W.E. B. Du Bois was one of the key political thinkers of his day. Born in 1868, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard in 1895 and spent some of his early years sparring with Booker T. Washington over the best route forward for black Americans. In 1909, he helped found the NAACP.
By then, the anticolonial vision that would span his voluminous writings and speeches had already crept into his prose. “The problem of the twentieth century,” he warned in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, “is the problem of the color line — in relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”
For Du Bois, the growth of global racism and colonial expansion reinforced an international racial hierarchy that placed people of color at the bottom and whites on the top. These forces, Du Bois argued, formed a crucial part of the international capitalist order — an order that could only be dismantled if the oppressed, particularly people of color, united to challenge it. If colonialism was the core driver of global conflict, ending it would pave the way for peace and social progress.
This argument ran through Du Bois’s diverse writings, including his articles in the Crisis, the NAACP magazine he edited from 1910 to 1934; his unpublished books; and his lesser-known short-fiction works and poetry. In his 1920 literary work Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Du Bois placed war and imperialism at the center of his analysis. Written against the backdrop of the Great Migration and World War I, Darkwater delivered a scathing critique of capitalism, colonialism, and the global racial color line in experimental prose:
Colonies, we call them, these places where ‘nig***s are cheap and the earth is rich; they are those outlands where like a swarm of hungry locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings, wield the lash of slave-drivers, rape girls and wives, grow as rich as Croesus and send homeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but they cluster in the tropics, with its darkened peoples: in Hong Kong and Anam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama and Havana — these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretch itching palms.
Du Bois’s 1928 historical novel, Dark Princess, returned to these themes. Narrated through the perspective of the protagonist Matthew Townes, a young black man, Dark Princess told the story of his budding romance with Princess Kautilya of the Tibetan Kingdom of Bwodpur. While a passionate tale of love, Du Bois’s political commentary was there as well — a call for Afro-Asian solidarity and an anti-imperialist critique of world affairs.
Du Bois’s 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America — often framed as a rebuttal to the racist Dunning School and praised for its incisive Marxist analysis — can also be seen as an “anti-colonial manifesto.”