Book Review: Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

Getachew’s compelling book seeks to reframe how we understand the politics of decolonisation in the 20th century. By exploring the ideas and political initiatives of key ‘Anglophone Black Atlantic intellectuals’ as they struggled with the dilemmas of postcolonial sovereignty – from Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to Michael Manley in Jamaica – Getachew demonstrates that they sought not just to affirm the national sphere against foreign rule, but to build a new global order (p. 5). More than nationalists, they were ‘worldmakers’.

The target of Getachew’s critique is a perverse view that credits Europe with the beginning and end of Empire. Central to this perspective is an understanding of Empire as the ‘alien rule’ of the colony by the metropole and the consequent exclusion of the former from international society. Those colonised peoples who cast off the yoke of imperialism were, according to this view, embracing the Westphalian national state model and seeking to enter international society at last. Decolonisation is thus read as evidence of the universalisation of European values.

In contrast, Getachew shows that key Black Atlantic leaders understood Empire not as the exclusion of the colonised from international society, but as their ‘unequal integration’ into it. Colonies were internal to international society, yet this society was a hierarchical space based upon what WEB Du Bois called a ‘global color line’, whereby non-White, colonised nations were given legal recognition but burdened with ‘onerous obligations’ and ‘conditional rights’ (p. 18). If the imperial problem was not just alien rule and exclusion but unequal integration, then the characters of Getachew’s book reasoned that an embrace of nationalism alone would be insufficient to break with Empire. International society itself must be transformed. The bulk of the book is dedicated to fleshing out the three main strategies of anti-imperial worldmaking that emanated from the Black Atlantic, through an extremely thorough exploration of archival sources in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe.

Getachew’s historical exposition begins in the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, as anticolonial rebellion broke out across the colonised world. In this context, Woodrow Wilson, on behalf of the Allied nations, sought to ‘contain the threat of revolution’ by appropriating the language of ‘self-determination in the service of Empire’ (pp. 39–40). The vehicle for this counterrevolution was the League of Nations, which Getachew interprets as a project of unequal integration. The League rearticulated imperialism by burdening colonised members with unequal obligations. This was shockingly illustrated with the case of Ethiopia, which the League admitted as a member, but saddled with invasive ‘international oversight’ requirements due to the existence of unfree labour in that country. Italy would later deploy the League’s language to frame its brutal invasion of Ethiopia as a humanitarian intervention.

The Italo-Ethiopian War and the League’s failure to adequately respond sparked an evolution in the thought and activism of Black Atlantic intellectuals. These scholars put slavery at the heart of their understanding of the imperial international order. An expanded definition of enslavement was employed to signify both transatlantic chattel slavery and the enduring exploitation of the colonised working class by imperial powers. To rectify this historical and ongoing injustice, these intellectuals sought to use the United Nations (UN) to enshrine the right to self-determination, not as an embrace of Westphalian sovereignty, but as a step in the direction of securing a new global order based on non-domination. This endeavour achieved victory with the UN’s 1960 passing of resolution 1514, which declared colonialism a violation of fundamental human rights.

If formalising the right to self-determination was the first Black Atlantic worldmaking strategy, the second was the attempt to create regional federations. After independence, postcolonial nations in the Caribbean and Africa faced the fact that they remained ‘small economies tethered to metropolitan and global markets’ (p. 108). To overcome this dependence, they endeavoured to forge federations that would provide both the scale at which a self-reliant regional economy could flourish and a centralised political authority that could rectify internal inequalities. This was pursued through the attempted creation of the Federation of the Eastern Caribbean and the Union of African States. While Getachew successfully demonstrates that such worldmaking initiatives were not mimicking notions of Westphalian sovereignty, they troublingly drew inspiration from the United States’ federal system and the European Economic Community. Regardless, these federations failed to take off due to internal disagreements over political centralisation and internal heterogeneity.

The final worldmaking strategy was the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Confronted by declining terms of trade in primary commodities that devastated many postcolonial economies, combined with the failure of federalist initiatives, Black Atlantic leaders in the 1960s–1970s put forward a novel diagnosis and prescription. They identified postcolonial nations as the ‘workers of the world’ and demanded the redistribution of wealth from the Global North to its producers in the South. The NIEO, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974, would achieve these ends by regulating the operations of multinational corporations on postcolonial territories and allowing primary commodity producers to form alliances to secure fairer prices, among other things. Yet, this strategy too failed, due to the disastrous effects of the 1973 oil shock on many Global South countries, opposition by powerful states, and an attack by neoliberal intellectuals – Slobodian (2018) explores this last factor in depth. In addition, as Getachew acknowledges, the NIEO glossed over class divisions within postcolonial nations and overestimated the capacity of the UN to serve as an instrument to effect global redistribution.

Worldmaking, then, ends on a melancholic note. However, Getachew finds much in these emancipatory projects to inspire contemporary struggles. We may draw from the spirit of these initiatives, she argues to construct a ‘postcolonial cosmopolitanism’ that aims to dismantle international hierarchy and the persistent legacy of imperial domination. This will likely be the least convincing part of this book for this journal’s readers, as Getachew fails to engage directly with the looming question of capitalism, preferring to refer to its symptoms (‘the outsized power of private corporations’, etc.) and tending to collapse these into the concept of Empire (p. 32). Yet, it is doubtful whether many of the greatest catastrophes facing the Global South today – climate change, premature deindustrialisation, secular stagnation and so on – can be explained by international hierarchy alone. Instead, these disasters are propelled by the binding competitive pressures that mark capitalist domination – a form of domination not ultimately grounded in ‘unevenly distributed rights, obligations, and burdens’ between nations (p. 33), but in the formal equality and illusory freedom of market exchange (Marx, 1976: 280).

Despite this obscurity regarding the intersection between imperial and capitalist domination, this is a powerful and persuasive book that successfully casts 20th-century decolonisation in a new light.