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The battle against colonialism has been a long one, and do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle? On the eighteenth day of April, on thousand seven hundred and seventy five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war in history. About this midnight ride the poet Longfellow wrote:A cry of defiance, and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo for evermore! 1 Two conferences were held at Bandung in April 1955. One was the real conference, about which not very much is known, about which people care even less, and which has faded away like a bad dream. The other was a quite different conference, a crystallization of what people wanted to believe had happened which, as a myth, took on reality in the Bandung Principles and, later, in the Bandung Spirit. The real conference aroused interest mainly because it contributed towards the solution of a crisis then much in the news but which history scarcely troubles to record. 2

Political scientists in early-twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to the British theorist and statesmen, George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863). His best-known work is An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprising three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.” Modern writers, however, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

Roosevelt received him [British ambassador Lord Halifax] that very evening at the White House. Their discussion focused on the Middle East. Trying to allay Halifax's apprehension and irritation, Roosevelt showed the ambassador a rough sketch he had made of the Middle East. Persian oil, he told the ambassador, is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it is ours.