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Writing 'global' intellectual histories involves historicising the transnational lives of key concepts. In this article, we argue that interdependence became a key concept in global inequality debates of the 1970–1980s. While ideas about interstate dependency have a long history, interdependence saw a remarkable breakthrough from the late 1960s onwards, partly in tandem with a liberal global egalitarianism, calling for the moral duties of 'rich nations' to alleviate poverty in 'poor nations.' Interdependence took centre stage in writings on international affairs and inequality within and between nations in the 1960s–1980s, both in the US and in Ghana. We first examine the work of American foreign policy intellectual Robert Tucker, and the conservative backlash against liberal global egalitarianism in late 1970s US. We then investigate writings on African regionalism by Ghanaian political economist S.K.B. Asante in the 1980s. A critique of interdependence shaped debates on global inequality, distribution, and justice amongst both American and African intellectuals. Coming from different perspectives and places, both Asante and Tucker were critical of the descriptive value of the concept of 'an interdependent world.' Interdependence was an ambiguous notion, which could be used to 'cover-up' persisting power structures in a world of very unequal nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have intellectuals from around the world thought about inequality in the world? In light of the call for a less Eurocentric history of ideas as well as recent debates about global inequality, this article introduces a special issue on the global intellectual history of an unequal world. The issue supplements the already available scholarship in at least four ways: it delves further into other kinds of inequalities than first and foremost economic inequality; it historicises key concepts in the intellectual history of an unequal world; it incorporates fine-grained analysis of indigenous languages and concepts; it extends the analysis of historical inequality vocabularies to how inequalities were critiqued. Moreover, this introduction sheds lights on possible methodological approaches for an intellectual history of global inequality. There is a need to go against a modular approach to the history of ideas to embrace the dialectic between the specific situatedness of our topics of research and 'global' contexts. Questions of transfer, circulation, connections, or diffusion of ideas need to be asked on an empirical case to case basis. We therefore propose location, temporality and legitimisation/critique as key analytical concepts when exploring historical thinking on an unequal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines two Ghanaian-born intellectuals – economist George Ayittey and anthropologist and sociologist Kwesi Kwaa Prah – and their positions on both local and global inequalities by studying their writings from the mid-1980s–1990s. It answers the questions of how and through which debates both intellectuals addressed and engaged with notions of global inequality. Methodologically anchored in global intellectual history, this article offers a historical, qualitative, and actor-oriented study. As emphasised by Jonathon Earle, the question of how African intellectuals have shaped the intellectual history of the modern world represents an understudied field within global intellectual history.1 In an attempt to address this void, I show how Ayittey and Prah invoked global inequalities through different notions of neo-colonialism as well as criticisms of African elites, such as their indigenous rootlessness. The article argues that their conceptions of global inequalities were hinged on broader debates revolving around issues of African (under)development while their proposed solutions were founded on notions of African indigeneity, drawing on earlier African thought. I show how they actively reused ideas of indigenous development as formulated by Gold Coast intellectual Joseph E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) in the beginning of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]