This contribution details an early chapter in the long and complex history of the relationship of international socialism with anticolonial movements in British India. It tells a story of global intellectual interaction that informed and shaped international socialism as well as transnational anticolonialism between 1918 and 1924. It does so by highlighting a few aspects of this history. First, it discusses why radical anticolonialists gravitated towards international communism in the wake of the First World War. Second, it shows how the intersection between Marxist theory and anticolonial thought resulted in a capacious understanding of imperialism as a mode of capitalist production and organization of resources. Third, it illustrates how in interactions with radical anticolonialists from colonies like India, communists across the industrial world came to recognize national revolutionary movements as an integral part of the imminent world international revolution. Finally, it reveals the British colonial state’s anxiety about the rise of subversive ideas in the interwar years and its beleaguered response to this type of transnational anticolonialism.

The expansion of empires in the late nineteenth century prompted leftists to invent a new kind of internationalism targeting what they called “imperialism.” Although there were many ways to combat imperialism, one approach soon came to dominate: the Leninist problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. The ideas that formed the basis of this problematic grew out of highly contingent debates in the twentieth century, but after Lenin’s death in 1924 were codified as the only radical way to change the world on a global scale. It was embraced by millions across the globe, especially by Vietnamese revolutionaries, who soon distinguished themselves as the leading force in the larger anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam. In fact, Vietnam emerged as a kind of test case for the Leninist problematic. It helped Vietnamese revolutionaries score many victories, but the experience of revolution in Vietnam revealed some of Leninism’s core tensions, the most important of which was the contradiction between nation-building on the one hand and universal communist emancipation on the other.

This chapater considers the interplay between black political and cultural activists in Britain and the USA during the New Negro era and the creation of black internationalist networks as a subset of what the author calls the Black Bolshevik Renaissance. These networks significantly inflected the trajectory of black radicalism in the USA and the UK (and the Caribbean and Africa) from the New Negro Renaissance through the Popular Front era to the Black Arts and Black Power moment of the 1960s and 1970s. A significant focus here will be how this internationalism decentered notions of what we might now call a “Black Atlantic” or the “Atlantic World,” emphasizing building and strengthening the relationships of Africa and African Diasporic communities to non-European peoples in European and North American colonies and semi-colonies of “the East,” anticipating what many US Black political and cultural radicals would later term the “Bandung World.”

The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 caused the United States to sever relations with Germany, though President Wilson held out hope for peace until learning that the German foreign secretary, Zimmermann, sought to turn Mexico against the US and use it as an intermediary to turn Japan against the Allies. Amid these tensions Nicholas II was overthrown and succeeded by a Provisional Government, ultimately led by Kerensky, which made the fateful decision to keep Russia in the war. In April 1917, days after the United States declared war, Germany gave Lenin transportation home from Switzerland, hoping he would foment a second revolution and knock Russia out of the war. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, Lenin indeed concluded an armistice with the Central Powers, but only after his appeal for a general peace “without annexations or indemnities” failed. The net result of the United States replacing tsarist Russia gave the Allies an ideological cohesion they had lacked previously. While Wilson characterized their war as a fight for universal rights and freedoms, the entry of the United States gave them millions of fresh troops to go with the capital, munitions, and supplies they were already receiving from American sources.