The global authoritarian moment and the revolt against empire LSE Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100197/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Motadel, David (2019) The global authoritarian moment and the revolt against empire. American Historical Review, 124 (3). pp. 843-877. ISSN 0002-8762 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy571 Reuse Items deposited in LSE Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the LSE Research Online record for the item.
[email protected] https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire David Motadel IN THE YEARS OF THE Second World War, Berlin became a hub of global anti-imperial revolutionary activism. Between 1941 and 1945, scores of anticolonial leaders flocked to Germany, among them Indians, most famously Subhas Chandra Bose; prominent Arabs, including the Iraqi nationalist Rashid ʿAli al-Kaylani, the Syrian rebel leader Fawzi al-Qawuqji, and Amin al-Husayni, the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem; Irish radicals, such as Seán Russell; and nationalist revolutionaries from Central Asia and the Caucasus—Turkestanis, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, and others. One of these men, the Arab nationalist Yunus Bahri, exulted in his memoirs about wartime Germany’s anticolonial international: “Delegations from oppressed, colonized, and occupied lands such as the Maghrib, Russia, the Arab lands, and India were coming to Berlin, which was victorious on all battlefields.”1 Many of them saw Germany as an ally in their struggle for a new world order.