In his path-breaking 1954 monograph, Nations nègres et culture, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop denounced Western histories for providing false justification for European imperialism and perpetuating notions of the inferiority of Black peoples. Diop called instead for histories that revalorized the African past and demonstrated Black contributions to world history. By contextualizing Diop’s historiographical interventions in terms of his anticolonial politics and the work of other anticolonial and anti-racist thinkers, this chapter shows how, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the terrain of history was a key battleground of anti-racist and anticolonial activism. The multiple sites in which anticolonial and anti-racist histories were developed – from museums like the Musée de l’Homme through journals such as Présence Africaine, and organizational initiatives funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiatives – are central to this story.

Throughout the twentieth century, the principle of ’self-determination’ had many lives – as political catch-phrase, legal possibility and a justifying logic of world order. In the aftermath of the First World War, it was a principle that suffused the treaty discussions of the Paris peace conference, and loomed large in the framing of the plebiscites, as well as the League of Nations mandate system. This was not least because it animated the claims of numerous nationalist and anti-imperialist activists agitating for increased rights and freedoms in this moment. This chapter explores how the notion of self-determination, and related ideas around national belonging, race and gender, manifested in this 1919 moment in the promises of the Allied leaders, in the claims-making of non-state actors and in the discussions of legal professionals. In so doing it shows how we can understand particular visions of international law in this period as part of a much larger political and cultural conversation about the relationship between the state and national, racial and gendered belonging.

One of the most difficult problems of present-day Europe is that which results from the mixture of heterogeneous populations within the borders of a single State. Centuries of conquests, migrations, partitionings, and dominations of one race by another have produced a tangle so inextricable that it is impossible to make political boundaries coincide completely with racial divisions. Consequently there are in each of the Central and Eastern European States groups of people who differ from the majority of the population in language, in religion, in national sentiment, or in all together. Although they are citizens of the State where they live, they feel like aliens in a country which is not theirs, and are too often so regarded by the majority. Until this sense of division has disappeared, the newly created States cannot develop any real unity. But it can only disappear gradually in the course of generations of mutual toleration. Attempts to hasten the process by force, or to carry out a superficial assimilation of the language and culture of minorities to those of the majority, defeat their own ends. Such a policy brought about the disruption of the Central European Empires, and would be even more fatal in the new Europe where so many minorities belong to races with a rich and rightly cherished inheritance. The new States do not have the same vast numbers of potential irredentists within their borders; but they have enough to make the question of their treatment a serious one from the point of view of European peace.

June 10. We have run into the “Cape Rollers” and believe me they are most uncomfortable. They are said to be caused by the meeting of the Indian Ocean with the South Atlantic, and the great difference in their temperatures causes currents and swells. Often it is very, very rough around the cape and far up on both sides as well. Thank heaven the ship is steady, and I can manage, although I took to my bed when we first ran into the rollers yesterday.

Now that we have tried to see how we can help you to prevent war by attempting to define what is meant by protecting culture and intellectual liberty let us consider your next and inevitable request: that we should subscribe to the funds of your society. For you, too, are an honorary treasurer, and like the other honorary treasurers in need of money. Since you, too, are asking for money it might be possible to ask you, also, to define your aims, and to bargain and to impose terms as with the other honorary treasurers. What then are the aims of your society? To prevent war, of course. And by what means? Broadly speaking, by protecting the rights of the individual; by opposing dictatorship; by ensuring the democratic ideals of equal opportunity for all. Those are the chief means by which as you say, “the lasting peace of the world can be assured.” Then, Sir, there is no need to bargain or to haggle. If those are your aims, and if, as it is impossible to doubt, you mean to do all in your power to achieve them, the guinea is yours – would that it were a million! The guinea is yours; and the guinea is a free gift, given freely.

