The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire 9780198713197, 0198713193

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

THE ENDS OF E M P I R E

The Oxford Handbook of

THE ENDS OF EMPIRE Edited by

MARTIN THOMAS and

ANDREW S. THOMPSON

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952783 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​871319–​7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank everyone who has helped in the production of this volume. The Oxford Handbook series is a great academic resource and we are delighted to have been given the opportunity to participate in it. Cathryn Steele, Stephanie Ireland, and the editorial team at Oxford University Press have provided essential guidance throughout the process. Colleagues at the University of Exeter’s Imperial and Global History Centre, several of whom have contributed to this collection, continue to broaden our perspectives on the end of empires. We owe a huge amount to Christine Boyle and Susan Leedham, each of whom has offered invaluable support with countless editorial tasks. It is also a pleasure and a privilege to have worked with such a tremendous group of contributors. Their commitment to the project has made the resultant volume much more than the sum of its parts, and we wish to record our gratitude to all of them here. Most of all, we are indebted to our partners, Sarah and Suzy, for their encouragement and support, and for the good grace with which they tolerated editorial exchanges spilling into the evenings and weekends. We wouldn’t be publishing this volume without them.

Contents

List of Contributors 1. Rethinking Decolonization: A New Research Agenda for the Twenty-First Century Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson 2. 1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires Robert Gerwarth 3. An Empire Unredeemed: Tracing the Ottoman State’s Path towards Collapse Ryan Gingeras

xi 1 27

43

PA RT I   NAT IONA L P E R SP E C T I V E S 4. Britain and Decolonization in an Era of Global Change Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell

65

5. France: The longue durée of French Decolonization Emmanuelle Saada

85

6. The First Postcolonial Nation in Europe? The End of the German Empire Andreas Eckert

102

7. Exceptional Italy? The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire Nicola Labanca

123

8. Après nous, le déluge: Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo Matthew G. Stanard

144

9. Portugal: Decolonization without Agency Norrie MacQueen

162

10. The Collapse of the Romanov Empire Alexey Miller

179

viii   Contents

11. Empire by Imitation? US Economic Imperialism within a British World System Marc-​William  Palen

195

12. Rethinking Empire: Lessons from Imperial and Post-Imperial Japan Louise Young

212

13. The Eclipse of Empire in China: From the Manchus to Mao Tehyun Ma

231

PA RT I I   R E G IONA L P E R SP E C T I V E S 14. Decolonization in South Asia: The Long View Joya Chatterji

251

15. Global Wars and Decolonization in East and South-East Asia (1937–​1954) Christopher Goscha

276

16. The End of Empire in the Maghreb: The Common Heritage and Distinct Destinies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia Sylvie Thénault

299

17. Decolonization in Tropical Africa Frederick Cooper 18. The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context: Revolution, Neo-​Colonialism, and Diaspora Spencer Mawby

317

333

19. Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization James Mark and Quinn Slobodian

351

20. Decolonization and the Arid World Robert S. G. Fletcher

373

21. The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past: Sites, Scholarly Networks, and Moral Geographies of Greater India across Decolonization Marieke Bloembergen

391

Contents   ix

PA RT I I I   T H E M AT IC P E R SP E C T I V E S 22. Self-​Determination and Decolonization Brad Simpson

417

23. Anti-​Colonialism: Origins, Practices, and Historical Legacies Christopher J. Lee

436

24. Unravelling the Relationships between Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Decolonization: Time for a Radical Rethink? Andrew S. Thompson

453

25. Decolonization and the Cold War Piero Gleijeses

477

26. Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires Martin Thomas

497

27. Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism: Gender and the Dynamics of Decolonization Barbara Bush

519

28. Repressive Developmentalism: Idioms, Repertoires, and Trajectories in Late Colonialism Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo

537

29. Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire David Motadel

555

30. Refugees and the End of Empire Panikos Panayi

580

PA RT I V   L E G AC I E S A N D M E M OR I E S 31. Postcolonial Migrations to Europe Elizabeth Buettner 32. Beyond Dependency: North–​South Relationships in the Age of Development Joseph Morgan Hodge

601

621

x   Contents

33. Imperial Business Interests, Decolonization, and Post-​Colonial Diversification Nicholas J. White

639

34. Film and the End of Empire: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Colonial Pasts and their Legacy in World Cinemas Paul Cooke

661

35. Remnants of Empire Michael J. Parsons

678

36. Literature and Decolonization Charles Forsdick

697

37. Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation: Making Reparations for Colonialism Robert Aldrich

714

Index

733

List of Contributors

Robert Aldrich is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney. Marieke Bloembergen is a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Elizabeth Buettner is Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. Barbara Bush is Emeritus Professor of History in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University. Joya Chatterji is FBA Professor of South Asian History and a fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Paul Cooke is Centenary Chair in World Cinemas and Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures at the University of Leeds. Frederick Cooper is Professor of History at New York University. Andreas Eckert is Professor of African History and Director of the IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History research centre at Humboldt University, Berlin. Robert S. G. Fletcher is Associate Professor of Britain and Empire in the Department of History, University of Warwick. Charles Forsdick is the James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Centre for War Studies at University College, Dublin. Ryan Gingeras is Associate Professor in the Department for National Security Affairs at the United States Naval Postgraduate School. Piero Gleijeses is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Christopher Goscha is Professor of History at the University of Quebec, Montreal. Joseph Morgan Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of History, West Virginia University. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo is  Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies-​ University of Coimbra.

xii   List of contributors Nicola Labanca is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Siena. Christopher J. Lee is Associate Professor of History, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. Tehyun Ma is Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. Norrie MacQueen is Honorary Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews. James Mark is Professor of History and Principal Investigator on the 1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective research project at the University of Exeter. Spencer Mawby is Associate Professor in History at the University of Nottingham. Alexey Miller is Professor of History at the European University of St Petersburg. David Motadel is Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Marc-​William Palen is Senior Lecturer in British Imperial/​Colonial History at the University of Exeter. A historian of empires and globalization, he is editor of the Imperial & Global Forum, the blog of the Centre for Imperial and Global History. Panikos Panayi is Professor of European History in the School of Humanities at De Montfort University. Michael J. Parsons is Emeritus Professor of English at the Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour. Emmanuelle Saada is Professor of French and of History and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University. Brad Simpson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Quinn Slobodian is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Matthew G. Stanard is Professor of History at Berry College. Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell is Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History at King’s College London. Sylvie Thénault is CNRS Director of Research at the Centre for Twentieth Century Social History, University of Paris I. Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for the Study of War, State, and Society at the University of Exeter. Andrew S. Thompson is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter and Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

List of contributors    xiii Nicholas J. White is Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History in the School of Humanities and Social Science at Liverpool John Moores University and Co-Director of Liverpool’s Centre for Port and Maritime History. Louise Young is Professor of Japanese History at the University of Wisconsin​Madison.

Chapter 1

Rethinki ng Dec ol oniz at i on A New Research Agenda for the Twenty-​First Century Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson

Over the past century, the collapse of formal colonial control, the end of empires—​or, as specialists usually term it, decolonization—​has reshaped the world’s political geography. The ideological impact of decolonization on the ways regimes, governments, and social movements justify their behaviour has been equally profound. In much of the Global South, rejecting colonialism was the necessary precursor to the creation of new nation-​states, new ideological attachments, and new political alignments. For some, not least in francophone Africa, that rejection did not necessarily produce support for decolonization but, rather, for alternate claims to political inclusion, social entitlements, and cultural respect, all aspirations thought to be achievable within, rather than beyond, the structures of empire. For many others, though, anti-​colonialism necessarily demanded a fuller decolonization—​of politics, of economies, and of minds. These more radical and rejectionist stances fuelled equally profound social transformations, placing the end of empires within a spectrum of revolutionary change. Decolonization also occasioned many of the longest, bitterest wars of the twentieth century. These conflicts were often hard fought. Violence was not, however, confined to armed struggles or their colonial synonym, ‘emergencies’. From symbolic acts of protest to persistent low-​level insurgency, the threat as much as the actuality of violence shaped decisions about how and when colonial rule should cease. A  contested process, at times pursued in the absence of forums for peaceful dialogue, decolonization catalysed differing styles of resistance, mass demonstration, and guerrilla warfare. Resistance, in turn, provoked imperial experimentation in counter-​insurgency, repressive legislation, and the mass displacement of civilian populations. Counter-​revolutionary in intent, these actions sometimes had social consequences as far-​reaching as the original uprisings they sought to crush. Even the most highly orchestrated colonial withdrawals were rarely entirely peaceful. Partitions and, conversely, enforced territorial unifications

2    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson could be especially bloody, leaving damaging legacies of unresolved argument and trauma, which spilt out over subsequent decades. Decolonization, then, could prefigure outpourings of retributive violence against those who were marginalized or, still worse, judged as collaborators by a country’s new rulers. Moreover, the end of twentieth-​century empires—​European and Asiatic—​marked the biggest and most concentrated process of state-​making (and empire un-​making) the world has seen: prevailing ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, and collective and individual rights were all reconstituted as a result. The end of empires promoted different ideas of belonging, whether to nation, to ethnicity, or to ideals. New types of social activism were stimulated, as were innovative forms of international and transnational cooperation, enabling colonial peoples to eject colonial overseers who, with only rare exceptions, enjoyed greater access to military power. In whatever way they are described, the movements and events explored in this Handbook stand alongside the twentieth-​century’s world wars, the Cold War, and the longer arc of globalization as one of the four great determinants of geopolitical change in living memory. So how might we best characterize decolonization as a global phenomenon? This Introduction and, more broadly, this collection of essays, offers some new answers to some very long-​standing historiographical questions. Contributors demonstrate how the end of empires was embedded in the geopolitics of the second half of the twentieth century: the lasting effects of the Second World War, the impact of the Cold War, and new and accelerating forms of globalization. Together and separately, these geopolitical forces reacted with the unfinished business of decolonization; each, in their different ways, affected, altered, or accelerated the others. The Second World War refashioned global politics beyond the Asian and European heartlands from which the major combatants entered hostilities in 1937, 1939, or 1941, just as the Cold War inflected the politics of decolonization. Pause, for instance, to consider the reconfiguration of territorial boundaries, the new human rights agendas, and the profound changes in international political economy that emerged in the wake of the two World Wars. Or reflect on the spread of colonial ‘proxy wars’, as Cold War animosities hardened. Whichever the example, we are reminded that the end of empires was, to some degree, contingent on the development of other geopolitical factors. Hence, decolonization has to be understood as, at once, a ‘post-​World War’ phenomenon as well as a process that gathered momentum in the long Cold War cycle running from the 1940s to the early 1990s.1 Different phases might be identified within that broad fifty-​year spectrum, depending on which ideological struggle or whose rights and entitlements predominated, or how practices of statecraft and public diplomacy changed as international organizations and international laws proliferated. For all that, decolonization was as much a catalyst to global change as an outcome of it. The political contestations, cultural clashes, and violent confrontations intrinsic to ending empire reverberated far beyond their immediate locale. Examples of successful contestation were a source of inspiration for communities elsewhere facing equivalent forms of political discrimination, social exclusion, or rights denial.2 The underlying concerns that animated anti-​colonial opposition were as pressing in South

Rethinking Decolonization   3 Africa as they were in North Vietnam. Methods of political mobilization, techniques of evasion, and styles of propaganda and mass communication practised in one place were emulated in others. The practices of civil rights movements in the United States, whether non-​violent and ecumenical or radically internationalist, resonated especially strongly.3 A rhetoric of anti-​colonial solidarity bore fruit, often articulated in stirring terms of affinities of the oppressed, of pan-​Africanism, pan-​Arabism, non-​alignment, or Third Worldism. That rhetoric also inspired groups and individuals to action and altered the terms on which the public diplomacy of empire was conducted.4 Often operating outside the law and with limited material assets to hand, opponents of empire exploited their moral resources instead. Appealing for global support on ethical grounds, they demanded an end to discriminatory legal regimes. They highlighted the maltreatment of colonial subjects and posited a world without the racial discrimination at colonialism’s core.5 Put differently, the moral disarmament of imperialism became the weapon of choice for those anti-​colonialists without the means to end empire militarily.6 Less theorized than its cousins imperialism and colonialism, decolonization is widely framed as a relatively discrete process.7 Yet, as several chapters in this volume reveal, decolonization’s conceptual and chronological boundaries have long been, and remain, decidedly fuzzy.8 One thing that unites recent if somewhat diffuse scholarship on the ‘end of empire’ is the tendency to increase its geographical and temporal span. The concept of decolonization is, in other words, now applied more widely and over a longer period than was the case for early political and scholarly practitioners of the term. Indeed, whereas past scholarship once presented decolonization as neatly packaged and compartmentalized by empire, region, and period, we broaden decolonization’s conceptual, geographical, and temporal boundaries in ways that force us to rethink what decolonization actually was. In theorizing decolonization, we highlight the following challenges: the prior requirement to determine whose empires are in question; the difficulty in establishing when or if decolonization was ever completed; and the need to work out whether decolonization as process was driven by its own unique motor or was pulled along by other extraneous factors.9 Together these theoretical challenges sit at the heart of this Handbook, and the rest of this Introduction explains how we have sought to tackle them, and to what interpretive effect. Our ambition—​building on revisionist scholarship on decolonization—​is to provide a new analytical framework, the purpose of which is not simply to explain when and why decolonization happened, but how it happened and, as importantly, with what results. Let us start with the term ‘empire’. Established disciplinary distinctions, such as that between oceanic empires and territorially contiguous empires, tend to cloud the issue of whose decolonization is under scrutiny. Historian Tony Hopkins, for one, suggests that any definition of decolonization must encompass the informal empires of western economic influence in Latin America, East Asia, and elsewhere, alongside America’s previous and current overseas engagements and China’s escape from the shackles of extra-​territoriality.10 Hence, the Handbook adopts a pluralistic understanding

4    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson of the term ‘empire’, encompassing a variety of types of rule, and all of the above categorizations. Another problem of first principles appears deceptively simple:  when did empires end? Decades of scholarship on modernization, dependency, ‘neo-​colonialism,’ ‘failed state’ architectures, and post-​colonial conflict make plain that answers cannot be reduced to a watershed moment of ‘flag independence’ or, in Swahili, uhuru wa bendera: the point at which external colonial rule nominally ended.11 State-​centric explanations clearly fall down insofar as they equate the withdrawal of colonial authority with the ‘end of empire’. Deeper economic changes are overlooked, as is the replication of colonial forms of authority within nominally independent countries. Rejecting the idea of ‘flag independence’ as a decisive break point, this Handbook reframes the idea of decolonization—​less as a sequence of events and more as a globally connected process. The approach adopted is to tackle decolonization afresh, explaining not just when, but how, why, and, importantly, if ever empires came to an end. In short, how is the history of decolonization to be rethought as a result of decisive methodological shifts, which have begun to emerge in the scholarship of the last decade or so? Imperial histories have long placed issues of race, gender, and culture at the heart of their analysis. Newer is the striking growth of interest in global history, histories of globalization, and transnational history, as well as histories of migration and diaspora, humanitarianism, development, and human rights—​all of which challenge us to think more broadly still about the dynamics of decolonization.12 Tracing decolonization’s global span reveals how the achievement of independence catalysed different ideas of statehood, galvanizing bold, if sometimes transient, experiments in social, racial, and gender equality, and sharpening popular identification within and between nations and communities undergoing similar struggles for freedom. Some of the ideas involved here were locally specific, even unique, but many more were shared, borrowed, or adapted among the peoples caught up in fights for basic rights, for self-​determination, and for the dignity of cultural recognition. If there is a primary dialectic at work here, it is that globalization conditioned decolonization, just as decolonization shaped globalization. It should thus come as no surprise that the interplay between decolonization and globalization looms large in our thinking. Globalization remains perhaps the biggest intellectual challenge facing the humanities and social sciences today.13 Yet its champions and critics are invariably concerned with the present, with crudely exponential assumptions about the pace and scale of scientific and technological change built into globalization’s teleology. These assumptions seemingly ignore the fact that much of our global past was forged in the crucible of the world’s empires, which were nothing less than giant systems for organizing mobility of all kinds—​of people, goods, and capital—​ on an international scale. If differing colonial experiences intersected, then decolonization is surely better understood within a global, rather than nation-​empire, framework of analysis. Indeed, a central argument recurring throughout the chapters in this Handbook is that decolonization was actively globalizing. It was a motivating force that triggered all

Rethinking Decolonization   5 sorts of changes ranging from global geopolitics and new trans-​regional alignments to major migratory movements and bitter culture wars over the legacies of empire. The implications of this line of argument are significant. If decolonization was truly globalizing in its effects, then it becomes difficult to treat the end of a particular empire or the demise of a single colony in isolation. Explaining the globalizing effects of the end of empires requires us to take more seriously the question of inter-​relatedness. It means that we need to consider how local colonial conflicts connected with wider causes, whether narrowly political or more broadly ideological, as well as with more longstanding shifts in the movement of people, ideas, and goods: in other words, with globalization. Reduced to its simplest terms, it is surely no coincidence that the oceanic and land empires constructed over centuries by Asia and Europe’s leading imperial powers disintegrated in relatively short order, and more or less together over the past century or so. We suggest that we need to address four basic themes to demonstrate how and why decolonization exerted such a strong globalizing pull: 1. Historicizing decolonization, not as some inevitable and long foreseen outcome, but as something more open-​ended, multi-​layered, and contingent—​neither entirely pre-​figured nor substantially pre-​determined, but a composite set of processes persisting well beyond formal transfers of power.14 2. Exploring how decolonization’s gathering momentum globalized the Cold War. Colonialism, its discriminations, and its rights denials were issues of more tangible concern to greater numbers of people than the Cold War’s ideological divides. The contention here is that the resultant struggles to bring colonialism to an end transformed the nature and extent of the Cold War. We argue that decolonization catalysed changes in international alignments, in transnational networks, and in the intersections between the Cold War and anti-​colonial attachments. As a result, decolonization registered as much across nations, empires, and international boundaries as it did within them. 3. Analysing the relationship between decolonization and globalization to explain why so many empires ended in so short a space of time, revealing that the possibilities of globalization—​of an interconnected world of mobility and movement—​ assured the supporters of decolonization greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to a global audience. 4. Recognizing that violent contestation was also integral to the decolonization process. Whether in full-​blown warfare within, between, or across states, or in insurgent attacks and the security force repression that these invited, or in the undeclared civil wars within colonial societies on the threshold of imperial collapse, the violence of decolonization was acutely asymmetric. So prevalent was this asymmetry that it might be judged fundamental to the nature of decolonization. We reach this conclusion because the asymmetry of colonial conflicts registered most strongly in the violence done to non-​combatants: for the most part, colonial subjects unrecognized in law or practice as ‘civilians’.

