Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination is broad in scope and rich in implications that resonate across several fields within political science—political theory, international relations, and comparative politics—as well as scholarship on nationalism and racial and ethnic politics. Her object of inquiry is black internationalist organizations and political actors in the period spanning the interwar years between World Wars I and II and in the era of anticolonial, anti-imperialist nationalism and pan-Africanism after World War II. The central claim of this book is that political actors such as George Padmore of Trinidad, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Michael Manley of Jamaica, Julius Nyerere of Kenya, and Eric Williams of Trinidad sought individually and sometimes in concert to implement their own vision of a more just, peaceful, and equitable geopolitical and economic order.

Rather than accepting the terms of what she calls unequal integration into the nation-state system (p. 25) Getachew asserts early on that black world-making in the era of decolonization and Third World nationalism “took a distinct trajectory in the Black Atlantic, where imagining the world after empire drew on an anticolonial critique that began from the foundational role of New World slavery in the making of the modern world and traced the ways its legacies were constitutive of racial hierarchy in the international order” (p. 5). Fundamental to remaking the world order was the transformation of the idea of self-determination from a principle applied only to peoples who were already inscribed into the upper echelon of Western racial hierarchy into the right of all peoples to self-determination regardless of creed, so-called race, or color. The key conceptual and theoretical innovations in this period related to the rejection of the top-down Wilsonian principle of self-determination within a racialized Westphalian order, which combined to privilege the state as the primary unit of political recognition and community while frustrating and repressing the political aspirations of the Asian, African, Caribbean, and New World peoples and nation-states in the post–World War II era.

As Getachew shows, one example of the West’s enactment of a racialized principle of self-determination was its silence and tacit support of the second Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The League of Nations’ inaction provided enough evidence to these actors that black and brown populations did not have the same access to the principle of self-determination and inviolable sovereignty as those populations deemed Aryan, white, or Euro-descended. The endurance of Jim Crow in the United States, apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and colonialism and racial rule in the colonies of the European powers in Africa, Asia and the Americas all demonstrated the ways in which racial states (as both a mode of being and a coercive apparatus) functioned in both the domestic and foreign spheres of polities committed to white supremacy.

In chapter 1, Getachew lays out a political theory of decolonization that captures the perspectives of political actors both renowned and obscure in their call for a more radical implementation of the right of self-determination. Chapter 2 provides an account of the reaction of Western powers and their advocates to this potential shift in self-determination’s definition and application. Some of this ground is covered in Mark Mazower’s account of the role of Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts in using the League of Nations to maintain the West’s racial hegemony (No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, 2009) and Susan Pedersen’s recent scholarship on the League of Nations and the mandates system imposed by Allied Powers after World War I (The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, 2015). Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the actual efforts in the Anglophone Caribbean and Africa to implement the visions of shared sovereignty and a borderless regional community. On the African continent, Nnamdi Azikiwe, an important and neglected figure in the study of transnational black politics from the Eastern Region of Nigeria, worried over the relative costs and benefits of a regional federation, on the one hand, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana advocated the centralization of governmental authority in a United States of Africa, on the other.

There were competing visions of African and Caribbean independence and, not surprisingly, competing versions of pan-Africanism emerging from Cairo, Brazzaville, Kingston, and Accra, among other places, all set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Nonetheless, many leftist pan-Africanists and the more territorially delimited nationalist actors did not view the nation-state and sovereignty as ends in themselves but rather as means to attain greater unqualified freedom and liberation. In this sense, multinational pan-Africanism resembled earlier “pan” movements in Europe premised on language, presumed race, and territory during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In one of the many subtle moments in this book, Professor Getachew provides insight into the modular and conceptual complications of these political actors and the sovereign nation-states they led or sought to lead. Calls for Caribbean and African multinational federations were largely forged in response to exogenous factors—namely, Western imperialism with its penchant for instigating coups and undermining political stability—while largely ignoring the ethnic, presumed racial, and religious differences internal to these new nation-states. Ghana, Nigeria, and Trinidad are obvious examples.

