independent India, by whom, and to what purpose. It interrogates the efficacy of Indian agency in negotiating the security challenges confronted by an under-resourced post-colonial state, and that counterparts in the West (and the Eastern bloc) saw as a valuable Cold War prize.

This chapter discusses the role and nature of the historian’s work, the professionalization of the craft, and why it is essential to a free society. Influenced by the German historian Leopold von Ranke, the American Historical Association founded in 1884 embraced the scientific ideal and a mission of achieving objective truth about the past. The possibility of objectivity, however, was questioned after World War I by Carl Becker and Charles Beard and ultimately by nearly all historians. The most extreme critique came from postmodernists who argued that historians are not uncovering the past, they are inventing it. History is a form of literature. Since the 1960s, the historical discipline has acquired many other new approaches besides postmodernism. Increasingly, it has focused its attention on studying groups in society estranged from power and influence, individuals and groups previously neglected and oftentimes voiceless. New questions of culture, mentalité, and subalternity have drawn historians’ attention. Among the new categories, gender was the most prominently pursued.

The collapse of the Japanese Empire in the aftermath of World War II left a power vacuum in maritime East Asia. The United States recognised this opportunity to shape the emerging Cold War and the geopolitical landscape of the western Pacific rim. Despite the lack of consensus among decision-makers in Washington, on-site naval commanders could effectively influence the US strategy in the region. The US Navy selected Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China as a local partner to assume responsibility for guarding the western Pacific rim. This decision was based not only on Chiang’s good relationship with the US Navy, which allowed it to enter China’s territorial waters and ports, but also on the belief that a pro-US Chinese navy could help secure America’s naval dominance in the region. With US military and financial support, Chiang successfully rebuilt a modern Nationalist navy. However, the ongoing power struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists made the situation unpredictable in maritime East Asia.

In the moments before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, nationalists in what is now the Indian state of Nagaland declared their own region independent. The Naga claim is key to understanding postcolonial state-making in the decolonizing world because it represented the limits of what could be an independent state in an era of seeming nationalist possibility. A Nagaland articulated the boundaries of national self-determination by demonstrating the practical restrictions of an international system in which national self-determination remained an aspiration rather than a right. Postcolonial state-making foreclosed the prospect of international recognition for many nationalist claimants, yet sovereignties that can only be seen outside the lens of their ruling state government persisted, even as they held conflicting claims of statehood.

The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 delineated territorial settlements, coronated several newly independent monarchs and resulted in an official declaration on the abolition of the slave trade, but it did not treat the issue of piracy. This paradox is the key concern of this chapter. Vienna’s Final Acts were the end product of these talks, and though they did not mention ‘Barbary piracy’, their conclusion would nevertheless have a great impact on the international treatment of this newly perceived threat to security. The years 1814–1815 were an important turning point because they initiated a period of transition. The congress created an international context in which North African corsairing could be reconceived as a threat to security. This new perception of threat hinged upon misconceptions of the supposed fanaticism and irrationality that allegedly characterised North African privateering. It also disregarded the long history of diplomatic and commercial contact between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

Guano imperialism marked the first major commodity rush into the Pacific. Between 1850 and 1900, the United States claimed over a hundred islands across the world through the Guano Act of 1856. Why did the United States develop a guano empire? Most scholarly attention focuses on state-led explanations for guano imperialism, like the influence of American farmers and naval lobbies on Congress. By contrast, this chapter presents evidence that entrepreneurs led the way into the Pacific. A sudden rise in guano prices led US entrepreneurs to search for guano and threats to their interests from foreign competitors led them to search for government protection.

This chapter provides an entrepreneur-led theory of American early Pacific imperialism. The central argument is that changes in commodity prices provided incentives for American imperialism. It outlines how price changes encourage imperialism through a sequence of three mechanisms: price, threat, and lobbying. The price mechanism posits that commodity rushes led American entrepreneurs to relocate overseas. The threat mechanism describes the turn from entrepreneurs into lobbyists. The lobbying mechanism describes how entrepreneurs built support for their imperial schemes. In making these arguments, the chapter highlights the structural differences between American and European empires in the mid-nineteenth century by drawing comparisons to economic theories developed to explain European empires.

This chapter offers a brief overview of US relations with the Korean Peninsula from the late nineteenth century through the Trump administration to provide a historical framework for understanding the chapters that follow. While laying out this framework, this chapter also advances the argument that the policies of the Trump administration toward the Korean Peninsula were not the dramatic breaks with the past the administration often claimed they were. President Trump was hardly the first American president to be skeptical of the US alliance with the ROK and attempt to change it – though the bluntness with which he did this was unprecedented. While Trump’s three meetings with Kim Jong-un could rightly be called historic in a narrow sense, there is ample evidence they were just the latest installment of what some scholars refer to as “entrepreneurial diplomacy” with the DPRK. In the broader historical context of US relations with the Korean Peninsula, President Trump’s policies toward the ROK and the DPRK appear more as variations on a theme than dramatic breaks with the past.

Chapter 1 begins with a brief sketch of the development of the domestic nuclear energy sector in South Africa (1950–1977). It illuminates how scientists were able to tap into sources of cooperation and funding to advance the nuclear energy industry during the 1960s and 1970s, following the Ploughshare Programme initiated under US President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative. Part of this chapter is devoted to the cooperation between South African, French and German firms. Recently obtained primary sources show how these collaborations enabled apartheid scientists to realize their vision of erecting the nuclear infrastructure to produce enriched uranium locally, ultimately feeding their nuclear weapons. I show how internal South African opposition to subjecting its nascent nuclear infrastructure to the emerging global non-proliferation regime manifested itself during that period, with repercussions for the coming decades.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”