Comrades against Imperialism

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

This book studies Jawaharlal Nehru's use of internationalism and anti-imperialism to unite the Global South between the world wars and provides an important history of the interwar years. For those interested in modern India, British imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, decolonization, international history, and the Cold War.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.