Gyan Prakash

Was the post-war twentieth century global history the epoch of the Cold War? This project challenges that traditional narrative, flipping it to embed the East-West conflict within a longer struggle against empire. Gyan Prakash argues that we can view post-World War II global history in the longue durée of anticolonial and postcolonial struggles to remake the world. He suggests that the struggle against empire was not only about changing the bilateral relationship between the metropole and the colony but also about transforming the world, a struggle that collided and became entangled with the Cold War.