6    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson

Historicizing Decolonization Historicizing decolonization means resisting the temptation to read history backwards, starting from the known endpoint of empire in order to assemble the causal factors that inexorably brought about colonial collapse.15 The interpretational dangers of doing so are clear. The complexity of colonial politics is flattened into a misleading story of supporters and opponents of empire—​of opposing extremes. Moderates of all stripes disappear from the narrative. Alternatives to decolonization are ignored. The prosaic realities of day-​to-​day colonial life are hidden; so, too, is the sense of contingency in people’s political choices. Within European nations, the banal acceptance of empire, or at least of some form of dependent relationship between richer and poorer societies, may also be overlooked or misunderstood. The pitfalls are many: colonial histories and local specificities are obscured, and other trajectories out of empire are not taken seriously as subjects of inquiry. Decolonization was neither ineluctable nor unavoidable. Rather, it was an outcome actively politicked over in terms of rival claims, many of which did not posit the complete rupture of imperial attachments. Social histories of popular politics in late-​colonial societies offer a powerful rejoinder to reductive accounts of communities either ‘for’ or ‘against’ decolonization: they make plain that abstract concepts like ‘nationalism’ and ‘anti-​colonialism’ fail to capture the diverse views and the differing motives of those involved. Anti-​colonial ‘nationalist mobilization’ was rarely as total or as clearly identifiable at the time as it might appear in retrospect.16 Instead, individuals’ claims expressed economic, political, or cultural demands that were not predicated on the achievement of national independence, sovereign rights, or self-​determination. New scholarship on self-​determination illustrates this contingency powerfully. For example, Brad Simpson suggests that human rights histories have made two erroneous arguments concerning the concept itself. First is that anticolonial movements used the discourse of self-​determination instrumentally, primarily to achieve broader goals, such as economic development and racial equality. Second, that by the 1960s, self-​ determination’s fiercest advocates in the Global South had reduced the principle-​cum-​ right ‘to the receipt of statehood and perpetual non-​intervention thereafter,’ diluting its liberal, democratic implications. Simpson contends that both arguments oversimplify the ways in which a variety of state and non-​state actors deployed self-​determination claims to envision sovereignty and human rights in the era of decolonization. Rather, self-​determination is better understood as a form of claim making about the nature and scope of post-​colonial rights and sovereignty—​an open-​ended, rather than a fixed, concept.17 Framed in this subtler light, decolonization begins to look more contested than inexorable, more historically contingent than preordained. In order to understand what decolonization is, we need to lay bare the various processes involved. Together these processes were to question the legitimacy of an entrenched order of empires and to pave the way for a new order of nation-​states to take

Rethinking Decolonization   7 its place. But this rethinking of decolonization as a composite concept is complicated by the fact that we still lack historical distance from the events in question. Just like a mooring rope, the further we have travelled from the era of decolonization, the more we have felt its pull. To better connect the effects of the end of empires to the making of our contemporary world, eschewing the polemics which continue to surround this subject, we need to reframe decolonization not as one process but as a bundle of processes, encompassing ‘post-​colonialism,’ ‘second wave decolonization,’ ‘re-​colonization,’ and ‘de-​colonialization.’ These processes transcended the experiences of individual colonial powers and colonies; and they predated and outlived formal transfers of power. Chronology is equally important here. To think through decolonization as a composite concept, it is necessary to analyse the end of empires as passing through a series of interlocking phases: an initial delegitimizing of colonialism; the resultant contestations over the persistence, the reform, or the termination of external colonial control; and the very imperfect transitions to sovereign independence for former dependencies that followed. Set within this chronological framework, ‘post-​colonialism,’ ‘second wave decolonization,’ ‘re-​colonization,’ and ‘de-​colonialization’ provide a basis for rethinking decolonization by bringing into considerably sharper analytical focus the multiple trajectories and the different timelines upon which the end of empire occurred. Critically, each of these processes was accelerated, but still far from complete at the moment of independence: collectively they point towards the conclusion that decolonization was not simply a dramatic geopolitical shift that occurred in the mid-​twentieth century, but something that has subsequently cast such a very long shadow over our contemporary world. ‘Post-​colonialism’ or, perhaps more accurately, ‘post-​empire’ is taken here not to highlight discursive forms of representation and resistance, important as they are, but in a more literal sense to mark out a formative and highly transitional period in the history of international relations, one in which governments, businesses, transnational movements, aid agencies, and other international organizations were seeking to protect their interests and preserve their influence through and beyond the moment of independence. All sorts of calculations intrinsic to the end of empire had to be made by those who sought to navigate their way across this late-​colonial and post-​colonial divide. Some adapted to new realities more readily than others. Just as colonialist attitudes and colonial practices did not end abruptly, nor on the other side of the scale did anti-​colonialism disappear as former dependencies achieved nationhood, or ‘flag independence’. Empire, after all, had been a pervasive, almost ubiquitous, form of political organization for centuries. Its effects were bound to linger, whether in material terms of economic dependency, political clientage, and NGO activity, in patterns of migration between imperial metropoles and erstwhile dependencies, or in subtler ties of language, culture, and outlook. Furthermore, as Christopher Lee makes plain in his chapter contribution, anti-​colonialism, too, would subsist as a prevailing way of thinking for many. ‘Post-​empire’ was not a moment in time: rather, it is better understood as the passage of time, marked by the dismantling of an old colonial order, the birth of a new

8    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson post-​colonial order, and the protracted and sometimes painful adjustments that led from the one to the other. After wresting formal control of their states from Europe’s colonial powers, national liberation movements also sought to exert more practical forms of control over what the institutions of those states actually did. On the eve of Ghana’s independence, Kwame Nkrumah declared that ‘we must show that it is possible for Africans to rule themselves.’ A prescient warning, for the premise for ‘second wave decolonization’ is that independence was often highly circumscribed. The incompleteness of formal decolonization and the lasting consequences of colonial dependency for African and Asian people’s belief in their capacity to govern their affairs are well captured by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Gaining worldwide attention for his first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe spoke of a ‘postcolonial disposition’ whereby ‘a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves’ had difficulty running the new systems ‘foisted upon them at the dawn of independence.’ During the 1960s and 1970s, the meaning of decolonization thus shifted away from the acquisition of legal sovereignty and towards the struggle over the apparatus of government that would make that sovereignty real. The extension of state ownership in former colonies, for example, often reflected attempts by ruling parties and regimes to match their political dominance with tangible control over national assets. From the nationalization of major industries within former colonial territories to the efforts made by Middle Eastern, African, and Asian export producers to build a new international economic order that served their interests above those of the western world, decolonization played out in fundamental changes to the political economy of newly independent states and the terms on which trade with the nations of the Global South should be conducted.18 Resistance to ‘re-​colonization’ by post-​colonial states took many forms. In his chapter, Joseph Hodge illustrates that, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the emergence of ‘development’ as both a guiding principle and an administrative practice of empire triggered numerous responses among colonial communities to escape its clutches. Such resistance did not end with formal independence. Quite the reverse: post-​colonial states were equally inventive in asserting their rights to determine how development, now typically re-​designated as overseas ‘aid’, should be transacted. Efforts to diversify sources of development and reduce reliance on any one donor or provider were one response, as was the formation, in short order, of a spate of non-​western branches of international organizations. In order to increase their lobbying power, some of these branches grouped themselves into regional conferences—​most notably, the Arab Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the Middle East. In these—​and other—​ways the international humanitarian arena became a key site of emerging power engagement in what had traditionally been western power discussions. To borrow the phrase of the Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove, the driver behind ‘de-​colonialization’—​a concept rooted in the psychological dimensions of colonial rule—​was nothing less than ‘a cleansing of the colonial languages.’ School curricula in numerous post-​colonial societies were rewritten to accommodate regime eagerness to revitalize vernacular language teaching, to teach ‘authentic’ national histories,

Rethinking Decolonization   9 or to promote a particular ideological worldview. Arabization programmes, commonplace in North Africa and the Middle East, became identifiable, not just with the restoration of Arabic language use in schools and administrative services, but with the promotion of pan-​Arab solidarity and opposition to Israel’s territorial gains in the aftermath of 1967’s Six Day War.19 ‘De-​colonial’ cleansing of this type was equally evident in the realm of international law. Although the initial spark for the revision of the 1949 Geneva Conventions came from humanitarian and human rights activists, the force that propelled the negotiations that led up to the Additional Protocols was post-​ colonial, specifically, a radical reframing of the very idea of ‘international armed conflict’ to incorporate the wars of liberation movements at a time when the majority of those movements had already succeeded in their independence quest. In that sense, the Additional Protocols were a retrospective proclamation of the justice and legitimacy of the anti-​colonial cause. To reiterate, the more expansive definition of decolonization we have been applying—​framed as a composite concept spanning successive phases—​points to a single conclusion—​one that pervades this collection of essays. Narrowly political definitions of decolonization as ‘a surrender of external political sovereignty,’ ‘the transfer of power from empire to nation-​state,’ or, more vaguely, ‘the taking of measures by indigenous peoples and/​or their white overlords intended eventually to end external control over overseas colonial territories,’ simply won’t do.20 Each definition, in its insufficiency, highlights the limitations in state-​centric explanations of colonial collapse that equate the formal transfer of power with the ‘end of empire’. Each overlooks deeper economic changes, as well as the replications of colonial forms of authority, juridical practice, land rights, property ownership, and commercial transaction in post-​colonial societies. These points bring us full circle to the question of when, and if at all, twentieth-​ century empires came to an end. It is, in certain circles, fashionable to argue that empires and imperialist practices somehow persist through rich world interventions in fragile states and developing world crisis zones. This type of analysis rests on two premises. One is that the chosen sites, the motivations, and the practices of contemporary European military interventions in Africa and Western Asia are intimately connected to the imperial pasts of Europe’s former colonial powers. The other is that understandings of political violence and state legitimacy are embedded in decolonization experiences. Western models of good governance predominate as indicators of how regimes should operate, how governments should reach decisions, and how communities should order their political lives. The persistence of quasi-​or neo-​colonial influences beyond independence was—​ and is—​a widely discussed phenomenon, not least in the midst of twenty-​first-century wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The view that humanitarian and human rights interventions exercise power over the very people they seek to emancipate is increasingly familiar. What many of its proponents fail to grasp, however, is that assertions of western power since the collapse of colonial rule are as likely to have been multi-​lateral as bi-​lateral. State aid may have become a pawn of Cold War politics, but multi-​lateral aid has hardly been agenda-​free either. The intervention of international agencies in

10    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson post-​colonial conflicts has raised growing concerns about what Nkrumah and others saw as the control of local policies from outside. Hence the idea of ‘re-​colonization’—​the replication of western forms of authority via non-​governmental and inter-​governmental organizations. What has fuelled such fears are the western origins and orientation of many of these organizations, including their continued reliance on the United States and Western Europe for much of their funding. If narrowly political concepts of decolonization are analytically too limiting, the phrase ‘end of empires,’ by contrast, opens the door to different historical timelines, which set colonial withdrawals and conventional ‘transfers of power’ alongside the murkier, often muted, effects of decolonization within formerly colonized societies and its lasting legacies within Europe itself. Sensitivity to transnational currents of change need not and should not deny space for national stories of ends of empire: this collection contains several such surveys. Equally, the decolonization phenomenon was something bigger and more complex than the experiences of any single imperial power and its dependencies. Hence, as Gary Wilder suggests, we might profitably look beyond ‘methodological nationalism—​the assumption that the national state is the primary unit of historical analysis and the privileged explanatory matrix for historical phenomena.’ Applying this thinking to experiences of empire in the francophone world, he concludes that . . . starting with the empire as an analytic category is not the same as studying French national actors in the many places they happen to be . . . . It follows that the crucial question is not how France behaved overseas or how its subject populations experienced colonial rule, but how the fact of empire, including ways that colonial subjects reflected upon it, invites us to rethink, or to unthink, France itself as well as the global imperial order within which it has been embedded.21

Wilder’s point is well made and might be applied to all of the modern empires studied in this collection. To illustrate the point, stop for a moment to consider decolonization’s trajectories in two very different empires, one—​the Japanese—​a relatively transient phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the other—​the Ottoman—​of a much longer, multi-​century duration. Beginning in Taiwan, Japan’s imperial conquests gathered momentum from the 1890s onwards. By the time that Japan seized Manchukou, a large swathe of northern Chinese territory, in 1932, East Asia’s eventual escape from foreign imperial control and the global conflict that would help bring out this liberation were coming into view. Japanese efforts to carve out its newest colonial state, to demarcate it administratively, and to reshape it culturally, were thus bound up with a larger war of conquest in mainland China. This conflict would also seal the fate of the Japanese empire as a whole.22 The Japanese path from imperial conquest through political and cultural implantation to enforced decolonization combined peculiar rapidity with vast social devastation.23 Thomas David Dubois captures this dynamic, commenting that ‘in contrast to the long century of British high imperialism, the entire history of Manchukuo is thus one of urgency, grandiose planning, and bold execution.’24

Rethinking Decolonization   11 If Japan’s experiences of empire-​building and forced decolonization were highly compacted, the fate of a much older imperial system—​the Ottoman Empire—​reminds us, following Wilder’s insight, that Turkey’s relationship with its colonial territories and its exposure to external imperial pressures might be usefully rethought. Let Alan Mikhail and Christine M. Philliou be our guides here: Cleaving the questions of longevity and violent demise into two demonstrates the difficulty, indeed near impossibility, of weaving together the early modern empire with the presumptive modern one. The brokers who proved so crucial to the long-​ term survival of the empire from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries were precisely the ones who were pushed out of the system when the reforms we associate with ‘modernization’ and ‘westernization’ were instituted in the nineteenth century. And yet we are only beginning to understand in all their complexities the final tests of diversity, crisis, and change that buried the empire in the twentieth century.25

The Ottoman Empire was not only much older than the Japanese Empire, it was also more of a hybrid. It was both land-​based and maritime, both indirectly ruled and directly colonized. In some regions Ottoman administrators felt isolated and exposed. Other parts of the empire were meanwhile judged capable of assimilation to a greater Turkish homeland.26 This hybrid quality helps explain why trying to fit Ottoman imperial history within a linear account of rise and fall is an analytical dead end. The examples of Meiji Japan and late Ottoman Turkey illustrate the tension experienced by rapidly modernizing nation-​states that were, at the same time, blocking demands for statehood within their colonial dependencies. The collapse of each empire following defeat in war triggered wider transformations throughout South East and Western Asia. The fates of the Japanese and Ottoman Empires thus suggest that the bigger questions still hanging over decolonization are not why it happened, but with what consequences—​in these two particular cases how decolonization’s broader transregional consequences played out. In seeking answers to these ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and ‘with what consequence,’ questions we are compelled to explore the connections between the global (or macro) forces of change and their more localized (or micro) dynamics.

Cold War and Decolonization: Globalizing Anti-​C olonial Conflict In the second half of the twentieth century, the local impulses behind decolonization conflicts from French Vietnam to Portuguese Angola were interwoven with the geopolitical contest between rival Cold War blocs. Yet, the political divides involved were really two sides of the same ideological coin, the basic dynamic being a clash of opposing worldviews about how societies—​and particular ethnic groups or social classes within

12    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson them—​should be organized and ordered in relation to one another. With notable exceptions among settler-​based rebellions in Palestine and Rhodesia, or among the pan-​ Hellenic supporters of the Greek Cypriot underground nationalist movement (EOKA) dedicated to ending British colonial rule in Cyprus, numerous anti-​colonialists were drawn to the egalitarian message of the Communist bloc. Within the Communist ‘second world’, in turn, multiple civil society groups, educational institutions, and workplace associations proclaimed international solidarity with anti-​colonial struggles.27 From Vietnam to Angola, contests that pitched the United States and its western allies against leftist anti-​colonial insurgents attracted the strongest interest—​and the greatest material aid—​of all.28 It is therefore surprising that decolonization was for many years treated by some Cold War scholars as incidental to the dominant plot of superpower opposition. Numerous historians now recognize that the end of empires was the central concern for many populations in the Global South as well as within the Communist world itself. For many, opposing colonial injustice was a more potent agent of change than the ideological abstractions and geopolitical competition of Cold War. For all that, the temptation in international history has been to privilege the disruptive impact of Cold War. That interpretative line is gradually changing with new and more nuanced perspectives on the nature and extent of Cold War–​decolonization interactions.29 Even so, reconciling these more varied viewpoints into a judgement on the implications of the Cold War for decolonization remains difficult. It could, for instance, be argued that while the Cold War shaped the course and consequences of some colonial conflicts, it was ephemeral in others. Equally, it is now more readily acknowledged that multiple-​state and non-​state actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain, whether in the ‘First World’ of the rich West or the ‘Second World’ of the Communist bloc, played an important part in slowing or accelerating imperial collapse. Among the latter might be counted a host of revolutionary actors, all of which offered greater dynamism, unbending commitment, and more responsiveness to the needs of their revolutionary anti-​colonial clients. At state level, one might include the Yugoslavs, other non-​aligned states, and, first and foremost, the Cubans. At non-​state level, one thinks of a host of solidarity groups and fund-​raising organizations that lent support, both moral and material, to anti-​colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. The essential question asked in light of this is whether Cold War pressures were driving processes of decolonization, or vice versa. Our conclusion is that the end of empires precipitated fundamental shifts in the way the Cold War was conceived and fought, through regional proxies in particular. Put simply, the collapse of empires sucked in Cold War rivals to pre-​existing colonial conflicts of much older vintage. While the Cold War was increasingly global in reach, decolonization was more actively globalizing. East-​West alignments and ideological divisions never mapped exactly onto the North-​ South conflicts that heralded the disintegration of empires. These disintegrations were sometimes falteringly slow (think of Portugal’s long-​lasting African attachments for instance), sometimes shockingly abrupt (recall the chaotic early months of the Congo crisis). But the essential point is that contested decolonization both antedated and outlasted the Cold War.

Rethinking Decolonization   13 The constant background noise of imperial collapse was something to which the major Cold War rivals had to adjust. For example, Washington policy makers in the late 1940s fretted that a strategy of pure containment was far too negative to draw Asian peoples away from Communism’s growing appeal. They turned instead to a more positive model: an ‘imaginary of integration.’ Cultural barriers between peoples would be broken down once it became apparent that ordinary Americans sympathetically identified with a world emerging from colonialism. The compelling need to avoid any appearance of racism, to discard any association with the language and attitudes of imperialism, and to bring about the political and economic integration of non-​Communist Asia increasingly informed American diplomatic rhetoric after 1945. Some of Asia’s leaders were meanwhile giving voice to an altogether different vision of their region’s future. As North Vietnamese troops neared victory over the French garrison besieged at Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954, China and India reached a settlement governing relations over Chinese-​occupied Tibet. At the same time, the two Asian giants elaborated the ‘five principles’ (pancheela) by which their relations should proceed: each was to respect the other’s territorial integrity; non-​interference in the internal affairs of the other would also be upheld; non-​aggression was made a formal objective; relations were to proceed on an equitable basis; and the fifth and ultimate goal was summarized as peaceful coexistence. Western observers, inclined to dismiss the five principles as vague and utopian, missed the point—​according to Matthew Jones, ‘it was the pancheela, perhaps more than any other statement at this time, that best represented the philosophical gulf between an “Asian” perspective on resolving outstanding issues between newly independent states and the fears of a bipolar division of the region into rival military blocs that the South East Asian treaty Organization (SEATO) was helping to excite.’30 The divide, as much philosophical as ideological, between the Cold War mindsets of the Western and Eastern bloc on the one hand, and the emergent nonalignment of the Global South on the other, was underlined a few months later when the so-​called Colombo Powers, many of them newly independent nations, convened at Bogor in Indonesia in December 1954. A larger conference of Asian and African states was announced for the spring of the following year.31 Bandung was the result. The significance of the 1955 Bandung Conference, of course, was never reducible to its overt challenge to Cold War thinking.32 Of greater importance was Bandung’s symbolic affirmation of a new-​style Third World politics, which highlighted the primary relevance of colonial discrimination, racism, and poverty for millions of people throughout the Global South.33 Decolonization, in other words, was more than the foremost diplomatic concern of the Third World’s leading international actors. Underlying that preoccupation was the determination to expose the basic injustice of colonialism to the world. Yet, the Bandung vision was never dogmatically anti-​ western—​it was more inclusive and optimistic than that. The presence of two former imperialist nations—​Japan and Turkey—​among the Bandung delegations underscored the idea that post-​empire futures could, and should, be brighter than their colonial antecedents.34

14    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson Bandung expressed through summitry a profound and popularly based shift in international and race relations that crystallized in the mid-​1950s. This shift, while most apparent in Asia, was also global in scope, connecting African-​American civil rights activism and radical pan-​Africanism with the embrace of anti-​colonialism by the governments and peoples of Soviet-​occupied Europe. Framed in this global, transnational setting, Bandung might be usefully connected with other epochal events of its time: the Hungarian uprising of October 1956; Egypt’s successful defiance of Anglo-​French-​ Israeli invasion a month later; Ghana’s path-​finding independence in March 1957; and the Little Rock civil rights protests that September. Each, in different yet complementary ways, brought to the surface the underlying connections between Cold War rivalries, race discrimination, and pressures for decolonization.35 In Jason Parker’s words,  . . . [t]‌he ‘Suez-​Ghana-​Little Rock’ time line noted above inaugurated what might be called the liberation phase of the Cold War, during which the dynamics of the superpower conflict served to advance rather than hinder progress on Race issues . . . in much of the Third World, liberation replaced repression because the ideological freeze of the latter thawed between a pair of burning contradictions. One, civil rights agitation in the United States began to quicken, undermining the image of the ‘land of the free’—​and convincing US officials that this was a serious Cold War concern. Two, even ‘progressive’ colonial administration, understood as a gradual devolution of European authority, became increasingly untenable as the Third World asserted the right of self-​rule sooner rather than later.36

The late 1950s were indeed a key transitional point, even if it is tempting to argue that the ‘liberation phase’ ushered in during these years was as much the product of decolonization’s globalizing effects as of fundamental changes in the dynamics of the Cold War. Transnational connections were a striking manifestation of decolonization’s global dynamic. The ideas and experiences of imperial rulers on the one hand and colonial peoples on the other reacted with one another. Multiple transnational networks resulted—​between officials and technocratic ‘experts,’ between social scientific theorists and medical practitioners, and, most famously, between anti-​colonialist lobbyists, writers, and fighters. Decolonization, then, was an histoire croisée, a complex history of inter-​connection in which comparison between the actions and experiences of differing colonial communities and those who claimed to rule them was deeply embedded. As Abin Chakraborty has put it recently,  . . . [w]‌hether it is the proliferation of Pan-​African discourses on both sides of the Atlantic, the dissemination of Rastafarian culture, Che Guevara’s revolutionary struggles in Latin America and Africa, the G[h]adar movement of California and its role in the Indian nationalist movement, Subhash Chandra Bose’s international networks and the formation of the Indian National Army or the role of various Asian and African diasporic communities in nationalist struggles—​all point to a persistently present transnational dimension in decolonizing processes.37

Rethinking Decolonization   15 For Che Guevara, speaking at the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America held in Havana in 1966, the Vietnamese struggle against French and American imperialism epitomized ‘a transnational ideal of post-​ colonial liberation based on a vision of proletarian internationalism.’ Che’s comments, redolent of the 1960s new leftism that he personified, also point to a more recent historiographical trend, namely the attempt to explain decolonization from the anti-​ colonial, or insurgent, perspective. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the Bengali playwright Utpal Dutt should devote his 1960s play Invincible Vietnam to what he saw as the emblematic struggle of contested decolonization.38 Bengal also shared longstanding bonds of solidarity with Vietnam. Bengalis and Vietnamese experienced catastrophic and colonially induced wartime famines during the 1940s. Various trade unions and political parties in Bengal observed Indochina Day on 25 October 1945 in opposition to the British decision to send Indian soldiers to assist Dutch and French colonial troops in restoring European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. Two years later, the all-​India Students’ Federation celebrated a Vietnam Day on 21 January 1947 in combination with other student associations. This time, police moved in to disperse the students’ protest, opening fire in front of the University of Calcutta’s Senate Hall and killing two students—​Sukhendu Bikash Nath and Dheer Ramian Sen.39 Bengali solidarity with Vietnam peaked during the late 1960s as American intervention heightened the impression of unbending western imperialist resolve to stifle Third Worldist demands for freedom.40 Here was transnational connection embedded in internationalist sentiment, in popular protest, and in cultural performance.

