Writing International History on the Periphery

The international history of American foreign relations with non-Western states and peoples during World War II and the early Cold War period remains in its infancy. With a few notable exceptions, most scholarship on American relations with Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia remains situated in an American context. Both the interests and outlooks of actors on the periphery, along with the subtle interplay of European-American diplomacy on colonial issues, remain largely obscured. The study of American-Indian relations is no exception. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials in India, Great Britain, and the United States, Kenton J. Clymer’s Quest for Freedom aims to redress this imbalance. If Clymer’s study never fully realizes the promise of an internationalist approach, his often revealing analysis substantially advances our understanding of American-Indian relations by placing decision making in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations within the larger context of interactions among the British, Indian nationalists, and Americans that shaped the patterns of decolonization in India.

Clymer contends U.S. support for a peaceful and orderly transition of power from British colonial rule to Indian independence that emerged in the early days of the Pacific War remained a consistent, if sometimes poorly implemented goal of American policy between 1941 and 1947. Strategic imperatives, he suggests, first brought India to the attention of the Roosevelt administration in the late 1930s as it recognized the subcontinent’s potential importance for offering manpower and war material to aid the Chinese in the war against Japan. After Pearl Harbor and the swift Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia in 1942, India’s importance for administration war planning intensified. American strategic goals, however, were frustrated by the chasm that separated the outlook of Indian nationalists, who were reluctant to lend their full support to the Allied war effort without a guarantee of autonomy during the war and full independence in its aftermath, from that of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his Indian viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, who firmly rejected Indian demands. Fearful that British intransigence would make India an unreliable strategic base, Clymer argues, Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly pressured Churchill in the early months of 1942 to reopen negotiations with the nationalists.

But sympathy for the Indian independence movement was not limited to Roosevelt and American military planners, Clymer suggests, nor was wartime strategy its most powerful motivating force. Traditions of American anticolonialism, he argues, produced continuing and widespread support for Indian aims even after the strategic centrality of India diminished in 1943 as military planners shifted attention to the Pacific Theater as the critical arena to defeat the Japanese. Clymer emphasizes the varying strains of anticolonialism that emerged in wartime discussions of India, carefully tracing how both idealist support for self-determination and realist fears that colonialism inhibited a durable postwar peace significantly contributed to American support for Indian independence. He explores the powerful and persisting impact of these anticolonial sentiments on Franklin Roosevelt’s sympathy for the Indian cause as well as their importance for the attitudes of key figures within the administration concerned with Indian policy and postwar planning such as Adolf Berle, William Donovan, Charles Taussig, Louis Johnson, and William Philips. Employing several important newly available archival collections, Clymer devotes particular attention to the views of Johnson and Philips, who acted as Roosevelt’s representatives in India to broker an agreement between the British and Indians that favored the nationalist cause. Clymer also explores the ways in which anticolonialism shaped sentiment for Indian independence among the broader American foreign-policy public, including members of Congress, leading journalists and columnists in the usually pro-British wartime American press, and such influential public figures as John R. Mott, John Gunther, Pearl Buck, Isaiah Bowman, and Hamilton Fish Armstrong.

While Clymer’s focus on military strategy and anticolonialism deepens but does not fundamentally challenge many of the conclusions offered in previous scholarship on U.S.-Indian relations, ¹ Quest for Freedom...