Decolonization and the Cold War Negotiating Independence

The Cold War and decolonization transformed the twentieth century world. This volume brings together an international line-up of experts to explore how these transformations took place and expand on some of the latest threads of analysis to help inform our understanding of the links between the two phenomena.

The book begins by exploring ideas of modernity, development, and economics as Cold War and postcolonial projects and goes on to look at the era's intellectual history and investigate how emerging forms of identity fought for supremacy. Finally, the contributors question ideas of sovereignty and state control that move beyond traditional Cold War narratives.

Decolonization and the Cold War emphasizes new approaches by drawing on various methodologies, regions, themes, and interdisciplinary work, to shed new light on two topics that are increasingly important to historians of the twentieth century.

Leslie James is Lecturer in World History at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Elizabeth Leake is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Preface Odd Arne Westad (LSE, UK)
Introduction Leslie James (University of Cambridge, UK) & Elisabeth Leake (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Part 1: Developing the Nation: Economics, Modernity, and the ‘State-project’
1. Postcolonial Citizens or Developmental Subjects? Agriculture, Nation-
Building, and the Peasantry in the Mekong Delta in the Long 1970s, Simon Toner (LSE, UK)
2. Grains and Geopolitics: American Grain, Soviet Expertise, and Cold War
Agricultural Contestations in Nehruvian India, Benjamin Siegel (Harvard University, USA)
3. From Extraterritoriality to Special Economic Zones: Anti-imperialism
and Foreign Investment, 1950-1990, Christopher Miller (Yale University, USA)
4. Export Processing Zones and the Making of the Cold War Geography of
Capitalism, Patrick Neveling (Historical Institute, Berne, Germany)
Part 2: Intellectual Imaginings of the Self, Solidarity, and Anti-racism
S. Moscow’s New Negro, and Vice Versa: Interwar Circulations of Black
Anticolonialism in the Context of the Global Cold War, Ani Mukherji (Nazarbayev University, Republic of Kazakhstan)
6. Cold War China-Africa: Maoism and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Duncan McEachern Yoon (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
7. Self-determination and Determination of the Self: ‘the West’, Communism,
and Colonialism in the Writings of Charles Malik, 1946-1963, Andrew Arsan (University of Cambridge, USA)
Part 3: Contested Image and Identification in the Politics of the Cold War and Decolonization
8. Tyranny of the Elders: Mobilizing Youth and Crafting Generational Politics
in Cold War Era Kenya, 1945-1978, Paul Ocobock (University of Notre Dame, USA)
9. The Malayan Communist Party, the Malayan Chinese Association, and
Chinese Political Participation during the Cold War (1920s–1950s), Anna Belogurova (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
10. Bobodhzan Gafurov: A Muslim Soviet Orientalist Appropriating the Russian
Imperial Heritage, Hanna Jansen (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Part 4: (Re)conceiving the World Order: Thinking Big and Small through Sovereignty and
Statehood
11. Historicizing the African Moment, Ryan Irwin (State University of New York, USA)
12. Malcolm X in France, 1964-1965: Anti-Imperialism and the Politics of
Border Control in the Cold War era, Moshik Temkin (Harvard University, USA)
13. Tinker Tailor, Soldier Subversive: India, Pakistan, and the Cultural Politics of
Cold War Intelligence, Paul McGarr (University of Nottingham, UK)
14. Grounding Ideologies: Archaeology, Anti-Colonialism, and the Cold
War in Egypt, William Carruthers (University of Cambridge, UK)
15. Sovereignty Deferred? British Intervention in India-Pakistan Disputes, 1947-
1963, Daniel Haines (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
16. British Colonial Violence in the era of the Cold War, Caroline Elkins (Harvard University, UK)
Conclusion, Elisabeth Leake (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) & Leslie James (University of Cambridge, UK)
Bibliography
Index