Since 1945 the problems surrounding development or growth have aroused far more interest in the economic world than any other subject, perhaps than all other subjects put together. We need not explore the genesis of this enthusiasm, but it is evident that it has two quite separate roots: on the one hand the desire to raise the standard of the economically and socially backward countries, on the other the anxiety to secure that the economically forward countries go on going forward and do not slip back into the apparent stagnation of the 1930’s. The economic analysis springing from these two roots have certain aspects in common (especially the emphasis placed on the need to secure a higher rate of investment and saving); but the economic and institutional background in the two types of country are so different as really to constitute them different spheres of discussion. It is convenient to refer to the problems of the developed countries as concerned with growth, most of their resources being already known and largely developed, apart from certain minerals for which uses have only recently been discovered. The problems of the backward countries can then be regarded as those of development of hitherto unused sources whose uses in general are, however, well known. We are here concerned only with the study of development in this sense.

Where specific technical practices are to be introduced into a culture or a part of a society which has not hitherto used them, it is desirable to strip these technical practices of as many extraneous cultural accretions (from the lands of origin) as possible. This recommendation applies to such varied matters as mass production, methods of immunization, development of alphabets for unwritten languages, methods of antisepsis or of sanitation, etc. It is realized that the technologies and inventions of modern science are themselves the outgrowth of a very particular historically limited type of culture – a culture in which the focus of interest has been upon the observable, the repeatable, the measurable, upon using the external world as a model even when processes within the body were concerned.

These biological data are of extreme importance: they play an all-important role and are an essential element of woman’s situation: we will be referring to them in all further accounts. Because the body is the instrument of our hold on the world, the world appears different to us depending on how it is grasped, which explains why we have studied these data so deeply; they are one of the keys that enable us to understand woman. But we refuse the idea that they form a fixed destiny for her. They do not suffice to constitute the basis for a sexual hierarchy; they do not explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her forever to this subjugated role.

Two major kinds of political issues marked the process which produced the UNHCR from the debates of ECOSOC and the GA during 1949 and 1950. The first was a product of the growing tensions between the West and the East and was linked with the second, the very basic issue of what the international community should do with refugees. This discontent had been a major factor in the debates that had created the IRO and had also been a factor of great importance in shaping the way in which the IRO had operated, and in determining its successes and failures. These tensions had reached much more serious proportions by early 1948 with the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade and airlift. It reached its height in 1949–50 with the dispute between the USSR and Yugoslavia, the appearance of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of the Korean conflict in 1950. In Europe, growing East–West tensions had brought about the declaration of the Truman Doctrine (12 March 1947), the initiation of the Marshall Plan economic aid program (June 1947), and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the Western military shield against the threat of Soviet attack (April 1949). There was also the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany out of Western-occupied Germany, and the setting up of the German Democratic Republic out of what had been Soviet-occupied Germany (May and October 1949). Moreover, the East in October 1947 had created the Cominform as the central organization for international communism. Thus Europe had become politically, economically and socially divided, and the opposition of each side to the other had gravely hardened.

We linger unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, our age-old habit, in mere image of the truth. But being educated by photographs isn’t like being educated by older, more crafted images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around claiming our attention. Daguerre started the inventory, with faces, and since then just about everything has been photographed; or so it seems. This very instability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as anthology of images.

Among other problems, the 1905 Revolution in Russia has brought into focus the nationality question. Until now, this problem has been urgent only in Austria-Hungary. At present, however, it has become crucial also in Russia, because the revolutionary development made all classes and all political parties acutely aware of the need to solve the nationality question as a matter of practical politics. All the newly formed or forming parties in Russia, be they radical, liberal or reactionary, have been forced to include in their programs some sort of a position on the nationality question, which is closely connected with the entire complex of the state’s internal and external policies. For a workers’ party, nationality is a question both of program and of class organization. The position a workers’ party assumes on the nationality question, as on every other question, must differ in method and basic approach from the positions of even the most radical bourgeois parties, and from the positions of the Pseudo-socialistic [sic], petit bourgeois parties. Social Democracy, whose political program is based on the scientific method of historical materialism and the class struggle, cannot make an exception with respect to the nationality question. Moreover, it is only by approaching the problem from the standpoint of scientific socialism that the politics of Social Democracy will offer a solution which is essentially uniform, even though the program must take into account the wide variety of forms of the nationality question arising from the social, historical, and ethnic diversity of the Russian empire.