Decolonization and Globalization Over the last decade, historians have paid considerably more attention to the relationship between empire and globalization.41 Neatly summarizing their continuing efforts to reconceptualize imperial histories as entangled, global processes, Durba Ghosh makes the connection explicit. She argues that the imperial/​global turn in historical writing presumes that empires were a product of global history as much as just a driver of it, and that modern empires were a consequence of global capitalism rather than a project specific to the colonizers.42 Decolonization has been largely absent from this story, however. Tony Hopkins has recently argued that a profound shift in the character of globalization brought the age of great territorial empires to an end.43 But if the globalization backlash of the interwar era of the twentieth century was subsequently followed by a period of ‘post-​war re-​ globalization’ (or ‘post-​colonial globalization’), the overall dynamics of that transition remain rather opaque, as does the more specific contribution of the end of empire to the process. Part of the reason for what may otherwise seem a surprising neglect of decolonization’s role in the new forms of globalization to emerge after 1945 may be sought in the underlying rationale for this Handbook: namely, that a much larger view

16    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson of decolonization is required in order to relate this historic change to other major geopolitical forces of the last century. In just the same way as globalization may have shaken up old bordered imaginations to be replaced by new narratives of interconnection, so decolonization now needs to shake up our understanding of what it has meant to move from an old imperial world to one of (ostensibly) new nation-​states. Another difficulty is that the relationship between decolonization and globalization becomes distorted when economics is taken as its main proxy. Viewed economically, the globalization of the second half of the twentieth century is pushed back in time. The results of trade liberalization in the decades after 1945 were, after all, profoundly disappointing. In the wake of decolonization, a raft of state-​led, import-​substituting industrialization across Asia, Africa, and Latin America resulted in much of the developing world becoming more closed, not more open, to international trade.44 The periphery shut the door just as the richer countries gradually opened up their trade regimes. So much is true. A more capacious view of decolonization, which, among other things, embraces the humanitarian, human rights, and development agendas that emerged through, and arguably as a result of, the collapse of colonial rule, and which had such profound consequences for thinking about economic systems, social norms, and racial relations, suggests that new and accelerating forms of globalization were already well underway by the 1960s. In the chapters that follow, we observe decolonization becoming entangled with globalization along three major axes. First, we should not ignore the fact that colonial rule is widely regarded as an obstacle to globalization that had to be removed. Many, if by no means all, theorists of contemporary globalization see the nation-​state as one of its key agents. They believe closer international integration to have largely been a product of the interplay of different national politics and state-​led initiatives. Their unspoken assumption is that a society’s freedom to make its way in the global marketplace is contingent upon its prior ability to gain and assert its independence.45 The act of giving political expression to nationalist sentiments, and thereby resisting foreign dominance, is taken to have been a necessary precursor to post-​war re-​globalization, regardless of the state of economic dependence that may then have persisted between the developed and developing worlds. Other commentators on contemporary globalization lean to the view that the influence of the state is retreating in the face of an array of supranational forces. Understood in this way, decolonization was a geopolitical phenomenon that was, in a very real sense, propelled by globalization—​our second axis. Newly imagined forms of integration that emerged after the Second World War were premised on a less-​stratified view of social relations. Globalization dismantled imperial systems of rule and displaced the racial hierarchies that had helped sustain them.46 New discourses of humanity emerged as the end of empires offered Europeans opportunities for global engagement rather than a retreat from it. Together, a post-​war generation of (mostly western) NGOs, many built upon connections forged by European empires, sought to forge denser networks between peoples across the world and to expand the knowledge within western societies of the suffering and plight of those living in the Global South. Their apparently relentless

Rethinking Decolonization   17 expansion, in turn, triggered concerns about their ‘banal,’ ‘petty,’ ‘mobile,’ or ‘sovereign’ power—​anxieties that were later to give rise to alternative critiques of global power relations, and meanwhile threatened to drain humanitarian, human rights, and development agendas of what moral purpose they had once had. These two axes of thought about the relationship between decolonization and globalization, the one pitching colonial rule as the obstacle to be removed by decolonization, the other casting decolonization as a geopolitical phenomenon driven by global changes, need not, however, be pitted as rival or antithetical interpretations. Yearnings for sovereignty were, after all, never simply about secession: they were also about new ways of thinking about belonging—​of belonging to a different kind of world order, with different norms and rules. Hence, declarations of independence were almost always also, and perhaps equally, declarations of interdependence: they signified claims to be recognized by something wider.47 This is precisely where the increasing prominence of international and transnational actors, within and beyond the United Nations, played such an important role. These actors served a critical function in post-​colonial transitions, helping to make new sovereignties recognized and more recognizable, while simultaneously holding those fledgling sovereignties to account. We can go further therefore to conceptualize decolonization itself as a globalizing process—​our third axis.48 To explain decolonization’s globalizing capacity we need to be clear about the factors involved, which include capital and commodity flows, voluntary and involuntary migrations, and ideas exchanged, cultural practices emulated, and ideologies adopted. Whatever one reads into the term ‘global’, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that forces of global change—​tangible and intangible—​were instrumental in the end of empires. Is it enough, then, to acknowledge a ‘global decolonization,’ much as scholars have reframed the Cold War in similar terms—​less as a binary ideological conflict than as a global contest substantially played out in the poorest regions of the world? States, peoples, movements, and groups spanning multiple continents were caught up in empires’ endgames. Millions of lives were changed. The end of empires certainly catalysed new transnational allegiances and innovative forms of transregional resistance to foreign authority. To take but one example, in their writing for its newspaper, el Moujhahid, the publicists of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale increasingly appealed not just to fellow nationalists at home, but to potential sympathizers overseas in like-​minded movements, in friendly neighbour-​states, or among United Nations delegations and NGO lobby groups. Anti-​colonialism, in other words, was in many cases articulated transnationally in a cosmopolitan language of rights.49 So much is true. Yet, we are not arguing simply that decolonization should be analysed globally. Intrinsic to our use of the term ‘globalizing’ is the contention that decolonization was about something more than the mere deconstruction of colonial relationships. Rather, decolonization actively reconfigured the distribution of wealth and power within and between societies, altered long-​established patterns of international relations, and gave rise to new forms of cultural interaction. The cumulative insights of this Handbook’s chapters confirm the conclusion that decolonization was a motive force that triggered all sorts of changes, some of which were social and cultural, others

18    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson political and economic, still others ideational and ethical. This larger view of decolonization sees the end of empires as a geopolitical force just as profound as globalization, and not merely a function of it. Decolonization, we argue, had a complex relationship to the new forms of integration that emerged after the Second World War. Whether understood as a prior condition to globalization, as a phenomenon propelled by globalization, or as a globalizing force in its own right, decolonization profoundly shaped the contemporary world. In particular, rethinking the relationship between decolonization and globalization reveals something about the very nature of globalization itself. Anchoring the ‘re-​globalization’ that took shape after 1945 amidst the geopolitics of decolonization exposes some of its underlying tensions. For example, by highlighting the wider geographical ramifications of local decolonization struggles we can better grasp the regional diversity of globalizing forces. These forces never emanated solely from within—​nor were they simply a product of—​ the West, however much the literature often suggests otherwise. Perhaps, above all, decolonization lends context to the grievances of those left behind by an era of deepening interconnectedness and interdependency while at the same time revealing those enriched by it, as exemplified by the contestation over the New International Economic Order of the 1960s and 1970s and, equally, by new forms of uncertainty arising from enhanced contact and increased mobility between the Global North and South.

Decolonization, Violence, and the Colonial Subject Decolonization is a story of inequality, asymmetry—​and violence. To understand that violence, one must first grasp how organized opposition changed through, and as a result of, decolonization. Decolonization’s violence was central to the pasts—​and later the memories—​of colonial populations; it was much less so to the lives of metropolitan Europeans. Although some of the violence involved—​its escalation and its targeting—​ was entirely predictable, much of it took imperial governments struggling to reassert their authority by surprise. Local populations bore the brunt of their governments’ knee-​ jerk reactions. Disaggregating the levels of violence further, within local populations, particular communities suffered especially badly. Sometimes this stemmed from their religious or ideological affiliation, whether real or alleged; similarly, the identity politics of ethnicity and culture fed cycles of violence and reprisal. Crucially, unarmed colonial subjects, whose ‘civilian status’ was never recognized in domestic or international law, typically suffered more from the violence of insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies than the warring parties who sought to exercise authority over them. The extremely young and the extremely old were perhaps inevitably the most vulnerable, especially when decolonization triggered famine, forced removal of resident populations, or hyperinflation and the consequent unaffordability of essential goods. Other

Rethinking Decolonization   19 forms of collective violence, some clandestine and deniable, some highly public and demonstrative, targeted alleged supporters of one side or the other. Such performative violence was intended to intimidate and deter. Its principal victims were typically those unfortunate enough to find themselves on a physical, cultural, or ideological frontline. Women’s domestic workloads and their primary roles in child rearing and field labouring left them exposed to the predations of insurgents and security forces alike. Younger men and women, including adolescents, figured prominently among the militias, ‘self defence units,’ and other paramilitary auxiliaries employed by security forces and insurgents to conduct some of the most visceral, face-​to-​face violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, the very young also figured among the principal victims of such violence. Decolonization is all-​too readily viewed as a binary, adversarial contest between imperial security forces and their anti-​colonial opponents. Arguments tend to centre on how late colonial counter-​insurgencies were fought. Such analysis can divert attention from what was locally particular, and from the dynamics of decolonization’s violence within and between communities, rather than between rulers and ruled. Few would disagree that ‘everyday violence’ was intrinsic to colonialism. But recognizing the casualness of that violence, whether physical or psychological, and its repetitious banality, is critical to understanding why certain groups among colonial subject populations—​ women, workers, and the young—​were particularly exposed to it. A key dynamic was the ruthless determination of insurgents and counter-​insurgents alike to impose their social control over civilian populations by whatever means they deemed necessary. Several chapters in this collection show a link between levels of insecurity and the intensity of violence, with many of those involved in acts of violence operating with minimal constraint or state direction. Late-​colonial violence, in other words, was increasingly privatized; it was either delegated to, or actively seized upon, by groups within particular communities to advance or protect their particular interests. Violent acts often catalysed cycles of retribution that widened the circle of those caught up in decolonization conflicts. Politicians, administrators, and military commanders responsible for devising and implementing imperial policies either misunderstood or chose to ignore the particularities of the popular opposition they faced. Macro-​level explanations were instead superimposed upon (and therefore obscured) the micro-​dynamics of political contestation. Regional officials and imperial governments misconstrued local demands for basic rights as portents or symptoms of broader pressure for statehood. As a result, numerous colonial governments passed up opportunities for dialogue, convinced that force majeure was required to suppress dissent. Even those in countries drawn to democratic universalism struggled with the proposition that their particular national brand of colonialism was less an instrument of social progress than a barrier to it. Underlying this inclination to repress was a crucial fact:  there was no recognized juridical category of ‘colonial civilian’ conferring guaranteed protections by the state. Quite the reverse: the non-​combatant majority populations within colonial societies were reconfigured as ‘objects of military necessity,’ treated by those carrying arms as assets to be exploited. Value was attached to non-​combatants for the goods they possessed

20    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson or the labour they might provide, for the shelter or support they might offer, and for the information they might divulge.50 The legally unrecognized status of colonial ‘civilian’ inevitably draws attention to the matter of rights denied, fought for, and won. In a very real sense, colonized populations were doubly rendered as subjects—​not only subjected under law to a second-​class status next to their imperial master, but also subjected to the demands of state security forces and other non-​state armed groups in their midst. Confronted with violence in ways that armed personnel were not, these colonial subjects required and sought protection from the state and its opponents—​when they failed to get it, they looked to various local or supranational protectors, from insurgent movements and loyalist militias to NGOs and other interested parties within the international community, to provide it. Violence, then, is a key variable, at once a driver of decolonization and a locally transformative experience for particular communities and groups. Asymmetry is, of course, widely invoked to explain the processes of contestation integral to decolonization, but invoked how? Often the argument runs thus: Europe’s imperial giants gradually lost political control because superior military equipment and training proved insufficient in the face of the disillusionment with protracted colonial wars that set in among their home publics. Whereas colonial populations were necessarily bound up with the conflicts being fought out around them, Europeans rarely were. For many colonial subjects facing unending discrimination, it appeared that colonialism could only end violently. European publics, meanwhile, were increasingly being told that violence was incidental to a process depicted as globally inexorable and to a decolonization that was coming regardless.51 May we take this point further? Does the idea of asymmetry help explain the end of empires? Plenty of foreign wars, old and new, have been fought with minimal public engagement ‘at home.’ We are, after all, living through a supposed ‘war on terror’ and, as we write, the extensive media coverage of the atrocities perpetrated by the followers of Islamic State has failed to galvanize European support for renewed interventionism in the Middle East. Wars of decolonization likewise signified a reversion to European type, a throwback to the so-​called ‘small wars’ of the long nineteenth century, rather than a continuation of the total conflict model established by the two World Wars. Ultimately, these were conflicts about adjustable interests, but not vital ones. Even those depicted by their supporters as struggles for survival turned out otherwise. Yes, settler societies faced a loss of privileged status, frequently the prospect of dispossession, even eviction. But, no, the imperial states themselves were not existentially threatened by their loss of empire. Indeed, many quickly devised new narratives of ‘planned’ decolonization and ‘transfers of power’ to affirm so.52 Notice here the distinction between state and regime. Whereas governments or, in Portugal’s case, even regimes might collapse under the weight of discredited colonial wars, the societies they claimed to represent did not. Violence was more remote and ultimately less impactful within the metropolitan societies in whose name it was conducted. As the 1950s wore on, residual cultural presumptions of an imperial ‘right to rule’ corroded. Imperial governance, once depicted as the surest route to the modernization of colonial society, was increasingly recast as the essential barrier to it. Post-​war western

Rethinking Decolonization   21 Europe’s rising prosperity and the commensurate turn to consumerism played its part. So, too, did more critical media attention and the more pervasive ethical qualms about empire in general. Emergent youth cultures, the decline of social deference, and the consequent egalitarian shift in cultural thinking all helped break the multi-​generational cycle of what one might call reflex imperialism—​something that was more a habit of mind than a conscious political choice. Thus, we have to take account of two interlocking processes in contested decolonization: on the one hand, the centrality of violence to the end of empires and, on the other, the acute exposure of unarmed and non-​combatant colonial subjects to its impacts. Appreciating what decolonization felt like, viscerally, in terms of day-​by-​day exposure to insecurity and fear, and to repression and violence, means looking more closely at the unarmed, unrecognized civilians who had no choice but to live through it, and whose lives were permanently scarred by it.

Conclusion This introductory essay has explained why this Handbook is based on a broad chronology and why it adopts an explicitly comparative focus. The plural in our title, ‘end of empires,’ is, in other words, significant. It reminds us that decolonization has deeper historical roots than are often acknowledged, requiring coverage of later nineteenth-​ and early twentieth-​century imperial change, and sensitivity to decolonization’s multiple variants. Empire endings were anything but synchronous. At the same time, this Handbook allows us to trace comparable processes within, and between, the different empires—​European and non-​European. Authors combine geographically framed treatments of decolonization, whether national or regional, with particular historiographical themes relating to major economic, social, cultural, and political questions of the post-​ war era. Together, their contributions demonstrate decolonization’s transformative effects, locally, nationally, and globally. With the aftershocks of decolonization very much in mind, this Handbook also revisits the historical legacies and collective memories of empire. By doing so, the final section, in particular, compels us to rethink how the forces unleashed by decolonization continue to resonate today. Rather than returning to somewhat clichéd arguments over American or other contemporary ‘empires,’ the collection’s final section traces several of the more tangible legacies of decolonization. Five stand out. One is the lasting shift in global patterns of migration whose origins lie in the late-​colonial period but whose consequences played out over subsequent decades. A second is decolonization’s abiding cultural impact, as various forms of art, performance, and literature wrestled with the disappointments and frustrations of colonial independence as well as marking its actual achievement. A third is the continuing arguments over the recognition of, apologies for, and possible reparation in response to past colonial misdeeds, many of which were committed within the ambit of counter-​insurgency campaigns fought at the end of

22    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson empire. Fourth is the consequential evidence of the colonial inheritance of twenty-​firstcentury development policy and practice, even if the implications of that inheritance are somewhat more complex than hitherto allowed. Finally, and most obviously, are the remaining colonial territories, the yet-​to-​be-​decolonized lands, that pepper the globe, often with troubled presents as well as pasts. These complex, and at times even contradictory, imperial legacies point to a broader conclusion: that decolonization not only remains unfinished but is perhaps indefinite. It is something likely to stay with us for decades to come. Far from being a geopolitical phenomenon that we can safely consign to the past, it remains strikingly relevant, with multiple consequences reverberating through the contemporary world. Dissecting the end of empires—​their timelines, their histories, and their unfolding consequences—​is intrinsic to unraveling the process of decolonization itself. What this Handbook shows is that decolonization was not a singular process, but a set of processes that decades later are still unfolding. Like its partner globalization, decolonization is therefore phenomenologically different from the twentieth century’s other major catalysts of global change: the two World Wars, the economic crisis of the interwar years, and the bipolar Cold War. Each of these, while leaving lasting legacies, may nonetheless be largely consigned to the past. Not so with decolonization. The end of empires is a phenomenon of the twenty-​first, as well as the twentieth, century. As such, this Handbook calls for a new research agenda which fundamentally rethinks decolonization, with a view to unravelling why it mattered so much at the time and why it still matters so much today. The aim of this agenda should be to enable not only the academy, but also government and a wider public sphere to understand how many of today’s global challenges were once activated, and continue to be animated, by a far-​reaching reconstruction of the international order, the effects of which have persisted way beyond the struggles for independence that now lie half a century or more in the past.

Notes 1. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2. Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–​1962”, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 465–​466. 3. Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African-​Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 97–​ 129; Nico Slate, “The Borders of Black Power”; Carol Anderson, “Rethinking Radicalism:  African-​Americans and the Liberation Struggles in Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea, 1945–​1949”; and Yohura Williams, “‘They’ve Lynched Our Savior Lumumba in the Old-​ Fashioned Southern Style’: The Conscious Internationalism of American Black Nationalism”: all in Nico Slate, ed., Black Power Beyond Borders:  The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–​12, 13–​34, 147–​168.

