AT MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 6, 1957, Kwame Nkrumah took to the stage in Accra to announce the independence of the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana in homage to the ancient West African empire. In his speech, Nkrumah declared that 1957 marked the birth of a new Africa “ready to fight its own battles and show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” In his view, the decade-long struggle for Ghanaian independence was only one battle in the broader struggle for African emancipation. “Our independence,” Nkrumah famously maintained, “is meaningless unless it is linked up with...

JUST THREE YEARS after Ghana’s achievement of independence, seventeen African states joined the United Nations, marking the high point of decolonization in the Black Atlantic world. In what would come to be called the year of Africa, the newly constituted African bloc in the United Nations successfully led the effort to secure passage of General Assembly resolution 1514, titled “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” The declaration described foreign rule as a violation of human rights, reiterated the right to self-determination, and called for the immediate end of all forms of colonial rule.¹ Resolution 1514...

ON APRIL 4, 1917, on returning to Petrograd from his exile in Switzerland, Vladimir Lenin delivered his famous April theses. Drawing from his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published that same year, the first thesis denounced World War I as “an imperialist war” driven by capitalist interests and envisioned a peace that would bring an end to both empire and capitalism. These theses thus demanded that power pass to the proletariat and peasantry, that peace be concluded on the basis of no annexations, and that “a complete break be affected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.”¹ Anticipating the...

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of anticolonial critics and nationalists, 1945 was eerily reminiscent of 1919. The end of the Second World War heralded renewed commitments to internationalism. As with the Wilsonian moment, calls for a new international organization were couched in the language of universal ideals. The 1941 Atlantic Charter, which articulated Anglo-American war aims, looked forward to the restoration of sovereignty and self-government to all peoples. And in the United Nations Charter, human rights and equality of nations were invoked as founding principles of a new world order. Yet, once again, the avowal of these principles did not entail the...

THE 1960 DECLARATION on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples and Countries was a watershed moment in the history of decolonization, marking the rise of an anticolonial account of self-determination. In rejecting the unequal membership and hierarchy that characterized international society in its imperial iteration, and by reconstructing self-determination as a universal right that accrued to all peoples, anticolonial nationalists secured the formal guarantees of international nondomination. The right to self-determination made foreign rule legally and morally objectionable, established independence and equality as the foundations of an anti-imperial world order, and extended full membership in international society to all...

IN 1964, two years after the collapse of the West Indian Federation and his inauguration as prime minister of the independent Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams took a tour of African states. On his journey across the Atlantic, he jotted down some notes under the title “A Small Country in a Big World,” and, following the subtitle, “The International Position of Trinidad and Tobago since August 31st, 1962,” he listed the economic and political challenges the new country faced: “attacks on preferences—difficulties of citrus, textiles, coffee, and cocoa; search for new markets; Geneva Conference on Trade and Development; economic...

IN MARCH 1975, less than a year after the United Nations General Assembly passed the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a scathing critique of the demands for a New International Economic Order. Having completed a two-year post as the United States ambassador to India, and before his brief stint later that year as representative to the United Nations, Moynihan expressed indignation that “a vast majority of the nations of the world feel there are claims which can be made on the wealth of individual nations that are both considerable and threatening.” Moynihan accepted...