Comrades against Imperialism
Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism

Examines the emergence of anti-imperialist internationalism during the interwar years from the perspective of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Michele L. Louro (Author)

9781108410403, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 August 2019

325 pages, 7 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'Michele L. Louro's Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism is an exceptionally well-researched, well-written and well-argued attempt to tell the history of Nehru's experience of the interwar world 'on its own terms'.' Alexander E. Davis, Asian Studies Review

In this book Michele L. Louro compiles the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded Jawaharlal Nehru's political vision for India and the wider world. Set between the world wars, this book argues that Nehru's politics reached beyond India in order to fulfill a greater vision of internationalism that was rooted in his experiences with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist mobilizations in the 1920s and 1930s. Using archival sources from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, the author offers a compelling study of Nehru's internationalism as well as contributes a necessary interwar history of institutions and networks that were confronting imperialist, capitalist, and fascist hegemony in the twentieth-century world. Louro provides readers with a global intellectual history of anti-imperialism and Nehru's appropriation of it, while also establishing a history of a typically overlooked period.

Part I. Mobilizing against Empire, 1927–1930: 1. A 'real' league of nations: the Brussels Congress, 1927
2. The making of the league against imperialism, 1927
3. Internationalizing nationalism in India, 1928–1929
4. Anti-imperialism in crisis, 1929–1930
Part II. Afterlives of Anti-Imperialism: 5. Nehru's anti-imperialism after 1930
6. Peace and war, 1936–1939
7. The war and the fate of anti-imperialism.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Asian history [HBJF]