Rethinking Decolonization   23 4. Jason Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Christopher Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlife of Bandung”, in Christopher Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 1–​44. 5. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:  Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 6. Ronald Robinson, “The Moral Disarmament of African Empire, 1919–​1947”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8, no. 1 (1979): 86–​104. 7. A  succinct introduction to the conceptual debates surrounding imperialism and colonialism is Prasenjit Duara, “Modern Imperialism”, in Jerry H. Bentley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 380–​393. 8. As historian Stuart Ward puts it, “ ‘decolonization’ is routinely deployed by historians as a convenient shorthand for the mid-​century collapse of Europe’s maritime empires, without further attention to its conceptual origins or indeed the purposes for which it was pressed into service”; see Stuart Ward, “The European Provenance of Decolonization”, Past and Present 230 (2016): 228–​229. 9. Central to this analysis are the forms of knowledge production involved, something which, for instance, produces very different African pictures of decolonization; see Jean Allman, “Between the Present and History:  African Nationalism and Decolonization”, in John Parker and Richard Reid, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 225–​237. 10. Anthony G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization”, Past and Present 200 (2008):  211–​ 247; Anthony G. Hopkins, “Globalisation and Decolonisation”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, f45, no.  5 (2017), 729–45. There are echoes here of Kenneth Pomeranz’s arguments in The Great Divergence:  China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 24–​27. 11. Allman, “Between the Present and History”, 230. 12. For insights into the methodological challenges involved, see Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton, “Destination Globalization? Women, Gender and Comparative Colonial Histories in the New Millenium”, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no.  2 (2003): 1–​10; Heather Streets-​Salter, “International and Global Anti-​Colonial Movements”, in Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds., World History from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 47–​74; Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 13. See Anthony G. Hopkins’ introduction, “Globalization:  An Agenda for Historians”, in Anthony G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002). 14. Viewed thus, decolonization becomes an explanation advanced—​ or ‘invented’—​ to account for transformations previously unanticipated by metropolitan politicians and publics; see Todd Shepard’s The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), as regards how French politicians and commentators rationalized their country’s impending loss of control in Algeria.

24    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson 15. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question:  Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), especially part III; Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation:  Remaking France and West Africa, 1945–​1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 16. Elizabeth Schmidt, “Top Down or Bottom Up? Nationalist Mobilization Reconsidered, with Special Reference to Guinea (French West Africa)”, American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 980–​984; also citing Israel Gershoni, “Rethinking the Formation of Arab Nationalism in the Middle East, 1920–​1945”, in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997),  18–​25. 17. Brad Simpson, “Self-​Determination and Decolonization”, Chapter 22 in this volume. 18. For the process in action, see Giuliano Garavini, After Empires:  European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South, 1957–​ 1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19. James D. Le Sueur, “France’s Arabic Educational Reforms in Algeria during the Colonial Era: Language Instruction in Colonial and Anticolonial Minds before and after Independence”, in Martin Thomas, ed., The French Colonial Mind: I: Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters (Lincoln, NE:  University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 195–​199, 211–​212; Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 70, 176–​177; “Stumped for words”, The Economist, 19 August 2017, 42. 20. All citations from John Springhall, Decolonization since 1945 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave-​ Macmillan, 2001), 2–​3. 21. Gary Wilder, “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographical Turns”, American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 738–​739. 22. Thomas David Dubois, “Local Religion and the Imperial Imaginary: The Development of Japanese Ethnography in Occupied Manchuria”, American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2006): 52–​74. 23. See Louise Young, “Rethinking Empire: Lessons from Imperial and Post-​Imperial Japan”, Chapter 12 in this volume. 24. Dubois, “Local Religion and the Imperial Imaginary”, 55. 25. Alan Mikhail and Christine M. Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 4 (2012): 737. 26. Mikhail and Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn”, 724. 27. David C. Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World”, Kritika 12, no.  1 (2011):  183–​ 211; Maud Anne Bracke and James Mark, “Between Decolonisation and the Cold War: Transnational Activism and Its Limits in Europe, 1950s–​1990s”, Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015): 403–​417; James Mark, Péter Apor, Radina Vučetić, and Piotr Osęka, “‘We are with you Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia”, Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015): 439–​464. 28. Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–​1975 (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 10–​39; Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–​1965 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions:  Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–​1976 (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 29. Recent essay collections bringing the Cold War and decolonization into the same analytical framework exemplify the trend. See, for instance, Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood

Rethinking Decolonization   25 Lawrence, eds., Beyond the Cold War:  Lyndon Johnson and the New Global Challenges of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Leslie James and Elizabeth Leake, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Gareth Curless and Martin Thomas, eds., Decolonization and Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 30. Matthew Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia? Race, the Bandung Conference, and Pan-​Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954–​1955”, Diplomatic History 29, no. 5 (2005): 852. 31. Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia?”, 847–​852. 32. Amitav Acharya, “Who Are the Norm Makers? The Asian-​ African Conference in Bandung and the Evolution of Norms”, Global Governance 20 (2014): 405–​417; Chen Jian, “Bridging Revolution and Decolonization: The ‘Bandung Discourse’ in China’s Early Cold War Experience”, in Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, eds., Connecting Histories:  Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–​1962 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 149–​151. 33. Christopher J. Lee, “The Rise of Third World Diplomacy: Success and Its Meanings at the 1955 Asian-​African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia”, in Robert Hutchings and Jeremi Suri, eds., Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (New York: Oxford, University Press, 2015), 47–​7 1; see also Christopher Lee, Chapter 23 in this volume. 34. Lee, “The Rise of Third World Diplomacy”, 47–​49. 35. Jason Parker, “Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Reperiodization of the Postwar Era”, Diplomatic History 30, no. 5 (2006): 887–​889. 36. Parker, “Cold War II”, 890. 37. Abin Chakraborty, “The Peasant Armed:  Bengal, Vietnam and Transnational Solidarities in Utpal Dutt’s Invincible Vietnam”, in Ruth Crggs and Claire Wintle, eds., Cultures of Decolonisation:  Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–​ 1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 109–​125, at 109. 38. Chakraborty, “The peasant armed”, 110–​111. 39. Chakraborty, “The peasant armed”, 113. 40. Chakraborty, “The peasant armed”, 120–​123. 41. For a selection, see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–​1914:  Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Hopkins, Globalization in World History; Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 42. Durba Ghosh, “Another Set of Imperial Turns”, American Historical Review 117, no.  3 (2012), 772–​793, at 782. 43. Anthony G. Hopkins, American Empire. A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 44. See, especially, Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rouke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), Chapter 9. 45. Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalization, 232. 46. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization”, 216, 228, 233–​234.

26    Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson 47. We are grateful to Professor Jeremy Adelman for this shrewd observation. 48. For a fuller exposition of this argument, see Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalization: From High Imperialism to Decolonization”, The International History Review 36 (2014): 142–​170. 49. Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 50. Isobel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2010), Chapter  10; Seth G. Jones, Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31, 38. 51. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization,  82–​90. 52. Todd Shepard, “ ‘History is Past Politics’? Archives, ‘Tainted Evidence,’ and the Return of the State”, American Historical Review 115, no. 2 (2010): 478–​481; John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 633–​638.

Chapter 2

19 18 and th e E nd of E urope’s L an d E mpi re s Robert Gerwarth 1

Introduction The Great War ended with the military collapse and disappearance from the map of three vast and centuries-​old land empires: the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires. A fourth, the Hohenzollern Empire, which had become a major land empire in the last year of the war when it occupied enormous territories in East-​Central Europe, was significantly reduced in size, stripped of its overseas colonies, and transformed into a parliamentary democracy with what Germans across the political spectrum referred to as a ‘bleeding frontier’ towards the East.2 Nor were the victorious Western European empires unaffected by the cataclysm of war: Ireland, for example, had experienced an unsuccessful nationalist uprising in 1916, but eventually gained independence after a bloody guerrilla war against British forces.3 Elsewhere, nascent decolonization movements around the world felt inspired by the public discourse over ‘autonomous development’ and ‘national self-​determination’ as prompted (with very different intentions) by US President Woodrow Wilson and Lenin, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks.4 Ultimately, the small non-​European decolonization movements were to be disappointed by the results of the Paris Peace Conference as ‘national self-​determination’ was applied to some of the Central European Successor States favoured by the Allies, but denied to everyone else. In Egypt, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Burma, Britain responded to imperial unrest with considerable force while, over the following decades, France fought back against resistance to its imperial ambitions in Algeria, Syria, Indo-​China, and Morocco.5 But it was in East-​Central Europe and the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire that the effects of the lost war and the implosion of imperial structures were felt most keenly and immediately. For centuries, European history had been a history of empires. On the eve of the Great War, much of the landmass of the inhabited world was divided

28   Robert Gerwarth into European empires or economically dependent territories, and there was little to suggest that the age of land empires was about to end. To be sure, the ‘awakening of peoples’ as a result of nineteenth-​century nationalism posed a significant challenge to the future of imperial rule, most notably in the Balkans where national and imperial interests collided. Balkan nationalism exploded violently during the Balkan Wars of 1912–​1913 when a coalition of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria expelled the Ottomans from all of their remaining European territories before turning on each other over the spoils of war.6 The influx into Anatolia of huge numbers of penniless and brutalized Muslim refugees had a profound impact on Christian-​Muslim relations in the Ottoman Empire over the following decade.7 However, the situation in the Balkans in 1912–​1913 differed significantly from that elsewhere. While there were calls for more autonomy within imperial structures, few in 1914 envisaged a future without the European land empires. It was the Great War and the defeat of the Central Powers that were to profoundly transform Europe’s map. After four years of mass slaughter, Europe’s land empires imploded, and while violence ended on the Western front and in some other theatres in the autumn of 1918, it continued unabated and sometimes even intensified in the shatter-​zones of the defeated empires. As a consequence of imperial collapse and the rise and clash of nationalist as well as Bolshevik and anti-​Bolshevik movements, an extensive zone of violence stretched from Finland and the Baltic States through Russia and Ukraine, Poland, the borderlands of Austria, Hungary, and Germany, all the way through the Balkans into Anatolia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.8 The post-​1918 process of nation-​state-​building amidst this violence was completed through secession from the defeated empires that had hitherto managed, sometimes violently but more often peacefully, a volatile mix of ethnic groups.9 Many of the now defunct empires had been more successful in accepting ethnic and religious difference (notably in the late nineteenth century and up until to 1914) than the majority of Successor States would prove to be in the interwar period. The complex mix of tensions between post-​imperial state-​building, the challenge of managing ethnic diversity in states that wanted to be homogenous, and the irredentism of aggrieved minorities would remain among the most explosive issues on Europe’s political agenda between 1918 and the forced ‘unweaving of peoples’ during and after the Second World War.

A World of Empires: Europe in 1914 When Europe went to war in 1914, empires dominated the continent geographically and politically. Despite some calls for more regional autonomy, few would have predicted—​ or indeed demanded—​a complete dissolution of the continental land empires when hostilities broke out in August that year. Although the decline and fall of Europe’s continental land empires after 1918 has often been portrayed as a historical inevitability, the ruling dynasties of the pre-​war world seemed firmly in control of the vast swathes

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    29 of territory that belonged to their empires. At least in hindsight, as Richard Bessel and others have argued, Europe on the eve of the First World War appeared remarkably stable.10 Imperial Germany, for example, certainly experienced political and social tensions, but even the most outspoken internal champions for change, the Social Democrats, had begun to advocate evolution over revolution. The fact that the SPD had become the largest political party in the Reichstag on the eve of the Great War was thus no indication of imminent revolution, but clear evidence that the Kaiserreich was by no means a dictatorship without extensive political participation rights. Even the far more autocratic tsarist regime in St Petersburg seemed more stable in 1914 than it had been in previous years.11 The complexity of the imperial structures that existed in 1914 can be illustrated with the example of the Habsburg Empire. Before the war, Austria-​Hungary had been Europe’s third most populous state (after the Russian and German empires), with over 50 million people, and one of its most ethnically diverse land empires. According to the official census of 1910, 23.36% of the empire’s population spoke German, 19.57% Hungarian, 16.37% Czech or Slovak, 9.68% Polish, 8.52% Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian, 7.78% Ukrainian, 6.27% Romanian, 2.44% Slovene, and 1.5% Italian; while the remaining 2.3 million spoke a variety of other languages.12 The allegiance of these different ethno-​ linguistic communities was dynastic, in this case to Emperor Franz Joseph, who ruled between 1848 and 1916. Following Vienna’s catastrophic defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866, Franz Joseph instigated a number of reforms, most notably the 1867 Ausgleich, which turned Hungary into a sovereign kingdom with a separate parliament within the Austro-​Hungarian Empire. This was what many among the non-​German and non-​ Magyar ethnic groups within the empire—​notably Czechs, Poles, and Croats—​aspired to as well. Yet calls for complete independence from the empire were rare—at least outside annexed Bosnia. Before 1914 some Croat and Slovene intellectuals within the Habsburg Empire had talked of sharing a common, South Slav identity with the Serbs, but they were a minority.13 It was the outbreak of war in 1914 that began to undermine the imperial consensus within the Austro-​Hungarian Empire. Initially, however, empire loyalties held remarkably firm and endured for several years. For much of the war, these loyalties (undoubtedly mixed with fears of repression and reprisals) trumped national loyalties as Poles, Czechs, and Croats joined Germans and Hungarians to fight for the Emperor as conscripts.14 The internal cohesion of the Dual Monarchy was undoubtedly weakened by the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in November 1916. Franz Joseph, who had ruled since the 1848 revolution, personified the empire and imperial continuity. 15 Yet, without the eventual defeat of the Central Powers, the Dual Monarchy would have undoubtedly survived the transfer of power from Franz Joseph to his heir, Karl. The war’s outcome was thus decisive for the Habsburg Empire’s fate as was the fact that French, British, and American decision-​makers gradually moved away from the idea of preserving the empire and towards the intention of dismantling it. From the start of the war, exile circles from within

30   Robert Gerwarth the Habsburg monarchy, notably of Czech(oslovak) and South Slav background, had made contact with influential experts on Central Europe in Britain and France such as the well-​connected Times journalists Henry Wickham Steed and Robert Seton-​Watson, and the Sorbonne historian Ernest Denis, who advised the French government on war aims in relation to the Bohemian lands. All three men played a key role in Allied propaganda attempts to portray the Dual Monarchy as a ‘people’s prison’, encouraging non-​ Germans and non-​Magyars in Austria-​Hungary to break away from the Imperial State.16 Even more important was the skilful manoeuvring of Tomáš Masaryk, a Czech philosophy professor and nationalist politician, who had fled Prague in late 1914 before settling in London. There he taught Slavonic studies at London University while simultaneously engaging in high-​powered conversations about the future of Central Europe. In early 1918, he also travelled to the United States, later meeting President Wilson in the White House in an attempt to secure his approval for an independent Czechoslovak state.17 Until the beginning of 1918, however, Entente decision-​makers were reluctant to embrace the break-​up of the Dual Monarchy as an official war aim. Allied plans for the post-​war future of the Habsburg monarchy focused on the transformation of the political system and the empire’s constitutional composition without questioning its existence.18 That said, in January 1918, Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech advocated an independent Poland and a federal Austria-​Hungary, whose peoples ‘should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development’. Yet autonomy was not secession. By June, Wilson’s position had hardened:  he now proposed that ‘all branches of the Slav race should be completely free from German and Austrian rule’. When the allies formally endorsed Poland’s right to an independent state and recognized Masaryk’s dissident Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris as the legal representatives of a Czechoslovak nation, the fate of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire was sealed.19 Matters were significantly more clear-​cut when it came to the Ottoman Empire. Long dismissed by Western diplomats and statesman as Europe’s ‘Sick Man’ and oppressor of Christian minorities, the Ottoman empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers and its genocidal policies towards the Armenians encouraged those who—​like Lloyd George—​were determined to break up the empire. Geostrategic and economic interests played a significant role in attitudes towards the Ottoman Empire: some of the Empire’s Arab provinces contained large reserves of oil, while other territories—​from the Straits to the Middle East—​were considered strategically vital by both the British and French.20 In May 1916, the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-​Picot came to a secret agreement about future British and French spheres of influence in the then-​still Ottoman-​controlled Middle East, notably in today’s Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. However, in order to encourage an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, the British simultaneously made promises about post-​war ‘independence of the Arabs’.21 Such promises were clearly at odds with both the Sykes-​Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British government had pledged support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.22

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    31 What exactly would replace the disintegrating empires was thus unclear when the war ended in November 1918, and would depend on a mixture of local and international factors.23

The Imperial Paradox of 1918: Dissolution and Expansion On 31 October 1918, the Commander of the Adriatic-​based Habsburg fleet, Miklos Horthy, sent a final telegram to his Emperor, Karl I, assuring him of his ‘unshakable loyalty’. Minutes later, he surrendered the flagship of his fleet, the SMS Viribus Unitis, and released the Czech, Croatian, Polish, and German Austrian sailors and officers around him into an uncertain future as post-​imperial subjects.24 By that point, the national revolutions within the empire had already taken place. On 16 October, Karl responded to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, growing pressure from within, and the spectre of defeat by issuing his ‘People’s Manifesto’ in which he promised to reorganize the empire along federal lines. Karl envisaged a loose imperial superstructure in which German, Czech, South Slav, and Ukrainian territories would be ruled autonomously. The ethnically Polish territories of the Habsburg empire were to become part of the independent Polish state that Wilson had promised in January 1918. Yet it was clear by this point that the ‘People’s Manifesto’ would not be sufficient to persuade the Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris to drop its demands for full independence.25 In early October other peoples took similar steps: a National Council of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in Zagreb on 6 October. On the following day, the Council of Regency in Warsaw proclaimed a ‘free and independent Poland’.26 The fate of the Habsburg empire was sealed at this point. Elsewhere, however, the transition from empire to nation-​state was significantly less peaceful. In fact, the cessation of hostilities on the Western front was atypical for the early ‘inter-​war’ period in Europe, as violent upheavals—​both inter-​state and civil wars—​remained a characteristic feature of life after 1918. Violence was particularly intense in the vast territories of the vanquished land empires whose defeat in the Great War provided the opportunity for the emergence of new and often nervously aggressive nation-​states.27 Those who fought in the name of these new nation-​states sought to determine or defend their real or imagined borders through force and strove to create ethnically or religiously homogenous communities. The birth of these new nation-​states in East-​Central Europe and the Baltic region was generally most violent in those regions where national and social revolutions overlapped. For herein lay one of the peculiarities of the ‘wars after the war’: in the overlap of two types of revolution, the revolutions of national self-​determination and the social revolutions for the redistribution of power, land, and wealth along class lines.28

32   Robert Gerwarth In the ethnically diverse Western borderlands of the former Romanov Empire, the situation was particularly complex, as the rapidly unfolding Russian Civil War intersected with different conflicts over borders. Although most national independence movements within the empire had been relatively weak before 1914, the fall of the Tsar and the German occupation of wide swathes of territories in East-​Central Europe created a unique historical constellation for cessation movements.29 Following the February Revolution, which transformed Russia into a short-​lived liberal democracy, Petrograd lost control over Poland, Lithuania, and much of Latvia. Soon after Lenin’s coup, anti-​Bolshevik forces took control over Estonia.30 On 23 November 1917, the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland broke with Petrograd; Kiev declared Ukrainian independence in January 1918.31 Unlike the peaceful events in the collapsing Habsburg empire, these national revolutions in the former lands of the Romanov empire were generally accompanied and followed by years of wars and civil conflict.32 In the absence of functioning states, militias of various political persuasions assumed the role of the national army for themselves (often against armed opposition from other groups which harboured similar ambitions), while the lines between friends and foes, combatants and civilians were less clearly delimited than had been the case during the Great War. Not since the Thirty Years’ War had a series of inter-​connected civil wars been as inchoate and deadly as now, as civil wars overlapped with revolutions, counter-​revolutions, and border conflicts between states without clearly defined frontiers or internationally recognized governments. German Freikorps soldiers fought with (and against) Latvian and Estonian nationalists (as well as Polish troops in Upper Silesia), Russian whites and reds clashed throughout the region while Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian armed bands fought over ill-​defined borders. The death toll during the short period between the Great War’s official end in November 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 was extraordinary: including those killed in the Russian Civil War, well over four million people lost their lives as a result of civil wars or inter-​ethnic struggles, not counting the millions of expellees and refugees who roamed the new borderlands of Europe.33 The abrupt break-​up of Europe’s land empires and the inability of the successor states to settle territorial disputes with their neighbours peacefully was pivotal in triggering post-​war violence. Newly independent Poland, for example, waged six wars against her neighbours between 1918 and 1920 in order to expand the country’s borders. Under the leadership of Josef Piłsudski, the Polish troops proved highly effective in doing so. In January 1919, Polish troops conquered Lithuania’s designated capital, Vilnius (Wilna/​ Wilno), and incorporated the ethnically mixed city into the Polish nation-​state. For the entire inter-​war period, the return of Vilnius to Lithuania remained a rallying point for Lithuanian nationalists and a bone of contention between the two states.34 By the spring of 1919, Piłsudski’s troops were also engaged in Upper Silesia against strong German volunteer forces, in Teschen (Teshyn) against the Czechs, and against Ukrainian forces in Galicia.35 However, the most existential conflict for the newly reconstituted Polish nation-​state was the war against Soviet Russia. When the conflict began, the Poles pushed as far eastwards as Kiev, but Trotsky’s Red Army held firm and

