Abstract
The twentieth century was dubbed the century of the refugee.1 War, the dissolution of multinational empires and the social engineering of totalitarian regimes were major factors in causing forced migration within Europe. Armenians, Cossacks, Jews and ethnic Germans in Central Europe were some of the victims of war and conflict in its opening five decades. Europe’s prolonged internal conflicts strengthened the forces of resistance to its far-flung empires. In the three decades after the close of the Second World War, European formal empires were wound up throughout Africa and Asia.2 More than a hundred newly independent states made their bow on the international stage. This process of decolonization coincided with massive displacements of population and resulting refugee flows. Taken together, the uprooting of populations in Europe and the wider world make one of the most terrible and tragic themes of modern history. There are, however, relatively few comparative examinations of forced migration, despite excellent case studies on such regions as the Balkans, central Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Dirk Hoerder, in his analysis of world migration, does, however, make it one of his categories, along with voluntary migration.3
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Notes
For an introduction to decolonization, see R. F. Holland, European Decolonization, 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey (London, 1988).
Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migration in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002).
The classic example of this was decolonization in the Belgian Congo. See for example, R. Lemarchand, Political Awakening in the Congo: The Politics of Fragmentation (Berkeley, CA, 1964).
Examples of this which are discussed below involve Indian communities in Uganda and, to a lesser extent, Kenya. For the colonial development of the Indian community in East Africa see, J. S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa c1886–1945 (Oxford, 1969).
For reflection on the range of factors prompting decolonization in the British Empire, see J. Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991). For a more recent comparative account of decolonization, see Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States 1918–1975 (London, 2008).
For a study of colonial policing and nationalist struggle, see Georgina S. Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame 1945–1980 (Manchester, 2006).
See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (London, 1987); Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization (London, 1994), pp. 160–74.
For a comparative study which highlights the less propitious circumstances regarding French Decolonization, see Tony Smith, ‘A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 20 (1968), pp. 70–102.
There is a growing literature on the mass migration in 1947. See: Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives Among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi, 2007); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998); R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi, 1998); Ian Talbot with Darshan Singh Tatla, eds, Epicentre of Violence: Partition Voices and Memories from Amritsar (New Delhi, 2006); Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge, 2009); Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957 (Karachi, 2006); Sarah Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi, 2005); Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York, 2007); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge, 2007).
See D. A. Low, Buganda in Modern History (London, 1971).
See J. S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, CA, 1958).
Jean Marie Allman, ‘The Youngmen and the Porcupine: Class, Nationalism and Asante’s Struggle for Self-Determination, 1954–57’, in James D. Le Sueur, ed., The Decolonization Reader (London, 2003), pp. 204–18.
See J. Gerard-Libois (translated by R. Young) Katanga Secession (Madison, WI, 1966).
On the background to Portuguese decolonization, see Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London, 1997).
W. David McIntyre, British Decolonization, 1946–1997 (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 32.
See, Benny Morris, 1948: History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale, 2008); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2003).
See Andrea Smith, ‘Coerced or Free? Considering Post-Colonial Returns’, in Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake, eds, Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009), pp. 395–417.
Ceri Peach uses the first, while Hoerder has favoured the second. See Ceri Peach, ‘Postwar Migration to Europe: Reflux, Influx, Refuge’, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 78 (1997), pp. 269–83; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 499.
For details, see James Ciment, Angola and Mozambique: Postcolonial Wars in Southern Africa (New York, 1997).
See D. R. Sar Desai, Southeast Asia: Past and Present, 5th edn (Boulder, CO, 2003).
For details, see Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, revised and updated edition (London, 2002).
For a perhaps overly optimistic assessment of the colons’ integration into French society, see Richard Alba and Roxane Silberman, ‘Decolonization, Immigration and the Social Origins of the Second Generation: The Case of the North Africans in France’, International Migration Review, vol. 36 (2002), pp. 1169–93.
See Hans van Amserfoort and Mies van Niekerk, ‘Immigration as a Colonial Inheritance: Post-Colonial Immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–2002’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 32 (2006), pp. 323–46.
Ibid., pp. 331.
For further details, see Maria Beatriz Rocha-Trindade, ‘The Repatriation of Portuguese from Africa’ in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 337–41.
Ibid. See also, Stephen C. Lubkemann, ‘Race, Class and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” among Portuguese Retornados 1975–2000’, in Andrea L. Smith, ed., Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 75–95.
For a recent account, see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2007).
See Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947 (New Delhi, 1991), pp. 162 & ff.
Lucy Chester, On the Edge: Borders, Territory and Conflict in South Asia (Manchester, 2008).
For the efforts by the main Sikh organization, the Akali Dal and the rulers of the Sikh Princely States to carve out a Sikhistan in this manner, see Ian Copland, ‘The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East Punjab Massacres of 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 36 (2002), pp. 657–704.
For the work of the Indian Military Evacuation Organization, see Brigadier Rajendra Singh, The Military Evacuation Organization 1947–8 (New Delhi, 1962).
Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (London, 2007), p. 43.
G. D. Khosla, Memory’s Gay Chariot: An Autobiography (New Delhi, 1995), pp. 164–8.
The most authoritative account of the Vietnamese boat people’s travail remains Carol Daglish, Refugees from Vietnam (Basingstoke, 1989).
For details, see Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, The Indian Minority in Burma: The Rise and Decline of an Immigrant Community (London, 1971).
William G. Kuepper, G. Lynne Lackey and E. Nelson Swinerton, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain: Forced Migration and Social Absorption (London, 1975), p. 27.
Ibid., p. 40.
See A. C. Mayer, Indians in Fiji (London, 1963).
Maurice Eisenbruch, ‘Cultural Bereavement and Homesickness’, in S. Fisher and C. Cooper, eds, On the Move: The Psychology of Change and Transition (Chichester, 1990), pp. 191–207.
N. Davies and R. Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London, 2002), p. 484.
P. Neville, Lahore: A Sentimental Journey (New Delhi, 1993); Som Anand, Lahore: Portrait of a Lost City (Lahore, 1998).
See M. U. Memon, ‘Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 14 (1980), pp. 377–410.
S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London, 1991), p. 10.
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© 2011 Ian Talbot
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Talbot, I. (2011). The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration: Some Comparative Case Studies. In: Panayi, P., Virdee, P. (eds) Refugees and the End of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305700_2
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