The Internationalist Moment
South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–39
- Ali Raza - Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
- Franziska Roy - Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
- Benjamin Zachariah - Research Fellow, Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University
International Politics
The years between the First and Second World Wars comprise a critical moment in the history of the world. In the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, individuals and countries sought new solutions and blueprints for a world of greater stability, equality, and interdependency. Their divergent ends and objectives were held together, if temporarily, by a euphoria for the vastness and integratedness of the world and the desire and optimism to remake it and shape the future of humanity.
This volume highlights this period in the political and social mobilization that comprises the “internationalist moment,” through the lens of South Asians’ interactions with a wider world and the wider world’s interactions with South Asia. The essays contribute to a growing, but as yet, inadequate field of the intellectual history of South Asia.
“The Internationalist Moment offers a detailed and much-needed study of interwar South Asian quests to transcend locality or the state, not simply physically but also intellectually and politically. ... [The] essays … compel us to refine our often simplistic understanding of ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ historiography.”
“This volume ... is an important corrective to South Asian histories that elide the international context and to international histories that underestimate the role of South Asia.”
“This is an innovative contribution to the emerging literature on global intellectual history ... [T]he essays … are important for the intrinsic value of the subjects they examine and for the methodological suggestion in favor of ‘intermediary’ intellectual history.”
An eponymous Volume about a two-decade-long period of diverse and criss-crossing internationalism, which the world experienced nearly a century ago as the first world war ended…This volume can help us understand what lines of thinking and action those dispossessed by this transition, as well as those thrilled by the opportunities it presents, could take.
