In the past two decades, historians have given us an increasingly complete picture of the intellectual pasts of black anti-colonialism. Including Robin D. G. Kelley’s recently reissued Freedom Dreams, Minkah Makalani’s In the Cause of Freedom, and Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire, this body of work has forged a deep understanding of the “Black Atlantic” tradition in particular.

These scholars have shown us that the political horizon of black anti-colonial thinkers — from communist cadres organizing port workers in interwar Marseille to the reformist postcolonial statesmen who plotted the New International Economic Order — was not limited to national liberation in a narrowly conceived sense but rather encompassed globe-spanning forms of transformation.

Musab Younis, a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and essayist for the London Review of Books, has produced a debut book that does much to enrich our understanding of this history. The title of his study, which focuses on the interwar period and is underpinned by research in French, British, and West African archives, neatly captures its central argument: black anti-colonialism was conceived “on the scale of the world.”