In the wake of colonial and racial exploitation, political leaders, technocrats, activists, and workers across the Third World turned to socialism to offer a new vision of post-colonial development. Against a backdrop of decolonization, white supremacy, and the Cold War, they fostered anti-colonial solidarity and created cooperative frameworks for self-reliance.

In following these actors, the contributions to this volume show that “development” was not merely exported from North to South: people across the Global South collaborated with each other while engaging with a diversity of socialist ideas, from European Fabianism and Marxism to tailored African, Asian, and Latin American models. They led debates on race and inequality from the 1920s and 1930s and spearheaded local, regional, and internationalist efforts to re-envision modernity by the 1950s and 1960s.

By examining the limitations and legacies of socialist development initiatives in and across the Third World, Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World offers new perspectives on the intertwined histories of socialism, development, and international cooperation, with lessons for both past and present.


The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI and Rice University, USA.

Su Lin Lewis is Professor in Global and Asian History at University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (2016) and co-editor of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (2022).

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor of African & Cold War History at Rice University, USA. He has published articles in several journals and has been an NEH/Ford Foundation fellow at the Schomburg Center and an Andrew Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, USA.