The archive of anticolonial political thought tends to throw up a cluster of tangled concepts that are not easily separable from each other: sovereignty, nationalism, independence, anti-imperialism, and democracy, to name a few commonly recurring ones. Of this repertoire, nationalism has long subsumed the rest within its amorphous conceptual shape. Its intuitive intellectual appeal derives ultimately from the compressed temporal horizon of colonial history, which allows for no clear isolation of the age of national self-discovery from that of the democratic revolution. The unfortunate result of the ubiquitous nationalization of the anticolonial age, especially for historians of political thought, has been the assimilation of the more intractable problems of democratic founding into the self-evident discursive horizon of nationalism.

The vast landscape of the empire both challenged and reconstituted the theoretical abstraction of popular sovereignty. Insofar as representative government was understood to require specific capacities and qualities among the people, the latter no longer remained an abstract norm but became a historical problem. This problem of the people did not necessarily address the vexing issue of common belonging—or the question of nationality. In the late nineteenth century, in India as much as in Europe, the developmental problem of peoplehood coexisted analytically with that of nationality. However, by the middle decades of the next century, as the fact of being a nation would seem to readily justify a people’s claim to sovereignty, the distinction between the nation and the people became increasingly blurred. The problem of peoplehood has certainly taken a particular shape in India, but the broader interplay between the national and the democratic is a global story. It is plausible that the nation operated as a synecdoche for popular sovereignty in Vietnam (as it did in India in the decades preceding independence), but we are unlikely to be able to do justice to the searching inquiries of anticolonial thought into the problem of democratic founding if the questions associated with the people are analytically absorbed into the category of the nation.

The other question that Pham poses in his review—whether the pursuit of self-rule was a greater motivation than that of “pride and dignity”—involves a similar problem. With the democratic legitimation of empires in the nineteenth century, the hierarchy between metropoles and colonies also became a hierarchy of peoples. The indignation of being deemed collectively unfit for sovereignty was no doubt profound, but the question is whether the search for dignity could be divorced from, or rendered politically unmediated by, the terms of the democratic age. What is remarkable about the broader history of anticolonialism is how the sovereignty of the people, rather than merely autochthonous forms of sovereignty, became central to the imagination of post-imperial futures. Which motivation came first—the ideal of self-rule or the pursuit of dignity—may be less important than the question of how these concepts of modern politics were remade in the entwined global landscapes of empire and democracy.

Finally, a brief note on the important point that Pham raises regarding the commonalities between Vietnamese and Indian political thought. In one sense, these convergences are to be expected, as both these traditions grappled with the global phenomenon of colonialism. The harder question, then, is what we should make of these parallels. We tend to take the shared thread of imperial connections as evidence of their global character, but perhaps the resonant themes that emerge from within each context and tradition of anticolonial thought offer a more capacious point of departure. This may also allow us to better appreciate the shared questions of political life across the colonial world without undermining the internal complexity of each tradition of political thought.