Two sections of the book exemplify its arguments and their significance—and it would be wonderful if, in the hands of a reader, the volume serendipitously fell open at them, preferably out of sequence.The first relates to the notion of cultural relativism, on page 119. The constant refrain from those who attack universal human rights is that their universality is illusory, a neo-colonial imposition on societies outside the West. Yet in October 1950, it was those countries which wanted to retain control of their colonies that invoked the problems of cultural difference. Defenders of European colonialism feigned respect for Asian and African tradition and culture as an excuse for weakening the principle of universality in the new draft human rights treaty. By contrast, the Iraqi, Egyptian, and Indian delegations argued against the notion of cultural differences—and successfully insisted on the universal application of rights.Far from being the handmaiden of imperialism, universality was, in fact, the prime weapon of those representatives who sought the end of colonial rule. Universal human rights were an integral part of decolonization—exalted as a set of ideas for liberation, not oppression. Given the later record of so many post-colonial regimes, their sincerity might be seriously questioned, but in these early days, it seemed real enough. And in terms of effects, this outspoken advocacy sharply strengthened the principle of the same rights for all, regardless of tradition, nationality, or culture.If the reader accidentally dropped the book again, I would hope it fell open to page 108. Here, a short vignette illustrates the level of control the Third World would gain over the human rights agenda.At the First World Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran in April 1968, the decolonized utterly dominated proceedings—so much so that an unlikely marriage was made between the US and the Soviet negotiating teams. Driven together by their frustration at being sidelined from the proceedings, American and Soviet diplomats grumbled to each other about being “exploited.”By the last week of the conference, the two Cold War enemies were sharing lunch in the US embassy, and the American diplomatic cables were reporting back that it was “comforting to know that even Soviets have their troubles and annoyance with small-time prima donnas who gang up to throw their weight around.” Instead of the usual sterile Cold War polemics, the two superpowers agreed, in the words of the US delegation, to “take it easy on each other.”Nothing better encapsulates the unusual dynamics of the human rights debate, where the strongest states in the world were reduced to consoling each other about their lack of control, sharing meals together as the Third World representatives wrote their priorities into the conference Proclamation.Today, the legitimacy of human rights often seems to rest on competing arguments about their past formulation. Much of the rhetorical armamentarium employed by the planet’s most egregious dictatorships pivots on the claim that their cultural and traditional values were not accounted for in the development of the international human rights system.From atheist autocrats, to Islamic theocrats, to African kleptocrats, assertions of exclusion and marginalization reside at the heart of attacks on human rights standards as imperialist, inapplicable, and illegitimate. Such assertions were at the heart of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s repudiation of the Universal Declaration in 1984, and its attacks on democratic dissent in 2009. Yet a previous generation of leaders and diplomats, many of whom were directly engaged in winning independence, actively fought for those very same standards against real—and well-armed—imperialists from Britain, France, and the Netherlands.My book provides an insight into the complex history of Third World engagement in the birth of the modern human rights order. I recover the story of those battles fought to make human rights truly universal, to outlaw racial discrimination, and discredit the eloquent excuses of colonialism. Then the book illuminates the depressing reversal of that universality, as the post-colonial world lapsed into the kind of authoritarianism it had once struggled against.Across the work, my focus remains on those voices from outside the West. Voices that both consolidated and compromised the hopeful vision of rights for all that was announced in their absence in 1948.