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    33 eventually advanced on Warsaw.36 Only a bold Polish counter-​attack against the Russian army, still celebrated in national mythology as the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’, averted a Polish defeat and secured victory over the Red Army. The Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921, left Poland with the western parts of Belorussia and Ukraine.37 Territorial dismemberment was also the fate of the Ottoman Empire, which lost all of its Arab possessions and was threatened in Western Anatolia by an initially successful Greek advance into Asia Minor. Armenian and Kurdish independence movements in Eastern Anatolia meanwhile saw their historical opportunity to free themselves from Turkish rule.38 What nationalist historians in Turkey to this day refer to as the ‘War of Liberation’ (İstiklâl Harbi, 1919–​1923) was, in essence, a form of violent nation-​state formation that included mass killings and expulsions, and represented a continuation of wartime ethnic un-​mixing that culminated in the violent exclusion of Ottoman Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia.39 Here, as elsewhere, the nation-​building process came at a high price, which, in particular, was paid by the minorities. When Smyrna was re-​ conquered by Turkish troops in 1922, up to 30,000 Christian residents were massacred. Many more were expelled in what became the largest involuntary population transfer in European history before the Second World War. All in all, some 70,000 civilians died violent deaths in Turkey during the decade after the war’s end, while approximately 900,000 Ottoman Christians and 400,000 Greek Muslims were forcibly resettled in a ‘homeland’ most of them had never visited before.40 At the same time, it could be argued that Lord Curzon’s euphemistically labelled compulsory ‘unweaving of people’, as the expulsions of 1922–​1923 were called, spared the region the even more violent convulsions that most of the other imperial shatter-​zones experienced over the subsequent two-​and-​a-​half decades. While this was not foreseeable at the time, it quickly became clear that, in the multi-​ethnic lands of Eastern and Central Europe, ‘national self-​determination’ was a dangerous concept. The settlements of Versailles, St. Germain, Sèvres, and Trianon emphasised the duty of new nation-​states to protect ‘their’ minorities, but they also established seemingly arbitrary new borders, which would be challenged—​time and again—​over the course of the twentieth century. The application of the principle of national self-​determination to territories of mind-​ boggling ethnic complexity was at best naïve, and, in practice, an invitation to transform the violence of World War I into a multitude of civil wars. All the new states supposedly founded on the principle of national self-​determination had within their borders large, vocal national minorities, which soon (and in any case after the onset of the Great Depression) began to demand re-​unification with their ‘homelands’. The problem of irredentism continued to haunt European politics for decades, not least because many of the ‘Successor States’ of East-​Central Europe were, in fact, mini-​Empires themselves and every bit as multi-​ethnic as the vanquished land empires (with the added problem that pre-​war ethnic tensions had been exacerbated by four years of brutal fighting).41 The only more or less ethnically homogenous states in post-​war East-​, Central-​, or South-​Eastern Europe were the core states of the vanquished land empires: the Weimar Republic, German-​Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Turkish Republic. The new Polish ‘nation-​state’, by contrast, contained a population that was nearly 40% Ukrainian,

34   Robert Gerwarth Belarusian, Lithuanian, or German. Czechoslovakia contained more ethnic Germans (22% of the overall population) than Slovaks and some three million Hungarians lived under Romanian rule. The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed as Yugoslavia in 1931) also did not reflect in its name that the state was also populated by very sizeable German, Hungarian, Bosnian, and Albanian minorities.42 All of this made it abundantly clear that ‘self-​determination’ was only granted to peoples who were considered allies of the Entente (Poles, Czechs, Romanians), but not to their wartime enemies. Nor was it a principle to be extended to non-​Europeans. As the leaders of decoloniazation movements in Africa and Asia demanded the application of Wilson’s concept of ‘self-​determination’ to their homelands, the US President shied away from alienating Britain and France, whose empires expanded further, notably through the League of Nations’ mandates in the Middle East and elsewhere.43 Unlike the white citizens of the now defunct Austro-​Hungarian Empire, so ran the emphatically racist rationale, the colonial people were not ready to run their own states.44 It would be wrong, however, to blame the Paris Peace Conference for all the dangerous asymmetries of power that were established after the Great War. The statesmen at Paris were by no means the only architects of the new post-​imperial order—​often they simply sanctioned decisions that had been made by emerging and victorious states on the ground before the Paris Peace Conference had even met.45 In some disputed cases, the Allies allowed for plebiscites in ethnically mixed territories where the population could decide to which state they wished to belong in the future. The most frequently cited example of this is the coal-​rich region of Upper Silesia, one of several contested German border regions for which plebiscites were laid down in the Versailles Treaty.46 After significant outbursts of violence between ethnic Poles and Germans in Upper Silesia, the region was divided in October 1921: Poland received a third of the disputed territory and 43% of the population—​a solution which satisfied neither side. The Allies also acted as mediator between rival post-​imperial powers fighting over the small but strategically and economically important Duchy of Teschen, which both Poland and Czechoslovakia insisted should be part of their new states. Unsure as to how to appease their two key allies in Central Europe, the Allies partitioned the duchy in July 1920.47 The peacemakers in Paris did recognize that ethnic minorities in the postimperial Successor States needed to be protected and they insisted on the signing of so-​called Minorities Treaties that would guarantee the rights and religious freedom of minorities before the new states would be internationally recognized.48 Alleged violations of the treaties could be brought to the attention the League Council and the International Court of Justice, either by members of the minority itself or by other states on their behalf. As Zara Steiner has rightly emphasized, the Minorities Treaties were among the Peace Conference’s most ‘notable’ achievements, as they provided a legal framework through which suppressed minorities could file complaints against their maltreatment by states.49 Overall, however, the Minorities Treaties proved to be a blunt instrument. Even Czechoslovakia, generally considered the most tolerant and democratic of the Successor

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    35 States, prioritized Czechs over any of the state’s minorities. Even many Slovaks soon felt disenchanted by the new political realities. Masaryk had promised the Slovaks far-​ reaching autonomy rights at the close of the war, but they were never implemented. He was even less inclined to safeguard the rights of ethnic Germans who, up until 1918, had dominated the economy and owned large estates which were now broken up.50 Foreign minister Edvard Beneš told a British diplomat bluntly: ‘Before the war, the Germans were here’ (pointing to the ceiling) and ‘we were there’ (pointing to the floor). ‘Now’, he declared, reversing his gestures, ‘we are here and they are there’.51 In some ways, the Minorities Treaties were even counter-​productive. Many from within the ethnic majorities in the newly created nation-​states perceived the legal provisions as a mechanism to undermine national sovereignty and consequently viewed minorities as privileged segments of the population.52 Worse still was the situation for those minorities for whom no state showed a particular interest. Of the various minorities that felt marginalized in the new nation-​states, none were affected as adversely and often violently as the Jews living in the western borderlands of the Romanov Empire and the eastern half of the former Habsburg Empire, notably in West Galicia and in Hungary. Fanned by the comparatively strong Jewish representation in the Russian revolution, anti-​Bolshevik movements were quick to stigmatize the 1917 overthrow as the result of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’.53 The claim was first used for propaganda purposes by the ‘White’ Russian forces as they tried to mobilize resistance against the Bolsheviks who otherwise had much more appealing promises of ‘land, bread, and liberation’ to offer new recruits.54 The anti-​Judeo-​Bolshevik card gave the ‘Whites’ something popular with which to identify and it quickly led to outbreaks of anti-​Semitic violence throughout the former Romanov Empire. In Western Russia and Ukraine, the situation was even worse as Jews bore the brunt of anti-​Bolshevism. Between June and December alone, some 100,000 of them were murdered, notably by members of General Anton Denikin’s ‘Volunteer Army’. Denikin’s men, however, were not alone in singling out Jews for murder: Ukrainian and Polish nationalist forces and various peasant armies also participated in the slaughter of Jews, usually in alcohol-​ fuelled pogroms; in 1919, 934 were recorded in Ukraine alone.55 In the Baltic States, too, violence was often directed towards the Jewish minority. When in January 1919, Vilnius was conquered by Polish troops, a three-​day pogrom killed over sixty people and an additional thirty-​seven in the nearby town of Lida.56 For obvious reasons, the Jewish minorities of East-​Central Europe had been among the strongest supporters of the Habsburg Empire. Many of the leading authors who—​ after 1918—​bemoaned the end of empires were Jewish citizens of the former Habsburg empire. As Joseph Roth put it in his famous Radetzky March: ‘As soon as the emperor says goodnight, we’ll break up into a hundred pieces  . . .  All the peoples will set up their own dirty little statelets.’ To Jews like Roth, the Habsburg empire had not been a ‘people’s prison’, but a state that had guaranteed his equality before the law and protection from anti-​Semitic violence or diffamation. In the post-​imperial Successor States of East-​Central Europe, few politicians were particularly concerned about the legal rights of their Jewish citizens. At the same time, many Jews in Russia supported the idea of

36   Robert Gerwarth Bolshevism, which explicitly advocated the notion of overcoming ethnic or religious differences in the interest of transnational class solidarity. It did not take long before the notion of Jews as both undesired pro-​imperial outsiders within the new nation-​states and the main ‘beneficiaries’ of Bolshevism spread throughout Europe and beyond. The fact that a relatively high number of Jews played prominent roles in the subsequent Central European revolutions of 1918–​1919—​Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin, Kurt Eisner in Munich, Béla Kun in Hungary, Victor Adler in Vienna—​seemed to make such accusations plausible, even for observers in Britain and France. French newspapers, for instance, frequently attributed the Bolshevik revolution to Jewish influence.57 And in Britain Winston Churchill published an infamous newspaper article in 1920 that attributed blame for the continental European revolutions to the Jews: ‘There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creating of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.’58 The international circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from 1919 onwards further fuelled these already widespread views. Its exposure as a forgery in 1921 did not reverse its enormous impact on the counter-​revolutionary imagination. Yet the unholy marriage of anti-​Semitism, nationalism, and anti-​Bolshevism produced contrasting results in different European settings. It was only east of the river Rhine (and more dramatically east of the river Elbe) that anti-​‘Judeobolshevism’ would lead to the pogroms and mass murders of Jews that became such a stark and gruesome feature of European history until 1945. The inclination within the international system to move away from protecting multi-​ ethnicity and endorsing the move towards ethnic exclusivity received a further boost in 1923, immediately after the brutal Greco-​Turkish War (1919–​1922). The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that ended this conflict stipulated that a meaningful peace between the former combatants could only be achieved through a ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Turkey. During the ‘exchange’ (that was already well on its way when the negotiators met in Lausanne), some 1.2 million Christian were expelled from Turkey to Greece, while nearly 400,000 Muslims living in Greece were ‘repatriated’ to the newly founded Republic of Turkey. Religion was the sole criterion for the expulsions. Lausanne thus left a dangerous legacy: it abandoned the idea of multi-​ethnicity and multi-​religiosity that had characterized the old land empires for centuries and sanctioned instead the right of state governments to expel large numbers of citizens on the grounds of ‘otherness’. The common problem of multi-​ethnicity and religious diversity in post-​imperial societies that wanted to be the exact opposite—​namely mono-​religious and ethnically homogenous—​would ultimately, both during and after the Second World War, lead to ‘solutions’ that proved disastrous across the territories of the former land empires: attempts to cleanse communities of their alien elements so that a utopian new society could emerge, and renewed efforts to root out those perceived to be harmful to community cohesion. These beliefs constituted a powerful component of radical politics and action in Europe after 1918, particularly in those countries frustrated with the outcomes of both the Great War and the post-​war conflicts. As such, an analysis of the

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    37 ways in which empires ended in Europe and its eastern margins is crucial for understanding the cycles of violence that characterized the twentieth century.59

Conclusions The First World War and the period of transition from war to peace between 1917 and 1923 transformed Europe from a continent of dynastic empires into one of nation-​ states. None of the continental European dynastic empires that entered the war survived the conflict in their pre-​war form. From the ashes of the Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires rose several republican states, nine of which—​among them Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic States—​had not existed in 1914.60 Never before in the modern period had the map of Europe been re-​drawn so dramatically.61 While this national revolution was widely welcomed by the new elites of the Successor States, it turned out to be a very mixed blessing for Central, Eastern, and South-​Eastern Europe. Admittedly, the old empires had been autocratic to varying degrees (with the Romanov empire at one end of the scale and the Dual Monarchy at the other), but the Successor States validated at the Paris Peace Conference were not without serious flaws either. Often impoverished, aggressively insecure, and populated by large, unloved minorities that felt oppressed by the new dominant ethnic majorities, most of the Successor States proved unstable. The Weimar Republic, often viewed as synonymous with a stillborn democracy, was actually (with the exception of Czechoslovakia and Finland) the last of the post-​war republics, created in East-​Central Europe and the Baltics in 1918, to give way to an authoritarian dictatorship of one kind or another. More immediately, the break-​up of empires and the struggle over ill-​defined borders led to a continuation of violence beyond November 1918. The post-​war violence that haunted the territories of the defeated land empires was in part a struggle over the formerly imperial territories that were now claimed by emerging nation-​states. But even though mass violence was largely confined to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, there were also wider global ramifications. Wilson’s talk of self-​ determination and the rights of small nations, as well as Lenin’s anti-​imperial rhetoric, inspired champions of decolonization across the world. Even if it would take another world war to implement the ideas of ‘self-​determination’ and post-​imperial independence from Europe’s blue-​water empires, the ideas that underpinned that process can clearly be traced back to the Great War and its immediate aftermath.

Notes 1. This chapter draws on the introduction to and chapter in Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–​23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

38   Robert Gerwarth 2. Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border:  Germany and the East, 1914–​1922 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Gregor Thum, ed., Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. On the Irish case, see the recent accounts of:  Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913–​1923 (London: Profile Books, 2015); Charles Townshend, The Republic: the Fight for Irish Independence 1918–​1923 (London: Penguin, 2014). 4. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37–​43. 5. For case studies, see: Gerwarth and Manela, Empires at War; David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–​1965 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Derek Sayer, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–​1920”, Past and Present 131 (1991): 130–​164; Jon Lawrence, “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and Fear of Brutalization in Post First World War Britain”, The Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003):  557–​589; Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–​1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),  64–​90. 6. Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912–​1913:  Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000). 7. See, for example, Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: Muslim-​Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-​Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 8. For an overview, see: Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); and subsequently:  Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires:  Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 9. Theodor Schieder, “Typologie and Erscheinungsformcn des Nationalstaats in Europa”, Historische Zeitschrift 202 (1966): 58–​81; David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 12. 10. Richard Bessel, ‘Revolution’, in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. 2, 126–​144, here 127; See, too: Jeffrey R. Smith, A People’s War:  Germany’s Political Revolution, 1913–​1918 (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007), 25–​49. 11. Bessel, ‘Revolution’, 127. 12. Robert A. Kann, Geschichte des Habsburgerreiches 1526 bis 1918 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1990), 581. 13. Peter Haslinger, “Austria-​Hungary”, in Gerwarth and Manela, Empires at War, 73–​90, here 74. 14. Bela K. Kiraly and Nandor F. Dreisiger, eds., East Central European Society in World War I (Boulder:  Social Science Monographs, 1985), 305–​306; and more generally Jonathan E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–​ 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 15. Mark Cornwall, “Morale and Patriotism in the Austro-​Hungarian Army, 1914–​1918”, in: John Horne, ed., State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 173–​191. See also John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–​1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 369–​443. Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky, eds., The Limits of

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    39 Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Berghahn, 2007). 16. On anti-​Habsburg propaganda: Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-​Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Twentieth-​century central European historiography (in English language) was long grounded in this wartime propaganda. Influential historians such as Oszkár Jászi and C. A. Macartney built on the work of the historians mentioned above and argued that national conflict had rendered the Habsburg monarchy moribund even before the beginning of hostilities in August 1914. Oszkár Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); C. A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790–​1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1969). For examples of the subsequent generation of historians who agreed that the war was merely a catalyst for the empire’s fall, see: Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–​1918, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press 1950); A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–​ 1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-​Hungary (London: Penguin, 1948). 17. Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 15. 18. Peter Haslinger, “Austria-​Hungary”, in Gerwarth and Manela, Empires at War,  73–​90. 19. Arthur J. May, The Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1914–​1918 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), vol. II, 722–​727 and 748–​755; Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel:  Germany and Austria-​Hungary at War, 1914–​1918 (London:  Penguin, 2015), ­chapter 13. 20. For the context, see Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–​1920 (London: Allen Lane, 2015). 21. Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 146. 22. John Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918–​1922 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), 156. 23. Reynolds, Long Shadow, 85–​103. 24. Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback:  Miklos Horthy, 1918–​ 1944 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1994). 25. Jan Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinscbaft:  Tschechen und Deutsche, 1780–​ 1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1996), 371–​372. 26. Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 831. 27. Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires:  The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–​1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between:  Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–​1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72–​97; Piotr Wróbel, “The Seeds of Violence: The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–​1921”, Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003): 125–​149. 28. Peter Gatrell, “Wars after the War: Conflicts, 1919–​1923”, in John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley, 2010), 558–​575. Bessel, ‘Revolution’, 138. 29. Ian Bremner and Ray Taras, eds., New States, New Politics:  Building the Post-​Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 240. Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 30. Karsten Brüggemann, “Kooperation und Konfrontation. Estland im Kalkül der weißen Russen 1919”, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 43 (1994): 534–​552; see also Brüggemann, “Die

40   Robert Gerwarth Esten, das Baltenregiment und die weißen Russen im Krieg 1919”, Mitteilungen aus baltischem Leben 41 (1994): 15–​17. 31. On this, see Rudolph A. Mark, “National Self-​Determination, as Understood by Lenin and the Bolsheviks”, Lithuanian Historical Studies 13 (2008): 30–​32. 32. Recent literature on some of these conflicts includes: Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Reynolds, Shattering Empires; also M. Reynolds, “Native Sons: Post-​Imperial Politics, Islam, and Identity in the North Caucasus, 1917–​1918”, Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 56 (2008):  221–​247; John Paul Newman, “Post-​imperial and Post-​war Violence in the South Slav Lands, 1917–​ 1923”, Contemporary European History 19 (2010): 249–​265; Julia Eichenberg, “The Dark Side of Independence: Paramilitary Violence in Ireland and Poland after the First World War”, Contemporary European History 19 (2010):  231–​248; Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–​1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Tim Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–​1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 33. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 34. On the Polish-​Lithuanian conflict, see: Andrzej Nowak, “Reborn Poland or Reconstructed Empire? Questions on the Course and Results of Polish Eastern Policy (1918–​1921)”, Lithuanian Historical Studies 13 (2008):  134–​142; P. Łossowski, Konflikt polsko-​litewski 1918–​1920, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1996); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations:  Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2003),  57–​65. 35. Julia Eichenberg, “Soldiers to Civilians, Civilians to Soldiers:  Poland and Ireland after the First World War”, in Gerwarth and Horne, War in Peace; Wróbel, “Seeds of Violence”; Wilson, Frontiers of Violence. On the Polish-​Ukrainian conflict, see: Torsten Wehrhahn, Die Westukrainische Volksrepublik:  Zu den polnisch-​ukrainischen Beziehungen und dem Problem der ukrainischen Staatlichkeit in den Jahren 1918 bis 1923 (Berlin:  Weißensee-​ Verlag, 2004), 102–​112; Mykola Litvyn, Ukrayins’ko-​pol’s’ka viyna 1918–​1919 rr. (L’viv, 1998); Michał Klimecki, polsko-​ukraińska wojna o Lwów i Wschodnią Galicję 1918–​1919 r. Aspekty polityczne I wojskowe (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen, 1997). 36. Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920:  Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe (London:  William Collins, 2008), 67. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-​Soviet War, 1919–​20 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1972). 37. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920; Davies, White Eagle. 38. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: A. Knopf, 1999), 415; Erik-​Jan Zürcher, “The Ottoman Empire and the Armistice of Moudros”, in: Hugh Cecil & Peter H. Liddle, eds., At the Eleventh Hour: Reflections, Hopes, and Anxieties at the Closing of the Great War, 1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, Ltd, 1998), 266–​275. 39. Erik-​Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Rôle of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905–​1926 (Leiden:  Brill, 1984); Paul Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology”, in: Jacob M. Landau, ed., Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), 25–​44. 40. There are no reliable statistics on the post-war Kurdish massacres, but the approximate numbers are: 5,000 deaths in 1921, 15,000 deaths in 1925, 10,000 deaths in 1930, and 40,000 deaths in 1938. See: Robert Gerwarth and Ugur Ümit Üngör, “The Collapse of the Ottoman

