Worldmaking after Empire

What can 'worldmaking' be after empire? In this profound and elegant book, Adom Getachew challenges the conventional narrative of anticolonial self-determination, showing that, in its best hands, decolonization was also an effort to critique and reimagine the moral-political languages of international order in the hope of transforming postimperial possibilities. In its understated luminosity and unsettling restraint, this book sharpens our sense of what is at stake in rehistoricizing the postcolonial present. --David Scott, Columbia University Fundamentally shifting the conversation about anticolonial thought and practice, Worldmaking after Empire is a work of profound intellectual and historical recovery and a landmark contribution to the study of the twentieth-century global order. Essential reading, this masterful book speaks beautifully to our own contemporary debates over globalization, inequality, and international politics, and serves as a powerful reminder of the paths not taken. --Aziz Rana, author of Two Faces of American Freedom This beautifully written and tremendously important book charts new territory and moves political theory in essential and innovative new directions. --Jeanne Morefield, Whitman College Worldmaking after Empire is a breathtaking achievement on the history and theory of global justice. Anticolonialism, it turns out, mattered not for its emphatic nationalism so much as for its subaltern cosmopolitanism. The resources of the traditions Adom Getachew pioneeringly reconstructs are far from being exhausted even today. --Samuel Moyn, Yale University