This expansive history of Black political thought shows us the origins—and the echoes—of anticolonial liberation on a global scale. On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this richly textured book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation. Bringing together literary and political texts from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, Younis excavates a vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the British and French colonial occupations of West Africa to the struggles of African Americans, the hypocrisy of French promises of 'assimilation,' and the many-sided attacks on the sovereignties of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how racialized imperialism provoked critical responses across the interwar Black Atlantic. By transcending the boundaries of any single imperial system, these counternarratives of global order enabled new ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire.  "Extremely well-documented. . . . it allow[s] the reader to come across and enjoy nuggets of history that Younis has excavated, but it also proves just how un-new current debates around class solidarity, gender, Whiteness, provincialism v internationalism actually are." ― Race & Class "A]n excellent study. The originality of the book’s construction is all the more impressive considering how many studies of Black Atlantic thought we already have at hand".  ― Jacobin “In his examination of the Black Atlantic, Younis creates one of the most comprehensive treatments of postcolonialists in one text. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” ― Choice Reviews "The book is a deeply probing venture into the idea of the world from the viewpoint of pan-African emancipatory movements, asking, among other things, what it means to reject globality as a domain for the privileged." ― Ethnic and Third World Literatures “Musab Younis’ On the Scale of the World asks its readers to attend a vision lost, rallying its readers to be present in the interwar black Atlantic and re-see the world through the recovered perspectives of the period’s anticolonial writers. In being present in this way, we briefly bracket our knowledge of how anticolonialism would later fare and instead see the world through the prism of diaspora in potentially counterintuitive ways.” ― Antipode “ On the Scale of the World provides a critically important revisioning of the scholarship on Black diasporic thought as a “surreptitious counternarrative” to the global order of White supremacy.” ― New West Indian Guide " On the Scale of the World offers a deep and textured engagement with archives spanning from London and Edinburgh to Porto Novo, Dakar, Accra, and Cape Coast. . . . Younis brings to life the world of inter-war Black anticolonial thought, offering a careful reading of the newspaper columns and editorials, but also books, poetry, plays, and other published material, that moved from continent to continent, and often from newsroom to newsroom." ― Journal of Developmental Studies "W. E. B. Du Bois famously observed that 'the color line belts the world.' The anticolonial intellectuals Musab Younis examines in his incisive and pathbreaking book knew that the only way to destroy the racial-colonial order was to fight on a world scale. A work rich in historical texture and theoretical sophistication, On the Scale of the World is destined to be a classic in studies of mid-twentieth-century Black radicalism."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination " On the Scale of the World carefully attends to the layers of spatial critique generated by Black and anticolonial thinkers in the interwar years. In this beautifully written text, Younis demonstrates how Black geographic knowledge unsettles imperial-colonial metrics by imagining the planet-world as a scale of rebellious dynamism, political struggle, embodied knowledge, and diasporic consciousness."—Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle and Dear Science and Other Stories "Drawing on an impressive range of deep research in early twentieth-century African diasporic periodicals in French and English, this dazzling study traces the emergence of an 'underground' circuit of Black anticolonial thought. Younis shows that, rather than blinkered parochialism or nationalist particularism, Black anticolonialism must be understood first and foremost as a persistent mode of defying the provincializing driv