Ultimately, Nkrumah, Eric Williams, and other advocates of multistate federation relied on the federalist model of the United States and the Westminster model of parliamentary politics in Britain as sources of governmental inspiration, thereby precluding considerations of other models of governance that operated outside the Western and Anglophone political imagination. Getachew makes a key distinction in her analysis between a federated nation-state and a regional confederation: “In their preoccupation with the external postcolonial predicament, their scant attention to internal pluralism and their turn to the United States as a model, Nkrumah and Williams fashioned postcolonial federation as a structure of centralizing and augmenting political authority” (p. 121).

Chapter 5 and the epilogue, “The Fall of Self-Determination,” dissect the second counter-reaction by Western powers (most notably the United States) to advocates for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that called for, among other demands, increased economic autonomy to accompany the hard-earned political autonomy in the so-called developing world. By the 1970s, as Getachew shows, the increased numbers of representatives from what is now referred to as the Global South intensified debate inside and outside the UN. Coups, countercoups, genocide, and corruption in various regions of the African continent served as proof to Western observers, particularly liberal antagonists at the UN such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of the inability of political leadership in the new nation-states to rule and ultimately determine themselves. Rather than view the implosion of regimes and nation-states in the aftermath of decolonization as examples of the failures of the newly minted African and Caribbean nation-states to competently and fairly exercise sovereignty and national and foreign policy, Getachew ends by noting that “the fall of self-determination marks not only a dead end but also a staging ground for reimaging that future” (p. 251) and the birth of a new language of politics.

There are two refreshing aspects of Professor Getachew’s approach rarely encountered in the examinations of these topics in the social sciences. First, her focus on political economy and geopolitics—namely, the nature of the geopolitical and economic stakes associated with black transnational efforts to overturn several centuries of extractive economies and political misrule—is a welcome counterpoint to the bulk of scholarship on black internationalism, which has tended to focus on matters of identity, literature, culture, and representation. Her cross-national scope ultimately decenters the nation-state and enables readers to trace the dynamic relationships between actors, institutions, and the ideas that motivated them across several regional and national boundaries.

Second, the book captures much of the scale, political complexity, and ideological diversity among the disparate array of political actors attempting to forge a single, unifying program of political and economic action for the new nation-states. Specialists in contemporary Western political theory should be able to identify family resemblances between the forms of political imagination on offer here and the major political and intellectual traditions of the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Marxism, Fabian socialism, dependency, and modernization theory, along with nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism, all make their appearances either methodologically or as a trajectory of liberation. Although informed by these intellectual and political traditions, Getachew demonstrates how the actors and organizations examined in this book adapted these traditions to address the combination of racial slavery, ethnonational and racial hierarchy, and capitalism in ways that no single tradition had fully addressed in the epoch under examination.

In a work of scholarship this layered and textured, there are a range of questions, some answered, some not, that emerge from the text. For brevity I will highlight two. First, the epilogue all too briefly provides an assessment of efforts by transnational black political actors to implement—not just reimagine—a more egalitarian and just geopolitical order. Implementation proved much more difficult than political imagination. To what extent was the “dead end” of pan-Caribbean and pan-African federation projects not peculiar to black nationalism and internationalism, but instead was symptomatic of the limits of non-Western political projects emphasizing sovereignty, self-determination, or shared sovereignty in the latter half of the twentieth century in the face of the enormous pressures exerted by Western powers and institutions? There are echoes here of David Scott’s Refashioning Futures and Conscripts of Modernity, which could be taken up in some future project.

Second, the movement of nonaligned nations tried to navigate a space between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in which proxy conflicts between political actors and governments siding with one or the other pole greatly affected the outcomes and stability of movements toward national independence. How similar or dissimilar are the black transnational political movements to Bandung and Colombo or even to earlier movements attempting to create a “third way” of political life in the nation-state system?

The period of decolonization attracted some of the most creative minds in the social sciences (including history) from the 1960s through the early 1980s: Immanuel Wallerstein (Africa: the Politics of Unity, 1967), Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973), Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961), and Walter Rodney (Guyana: The Making of a Labour Force, 1981). The command of such a diverse range of regional literatures, primary resources, and political theory on display in Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire makes it an extraordinary scholarly achievement for someone at such an early stage in her career. This is the kind of book that should invigorate research streams on black internationalism and political thought in political theory, as well as in other fields of the discipline.