This article was published in the Journal of Negro Education and adapted in his 1947 World and Africa. Du Bois develops a classic anti-imperial argument of the imperial boomerang, arguing that Nazi atrocities have historical precedents in the violence and dehumanization of the colonized world where the color line had justified and elided this domination. The crisis and collapse of Europe signaled by the rise of Nazism indicates for Du Bois the decadence of European civilization, which he describes as a “self-worshiping” structure bound to fall.

This 1933 essay revisits Liberia’s precarious political and economic situation in the wake of a League of Nations commission formed in 1929 to investigate charges that the Liberian government had tolerated slave trading. Du Bois wrote the essay on the basis of a cache of League documents provided to him by the writer and activist Anna Melissa Graves. Du Bois writes that the League’s International Commission of Inquiry or Christy Commission dwelt more on general economic conditions, having quickly concluded that Liberia had successfully suppressed the forced labor practices in question. Its elaborate and misguided economic proposals failed to recognize the true reasons for Liberia’s poverty and debt and threaten to exacerbate the problem. United States government efforts to guarantee the profits of the Firestone Corporation likewise demonstrate Liberia’s vulnerability to being “ruthlessly exploited as a foundation for American and European wealth.”

This brief essay replies to the response by N. S. Subba Rao to Du Bois’s “Clash of Colour” (chapter 12). It argues that Rao’s objection to solidarity among the “coloured peoples” of the world against white domination is misguided. What is required is a “third path”: a posture neither of humiliation nor of war but of strength and unity against white domination will lead toward the ultimate goal of a “real union of all colours and of races.”

Du Bois summarized this 1944 essay as follows: The philosophy of biological race differences which divide the world into superior and inferior people will persist after this war. This is shown in the persecution of Jews, the refusal to emancipate India, the relations between Asia and Europe, and the attitude toward South America and the Caribbean. To leave out discussions of race in post-war planning enables Europe and America to fight for democracy and the abolition of poverty while ignoring the fact that race prejudice makes this fight consistent with compulsory poverty, disease, and repression of most of the workers of the world.

This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

This 1956 essay, marking the 39th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, was one of several articles that Du Bois contributed to New World Review, a publication associated with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and the Communist Party of the United States. Du Bois highlights the exemplarity of the Russian Revolution for anticolonial struggles and the Soviet Union’s support of national liberation. Significant in this essay is also Du Bois’s obfuscation of the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, a key feature of his late writings.

First published in Foreign Affairs in 1938, this essay describes the racialized regimes of labor exploitation in colonial Africa, tracing the patterns of land expropriation, resource extraction and resistance that give shape to different trajectories across the continent. Du Bois identifies immanent potentialities in this landscape from the cooperative model to the resignification of leisure. An expanded version of this essay appeared in the 1939 Black Folk Then and Now.

Published in The New Republic in 1925, this essay challenges the standard question, “What is wrong with Liberia?” and the reflexive American view that Liberia must have failed to develop because of inferior abilities. An early account of what would come to be called neocolonialism, it analyzes the distinctive form of white domination suffered by vulnerable but formally independent Black states such as Liberia: economic exploitation on the part of white states and capitalists through foreign control of natural resources and markets, ruinous loans to the government, and the imposition of costly and ineffective outside experts.

Du Bois edited and wrote the introductory chapter to the NAACP document An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Rights to Minorities, submitted to the United Nations in October 1947. In his introduction, he argued that the “color caste system” had been disastrous for American democracy. After the North’s victory in the Civil War, Northern capitalism’s financial stake in cheap slave labor led it to participate in enforcing a racial caste system keeping African Americans in economic and political subjugation. The domination of the American economy by big business and monopolies on land and natural resources explain why democracy has been crippled throughout the country, with mass disenfranchisement of African Americans and many whites, especially in the South. The denial of African Americans’ right to vote means a failure of democracy in the world’s leading democracy and in the world. The disproportionate power granted the most anti-democratic elements in American society perverted American foreign policy in favor of imperialism, against the League of Nations, and against weaker nations. With the UN based in New York, American racial discrimination infringes the rights of all peoples and has become a matter of international concern.

This address to the Rosenwald Economic Conference in 1933 brings together in a single analytic frame the struggles of African Americans under relentless racial oppression in the United States and those of independent Black states such as Liberia and Haiti. Focusing on African Americans’ dire economic condition during the Depression, it argues that even if they were able to found an independent state they would be unable to escape the domination of concentrated capital. While expressing admiration for communism in Russia, it rejects the Communist Party in the United States as ill-equipped to tackle the role of racism in maintaining African Americans’ economic privation. It proposes instead that African Americans resist participating in the white American economy and pioneer an economic revolution consisting of non-profit industry; collectively funded provision of services, especially medical and legal; and “intelligent cooperating consumers” committed to buying only goods produced by fairly compensated labor.

This unpublished essay of 1946 examines the West African cocoa industry as a case study of the attempt by African agricultural producers to resist exploitation by European capital. On the Gold Coast, native farmers developed robust cocoa production without European investment or other assistance; if they were white, they would soon have become a prosperous community of independent peasant farmers, begun processing raw material, and eventually achieved Dominion political status. Because they were Black they faced unhindered exploitation, refusals to give them voice in industry or the state, and ignorance and betrayal on the part of British officials. Merchant cartels monopolized the market and suppressed the price paid for raw cocoa, farmers were prevented from hedging against fluctuations on the world market by storing their crop, and they were driven into ruinous loans by moneylenders. The farmers’ early success in boycotting the cocoa market was disrupted by the advent of World War II, when the British government established a government monopoly and fixed cocoa prices. The cocoa farmers’ self-organization should be recognized as a model for the emancipation of colonial populations.