"The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers."—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

A landmark work from a brilliant young scholar, The Darker Nations chronicles the rise and fall of the Third World. Its hardcover publication was hailed by renowned scholar Immanuel Wallerstein as "essential background for rethinking history." Publishers Weekly recognized its relevance for global activists today, noting its "vital assertion of an alternative future, grounded in an anti-imperialist vision."

Brilliantly tracing the hopes of this decades-long global movement, its limitations, and its ultimate downfall in the 1980s, Prashad reconstructs the fascinating prehistory of the Third World, recalling the now-forgotten 1927 Brussels conclave of the League Against Imperialism—an international effort that brought Albert Einstein together with Jawaharlal Nehru, Madame Sun Yat-Sen, and hundreds of other far-flung revolutionaries. The book also offers a striking new analysis of the 1955 conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where twenty-nine African and Asian countries—and Third World giants like India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser, and Indonesia's Sukarno—launched the Third World project.

Elegiac, combative, revisionist, incisive—and recalling the vivid thoughts and words of scores of extraordinary intellectuals, artists, and freedom fighters—The Darker Nations is destined to become a classic.

'Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible. And today the indictment is brought against it...by tens and tens of thousands of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.'--Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism

Here, from a brilliant young writer, is a paradigm-shifting history of both a utopian concept and global movement--the idea of the Third World. The Darker Nations traces the intellectual origins and the political history of the twentieth century attempt to knit together the world's impoverished countries in opposition to the United States and Soviet spheres of influence in the decades following World War II.

Spanning every continent of the global South, Vijay Prashad's fascinating narrative takes us from the birth of postcolonial nations after World War II to the downfall and corruption of nationalist regimes. A breakthrough book of cutting-edge scholarship, it includes vivid portraits of Third World giants like India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser, and Indonesia's Sukarno--as well as scores of extraordinary but now-forgotten intellectuals, artists, and freedom fighters. The Darker Nations restores to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World, whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced a much impoverished international political arena. 12 b/w photographs.