This chapter reconstructs how Tagore and Nag’s agenda for a global humanism, inspired by the template of Greater India, was put to the test at Visva-Bharati university, a space closely monitored by the colonial authorities as a potential breeding ground for sedition. Tagore’s peculiar blend of Orientalism and internationalism resonated with an international group of intellectuals, including Romain Rolland, Carlo Formichi, Sylvain Lévi and Yone Noguchi, but ultimately lost traction amidst the ideological turmoil and political developments that marked the 1920s and 30s. As Tagore’s controversial visit to Fascist Italy painfully revealed, a vision of world order premised on the cooperation of cultural ambassadors from the East and West sharing the same humanist ideals, became increasingly untenable. Furthermore, the Indian exceptionalism and cultural essentialism that energized Tagore’s vision turned out to be unpalatable for figures such as Lévi, who supported the GIS but dismissed any notion of an Eastern mission to ‘redeem the West’. Japan’s geopolitical ascendency altered the East for good and shattered the dream of a united Asian front inspired by the legacies of ‘Greater India’.

This chapter provides an outline of the book’s central argument, explaining the different dimensions of Vichy’s double bind and situating it within the context of the scholarship on the Vichy French government, Italian Fascist foreign policy, French collaboration and the occupation of France during the Second World War.

Economic nationalism became a dominant, and often destructive, discourse in the interwar period. This manifested itself in the rise of economic antisemitism in Nazi Germany, as well as in the corporatist dictatorships ruling Italy, Romania and Brazil. These autocracies were promoted in the writings of Mihail Manoilescu, who believed that dictatorship could spur growth even in autarky. In other ways, however, the interwar period saw a sharpening of existing nineteenth-century trends. Anti-imperialist movements remained powerful, especially in China, where Sun Yat-sen conceived of a powerful protector state that would manage foreign investment. Multi-ethnic contexts, as in Mandatory Palestine, encouraged isolationist approaches, this time from Zionist nation-builders. These efforts at nation-building encouraged economic segregation and ultimately inter-communal conflict. Even Britain, the erstwhile beacon of free trade, attempted to transform its Empire into a self-sufficient trading block during the Great Depression.

This chapter examines the Italian translation of Langston Hughes’s poetry of the late 1940s and 1950s against the grain of Hughes’s life experience in Italy in the summer of 1924, as evidenced in The Big Sea and the letters written during this time. It argues that the work of translation reflects Italy’s fascist racial thinking, which makes the poet’s Blackness either obscurely picturesque or altogether invisible. Hughes’s own reading of Italy, in turn, makes Blackness historically visible by uncovering the rhetorical illusion that plagued both the conventional view of African American poetic expression as folkloric and the conventional view Italy as idyllic.

This chapter discusses J.P. Morgan & Co., Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, imperial Japan, and the spectre of another war. It argues that the Morgan partners misunderstood the Nazi regime, in large degree because they attributed a far more influential role to Hjalmar Schacht than was warranted. If Morgan incomprehension about Nazism attested to how even the well-informed in the 1930s failed to descry Nazi radicalism, the Morgan tie with Fascist Italy was different. While the Corner was ignorant of Mussolini’s ambitions, aggression in Ethiopia provoked a reassessment. It was the desire to remain aligned with Washington and the hope of garnering Vatican business that preserved the tie. As for Japan, Lamont believed in the existence of two Japans: one Western oriented, open to liberal democratic capitalism; the other militarist and aggressive. He forgave, as did his partners, Japanese expansionism as the expression of the second strand. Between 1933 and 1937 Lamont’s attitude changed, moving to support Roosevelt’s famous October 1937 “Quarantine Speech.” For many, such as Senator Gerald P. Nye, the Morgan bank, complicit in American entry into war in 1917, was leading the United States down the same road. The chapter demonstrates that this was not so.

Chapter 5 analyses how, in the context of the international isolation of Francoist Spain in the early 1940s, autarchic discourses and projects for economic and industrial self-sufficiency gained prominence and guided the new policies. Raw materials, the way they were geographically distributed and the economics of their exploitation became state decisions to which chemists contributed in reframing academic disciplines and industrial endeavours. This chapter also stresses the distinction between autarky (referring to economic self-sufficiency) and autarchy (referring to autocratic political rule). Under the influence of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, chemicals became important agents for the materialisation of the early Francoism. Industrial chemistry training evolved from the traditional technical chemistry books and subjects to a more ‘modern’ approach to chemical engineering. Finally, chemical diplomacy and chemists’ active role as ‘ambassadors’ of the regime provide additional reasons to revisit autarky/autarchy, as well as pointing out some lines of continuity with the scientific culture of the pre-Civil War period.