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Malaysian worldmakers in the age of decolonisation, 1950s-1970 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118087 Bin Mohamed Yazid, Muhammad Suhail Hussin, Iza In the 1950s and the 1960s, Malaysian nationalists harboured ambitions to remake the world following the age of empires. Among them was a group of state actors whose Anglophile and anti-communist profiles had facilitated their rise to power. Turning to the platform of international institutions, these leaders competed, cooperated, and clashed with their counterparts across the North-South divide in their quest to correct global inequalities and to safeguard Malaya’s newfound sovereignty. They also creatively adapted and translated anticolonial idioms from different international circuits to consolidate their nationalist regimes at home. Synthesising sources from different national repositories and archives of international organisations, this thesis locates the Malaysian leaders in a series of overlapping ‘global orders’, namely the Commonwealth of Nations, the United Nations, and an imagined Muslim World. In doing so, it makes three interventions. First, this thesis recovers the understudied intersections of internationalism and nationalism in the making of the postcolonial state. Second, it foregrounds distinct visions of decolonisation embedded in varying international organisations, recovering inventive means through which smaller ex-colonies like Malaysia exercised sovereignty. Third, by scrutinising underappreciated Malaysian initiatives in a range of international theatres, it distils hidden asymmetries between Afro-Asian states and exposes the facile quality of ‘Global South’ solidarities. In making these interventions, this thesis illuminates the process of entrenchment of the nation-states system as well as the limits of self-determination in the postwar world. University of Cambridge 2024-09-17 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng Trinity External Research Studentship, Trinity College, Cambridge National University of Singapore Overseas Graduate Scholarship Development Grant, National University of Singapore Smuts Memorial Fund, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Holland Rose Studentship, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Mary Euphrasia Mosely Travel Grant, University of Cambridge https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/383887 embargo 2028-05-12 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c60b2d04-baed-4b95-bc92-f1f86bbcffe4/download dba8469cab51970a1bbc69767880fde4 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/f8411112-e432-43e3-b1f2-3731e0b2712b/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved Commonwealth of Nations Decolonisation Malaysia Muslim World United Nations