A substantial contribution to the literature of imperialism and colonialism.
A global study of decolonization as colonial empires collapse.
The process of decolonization is incomplete, according to British historian Thomas, author of Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire. “Locating decolonization,” he writes, “means pinpointing when people in a society began thinking and acting toward a future in which imperial formations would no longer be there.” This process began in the early 20th century but accelerated after World War II, when Vietnamese forces defeated the French colonial government in 1954 and 17 sub-Sarahan African nations declared independence in the year 1960 alone. For all the lip service paid to self-determination, however, the former imperial powers—Britain and France, principally, and their successor, the U.S.—retained economic power over much of the former colonial world. Against this, decolonization as “a process of several moving parts” was necessarily hampered. For instance, writes Thomas, former colonial maps that divided ethnic groups across national lines in order to control them more easily remained intact in independent nations such as Nigeria and Congo, where independence movements by minorities “ended in catastrophic violence and reversal.” Violence emerges as a key theme in the author’s account, and a vicious cycle of violence at that. Unrest among colonized peoples often leads to violent repression by the colonizers, which leads to a violent response by freedom fighters, which leads to more violence that often continues even when the colonizer finally leaves. In the end, Thomas writes, while some once-colonial states have entered the world community, others remain hobbled, and the “people marginalized by ethnicity, religious affiliation, or income from the narratives of rich-world politics underline that the unmaking of empire did not mean the end of colonialism.” The 290-page notes and bibliography sections attest to the author’s prodigious research.
A substantial contribution to the literature of imperialism and colonialism.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780691190921
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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