1918 and the End of Europe’s Land Empires    41 and Habsburg Empires and the Brutalization of the Successor States”, Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015): 226–​248. 41. On the Successor States as mini-​empires, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 153. 42. See statistics in M. C. Kaser and E. A. Radice, eds., The Economic History of Eastern Europe, 1919–​1975, vol. 1 (London, 1985), 25. See also the detailed discussion of the issue in Prusin, The Lands Between, chs 1–​4. 43. Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 60–​61 and 145–​147. On the May Fourth Movement, see Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 44. Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32 (2006): 571; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17–​44. 45. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 89. 46. For the full story of Upper Silesia’s dramatic yet profoundly ambivalent nationalization, see James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland, 1890–​1922 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); T. Hunt Tooley, “German Political Violence and the Border Plebiscite in Upper Silesia, 1919–​1921”, Central European History 21 (1988): 56–​98, and Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918–​22 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). See also Tim K. Wilson, “The Polish-​German Ethnic Dispute in Upper Silesia, 1918–1922: A Reply to Tooley”, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 32 (2005): 1–​26. 47. Robert Howard Lord, “Poland”, in Edward M. House and Charles Seymour, eds., What Really Happened at Paris:  The Story of the Peace Conference by American Delegates (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 82–​83; on the dispute see H. M. V. Temperley, ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (6 vols, London: Institute of International Affairs, 1920–​1924), vol. 4, 348–​363. 48. Mark Levene, Devastation: Volume I: The European Rimlands 1912–​1938 (Crisis of Genocide) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 230–​240. 49. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 260; Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–​1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 86. 50. On land reform, see Daniel E. Miller, “Colonizing the Hungarian and German Border Areas during the Czechoslovak Land Reform, 1918–1938”, Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 303–​317. 51. As quoted in Mark Cornwall, “National Reparation? The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918–​1938”, Slavonic and East European Review 75 (1997): 280. 52. Charles S. Maier, “International Associationalism: The Social and Political Premises of Peacemaking after 1917 and 1945”, in Paul Kennedy and William I. Hitchcock, eds., From War to Peace:  Altered Strategic Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2000), 37–​52, here 43. 53. Oleg Budnitskij, Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–​1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

42   Robert Gerwarth 54. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1996). 55. William W. Hagen, “The Moral Economy of Ethnic Violence:  The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 (2005): 203–​226. 56. Joachim Tauber, “Antisemitismus in den baltischen Staaten in der Zwischenkriegszeit am Beispiel Litauens”, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 54 (2005): 25–​35. 57. Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-​Semitism (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), vol. 4, 274–​276. 58. Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism”, Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920. 59. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see: Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016). 60. Mazower, Dark Continent,  1–​2. 61. Steiner, The Lights that Failed, 84.

Chapter 3

An Empire Unre de e me d Tracing the Ottoman State’s Path towards Collapse Ryan Gingeras

Introduction When Mustafa Kemal assumed the podium in the inaugural session of his Grand National Assembly, he did so in the service of the sultan and the Ottoman state. His first speech before the body in April 1920 offered no indication of his eventual preference for republican government. The occasion instead was used to summarize the injuries and humiliations the Ottoman state and the Turkish nation had endured since the end of the First World War. Istanbul’s occupation by the war’s victors had made the sultan a prisoner in his own palace. The self-​proclaimed Grand National Assembly in Ankara had been founded in response to the Allies’ decision to dissolve the imperial parliament, an act that was clearly meant ‘in principle to discard the sovereignty of the Ottoman state.’ ‘After a seven-​hundred-​year existence of grandeur and majesty’, the empire now ‘stood at the edge of extinction.’ Yet he remained confident that the Almighty remained with them and that the loyal remnants of the imperial army, ‘our unfailing forces’, would win the day and liberate the sultan and his lands.1 Mustafa Kemal’s pretentions of loyalty and faith in the empire were discarded within less than three years of this speech. By the time Istanbul was freed from foreign occupation in November 1922, the Ankara government had abolished the Ottoman monarchy and compelled the sultan to seek refuge abroad. Ironically, Turkey’s future president did not immediately render any great indictment upon the empire’s fall. It instead fell to his surrogates to declare the Ottoman state officially—​and deservedly—​dead. On the day before the sultanate was formally abolished, the National Assembly entertained a motion condemning Istanbul’s last high officials as traitors. There was no more talk of the empire’s greatness. Supporters of the motion instead decried the Ottoman state as one defined by ‘several centuries of ignorance and debauchery.’2 Sovereignty no longer

44   Ryan Gingeras rested with the monarchy, but with the Turkish nation, a polity long suppressed by the sultan. The National Assembly’s decision to disown the empire was not one made without some deliberation. It is possible that leaders such as Mustafa Kemal had privately erred against the Ottoman state’s survival in advance of the body’s first session in Ankara. Yet from the vantage point of 1922, such a conclusion had not always been obvious, nor was it one reached with ease. Imagining a future without the sultan, and the empire he embodied, was the product of a number of cataclysmic events. The audacity eventually required in establishing a republic, one premised upon an imagined community of ‘Turkish’ citizens, required changes to what many had previously thought was impossible or preferable. Wars and international treaties were certainly crucial in speeding the end of the Ottoman Empire. Yet there were still other factors that compelled many of the empire’s most loyal citizens to conceive of a future without the sultanate. Pinpointing the moment when the Ottoman Empire ceased to be a viable state is a precarious proposition. There were clear symptoms of the empire’s disintegration as the modern age unfolded. The state’s receding frontiers provided the most obvious indication of the mortal dangers facing Ottoman rule. Defeat in war and the loss of territory compounded rampant levels of poverty and disorder in multiple corners of the empire. The government’s sovereignty appeared to grow ever weaker in the face of increased Western interest in the empire’s economy and solvency. Still others could point to the lack of public confidence in the guarantees of imperial citizenship. The means by which the government came to define ‘Ottoman-​ness’ often confounded residents throughout the empire. Doubts and debates about the government’s policies or posturing at times were cause for intense intercommunal fighting. Still, nothing about the events preceding the abolition of the sultanate necessarily made the empire’s collapse inevitable. Amid lingering uncertainties, there were stubborn numbers of Ottoman citizens willing to cast their uncertainties aside. On the contrary, the last century of Ottoman history can be justifiably described as an era of political vibrancy and exuberant reform. Due to the immense efforts expended in trying to transform the empire’s institutions and political climate, many Ottomans found reasons to look upon the beginning of the twentieth century with hope. Material and political changes taking place in the capital and in the provinces suggested that the empire was rapidly becoming more modern and more worthy of international respect and admiration. The one event that helped solidify this sense of optimism was the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. As an episode that reintroduced representative government and constitutional order to the state, the revolution seemed to promise greater democratic engagement and stability for the whole of the empire. The revolution’s main party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), compelled large swaths of the population to believe that they, a group mostly comprising young officers and bureaucrats (collectively known as Young Turks), could effect substantive change in the capital. Even as disillusionment with the emerging Young Turk regime spread, arguably the majority of Ottoman citizens could not envision the empire’s collapse. All understood that the

An Empire Unredeemed    45 sultanate’s fall would represent a catastrophe of inordinately violent and destructive proportions. Four successive wars—​over Libya, the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Turkish War of Independence—​catalysed the empire’s demise. The outcomes of each of these conflicts resulted in more than just the empire’s contraction and the deaths of thousands of combatants. Fighting along the state’s periphery drained invaluable resources from the economy and heaped untold hardships upon civilians. Losing battles, and wars in turn, drained confidence from notable members of Ottoman society and led many otherwise loyal citizens to contemplate alternatives to the sultan’s rule. For many leaders of the CUP, defeat had a radicalizing effect upon how they perceived the empire and its future. In the hopes of rooting out potential sources of treason and consolidating the imperial state and nation, the Young Turk government struck out violently against large segments of the population. The results of these policies, which included the mass displacement and murder of hundreds of thousands, rendered a deep divide between citizens and the government, as well as within provincial communities. For citizens who found themselves conquered and incorporated into new states and territories after 1918, the memories of these final years of war undermined any residual desire to see imperial rule over their communities or lands restored. While the most fundamental institutions of the Ottoman Empire may have survived the end of the First World War, large numbers of the state’s remaining citizens, including many of its principal leaders, began to doubt the sultanate’s viability. Sultan Mehmet VI Vahiddedin’s tainted rule did much to condemn the royal family as a governing institution. With Woodrow Wilson’s promise of independence for dominant nations within the dying Ottoman world, many of the empire’s surviving leaders and notables, including Mustafa Kemal, found new inspiration to fight on. Though nominally committed to saving the sultan and his regime, Kemal and his followers tended to depict their ‘national struggle’ as one rooted primarily in the emancipation of ‘Muslims and Turks’. The bitter severity of the Turkish War of Independence, which was punctuated by egregious acts of state and communal violence, deepened this nationalist assertiveness while undermining the last vestiges of communal Ottoman culture. Final victory in 1922 allowed Turkey’s first president to dismiss any pretention of restoring the empire. Though they had once been the empire’s most loyal servants, Turkey’s founding leaders quickly repudiated the Ottoman past. There would be neither eulogies nor nostalgia in the decades that followed the sultanate’s collapse. For all that, the empire, as both a state and nation, formed an irredeemable legacy. To find a singular premise explaining why the Ottoman state collapsed, one could conceivably begin with the struggles over the meaning of imperial reform. Arguments that raged over how centralized the state was supposed to be helped frame many of the contentious policies and actions of the empire’s last governments. Questions over banal matters of governance (such as taxation and land rights), as well as deeper, emotive issues, such as the empire’s ‘national identity’, created deep fault lines between citizens, depending upon the belief that the central government held a unique right to determine policy or even lead the debate. Those who supported a highly centralized government—​ one that was entitled to define the nature and content of Ottoman citizenship—​largely

46   Ryan Gingeras won out in shaping the governing philosophy. The CUP’s insistence upon a unitary vision of the state and nation deepened the political divide between the government and its opponents and led to outright acts of dissident violence and state oppression. As the threat of war and conquest loomed larger, Young Turk leaders increasingly identified ‘Muslims and Turks’ as both the foundation of the Ottoman nation and the true basis of the state’s legitimacy. This ultra-​nationalist turn by the Young Turks, as well as the physical damage wrought during the wars of the early twentieth century, helped condemn the empire as a failed endeavour in the eyes of both loyalists and dissidents alike.

Prelude to Collapse: Assessing the Implications of the Long Nineteenth Century There was a time when historians saw the Ottoman defeat before the gates of Vienna in 1683 as the beginning of the end of the empire. From that moment forward, many scholars were content to depict the Ottoman state as one locked in a death spiral that, centuries later, led to its final collapse. Contemporary scholars in the field have progressively taken issue with this notion of the long Ottoman ‘decline’. Beyond the historical determinism of the traditional argument, Istanbul, in fact, displayed a certain strength and agility in weathering various crises during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite severe losses on the battlefield, the sultan’s court managed to sustain large armies over very long periods of time. A great host of provincial actors, such as governors, janissaries, local patricians, tribal leaders, and even bandits, fought to maintain the imperial state as tax collectors and military recruiters. As defeats against Russia and Austria mounted in the eighteenth century, Ottoman officials adopted new strategies and technologies geared for war. It is true that many imperial officials would have agreed that the state faced great dangers by the turn of the eighteenth century, but an end to Ottoman rule was neither considered imminent nor probable. The dawning of a new century did, however, prompt deep debate in the capital over the nature of imperial government. Like many early modern empires, the Ottoman state was a highly syncretic political organism. A large, overlapping system of local officials and informal actors managed the promulgation of law, taxes, and war throughout the empire. Bureaucracy, for lack of any better term, often comprised ad-​hoc commissions or undertakings; no regular civil institution oversaw such matters as education, health, or transport. The balance of power within the empire tended to favour provincial notables at the expense of the sultan and his court. The fluidity of the Ottoman government, as well as the decentralized character of political authority, regularly inhibited centralized policy-​making by leaders in the capital. The state’s inherent weaknesses were most clearly visible when it came to mobilizing armies. In comparison to the better-​equipped

An Empire Unredeemed    47 and better-​trained forces of Russia or France, the Ottoman military of the eighteenth century still relied upon poorly led and inadequately supplied janissaries and provincial militias to defend imperial borders. Replacing such an antiquated system was fraught with danger. Adapting new systems of recruitment, training, and supply meant challenging the authority and livelihoods of powerful notables and factions in both the capital and the provinces. Sultan Selim III’s execution at the hands of rebellious janissaries and other officials in 1808 demonstrated the extent to which members of the ancien regime were willing to fight reform. Mahmud II, Selim III’s heir, set the tone for the reformist struggle that would define the remainder of the nineteenth century. In deploying his Western-​styled ‘New Force’ to massacre Istanbul’s janissary garrison in 1826, the sultan established a series of bloody precedents for how the restructuring of the Ottoman government would proceed thereafter. The imperial government in Istanbul now reserved the sole right to direct state administration. In principle, no political institution or custom would stand immune to reform. Western European models would be used to create ‘modern’ governmental bodies and administrative practices. As a matter of policy, the state would brook no compromise with those who opposed this reformation of the empire. Violence would be repeatedly used to cow individuals and communities into accepting the revolutionary changes imposed by the government. The empire’s reordering (or Tanzimat) dramatically altered life in both the capital and provinces. The proliferation of state offices and services strengthened the capital’s ability to administer the empire at large. The establishment of state-​run courts, hospitals, and public schools, as well as barracks and police stations, created a new sense of citizenship and belonging for communities living throughout the Levant, Anatolia, and the Balkans. Public services and legal reforms, as well as employment opportunities offered by the bureaucracy and military, inspired large numbers of men and women to feel more invested in both the empire and affairs in the world at large. Cultivating this new imperial identity, as a means of combating sedition and consolidating imperial rule, was among the greatest priorities for Ottoman reformers. For the Tanzimat’s chief architects, the empire’s diversity, in terms of culture and terrain, was substantially set aside in favour of a more unitary notion of belonging. Muslims, Christians, and Jews were all citizens, and all ‘were subjects of one ruler’, and therefore, ‘the children of one father.’3 Difficult, and often intractable, obstacles beset the lofty aspirations of nineteenth-​ century reformers from the beginning. Overthrowing the authority of long-​established local patricians and notables (often referred to as ayan) did not necessarily improve the quality of Ottoman governance. Appointees from Istanbul often proved incompetent, corrupt, or incapable of effective administration. Financial resources were generally scarce, a condition worsened by foreign trade pacts and massive loans. Repeated and aggressive foreign interventions amplified these structural challenges. As the nineteenth century ended, many of the problems that had plagued the reign of Mahmud II remained unresolved; the army continued to struggle on the battlefield, the treasury remained bare, and the state still exhibited signs of weakness.

48   Ryan Gingeras Arguably the greatest challenge confronting the reformed Ottoman state was an existential one. In proclaiming a new, highly centralized order of law and administration, officials in Istanbul explicitly revoked legal privileges and allowances previously enjoyed by tens of thousands of the sultan’s subjects. For nomads and villagers living in isolated parts of the empire, rigorous centralized government curtailed their cherished communal autonomy. More gravely, universal citizenship threatened the dual system of law pertaining to non-​Muslims (the so-​called millet system). Compelling Muslims, Christians, and Jews to accept one another as political and social equals destabilized traditional relations between elites and common citizens. Communal leaders regularly conflicted with imperial representatives, as well as with each other, over the exact terms of equal citizenship (affecting issues such as land tenure, the authority of civil and ecclesiastical courts, and political representation). The influence of Western representatives further complicated the ways in which citizens negotiated matters of Ottoman identity and civil rights. The establishment of European and American schools, businesses, and diplomatic offices in the provinces created separate systems of education and patrimony that rivalled those of imperial government. By 1900, Ottoman reformism, as well as the increased influence of Western actors, nourished sectarian and ethnic tensions in various corners of the empire. The reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–​1909) crystalized the prospects, incongruities, and dangers that confronted the modern empire as a whole. As the state’s newly crowned sovereign, he endorsed the institution of a constitution and national assembly, two political innovations that were coveted by members of the capital’s reformist elite. Yet the outbreak of a nationalist rebellion in Bulgaria, followed by a disastrous war with Russia, soon prompted the sultan to abolish both of these constraints upon his authority. Though skewered both at home and abroad as a politically intolerant and paranoid despot, ‘the Red Sultan’ did not depart substantially from the essence of the Tanzimat reforms. In the course of his thirty-​year reign, Abdülhamid II redoubled the state’s efforts to expand imperial administration in all corners of the Ottoman realm. To some extent, he embraced the pluralistic spirit of Ottoman national identity and citizenship. However, the sultan often emphasized that Muslims formed the backbone of the Ottoman nation. His insistence upon the Islamic character of the Ottoman Empire grew more heated after a government crackdown against suspected Armenian militants in the 1890s. To concede to Armenian nationalist demands, or bow to European pressure regarding international or domestic politics, represented, in his words, ‘the beginning of total annihilation’ and something to be fought ‘with all the strength we possess.’4 Abdülhamid II’s reign came to an end soon after the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908. The officers and bureaucrats most responsible for compelling him to restore the constitution and national assembly that summer drew both positive and negative lessons from his lengthy reign. On the one hand, revolutionaries saw him as the embodiment of reactionary elements buried deep within the Ottoman state and psyche. His rule exemplified what many considered the most tyrannical, archaic, and irrational qualities of the pre-​Tanizmat past. On the other hand, they tended to share the sultan’s conclusions regarding nationalism and the future of the country. Separatists, as well as the Great Powers of Europe, did threaten the empire’s long-​term health. Both had to be

An Empire Unredeemed    49 fought and bested. Defeating these threats required a renewed commitment to Ottoman nationalism and the continuation of the reformist ethos that had defined civilian leadership during the Tanzimat era. The means by which the Young Turks pursued this agenda, through rigid and often uncompromising centralization, contributed significantly to the Ottoman Empire’s fall.

