THE END OF EMPIRES AND A WORLD REMADE

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.