In this sprawling but wonderfully written book, Vijay Prashad explains why and how this happened. The story is multilayered, though it orbits the International Monetary Fund’s insistence on economic ‘structural adjustment’ accompanying loans, an ‘adjustment’ requiring from Jamaica strategies and approaches acceptable to the United States primarily. A steep descent ensued, from an annual average growth rate of seven per cent during Jamaica’s first independent years to the social catastrophe of 1985, when International Monetary Fund agents flew to New York on Friday afternoons and returned on Monday mornings to continue ‘adjusting’ the public service.

The book reminds us that creators of the Third World project sought to counterbalance the ‘great powers’ by drawing on emergent expressions of self-determination in nations so diverse as Burma and Bolivia, India and Indonesia, Grenada and Guatemala, Palestine and Paraguay. It is an important reminder, given that it has long been respectable to avoid the term ‘Third World’ because of its assumed derogatory approach to the individuality and dignity of specific nations. Rather than being ascribed by global overlords, the term was adopted proudly by the newly emergent forces themselves. Prashad considers it a movement fuelled almost exclusively by anti-colonialism and post-colonialism: ‘Despite the infighting, debates, strategic postures, and sighs of annoyance [there was] a belief that two-thirds of the world’s people had the right to return to their own burned cities, cherish them, and rebuild them in their own image.’ Writing about the 1955 Bandung conference, Prashad should have perhaps described the whole movement, though some would emphasise stimulants other than the colonial alone.

To begin, Prashad cleverly invokes Aimé Césaire, recalling that the French crushed the 1805 Haitian revolt, then essayed the same in Vietnam 150 years later, with a similar lack of success. He then locates the Third World project’s origin: subjugated peoples struggling to reassert their identity and authority. This is followed by the 1927 League Against Imperialism conference, held in Brussels, Prashad argues, to highlight Belgium’s appallingly violent and exploitative Congo record since the late nineteenth century. This meeting included Soekarno, Nehru and a host of other emerging leaders who questioned the legitimacy of the imperialist enterprise.

This book covers enormous ground. Few works combine so successfully culture, economic history, political theory and global nationalism. Among its many strengths, apart from the encyclopedic sweep, is an emphasis on both the role of women and the intellectual dimensions that mark the Third World experience: Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon and Arthur Lewis all appear perfectly in context as contributors to an enterprise, rather than as abstract theorists. So too do influential novelists and poets such as Pablo Neruda. It is fascinating to see evocative academic names such as Claude Lévi-Strauss threaded through the story. None is more striking than that of Samuel P. Huntington, whose influence on American international policy predates The Clash of Civilizations (1996) by many years, with his Political Order in a Changing Society (1968) being, in Prashad’s view, a paean to the ‘military modernisation’ that swept the Third World.

Similarly, Prashad explains lucidly, even attractively, how emergent global economic theory and practice, along with bargaining for and struggles over resources such as oil and, in the Jamaican case, bauxite, both unified and divided the Third World over half a century. He rehearses the importance of people such as Raul Prebisch, the Argentine central banker turned United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America boss, whose paper ‘The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems’ (1948) set the agenda for Third World discussion, particularly addressing how economies impoverished by exploitation might position themselves to improve the lot of all their people. The seriousness of that debate contrasts spectacularly with the later excesses of serial exploiters such as Sese Seko Mobutu in Zaire.

As he traverses all this and more, Prashad scans the options demonstrated in Cuba and Algeria, the problems presented by Iran and Egypt, the economic models imposed by the First World and proposed by the Third, and, above all, the irony inherent in his subtitle: it might be a ‘people’s history’, but it does not record a people’s victory. His is a sophisticated and reasoned voice from the left, if sometimes almost from the ‘romantic’ left, and many will want to contest his case. Inevitably, for example, ‘big’ Third World (mostly) men dominate the story, their supporters frequently left to rue betrayal and corruption:

From India to Egypt, from Ghana to Indonesia – the great legions of the Third World drew their immense strength from popular mobilization, but none of these states enabled the people who created the platform for freedom to have an equal part in the project to build it.

Nowhere was there greater contrast between Third World dreams of unity and the reality of conflict than in the 1962 Sino–Indian war. Seven years earlier, in Bandung, the two led the drive for collaboration, but the powerful mix of border envy, national pride and global resource politics led to battle. Prashad takes this fissiparous essence to build the story of how military growth helped wreck the Third World project: India, built on non-violence, doubled its military spending after its embarrassment in 1962, to become a leading global purchaser of arms while poverty remained endemic. Throughout the book, Prashad uses these contrasts to display both the tragic failure and the inherent ironies of the movement – the slogans rarely matched actions. As a result, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara stand less as romantic heroes than as the last bastions of principle and loyalty.

Prashad links the Third World project’s final decline to two main influences: a strengthening pro-globalisation bloc within the movement, and an emergent crude cultural nationalism serving the internal needs of extant and nascent power groups. He considers the 1983 New Delhi Non-Aligned Movement summit as crucial for the first impulse. Castro attempted unsuccessfully to hold the old line against Singapore’s pro-capitalist one, Indira Gandhi steering between the two as India began its shift from the Gandhian to the Silicon Valley option. By then the die was cast: ‘There was no longer any frontal assault on the institutions of imperialism that sustained and extended global inequality – not just economic inequality but also political and cultural inequality.’   Powerfully, Prashad uses the cultural nationalism impulse to conclude by covering the rise of modern Islam and the creation in 1969 of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, itself following the Saudi revival of the World Muslim League to push, in Prashad’s view, the ultra-orthodox reform tendencies of the Wahabists. In this, Crown Prince Faysal of Saudi Arabia is cast as a ‘true believer’ who ‘drew from the institutional advantages of his belief to counter the growth of Third World nationalism’. From there it is an easy step to see the ultimate collapse of anything resembling a ‘third force’ in the world order in the face of a rising cultural nationalism combined with the pro-capitalist forces.

While his argument is deeply nuanced and exhaustively detailed, Prashad essentially sees the power of the international economy having suppressed the originally unified aims of the Third World movement, with the current severe religious and cultural forces being consequential expressions of frustration and anger. While this sails mighty close to Huntington’s Clash, it has a certain ring at a time when the Palestinian movement, for example, gorges on itself.

In the end, even if the book demonstrates the sheer impossibility of the project, Prashad hopes for a replacement movement that might serve ‘the people’ better than this one did. For that reason alone, the lessons outlined so splendidly, if provocatively, must be read and understood.