Description
This paper, based on my first monograph, examines the role of revolutionary internationalism in bringing about empires’ formal ends in the twentieth century. It shows how the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia sparked a global campaign for universal self-determination. In the wake of the First World War, the young Soviet state emerged as a fulcrum and signpost for imperial agitators across the world. Encouraged by the triumph of Lenin and his party, anticolonialists tied the eradication of imperialism to the revolutionary end of global socioeconomic hierarchies. From across the colonial world, anticolonial activists, thinkers, and campaigners came together during the interwar period to demand the end of formal imperialism across the world. I argue that Lenin’s political thought and the Communist International’s patronage provided a language for the universal case for self-determination and global decolonization. I show how this language of revolutionary internationalism travelled to the colonies, how it was interpreted by anti-colonial activists and how it mingled and related with a range of national, regional and workers’ political projects. Eventually this led to the formation of a global imagined community of the colonized committed to global decolonization as well as to international revolution.
