European empires dominated the world for centuries. They also sparked vast and complex anticolonial movements. In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned to the history of anticolonialism. They have suggested that those who opposed imperial rule – in Latin America, Africa and Asia, across the Caribbean and Pacific – were not only political actors, but also theorists who produced original analyses of world politics. This theory was inseparable from political action and part of a wider confrontation with the reality of colonial domination.

Drawing on my research into the archives of African and Caribbean anticolonialism, I will explore what it means to study anticolonial political theory. Such theory is relevant not only to the period of colonial rule, but also, I will argue, in our contemporary moment – when the world is formally decolonised yet marked by forms of domination that Kwame Nkrumah called ‘neocolonialism’. I will outline trends and debates in current scholarship on anticolonialism, suggest how to read anticolonial writing as theory, and ask how we might compare concepts across different spaces of anticolonial thought.