Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization

As countries ravaged by colonial capitalism and white supremacy sought to build a post-imperial world, many turned to socialism to offer a new vision of social equity and post-colonial development. While development is often understood as a process that emerges from the Global North to the Global South, this open access book examines the history of development from the perspective of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, centering how socialism was employed to drive post-colonial development projects.

Beginning in the interwar era, Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World rewrites the origins of development by examining dialogues about race, class, and uneven development between the North and South. Focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, it explores decades of aid competition, cooperation and solidarity across the Global South, particularly among the Left, to show how countries across the Global South consciously developed internationalist efforts to cooperate and connect with each other, developing shared regional and global frameworks for development and self-reliance. This book brings fresh angles to the history of socialism, development, and internationalism by viewing them as intertwined narratives from the perspective of the Global South.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI and Rice University, USA.

Su Lin Lewis is an Associate Professor in Modern Global History at University of Bristol, UK. She works on the social history of globalisation, including cosmopolitan port-cities, transnational activist movements, and post-colonial internationalism, with a focus on modern Southeast Asia. She is the author of Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (2016), which won the Urban History Association’s Prize for Best Book, and co-author, with Carolien Stolte, of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (2022). She is currently an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow working on a project about Socialist Internationalism in the Afro-Asian World.

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor of African and Cold War History at Fordham University, USA. A member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, he is also a Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2023-2024). He has published articles in the Journal of African History and The Journal of West African History and has a forthcoming article in Comparative Studies in Society and History. He has also published in popular media outlets such as The Washington Post and Foreign Policy.