Vijay Prashad begins with an evocation of Frantz Fanon’s concluding remarks in The wretched of the Earth, words that imagined the daunting but hopeful fate of postcolonial nations ‘whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers’. Prashad boldly echoes Fanon by announcing that ‘the Third World was not a place. It was a project.’ The global history of this project – the expression of collective hopes and struggles for a changed and improved world – is the subject of this ambitious and rewarding book. This history presents almost a completely alternative version of the twentieth century interpreted through the clarifying lens of the experiences of the world’s majority, the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, concentrated principally in the era of decolonization from the end of the Second World War to the late 1980s.

Prashad’s engaging work revolves around chronicling the pursuit of social justice, political freedom and independence, geo-political peace and security through disarmament, cultural dignity and diversity, and equitable economic development – the core principles and demands articulated since the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955 and reiterated through the subsequent meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement. His analytical survey does not emphasize the marginal, derivative, and literally tertiary status of postcolonial and developing nations in the ostensibly central drama of the Cold War – evident, by contrast, in even so brilliantly conceived a work as Eric Hobsbawm’s The age of extremes. Rather, Prashad elucidates, by a much-needed reorientation of focus, the priority and active agency of the Third World in the post-1945 global historical narrative.

The chief concern of the book is to explain how the dreams and hopeful aspirations of three continents were derailed – why and how the project of the Third World failed. Nearly two-thirds of the work examines the several facets and historical unfolding of this tragic process and its catastrophic consequences. Yet Prashad states his position clearly early on when he identifies an endemic flaw in the project. Unity among ‘the darker nations’ (the curious appellation coined by the radical historian and activist of the Black diaspora W. E. B. Du Bois) and, more crucially within these states, across social classes and political parties had been forged in the crucible of anti-colonial and imperial struggle. This was the proximate and necessary historical precondition of the Third World (and, incidentally, the book could have used an early, brief chapter summarizing some key features of colonial rule and its historical consequences, as background to national liberation struggles and decolonization). Yet national liberation was typically achieved without accomplishing genuine social revolution or dismantling the colonial character of the state through ‘democratic socialism’. Such limitations made the project vulnerable to defeat.

While not offering an exhaustive historical account of these societies in the postcolonial era, The darker nations does provide a remarkably comprehensive and coherent narrative of the Third World project and its history. It covers an impressive range of historical topics and geographical locations in eighteen chapters, each titled with a particular city name. Some, such as Brussels, Bandung, Cairo, Belgrade, and Havana, served as the locations of important conferences that shaped the political platform and emerging identity of the Third World; through these Prashad introduces major political figures such as Nasser, Nehru, and Nyerere, as well as the institutions that gave formal expression to the Third World agenda, including the UNCTAD and the Non-Aligned Movement. Others have a looser, metonymic connection to the wide-ranging thematic and comparative histories contained in their chapters. ‘Buenos Aires’ opens with an account of the Argentinian political economist Raul Prebisch and treats dependency theory as a uniquely Third World economic answer to the problems and challenges of development – an intellectual riposte to modernization theory. ‘Tehran’ and the story of the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Mossadeq’s nationalist government in 1953 serves as the context in which to introduce the poet Forugh Farrokhzad and the writer Jalal-e Ahmad for a discussion of cultural identities in anti-colonial and nationalist ideology that, among other things, accomplishes a sharp critique of the negritude movement. Sometimes, the artful location of a major moment in the Third World project within the context of one of its capital cities verges on a strained, artificial platform. Nevertheless, the work retains its coherence by tracing these major thematic lines along its broad argumentative and narrative arc, divided into three stages or sections. ‘Quest’ defines the project of the Third World and provides a contextual account of its early political, economic, ideological, and cultural expression. ‘Pitfalls’ examines the internal weaknesses, flawed attempts, and contradictions that ‘corroded the imagined community of the Third World, and eventually participated in the decimation of its agenda’ (p. 114). And ‘Assassinations’ details the processes by which the First World subverted this agenda politically, economically, and militarily, as well as the consequent emergence of atavistic movements of ‘fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power’ in place of a democratic, secular socialism (p. xviii).

In some ways, the broad outlines of Prashad’s argument and his specific claims are not surprising, or even entirely unique. He follows Fanon’s prescient warnings found in the chapter from The wretched of the Earth entitled ‘The pitfalls of national consciousness’ in his own history of postcolonial Algeria’s authoritarianism. Moreover, critiques of the costs of neo-liberalism and the mordant histories of how the debt crisis led to the imposition of structural adjustment schemes and the tragedies of globalization have been commonly rehearsed. However, Prashad produces uncommonly clear and vivid portraits of these economic processes and situates them in a coherent articulation of their political consequences. Furthermore, his engagingly conceived and energetically written account bristles with provocative insights and suggestive connections about, for example, the distinctively ‘international nationalism’ of Third World countries (pp. 12–13) or the character of ‘progressive’ military coups d’état in the absence of national liberation or popular social justice movements (pp. 146–9) across an impressive and expansive terrain from Buenos Aires to Bali.

One weakness of this account concerns Prashad’s treatment of the culture of Third Worldism as a medium for expressing and mechanism for forging transnational solidarities. He does note that the political project of the Third World found expression in a new imagination for its cultural workers, briefly mentioning as examples of the phenomenon the poet Pablo Neruda, the singer Umm Kulthum, and the painter Sudjana Kerton. Nevertheless, he does not explore in any analytical depth either the networks of transmission and reception of their cultural productions across linguistic and national contexts or the broader means and processes through which a shared public culture of anti-imperial resistance emerged from and helped sustain the project of the Third World. One need only remember Fanon’s startling essay on the transformation of the radio from rejected emblem of the alien culture of the colonizer to vital tool of a revolutionary political consciousness that consumed ‘news’ as a mechanism of solidarity with anti-colonial struggle to envision fruitful possibilities for such a history. Further analysis in this vein might also have opened the narrative to a greater awareness of the agency of ordinary people in the darker nations and of the concrete meanings of the project of the Third World as an expression of their political, social, and economic aspirations. Heroic political figures, radical thinkers, and stellar artists populate this history of the Third World, while the people of this ‘people’s history’, more often than might have been necessary perhaps, appear on the historical stage as collectivities (Fanon’s ‘colossal mass’ ), betrayed by their national elites or bravely (if vainly) negotiating their dire fate against the agendas of equally abstract institutions and impersonal historical forces. It is asking much of an extraordinary work, but perhaps a greater evocation of people in The darker nations, their participation in both revolutionary struggles and diurnal resistance, and the courageous ways in which they continue to keep alive their dreams would have allowed Prashad to expand his final, brief, hopeful note about a future agenda emerging from contemporary struggles. Certainly, such efforts have been aided by this history, an invaluable resource to scholars, students, and activists alike of the legacies of the Third World.