The Young Turks: Setting the Tone for Collapse During the first decades of its existence, the CUP represented a relatively open tent capable of accommodating activists and civic leaders seeking radical change in the Ottoman Empire. As a movement with a strong following among expatriates fleeing Abdülhamid II’s rule, the party initially comprised a rich array of liberals, nationalists, socialists, and conservatives drawn from a variety religious and ethnic backgrounds. Yet when the group began to attract a greater following within the Ottoman Empire, the CUP increasingly relied on a narrower social base. The Young Turks who succeeded in prosecuting the revolution of 1908 tended to be Muslim and employed by the state as either mid-​level officers or officials. They were typically young and generally the beneficiaries of a public education. While they uniformly loathed the autocracy and nepotism of Abdülhamid II’s reign, most sympathized with his contention that Muslims, like themselves, formed the core of the Ottoman nation. This belief in the empire’s dominant Islamic character did not necessarily lead stalwart Young Turks to reject or belittle non-​Muslims as fellow citizens. To the contrary, CUP leaders actively sought Jewish and Christian allies, including Armenian and Macedonian nationalists, in fomenting their revolution. Enabling Christian citizens to sit side by side in a restored parliament, while working together to protect their shared ‘national rights and freedoms’, were considered ‘foundational principles’ by the CUP.5 Though the individuals and events responsible for the Young Turk Revolution were largely concentrated in the empire’s Macedonian provinces, throngs of citizens throughout the Ottoman domains rang in the restoration of the 1876 constitution. Muslims and non-​Muslims, as well as nationalists of various stripes, interpreted the CUP’s victory as a chance for greater political engagement on issues vital to the state’s survival. Parliamentary elections held in the winter of 1908 were as much an affirmation of the Young Turk cause as a celebration of Ottoman national unity. Yet within a year of the revolution, popular and elite impressions of the CUP began to change. After a failed counter-​coup, Young Turk advocates in the post-​revolutionary government pushed for restrictions against the press and public assembly. When CUP opponents in Adana sacked the city’s Armenian quarter and left thousands dead, some party supporters charged local Armenians with nationalistically provocative behaviour. Other parochial challenges sapped enthusiasm for the new Unionist regime. In

50   Ryan Gingeras Iraq and in Palestine, CUP support for greater European intervention (be it in favour of British shippers or Zionist migrants) raised the ire of local leaders. In the Balkans, the Young Turks were compelled to mediate between competing members of the Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox Church (an effort that earned the government little praise at home or abroad). Among the most divisive issues to plague the CUP were disputes concerning the use of local language. Unionist leaders in Istanbul insisted that Turkish become the lingua franca of provincial public schools and offices (as well as ministries and universities in the capital). For advocates of ‘national revival’ among Albanians, Arabs, and Greeks, such a stance smacked of chauvinism and intolerance. From the standpoint of provincial activists, an Ottoman citizen learning and publically employing a local language was a birth right that did not conflict one’s loyalty to the empire. What the Young Turks sought, as one Albanian opponent saw it, was not a union of ‘different races under the flag of the Ottoman constitution’ but to ‘absorb the nationalities’ and render them ‘docile and common Ottomans’ with no knowledge of their national origins.6 Luminaries within the Young Turk movement of course rejected such criticisms out of hand. Their insistence upon unitary rule and the utilization of one common language stemmed from their grave assessment of the empire’s political health. While the CUP raged against Western interference in the state’s affairs, party leaders understood that the country’s economy, and the imperial treasury, required foreign investment and loans. The central government had to play a direct role in provincial politics in order to mediate between rival communal factions. Above all, Unionists were acutely apprensive to the prospect of seditious movements taking root in the Ottoman hinterland. For many of the party’s leaders and rank-​and-​file who served in Macedonia—​a region long troubled by sectarian and nationalist violence—​consolidating state administration and a shared sense of nationhood was an imperative that required firm action. Enforcing Turkish as the language of public education and governance, many Unionists formally argued, derived less from a nationalist bias than from practical analysis. ‘To allow different languages in government,’ as one prominent CUP journalist put it, ‘would be setting up a Tower of Babel,’ an edifice destined to fall.7 Within party circles, however, there were individuals who relished the prospect of an increasingly ethnicized Ottoman Empire. Some writers and activists lauded the country’s Turkic past and romanticized the empire’s place within the Islamic world. Before 1914, such predilections did not necessarily steel the CUP’s resolve about imperial policy. It was only after a profound series of crises that CUP officials drew more directly upon these nationalist tendencies in crafting more radical policy choices.

The War Years Begin: Libya and the Balkan Wars A string of events that either occurred or culminated in 1911 catalysed the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s fall. The year began with the state fighting two bitter insurgencies

An Empire Unredeemed    51 that erupted in two distant corners of the country. In the Albanian highlands rebels attacked military and civilian targets in response to Istanbul’s attempts at conscription and public disarmament. Meanwhile in Yemen, the imperial army remained bogged down in combating the last throes of an insurrection that had begun after the capital had reasserted direct rule over the province in the late nineteenth century. Some domestic opponents, as well as elements of the foreign press, interpreted the revolts as symptomatic of the CUP’s growing unpopularity and its intolerance towards provincial opposition. Italy’s decision to invade and partition the provinces comprising Libya was initially read as further confirmation of the CUP’s declining fortunes. Many inside and outside the empire suspected that Tripolitania, a territory cut off from the Ottoman mainland, was irrevocably lost. Ranking Unionist members, however, were undaunted in their desire to hurl the invaders back. While local civilians and military forces hemmed in the Italian landing parties along the Libyan shoreline, the CUP smuggled bands of volunteers, usually party members, overland and across the sea to join the defence. Between September 1911 and October 1912 Ottoman and Italian forces remained deadlocked outside the principal beachheads of Darna, Benghazi, and Tripoli. Successes achieved by the defending forces, as well as the ingenuity and bravery soldiers demonstrated during the fight, heartened imperial popular opinion and emboldened the CUP. Despite long odds, the war in Libya initially suggested that the empire was capable of besting a European power. For devoted Unionists, the campaign boosted their confidence that the party, as the vanguard of the nation, could overcome dangerous enemies in times of crisis. Affairs in the Balkans ultimately undermined the renewed sense of self-​assurance attained as a result of the war in Libya. In the four years that followed the Young Turk Revolution, many local observers witnessed a steady deterioration of communal relations in Macedonia and the Albanian lands. The CUP’s promise to instill a new spirit of ‘brotherhood and unity’ among the region’s diverse population was increasingly belied by the uneven enforcement of regulations related to disarmament, government employment, taxation, and conscription. Law and order began to erode. A resurgence of militant nationalist activity was accompanied by upheaval in numerous districts. As rebellion smouldered in predominantly Albanian regions throughout 1912, a wave of bombings targeting government offices and Muslim civilians swept over Macedonia. Fears that Bulgarian and Serb Orthodox Christian guerillas were responsible for the blasts led some in the CUP to take matters into their own hands. By the end of 1912 bands of CUP vigilantes had openly assassinated dozens of suspected militants, a campaign that instilled a climate of fear among Christians throughout Macedonia. The government’s failure to uphold the peace, as well as its heavy-​handed tactics towards civilians and rebels alike, fed antagonism towards the CUP throughout the Balkans. Anti-​ Unionist sentiment in the Balkans (and elsewhere) proved so virulent that Young Turk agents resorted to trickery and voter suppression in winning the election of 1912 (ruefully remembered as the ‘election with a stick’). While these factors alone did not lead to the collapse of Ottoman rule in the region, many of the tensions that defined Balkan politics in 1912 resonated within the region (and the empire at large) for years to come.

52   Ryan Gingeras A previously unlikely alliance of regional powers struck the final blow against the Ottoman administration of the Balkans. The First Balkan Wars did not come as a complete surprise to either the Ottoman Empire or the world at large. Newspapers had reported heated diplomatic exchanges between Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria in the lead up to the first calls for mobilization in the fall of 1912. Within six weeks of the war’s outbreak in October, the Ottoman army abandoned its forward positions and conceded huge tracts of land. Whether it was the result of poor training, leadership, or planning, the war was arguably lost long before the signing of the Treaty of London in May 1913. Civilians, far more than soldiers, bore the brunt of the empire’s rapid collapse in the Balkans. Bulgarian, Serb, and Greek troops systematically burned homes and whole villages. Muslims received the worst of this treatment, with incidents of murder, rape, theft, forced conversion, and mass expulsions reported in various districts. Rather than endure the threat of further violence, tens of thousands of Muslims fled their homes both during the war and in its aftermath. At the height of the conflict, a band of Albanian notables declared an independent Albanian state along the western periphery of the Balkans (a claim eventually backed by other European powers). Later, amidst a cataclysmic military defeat and an unprecedented refugee crisis, many Unionists interpreted Macedonia’s fall and Albania’s declaration of independence as proof of their apprehensions about provincial national movements. Even though Albanian notables joined to form a government defensively (for fear of a joint Serb/​Greek conquest of their home regions) and native Orthodox Christians contributed relatively little to the defeats suffered by the Ottoman army, most CUP members interpreted the First Balkan War as a bitter lesson in treason. During the fighting, high-​ranking Young Turks took it upon themselves to eliminate the last remnants of organized political opposition in the capital. In January 1913, a group of CUP officers stormed into the central imperial offices, the Bab-​ı Ali, forcing the sitting cabinet to resign at gunpoint. In the aftermath of the so-​called Bab-​ı Ali coup, the party saw to it that only loyal Unionists served at the highest ranks of the government. The sitting sultan, Mehmet V Reşat, stood aside as the CUP imprisoned or exiled hundreds of erstwhile opponents. The CUP grew more conspiratorial, vengeful, and dictatorial in the management of the administration as the effects of the Balkan Wars became more apparent. As hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way on foot or by sea to the Ottoman lands, Unionist rhetoric grew more exclusionary, suspicious, and militant. The party sponsored the creation of paramilitary organizations with an eye towards preparing young Muslims for future wars. It became Unionist policy to develop ‘a culture of entrepreneurism and trade’ among Muslims in order to offset the influence of foreign competitors and non-​Muslim commercial interests. By 1914 government officials and party loyalists openly speculated that thousands of Orthodox Christians either supported or sympathized with the empire’s enemies during the Balkan Wars. In late 1913 Istanbul agreed to a mutual population exchange with Bulgaria, forcing up to 50,000 Ottoman Bulgarians to vacate regions of Thrace. The outbreak of the First World War pre-​empted the finalization of a similar agreement with Greece in 1914. Yet, in anticipation of such an agreement, CUP agents oversaw the mass expulsion of 150,000

An Empire Unredeemed    53 Ottoman Christians from throughout western Anatolia. Even though government officials denied any role in forcing native Greeks to leave their homes, it is clear that Young Turk leaders counted upon the results of this campaign. Interior Ministry officials tallied and remanded homes and business abandoned by fleeing Orthodox Christians with the deliberate intention of distributing them to Muslims (particularly those left homeless by the Balkan Wars). Unionist efforts to consolidate power did not necessarily reflect their actual strength or confidence. As Ottoman representatives negotiated with the Balkan states over the final terms of peace in 1913, Armenian and Arab nationalist factions pressured Istanbul for greater political and cultural rights. Citing patterns of discrimination and oppression, leaders of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) lobbied imperial and foreign officials for the creation of an internationally governed autonomous region in Anatolia. A cohort of Arab politicians based abroad followed suit and demanded greater language rights as well as recognition of the empire’s dual ‘Turkish–​Arab’ character. With many in the local and international press doubting the long-​term survival of the state, CUP officials formally acquiesced to many of these calls for greater decentralization. In hindsight, Unionists later looked upon these nationalist demands as early indicators of treason. Arabs and Armenians, as many in the CUP perceived it, had chosen the empire’s darkest hour to appeal to foreign powers and press the Ottoman state for autonomy. As the empire entered the First World War, this lingering sense of apprehension and betrayal fuelled a further series of oppressive domestic measures.

The Ottoman Empire in the Great War Istanbul’s initial reaction to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was slow and indifferent. In the six months that preceded the Archduke’s murder, the government had largely focused upon the need to reform the military in the wake of the Balkan Wars. But as the armies of Europe began to mobilize towards the end of July, CUP leaders understood that a grave conflict loomed on the state’s borders. With the empire frozen outside of Europe’s system of alliances, Ottoman officials feared that the country’s isolation would entice one or more powers to invade and seize territory. Finding an ally became an immediate priority. As the summer progressed, high-​ranking CUP representatives communicated with each of the Great Powers hoping to secure defensive guarantees. Ultimately, Germany proved the only state willing to offer Istanbul unfettered diplomatic and military assurances. Unionist leaders greeted Berlin’s proposed alliance with the Ottoman Empire as a great coup for the state and the party. With the backing of Europe’s most powerful army, the government called upon the nation to mobilize on 1 August 1914. As in each of the combatant nations, Istanbul’s call to arms was embraced as evidence of the country’s youth and national unity. Men and women from throughout the empire turned out to celebrate the mustering of troops. Hundreds of thousands of

54   Ryan Gingeras Muslims and non-​Muslims, as well as people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, willingly came forth as conscripts and volunteers to aid the war effort. Planners in Istanbul were at first unsure of what posture the empire should assume in the conflict. Some believed that the country should simply remain on the defensive and await the fighting’s outcome in Europe. A majority of CUP officials, however, believed the nation’s army should immediately move to the attack. Like other European leaders, senior Ottoman generals, including Minister of War Enver Pasha, believed that victory was best secured through offensive measures. In specifically advocating an assault on the Russian Caucasus, Enver envisioned the creation of a series of ‘buffer states’ governed by members of the region’s Muslim population. This rearrangement of territory, meant to safeguard the empire’s exposed eastern border, accorded with Germany’s desires for the empire to endorse a jihad against the Entente (a move many hoped would trigger rebellions in Muslim-​populated regions of the Russian, French, and British empires). With the war won, Unionists in the capital expected the empire to emerge politically and spiritually stronger with its sovereignty assured. The state, they hoped, would no longer be burdened by loathsome foreign agreements (such as the hated capitulations or trade concessions to Western powers) and the nation would become more unified around the power and leadership of the CUP. It did not take long for events to expose the folly of these plans and expectations. The Ottoman Empire entered the war as the poorest and least prepared of the conflict’s combatants. As a country with a tiny industrial base and deep structural deficiencies in matters of transport, health, and agricultural self-​sufficiency, officials faced critical shortages from the war’s opening stages. Enver’s disastrous decision to open the campaign with a winter assault on the Caucasus compounded these hardships. Having never commanded more than a few thousand men in battle, the thirty-​three-​year-​old Minister of War ordered the empire’s Third Army to advance across the Russian border amid deep snow and frigid temperatures. When Tsarist forces counterattacked, the bulk of Enver’s forward divisions surrendered or succumbed to the elements or disease. It is now estimated that between 50 and 90% of the Third Army was killed, wounded, or captured by the conclusion of the so-​called Sarıkamış campaign.8 As the empire subsequently ceded ground in Anatolia, Iraq, and the Sinai, an air of crisis settled over the capital. Noted victories achieved at Gallipoli and Kut in 1915 and 1916 provided only momentary respites from the threat of an Entente breakthrough. In the midst of the military’s severe setbacks, Unionist ministers in Istanbul cast a suspicious eye over the Ottoman population as a whole. Despite the willful mobilization of thousands of Arabs, non-​Muslims, and Balkan refugees into the army (as well as vocal assurances of loyalty by noted Armenian and Arab politicians), prewar distrust of these groups endured. The government’s anxieties intensified with early reports of Ottoman Armenians joining Russian forces and attacking Ottoman troops and instillations. By the spring of 1915, senior officials had ordered the disarmament of non-​Muslim soldiers and begun internally exiling Orthodox Christians from western Anatolian for fear of local collaboration with Entente forces. An anti-​conscription uprising by Armenian peasants in the central Anatolian region of Zeytun brought simmering CUP unease

An Empire Unredeemed    55 to boiling point. After recommending the deportation of Zeytun’s population to the northern Syrian desert, Istanbul issued a general order to provincial operatives to search Armenian homes for weapons and other incriminating evidence. The arrest and imprisonment of over 200 prominent Armenians in Istanbul on 24 April heralded a widening crackdown against Armenian civilians living throughout the empire. By the end of May, Interior Minister Talat Pasha directed civilian authorities to expel all Armenians living in ‘areas of warfare’ and to relocate them, en masse, to assigned districts in Anatolia and Syria. By the end of 1915, virtually every Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and forcibly driven to live in exile. International news agencies had carried stories of attacks on Christian civilians well before the opening stages of the Armenian deportations. Yet with the arrival of the first exiled survivors in northern Syria, both domestic and international observers were shocked by the scale and brutality of the government’s treatment of its Armenian citizenry. Foreign diplomatic staff (including representatives of the Central Powers) wrote detailed reports accusing imperial officials of massacring men, raping women, and abusing people of all ages. Some provincial officials also voiced concern or criticized the CUP’s policy, with one district governor likening the deportations to actions only to ‘be seen in the Middle Ages.’9 The fragmentary nature of the Ottoman archival record offers only partial insights into the motivations behind the Armenian deportation. It is known that Talat Pasha attempted to oversee the removal of Armenians, meticulously recording the destinations and numbers of deported peoples. Especially close attention was paid to the quantity and value of abandoned property. The passage of legislation mandating the seizure of assets belonging to deportees gave legal sanction to a mass transfer of wealth into the hands of thousands of Muslim civilians and officials. As a policy geared towards strengthening the role of Muslims within the national economy, the government’s wholesale appropriation of property would suggest that Armenians were never meant to return home. As the war progressed, CUP officials sanctioned a series of initiatives designed to reconfigure the empire’s political and demographic contours. By 1916 authorities in Istanbul had ordered untold thousands of native and immigrant Greeks, Albanians, Arabs, Jews, Kurds, Roma, and Turks to be relocated, scattered, and resettled. While the reasoning behind these measures differed with respect to each ethnic group, records from Talat Pasha’s Interior Ministry make clear that a singular goal underpinned the policy. It was hoped that ethnic groups targeted for forcible relocation would become more diluted as social or political blocks. They would perhaps abandon their native languages and elements of their culture or, more simply, cease to threaten the integrity of the state as densely settled ‘minorities’. The desire to consolidate centralized control over the empire led Unionist officials to take a special interest in the Ottoman Levant. Within the first two years of the war, officials in the capital took steps to rescind Lebanon’s status as an autonomous province and strengthen imperial offices and communications networks in the region as a whole. The seizure of incriminating evidence from the French consulate in Beirut prompted the trial and execution of over thirty noted Arab politicians and journalists. Further

56   Ryan Gingeras aggravating the profound societal disruption in the Levant was the outbreak of famine in numerous districts along the Mediterranean coast. By war’s end, starvation claimed up to a half a million lives in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.10 Provincial expressions of opposition or armed resistance to the CUP government were often fleeting or isolated during much of the war. Armenians in several corners of Anatolia, such as Van, Urfa, and Iskenderun (the famous Musa Dagh uprising), did rise up in 1915 in defiance of the imperial government (in the two latter cases, specifically in response to the arrest, murder, and deportation of local citizens). Arab citizens in the central Iraqi cities of Hillah, Nijaf, and Karbala also mounted insurrections in response to what many perceived as state oppression. The most noted incident of rebellion, the so-​called Arab Revolt led by Faisal and Hussein of Mecca, similarly began as a localized response to Istanbul’s attempt to strengthen the government’s hold over the Arabian Peninsula. While the movement cloaked itself in the language and symbolism of Arab nationalism, there is little evidence to indicate that the Arab Revolt possessed strong popular roots. Contrary to the suspicions of many Young Turks, ethno-​nationalist tendencies among leading politicians did not sway the vast majority of non-​Muslims and Arab citizens to reject the Ottoman state. By war’s end, other factors impugned the CUP, and the Ottoman state, in the minds of imperial citizens. Mass requisitioning of food, animals, and other materiel eventually created famine-​like conditions throughout the empire. Religious conservatives were angered as women entered the workforce in larger numbers. The war’s death toll led to escalating numbers of orphans and widows (particularly among displaced Armenians), a situation that led to rampant levels of sexual exploitation. As these and other hardships mounted, popular enmity towards the CUP rose. Many accused leading Unionists, including notable figures in the capital, of hoarding and war profiteering. By 1917 party leaders were forced to deny these allegations directly, with one official ludicrously stating that the war had produced a ‘commercial and economic awakening in the country.’11 Despite outward demonstrations of party unity, whispers of dissent permeated Unionist circles. In 1916, a once-​prominent CUP member and feared guerrilla commander was tried and executed for attempting to stage a coup in order to reach a separate peace with the Entente. Fears of internecine fighting between party officials, particularly Talat and Enver Pashas, added to elite impressions that the party and state were coming apart. Evidence of the empire’s disintegration reached new heights as the war drew to a close. Ottoman advances in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus following the Russian Revolution did little to compensate for the steady collapse of the Levantine and Iraqi fronts. Desertion rates skyrocketed into the summer of 1918, with perhaps more than half a million men abandoning the front before the war was over. While bandits ravaged much of the Anatolian countryside, provincial citizens and mutinous troops, some of whom acting in concert with members of Emir Faisal’s rebel army, harried retreating troops and sacked government offices in Syria. Istanbul’s will to fight on ground to a halt after Bulgaria’s capitulation to the Entente in September 1918. With the empire’s landline to the Central Powers severed, and the prospect that other members of the alliance

An Empire Unredeemed    57 would similarly seek an accord, CUP leaders quietly sued for peace under the auspices of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Point plan. Though initial Ottoman diplomatic overtures gained little traction, the American framework for peace registered a stronger impact upon imperial politics in the war’s final months. In order to preemptively comply with Wilson’s demand that all Ottoman nationalities be granted ‘an unmolested opportunity of autonomous development,’ Unionist officials signalled their willingness to decentralize the imperial administration.12 All hope that the CUP would oversee the empire in transitioning into the postwar era evaporated within a month of the signing of an armistice in late October 1918. The terms the Entente offered Istanbul were stiff and uncompromising. The nation’s army was required to pull back from Syria into the Anatolian interior and demobilize. Fearing their capture and prosecution for having committed ‘crimes against humanity’ (a term the Entente coined to describe Istanbul’s treatment of Armenians), several of the CUP’s principal leaders (including Talat and Enver) fled the country. In the wake of their flight the party formally dissolved, leaving the capital in political chaos. The collapse of the Young Turk regime paved the way for staunchly anti-​Unionists to seize control over the empire’s main political institutions. Leading this change in regime was Mehmet VI Vahideddin, whose palpable loathing of the CUP was well known even before ascending the throne in the summer of 1918. Under Vahideddin’s watch, scores of Unionists were rounded up and imprisoned for acts of mass murder and theft during the war. The sultan and his new government did little to contest the Entente’s harsh terms for peace. Negotiating with the war’s victors through diplomatic means, as one loyalist official put it, was a matter of service to the country, ‘for which there was no other alternative except complete destruction . . . .’13

