Islands of Global Revolution

Summary

As Odd Arne Westad observes in this volume, we live in a present profoundly shaped by anti-colonial struggle. Western colonialism has wreaked such a profound impact on global history and the present that the study of revolutions outside of the North Atlantic is frequently enveloped within models seeking influence and diffusion from power centers to putative peripheries. As scholars, politicians, and others have long observed, however, colonized sites were not peripheral to the modern world at all but rather constitutive of its very foundation in moments of peace and war, profit and downturn, and especially in fomenting the greater preconditions that sparked apparently metropolitan revolutions. That these deep colonial connections might have been obfuscated in Europe, even at moments of revolutionary rupture, only highlights the distortions of national political discourses, the hermetic fiction of the national frame, and the success of colonial power in disguising itself.