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The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941–2000
Author(s): Bradley R. Simpson (Author)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication Date: October 14, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 384 pages
- ISBN-10: 0199944407
- ISBN-13: 9780199944408
Book Description
Pacific Island territories, indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, rejected the efforts of large, powerful states to define self-determination along narrow lines. Instead, international historian Bradley R. Simpson shows they offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world.
An ambitious work of global breadth on a key geopolitical issue,
The First Right transforms how we think about the making of the twentieth century world order and the place of the global South and decolonization in it.Editorial Reviews
Review
“In his magisterial The First Right. Brad Simpson transforms our understanding of self-determination in the modern world. Tracing the long arc of decolonial struggles in Asia and Africa along with movements for Indigenous rights and climate justice, he makes clear the meanings of self-determination were never fixed but instead the product of sustained local struggles for political, economic, and cultural rights in an always shifting and often hostile global system. In its remarkable reach and strikingly original claims, this is international history at its best.” — Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago
“A stunning and indispensable analysis of how tensions between ideas of self-determination and rights shaped global power relations and decolonization from the 1940s onward. No other book has so deftly and consistently captured the interplay of top-down international politics and bottom-up claims by anticolonial and sub-state and nonstate movements to show how these dynamics produced the contours and challenges of our present moment.” — Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia
About the Author
Bradley R. Simpson is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of
Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 and the director of the Indonesia documentation project at the nonprofit National Security Archive.
