The crisis of European hegemony.

“The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920

Du Bois (1868–1963) wrote this essay as World War I was ending. He argued that the war was not a crisis of European civilization but the inevitable consequence of a global racial order that European nations had built through colonialism. He connected the violence of the trenches to the violence of empire: the same nations that competed to rule Africa and Asia brought that competition home to Europe. His analysis anticipated anti-colonial thought by decades. Read the source →

“All subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them. In the name of the Vietnamese people, we ask that you recognize our right to live freely and equally with all other peoples.” — Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Ho Chi Minh), petition to the Paris Peace Conference, Versailles, 1919

The future Ho Chi Minh traveled to Versailles in 1919 to petition the Allied powers for Vietnamese independence from France, citing Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the principle of self-determination. He was ignored. The Paris Peace Conference, which claimed to be reorganizing the world on principles of national self-determination, applied those principles only to European peoples. His petition documents the colonial subjects watching the peace conference from outside its doors. Read the source →

“We are here in France, in the mud and the cold. Brothers fall beside us every day. And all the while India is still under the English. We are fighting for England. England is not fighting for us.” — from letters of Indian soldiers, British Expeditionary Force censor records, France, 1915–1917 (India Office Records, British Library)

Approximately 1.5 million Indian soldiers served in WWI for the British Empire — in France, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, and East Africa. British military censors intercepted and translated their letters home; those translated records, preserved in the India Office Records at the British Library, are the most direct accounts we have of colonial soldiers’ inner lives during the war. These men received lower pay than British troops, served under British officers, and returned to a country still under colonial rule. The Amritsar Massacre — in which British troops fired on unarmed Indian civilians — occurred just one year after Indian soldiers helped win the war. Wilfred Owen is not a missing voice; he is the most-taught text of WWI. The Indian soldiers who fought the same war, in the same mud, questioning the same lie — they are the missing perspective. Read the source →

“The exploitation of our oil has brought to Mexico only what the companies chose to leave behind. The wealth goes out and the poverty stays. I am not nationalizing oil to harm our partners; I am nationalizing it to give Mexico what is rightfully Mexico’s.” — Lázaro Cárdenas, presidential address on the nationalization of foreign oil companies, Mexico City, March 18, 1938 (translated from Spanish)

Cárdenas (1895–1970) nationalized U.S. and British oil companies operating in Mexico in 1938, the first major nationalization of foreign natural resources in the Americas. His address documented the relationship between commodity-producing nations and the industrial powers that extracted their resources—the global economic structure that produced the interwar Depression unevenly. His action became a model for resource nationalism across the Global South. Read the source →

“The Arabs and their Allies are ready to fight on the side of Britain and to cooperate with her… In return, we ask that Britain acknowledge the independence of the Arab nation and its right to govern itself according to its own traditions and laws.” — Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, letter to Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, July 14, 1915 (the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence)

Sharif Hussein (1853–1931), the Sharif of Mecca, negotiated this correspondence with Britain during World War I—promising an Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in exchange for British support for Arab independence. Britain agreed. The subsequent Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which secretly divided the same territory between Britain and France, and the Balfour Declaration (1917), which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, contradicted these promises. Hussein’s letters are the foundation of the Arab grievance against the post-WWI settlement. Read the source →

“We were not invited to the conference that decided our fate. We were presented with a done deal and told to accept it or be destroyed. What kind of justice is this, when the great powers divide the living flesh of a small nation and call it peace?” — Jan Masaryk, Czech diplomat, on the Munich Agreement, September 1938 (approximate, as recorded by contemporaries)

Masaryk (1886–1948), son of Czechoslovakia’s founder, was serving as Czech minister to Britain when the Munich Agreement was signed. Britain and France agreed to transfer the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany without Czechoslovakia’s participation. His reaction, recorded by British officials and journalists, captures the perspective of the small states whose territories the great powers traded in their attempts to appease Hitler. His question—what kind of justice divides a nation without consulting it?—echoes across the interwar period. Read the source →

“At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, I was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl two kilometers from the center of Hiroshima. Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light. The world turned white, then dark. When I woke, I was buried under rubble, and around me was a city that no longer existed.” — Setsuko Thurlow, Hiroshima survivor, Nobel Peace Prize ceremony acceptance speech (on behalf of ICAN), Oslo, December 10, 2017

Thurlow (b. 1932) survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and became one of the most prominent voices for nuclear disarmament. Her testimony, delivered at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, documents the experience of civilians at the center of total war. AP World covers WWII through strategy, technology, and geopolitical outcomes. Thurlow’s account represents the 70,000–80,000 people killed instantly at Hiroshima and the survivors whose lives were permanently altered—the human content of the phrase “strategic bombing.” Read the source →

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.” — Elie Wiesel, Night, 1960 (translated from Yiddish by Marion Wiesel)

Wiesel (1928–2016) was a Romanian-born Jewish teenager when he was deported to Auschwitz. His memoir, first written in Yiddish and later translated, is one of the foundational accounts of the Holocaust. The passage is structured as a litany of what must never be forgotten—directed at readers who were not there, in a world that had tried not to know. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. His testimony represents the six million Jewish people killed in the Holocaust and the imperative that their deaths not be abstracted into a statistic. Read the source →

“I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.” — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950 (translated from French by Joan Pinkham)

Césaire (1913–2008), a Martinican poet and politician, wrote this essay in the aftermath of World War II, when European nations were still presenting colonialism as a civilizing mission. He argued that colonialism had not brought progress to colonized peoples but had instead created the conditions that produced fascism: the violence, dehumanization, and racial hierarchy that Europeans practiced in the colonies came home to Europe as Nazism. His essay was a foundational text of anti-colonial thought and the négritude movement. Read the source →