Last Days of Empire

Abstract

Sixty years after the headline events that the term ‘decolonization’ evokes, its historiography remains a work in progress. There are several reasons for this. Perhaps the first, and most material, is access to new sources, although what promises to be among the most revealing, the so-called ‘migrated archive’ of British colonial administrations for long discreetly lodged at Hanslope Park, has yet to yield up its secrets. The second influence at work is the startling series of geopolitical changes through which the world has moved since the 1960s and 1970s: the fall of one great imperial system and the consequent end of the Cold War; the rise of a new (potential) superpower; the political growth of fundamentalist Islam. The third is the emergence of new public (and therefore scholarly) concerns that have shaped our perception of the causes, course, and outcome of decolonization: perhaps most obviously the discourse of human rights, and a sensitivity, much less developed even twenty years ago, to the threat and use of violence for political purposes. The fourth is the discovery of a new relevance in the processes of decolonization, as international interventions, whether for humanitarian or geostrategic reasons, have proliferated. Staging the ‘exit’ (not least its rhetorical justification) has become a major new branch of statecraft.