and would eventually push back against the exploitative nature of capitalist imperialism and the world system built around it.26
Two years later, in 1917, V. I. Lenin would offer an even more famous exegesis of imperialism in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which would influence anticolonial thought across the world well into the twentieth century. In significant part an addendum to Hobson, Lenin’s text centered on the growth and development of global finance capital and its role in the creation of the early twentieth-century world order.27 Like Du Bois, Lenin rejected the predominant interpretations of the First World War as arising from nationalism—or what Du Bois called “sentimental patriotism.”28 Lenin viewed such narratives as political distractions emerging out of a broader process by which global capital had begun to consolidate itself through the monopolization not only of markets, but also of industries and institutions. The goals of expanding finance capital went beyond merely exporting goods to new markets, according to Lenin. They included controlling “spheres of influence” whereby global markets could become key drivers of the systematic redistribution of wealth to the imperial metropole. As outlined by Lenin, banking institutions in particular were leading global capitalism beyond the struggle for resource control to an increasing reliance on the mechanisms of finance. As such, Lenin outlined an early twentieth-century world system founded upon the accumulation, control over, and continuous reproduction of profit.29
What Lenin sought to detail in Imperialism was a historical and theoretical model of an imperialism that had loosened the imperial powers of Europe from many of their liberal moorings. In doing so, he—like Du Bois—situated the violence of the First World War as the natural outgrowth of the global rise of European finance capitalism. Imperialism, as understood by Lenin and later returned to by many subsequent anticolonial intellectuals, thus served little purpose but to divide the world among its various capitalist powers. Europe’s African and Asian colonies were thus not only constructed to provide the labor, resources, and markets necessary for capitalist expansion. They also represented a new territorialized framework through which to manage each colonial power’s expansion in relation to the others. The stakes of this arrangement for the various powers, Lenin argued, were immense, in that they sought to control that which, much as Du Bois had noted two years earlier, was uncontrollable. “The more capitalism develops,” Lenin explained, “the more the need for raw materials arises, the more bitter competition becomes, and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds throughout the whole world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.”30 As with his American contemporary, Lenin insisted that herein lay the roots of the instability of the twentieth-century world order, as global capital continued to mature out of its nineteenth-century adolescence and needed new spaces to grow on a map in which nearly all of the world’s land had already been partitioned.31
For colonized intellectuals and others, Lenin thus provided a model by which to both analyze and critique the liberal and capitalist underpinnings of the early twentieth-century international system. He also offered them a mechanism through which to internationalize Marxism, taking it beyond the confines of societies with already established industrial proletariats. In Central Asia, for instance, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev turned to aspects of Lenin’s theoretical model in an attempt to extend the idea of the proletariat beyond social classes to entire dispossessed “nationalities,” arguing that all Muslim peoples should be regarded as part of the proletariat.32 For Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar who until his 1923 arrest was the most influential Muslim within the Soviet Union, such a framework allowed for the integration of Islam into the Marxist worldview on its own terms.33 Moreover, it also offered a model in which, on the international scale, “nations” themselves had characteristics of social classes as described in Marxist theory. In this light, he insisted in 1918 that there were different types of proletariats based upon the relative wealth of the nations they inhabited, and that certain national proletariats would be more revolutionary than others based upon the level of oppression they had historically faced.34
Likewise, in Europe’s colonies, figures like Jawaharlal Nehru broadened their intellectual framework in the 1920s as they too looked to Lenin and the Soviet Union for alternative models for interpreting the colonial system and the imperial world order. Nehru, who toured the Soviet Union with his father in 1927, used his reflections on his experience to compare and contrast the rapidly industrializing revolutionary society he witnessed there with an India that he viewed as comparatively much more conservative and set in its ways. Writing in 1928, Nehru stressed that, “for us in India the fascination [with Soviet Russia] is even greater [than elsewhere in the world], and even our self-interest compels us to understand the vast forces which have upset the old order of things and brought a new world into existence, where values have changed utterly and old standards have given place to new.”35 A little more than a decade later, in his 1941 autobiography, Nehru again returned to the subject of the Soviet experiment as he recalled with wonder how the interwar Soviet Union, during a moment in which much of “the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going backward in some ways,” was able to overcome these trends as it redefined the Soviet place within the international community. Shifting to the subject of Marxism itself, the future Indian prime minister ultimately presented the “theory and philosophy” as a vehicle for providing new pathways to a “future . . . bright with hope,” regardless of the bleakness of the past or present.36
In 1947, Nkrumah would publish his own Lenin-inspired treatise, Towards Colonial Freedom. In this relatively short pamphlet, Nkrumah detailed what he saw as the systematized ways in which imperialism created and maintained an imbalance of trade between Europe and its African colonies. For Nkrumah, as with both Lenin and Du Bois, capitalism could not function without imperialism. Instead, capital could only fleetingly sustain the pressure from its own persistent need for growth before it had to look elsewhere, or cannibalize the most profit-sucking element in the production process, namely labor. As with Lenin and Du Bois, Nkrumah maintained that the colonial system provided European capital an alternative by opening up a new set of unfettered arenas for labor and resource extraction, while at the same time guaranteeing markets for the sale of the colonizers’ goods. The future Ghanaian president thus opened his 1947 text with a forceful declaration: “The aim of all colonial governments in Africa and elsewhere has been the struggle for raw materials; and not only this, but the colonies have become the dumping ground, and colonial peoples the false recipients, of manufactured goods of the industrialists and capitalists of Great Britain, France, Belgium and other colonial powers who turn to the dependent territories which feed their industrial plants. This is colonialism in a nutshell.”37
MANCHESTER AND THE AFRICAN ANTICOLONIAL IMAGINATION
In terms of Nkrumah’s intellectual development, Towards Colonial Freedom did not have its direct origins in the political and intellectual traditions of the Gold Coast. Instead, the pamphlet represented a coming together of a broader set of transnational anticolonial traditions and experiences in the future Ghanaian politician’s thinking. In fact, what makes the text significant is not particularly its originality, but rather the diversity of political and intellectual influences—pan-African, Marxist-Leninist, and anticolonial revolutionist, among others—embedded within it. Nearly all of these influences found their most prominent expression in the diasporic radicalism of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. In the United States, for instance, where he spent the decade between 1935 and 1945, Nkrumah lived, worked, studied, and organized in locations ranging from rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, to major American cities and black internationalist hubs like New York City and Philadelphia. As a result, at the center of Nkrumah’s American experiences were the political and economic realities of being black in the Depression-era and wartime United States as he embarked upon a number of economic endeavors outside of his schooling, including hawking fish, laboring in a shipyard near Philadelphia, and working in a soap factory, before waiting tables on a shipping line running between New York and Vera Cruz, Mexico. Even more importantly, for Nkrumah, this was also a period of political experimentation in which he sought to embed himself into an eclectic array of pan-African political
