Portentous changes have occurred in recent years in the way people’s lives have been organized and directed through national communities and in the political inter relationships of those communities. One fateful change was of course, the spectacular rise of the Soviet Union to great power status and its westward encroachment of Eastern and Central Europe. Future historians, however, are likely to see an event of still greater consequence in the emergence of China, under the enforced discipline of a Communist regime, from economic stagnation and generations of political impotence and anarchy. Another political mutation of comparable importance was the liquidation of the European colonial power system in South Asia after the Second World War. Within the space of a little more than a decade, nearly 600 million people in South Asia were liberated from colonial rule. As in the case of the other changes mentioned, the significance of this event was not confined to the region in which it occurred. It is clear that, as the process of South Asian liberation gathered momentum, it powerfully stimulated nationalist aspirations in west Asia and Africa. The process of emancipation is not yet complete but there is no doubt that, in a few years time all colonial people will be politically independent. Political independence in its newly liberated countries brought in its train a desire for freedom from foreign economic domination, where this urge has not been satisfied, a chorus of protest has risen from intellectuals craving for more radical policies. In this respect the trend of events in South Asia has also sharpened the ambitions of countries only formally independent, especially those in Latin America.