Review of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire
| Author | Sandipto Dasgupta |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829820939633 |
| Subject Matter | Book Forum |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829820939633
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2020, Vol. 48(3) 351 –359
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829820939633
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1. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self Determination
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 3.
Review of Adom Getachew’s
Worldmaking after Empire
Sandipto Dasgupta
The New School, USA
Keywords
empire, postcolonialism, self-determination
European imperial expansion, Eric Hobsbawm noted, made all history henceforth global
history. This is the central premise behind Adom Getachew’s brilliant first book,
Worldmaking after Empire. Early on in the introduction to the book, she notes, ‘Europe’s
political and economic entanglements with the rest of the world constituted a novel era
of world politics that made it impossible to think domestic politics in isolation from the
ever-widening global interactions’.1 The way she translates this seemingly straightfor-
ward historical claim into a methodological commitment that structures her work is what
makes this book a standout contribution to recent scholarship. It is easier, relatively
speaking, to write a book that makes an argument on terms already laid out. It is far more
difficult to devise a methodological framework that itself intervenes in the debate the
book seeks to address. That is, rethinking not just what the answer is, but how one must
set out to answer it.
That debate (to put it simplistically) is regarding how to afford non-western or anti-
imperial political thought the same centrality and significance that has traditionally been
afforded to western traditions of thought. If the non-Europeans were overwhelmingly
subjects rather than agents of imperial globalisation, how could we portray them as
authors of global political thought? If the Europeans made the imperial world through
their material and discursive domination, how could those on the wrong side of that
domination produce concepts that can lay a claim to ‘world-making’, rather than simply
Corresponding author:
Sandipto Dasgupta, The New School, NY, USA.
Email: DasguptaS@newschool.edu
939633MIL0010.1177/0305829820939633Millennium – Journal of International StudiesDasgupta
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