Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism

Scholars have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. This scholarship has often employed an "inside-out" methodology that explores how imperial discourses pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, but has largely ignored the reverse-the ways in which these places and their inhabitants engaged with European fascisms. Addressing this gap, Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism takes an "outside-in" approach to examine fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose and Mohandas K. Gandhi.

This unique approach redefines and reconceptualises our understanding of major European events, including the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement and the outbreak of the Second World War. Rather than a clash between the supposedly conflicting socio-political systems of fascism and democracy, this book argues that the crises of Interwar fascism were yet another imperial contest similar to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles. Whether fascist, democratic, or imperialist, Europe's great powers collectively negotiated the fate of smaller nations. Taken together, these global superpowers were a collection of collaborative yet hostile nation-states with one thing in common: the procurement and maintenance of empire.