Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-336) and index.

Introduction: Explaining anti-imperialism and Third World nationalism -- 1. Surveying the crossroads of the world : Paris at the intersection of global migrations -- 2. Building communities : everyday ethnicity and popular culture -- 3. Lovers, husbands, fathers, workers, and soldiers : private life and work -- 4. Learning and imparting lessons in anti-imperialism : students in the Latin Quarter -- 5. The clearinghouse of world politics : international relations and colonialism -- 6. Communist intermediaries : the French Left, the Comintern, and anti-imperialists -- 7. A revolutionary lingua franca : anti-imperialism, civic rights, and the republican ethos -- 8. Vernacularizing nationalism : an outcome foretold? -- Biographical appendix.

"This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international and global history as well as migration, race and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea"--