We cannot say that colonization is a part of the French tradition. It is a process that had taken place outside of the life of the French people. The Algerian venture was on the one hand a matter of dynastic prestige; on the other, a part of Mediterranean security policy; as often happens, defense is transformed into conquest. Later, the acquisition of Tunisia and Morocco was – as one of those who played a great part in the latter remarked – largely the reflex of the peasant enlarging his patch of land. The conquest of Indochina was a reaction of revenge against the humiliation of 1870. Having been unable to resist the Germans, and taking advantage of temporary unrest, we compensated by depriving of its fatherland a people with an age-old tradition, peaceful and well organized. But Jules Ferry’s government carried out that act by an abuse of its powers and in open defiance of French public opinion; other aspects of the conquest were carried out by ambitious and amateurish officers who were disobeying the strict orders of their leaders.

The value of life rises with the embellishments and alleviations afforded by daily advancing progress; and lastly, as regards the advantages of the final victory, a strip of land or a heap of fortress stones, or the absolutely illusory “Fame” – these things, powerless to enrich or to make happy, sink in an ever greater disparity to those sacrifices, increasing to the uttermost, which they render necessary.

After having viewed the immigration situation in the seven countries selected for this study, the question naturally arises whether there are observable in these countries any common aims. One express determination does seem to be present in all, and that is to admit only such immigrants as will cause no permanent impairment of the national standards of living. Each country has its own aims and ambitions for the future, which have been derived from the type of people who first developed its resources, or from those whom each nation calls the native-born. This really means those groups who relatively early succeeded to places of importance. It is thus that Nordics prevail in one nation, and Alpines or Mediterraneans in another, and each values most its own distinctive characteristics. Besides this, for varying reasons, there is likely to be found in each country preferential alignment with certain other racial or national groups. For example, the Germans, who are predominantly Nordics, because of occupational adaptability, are desired in Brazil, which is of other basic stock. But such apparent exceptions do not obscure the fact that there has developed a national consciousness and self-appreciation in each nation which makes it openly question the wisdom of admitting into its midst aliens with standards varying widely from its own. The colored races have been the first to come under the ban, with considerable objection against the Orientals. Each nation is certain that it does not want its present character to suffer deterioration by the further admixture of unassimilable groups; and all view with suspicion those races having divergent physical, economic, and religious standards. An English-speaking white man’s civilization seems to be the accepted standard in all but the South American republics where the Latin tongues take first place. Even in Brazil are now indications of a color-line. This much, then, the countries under observation have in common in respect to their immigration policies. The World War having focused attention upon the structural weakness of a nation made up of a polyglot people, greater homogeneity of population has since become the watchword. […]

Thus the delegates, taken as a whole, tend to fall into two groups – the insiders and the outsiders. The psychology of these two groups is very different and they must be looked at separately.

It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that “Ethics” is but another word for “righteousness,” that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless.

Evidence enough that the Anglo-American relationship is a debatable one may be found in the fact that it is debated, even at tedious length. Evidence that it is an alliance in any specific or bilateral sense might be harder to establish. All fifteen of the member-states of NATO, to be sure, are formally allies, and it is no doubt true, though not an officially defensible proposition, that some allies are more allied than others. But the claim that the relationship between Britain and America is of more significance, or better worth examining than, say, that between Norway and Turkey would have to look to other evidence than the formal words of treaties.

Mahan’s master work on sea power, and the subsequent books and essays that streamed from his hurrying pen, had world-wide repercussions on naval development and world politics. Mahan’s interpretation of history excited expansionist forces already stirring in Europe, in America, and in the Far East. His strategic ideas, derived largely from the history of British naval policy and operations, were accepted as precepts from universal application and utility, without qualification as to time and place. And the impact of these ideas was widely felt in accelerated naval development which, inside of two decades, was profoundly to alter the balance of naval power, with political repercussions on every ocean and continent.