Empire’s End: Laying the Groundwork for the Sultanate’s Fall Vahideddin and his supporters in the capital could not command the loyalties of all within the government and society. While demoralized and fragmented, the remnants the CUP remained steadfastly opposed to conceding total defeat to either the sultan or the victorious powers. After formally dissolving the party (an organization undeniably tainted by the war), many erstwhile Young Turks sought to undermine the terms of the armistice by any means possible. Two events galvanized this nascent resistance into a coherent ‘National Movement’ (one of several titles embraced by the fighters). The Greek seizure of Izmir in May 1919, which resulted in the killing of hundreds of unarmed, predominantly Muslim civilians, stoked outrage throughout Anatolia. While the sultan and his partisans did little to oppose the Greek landing, former Unionists rallied civilians and military personnel to organize an ad hoc front against the invasion. The convening of the so-​called Erzurum Congress in August 1919 further solidified this

58   Ryan Gingeras resistance and brought it under the control of a single administrative body headed by Mustafa Kemal. In the three years that followed, supporters of Kemal’s Defense of Rights Association assumed de facto control over most of what remained of the imperial administration, including the army and the imperial assembly. As the fighting between so-​called Nationalists and foreign forces occupying Anatolia escalated, Vahideddin’s influence withered. The sultan’s opposition to Mustafa Kemal’s forces (which he rightly characterized as a Unionist movement) ultimately provided a warrant for his overthrow and an end to his dynasty. Unstable conditions at home and abroad forced Mustafa Kemal and his supporters to maintain a fine rhetorical line regarding the future of the state. From the outset of the National Movement in the spring of 1919, to the point of Greece’s defeat in the fall of 1922, the Defense of Rights Association did not explicitly declare its opposition to the sultan. Even though Vahideddin’s government had officially dubbed Kemal and his confederates bandits and apostates, the National Assembly in Ankara abided by the fiction that the French and British seizure of the capital had forced the sovereign’s repudiation of their movement. Maintaining strict fealty to the monarchy, however, did not mean that the National Movement refrained from challenging foundational aspects of the empire’s substructure. In adopting a postwar framework for resistance, the Defense of Rights Association adamently represented itself as an organization in tune with the national will of ‘Muslims and Turks’. In declaring Anatolia a land overwhelmingly inhabited by a Turkish-​speaking Muslim majority, Kemal and his supporters substantially accepted the Entente’s wartime territorial gains and foreswore any claim to ‘Arab territory’. Christians were visibly absent from the Nationalist coalition and were singularly accused of acts of treason and violence. While the exclusivity of the Nationalist Movement was rooted in the CUP’s increasingly bigoted perceptions of the Ottoman nation, the postwar consensus about self-​determination, as defined by negotiators at Versailles, had an indelible impact upon how Mustafa Kemal and others spoke about Anatolia’s political future. The socio-​political integrity of Anatolia’s supposed ‘Muslim and Turkish’ majority provided the notional basis for Ankara’s struggle for Anatolia’s freedom from foreign occupation. While natives and foreigners had long used the terms ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turkish’ synonymously, and without reference to any single ethnic or sectarian group, Nationalists in Ankara identified Turkish ethnicity as the cornerstone of citizenship and nationhood. By the end of the conflict with Greece, voices in Ankara reserved the ‘Ottoman’ moniker solely for the sultan and those who haplessly followed him. Being Turkish, by contrast, did not simply imply one was loyal to Mustafa Kemal’s government; it meant that one belonged to a distinct Turkish-​speaking Muslim nation, which governed Anatolia in its entirety. The ferocity of Ankara’s war against Greece reinforced the strict ethnic and sectarian traits Turkishness began to acquire. Nationalists treated atrocities committed by Greek troops, as well as by native non-​Muslim auxiliaries, as justification for their vision of Anatolia as an exclusively Turkish Muslim homeland. It appears that few inside or outside of Ankara mourned the death of the cosmopolitan imperial cultures that had characterized urban and rural life before the war. The deliberate demolition

An Empire Unredeemed    59 of villages and towns in western Anatolia, particularly during the rout of Greek troops after the Nationalist offensive of September 1922, underscored the collapse of Ottoman inclusivity. Mustafa Kemal’s famous incantation after the burning of Izmir (an act most likely committed by Nationalist troops) to ‘let [the city] burn, let it crash down’ reflects the finality with which the empire, as a culture, ceased to exist.14 Ending the Ottoman Empire was not necessarily a natural outcome of the First World War. There was nothing that prevented Mustafa Kemal or the National Assembly from maintaining the Ottoman mantle and preserving the notion of an empire in Anatolia. Dethroning Mehmet VI Vahideddin and abolishing the sultanate were deliberate and definitive actions intended to banish the empire to the past. Proponents of the National Movement were drawn to this path of action by a deeply layered set of defeats and disappointments. Some elements that informed their judgement derived from recent events. The sultan had disavowed their movement, fearing that the National Movement was simply a Trojan horse for the CUP’s return to power. Vahdidden’s willingness to accept the protection of the British and French provided a license for his removal. In general, the international political environment after the First World War made the restitution of an Ottoman Empire difficult (even if the Nationalists chose to retain the royal household). The Bolshevik revolution, as well as the Wilsonian framework for peace, influenced many in Mustafa Kemal’s circle to embrace the nation-​state as the model for their country’s political future. The intensely violent and overtly sectarian nature of the political climate in Anatolia reinforced this new consensus about the country’s national identity. Greece’s brutal invasion and subsequent occupation cemented the National Movement’s claim that it represented a Muslim and Turkish majority in Anatolia. The postwar Ottoman government in Istanbul meanwhile failed to oppose foreign claims on its territory in either word or deed. There was, of course, a deeper current of disillusionment that fed into the National Movement’s eventual rejection of its Ottoman heritage. With the declaration of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal and others became more forthright in declaring the empire a failed example of modern reform and governance. Kemalist leaders also characterized the CUP as the embodiment of the old state, arguing that the wartime government’s decision to immerse the country in the Great War proved the empire’s frailties (an ironic stance since many, including Mustafa Kemal, had contributed mightily to the Unionist cause). At other times politicians in the young Turkish Republic preferred to indict the Ottoman imperial administration as a historic failure. Atatürk’s daughter and stenographer, Afet İnan, famously characterized the empire’s last century as was an era riven with ‘indecision, incompetence and depression’ (one that had barely evolved from its original ‘dishonorable medieval form’). She hardly accounted for the reforms that preceded the Great War, specifically calling the men of the Tanzimat individuals who ‘were against the notion of liberty.’15 The break up of the empire in the twentieth century was therefore justified. İnan’s principal argument, namely that the Ottoman government’s failures were rooted in the state’s reliance upon ‘unmodern’ elements found in Islam, misconstrues the genuine tensions and debates that preceded the empire’s collapse. For

60   Ryan Gingeras those actively engaged in imperial politics during the state’s last decades, there were other more prescient issues that fomented disagreement. The enduring disputes over how the empire should be administered, either as a highly centralized regime or a more loosely associated combination of peoples and lands, provoked profound divisions and bitterness inside and outside the capital. The implications of this debate extended beyond the issues of administrative control or representative participation; the choice between centralization and decentralization also determined the broader issues of who had the right to define what it meant to be an Ottoman, and how that identity was to be lived or experienced. The CUP’s willingness to use violence and its uncompromising stance towards state centralization propelled this internal debate to its bitter end. Many of the horrors experienced by the empire’s civilian population were direct expressions of the CUP’s political tendencies: favouring Muslims (at the expense of non-​Muslims), accusing entire ethnic groups of treason, and using the state security forces to expel, kill, and appropriate property from peaceable Ottoman citizens. Still, it would be wrong to lay the empire’s demise solely at the feet of the Young Turks. Ending Ottoman rule was a decision taken without the consent of most of the empire’s citizens. Be it in the Balkans, North Africa, the Levant, or Mesopotamia, the establishment of post-​Ottoman borders, states, and cultures took place in the wake of foreign conquest. De-​Ottomanization, for the most part, was not tantamount to decolonization; nationalism or popular agency rarely had anything to do with the process by which a land ceased to be included within the sultan’s domain. However, when looking specifically at the development of nationalist political cultures in the aftermath of 1918, it is clear that the violence unleashed during CUP rule had a profound impact upon how many perceived the Ottoman legacy. The fierce violence of the Young Turk era came to colour the whole of the empire’s history, not just its final decades. The deportations, public executions, and famine experienced by Armenians, Syrians, and Iraqis, as well as the uprisings, massacres, and bombings experienced by Macedonians and Albanians, has continued to influence the negative terms with which many historians and politicians depict the empire (beyond just its fall). Though there is still much to be learned about how the first generation of former Ottoman citizens perceived and remembered the empire, two things may be said with some certainty. By November 1922, little public mourning accompanied the abolition of Ottoman rule. And when the Republic of Turkey officially occupied the sultanate’s place in October 1923, it is difficult to find expressions of loss or longing for the empire that was gone.

Notes 1. TBMM, Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre: 1, Cilt: 1, April 24, 1920. 2. TBMM, Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre: 1, Cilt: 24, October 30, 1922. 3. Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856–​1878 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 45.

An Empire Unredeemed    61 4. Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 199. 5. Mehmet Hacısalihoğlu, Jön Türkler ve Makedonya Sorunu (Istanbul:  Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2008), 448. 6. Ismail Kemal, Memoirs (London: Constable Press, 1920), 366–​368. 7. Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–​1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 88. 8. Hikmet Özdemir, The Ottoman Army 1914–​1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 52. 9. M. Talha Çiçek, War and State Formation in Syria:  Cemal Pasha’s Governorate during World War I, 1914–​1917 (London: Routledge, 2014), 122. 10. Schatkowski Schilcher, “The Famine of 1915–​1918 in Greater Syria”, in John Spagnolo, ed., Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honor of Albert Hourani (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1992), 254. 11. Mustafa Ragıp Esatlı, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Son Günleri: Suikastlar ve Entrikalar (Istanbul: Bengi, 2007), 88. 12. Michael Neiburg, ed., The World War I Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 292. 13. TNA/​FO 371/​5045/​E-​9666, August 10,  1920. 14. Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), 346. 15. Afet İnan, “Türk-​Osmanlı Tarihinin Karakteristik Noktalarına bir Bakiş”, Belleten 2.5/​6 (November 1937–​April 1938), 131.

Pa rt   I

NAT IONA L P E R SP E C T I V E S

Chapter 4

Britain a nd dec ol oniz at i on i n an era of gl oba l c ha ng E Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell 1

In 1947, the distinguished Oxford historian Sir Reginald Coupland was commissioned to write a short historical account to mark Indian independence. ‘The Goal of British Rule in India’ was distributed by the Foreign Office around the world and translated into French, Dutch, and Italian as part of a concerted British effort to exploit the occasion to the full and demonstrate the ‘liberal and progressive character of the British Commonwealth’.2 Coupland’s brief survey presented an account of how a liberal imperialism had guided British policy since Britain had acquired power in India ‘almost, it seemed, by accident’. Dominion status in India and Pakistan was the fulfilment of this civilizing mission; the latter an achievement which Thomas Macaulay had once suggested would be ‘a title to glory all our own.’3 Coupland’s account can be seen as encapsulating enduring ideas of a British imperial exceptionalism. Later historians generally concur that, as one scholar writes, the ‘explanatory key’ to British decolonization lay predominantly with the metropolitan, decision-​making, centre, rather than on the ‘periphery’.4 Few, however, would now accept Coupland’s central premise of British decolonization as the fulfilment of an unswerving liberalism. Rather, most would point to some combination of metropolitan weakness and anti-​colonial political movements in bringing about post-​war imperial dissolution. In this, the dynamics behind British decolonization were not so different from those of the decolonization of other European powers. As recent literature adopting a world historical perspective argues, the British empire fell victim to the same global forces as other modern empires as world war reconfigured colonial politics and tilted power away from the old western European imperial powers and towards new centres.5 Viewed through a world history lens, British imperial decline consequently illustrates a broader trend, in which a world hospitable to empires became more hostile to them. British decolonization also helped create a new phase of contemporary globalization: a

66   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell world partitioned among the old European imperial powers gave way to a new geopolitical order centred around the nation state. Empires, perceived by many scholars as the engines of earlier globalization, had become in some ways obstacles to it. Decolonization was, as this volume’s editors argue, hence ‘surely less national than both global and globalising’.6 British decolonization—​encompassing not only the colonial empire, but also a residual ‘informal empire’ and the independent Commonwealth—​is an essential, and in many ways uniquely compelling, part of this global history. While this chapter thus presents British decolonization as one manifestation of a broader process, it nevertheless also aims to highlight the particularities of British experience. For all that it was weakened in world wars, twentieth-​century Britain was at the centre of an empire larger than any other, and a co-​architect of the post-​war settlement. Such was the unequal nature of the European colonial empires that there were in effect empires operating within empires, with British interests prominent in the colonies of weaker European states like Portugal. Britain’s singular imperial history informed the ways in which the British engaged with the wider world, not least in the form of enduring ambitions to exercise an independent global role after 1945. For some time, Britain’s historic pre-​eminence still clothed Britain with the appearance of great power status, which shaped its relations with the rest of the world, including the United States. Residual British power and influence, especially in the Middle East, provided the context in which America perceived Britain and its empire-​Commonwealth as a useful platform for building new geopolitical alliances within a Cold War environment—​for all that the diplomatic relationship was sometimes frosty. Conversely for Britain, crippled by war, the continued exercise of overseas power was only possible with American money. Later twentieth-​century historiography hence posits a different model of British exceptionalism to that advanced by Coupland. The post-​war British empire, W. R. Louis and Ronald Robinson argue, was ‘more than British and less than an imperium’, transformed and internationalized ‘as part of the Anglo-​American coalition’.7 Comprehending other distinctive features of British decolonization requires us to appreciate the ways in which ideas of a liberal British imperialism shaped how the British navigated, as well as packaged, post-​war imperial decline. As this chapter shows, history functioned as a kind of route map with which to negotiate the processes of decolonization, which in turn fashioned the distinctive ways in which Britain reconfigured its overseas interests for a post-​imperial age. In what follows, these themes will be worked out in a broadly chronological discussion.

The British Empire on the Eve of Decolonization The British empire was the largest of the modern world. The colonial empire comprised a geographically sprawling collection of crown colonies, protectorates, and mandates/​UN

Britain and decolonization    67 trust territories that painted much of the globe red. It reached its greatest territorial extent after the First World War when the acquisition of former Ottoman and German colonies in the form of League of Nation mandates enabled the realization of long-​held British ambitions to control territory from the Cape to Cairo. Alongside this colonial empire, there was the ‘old Commonwealth’. The dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had been self-​governing since the nineteenth century, their independent status being subsequently clarified in 1926 and given legal status in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. They nonetheless remained crucial elements in a ‘British world’ with emergent national identities still accommodating an enduring Britishness. Britain also had the remains of an ‘informal empire’, now concentrated in the Middle East. Here Britain was the most important regional power, its influence sustained via oil and banking companies, a network of client rulers, and military bases.8 A military presence was most significant in Egypt, where a substantial garrison of British troops was stationed in the Suez Canal Zone in accordance with an Anglo-​Egyptian treaty agreed in 1936. Within this British imperial system decline had deep roots and corresponded to a broader pattern of global change. Already in 1900 Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, faced rising competition from rapidly industrializing countries, while the British navy, the basis of its nineteenth-​century global power, was now rivalled by both American and Japanese fleets, and directly threatened by a German one. By 1919, territorial aggrandizement and world war had left British resources severely stretched and struggling to cope with uprisings and anti-​British movements in Ireland, Egypt, and India. The war was hence quickly followed by Egyptian independence and dominion status for a new Irish Free State, and a measure of constitutional reform in India. Over the next two decades the principal Indian nationalist organization, the Indian National Congress, significantly strengthened its position. Other pressures derived from the 1929 Wall Street Crash and global depression. In both Africa and the Caribbean, worsening terms of trade and falling incomes inflamed unrest among colonial labour forces. At home, they forced Britain off the gold standard in 1931, highlighting structural weaknesses of the British economy, since sterling was significantly overvalued and unable to cope with the constraints of the exchange rate system. Yet notwithstanding these pressures, and a recentring of British imperialism on Africa and the Middle East, in the 1930s Britain was still the ‘only truly world power of consequence’.9 By liberating sterling from the obligations of the system, Britain’s departure from the gold standard kick-​started domestic economic recovery and was the context in which Britain also finally abandoned free trade and entered into a series of imperial preferential trading agreements at Ottawa in 1932. The City remained a globally important financial centre, and sterling an international currency: that so many countries chose to link their currencies to sterling after 1931 is illustration of Britain’s ongoing role in their external trade and significance as a source of international capital. The dominions also formed integral parts of a British worldwide defence system. In 1939, while Ireland chose to remain neutral, the other dominions quickly followed Britain to war despite the strains and political differences that had resulted from their participation in the 1914–​1918 conflict.

68   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell

The Second World War and its Aftermath The Second World War dealt a fatal blow to this international order, including Britain’s imperial system, even while it was also the occasion of an impressive demonstration of imperial strength. War destabilized the fragile basis of British authority throughout much of its colonial empire, and marked a decisive shift in power from Britain to America, and from a world still tolerant of empires to one now more definitively framed by ideologies of self-​determination. In imperial terms, the year 1942 was critical, realizing the British government’s worst fears about its ability to wage war in two theatres. The pace at which the Japanese swept through British colonies in the Far East between November 1941 and the surrender of forces in Britain’s supposedly impregnable base at Singapore in February 1942 dealt a devastating blow to prestige and morale. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the wartime disruption to colonial administration and the difficulties of re-​occupation—​initially under an ‘arrogant’ British Military Administration—​further complicated British efforts to restore control.10 Chinese communists, whose Malayan People’s Anti-​Japanese Army Britain had helped arm during the occupation, turned against the British, alienated in part by British plans for a new Malayan Union of the Straits Settlements and Malay states; this proved equally unpopular among ethnic Malays whose primacy it threatened to undermine. Britain’s failure to defend its empire in the East had profound consequences for the antipodean dominions, for whom it represented, in one historian’s assessment, a ‘great betrayal’.11 It also brought the Japanese through Burma to India’s back door. In response to the Japanese threat, the British government, keen to secure the cooperation in the war effort of Congress (whose members had embarked on a non co-​operation campaign when Britain declared India at war without consultation), despatched a mission to dangle the carrot of post-​war independence. The offer was refused and instead Congress began a Quit India campaign, forcing Britain back on the co-​operation of the Muslim League, now seeking a separate Muslim state. India was just one example of how the war strengthened or reconfigured established anti-​colonial politics and contributed to the emergence of new movements. Even in areas remote from the Far East, the impact of the new ‘empire of the sun’ could be felt as Britain mobilized other colonies more aggressively for war.12 Financially the war left Britain ‘virtually bankrupt’, transformed from a creditor to a debtor nation. From 1939, the imposition of wartime exchange and import controls throughout the informal sterling bloc remodelled it into a highly regulated ‘sterling area’. Neutral countries decoupled their currencies from sterling; the area thus became tightly centred on the empire-​Commonwealth and the Middle East, operating in part as a giant machine to help finance Britain’s war, with sums chalked up to members’ ‘sterling balances’ in return for military resources and supplies. By the war’s end Britain’s debts amounted to some three to four billion pounds—​with one billion owed to India alone13—​ while a huge imbalance between the value of Britain’s exports to dollar countries and

Britain and decolonization    69 its spiralling imports had created an alarming ‘dollar gap’. Britain’s financial and industrial base had shrunk considerably, while Britain’s international liabilities extended to the maintenance of its existing colonial and defence commitments and role in policing the post-​war international settlement. This added to pressures generated at home, where in 1945 a Labour government under Clement Attlee was elected and committed to delivering on plans for free universal health and social care. Even before the war in the East had ended, negotiations had therefore begun for an enormous American loan. Internationally, other aspects of the post-​war settlement were increasingly inhospitable to colonialism. The United Nations, though framed by imperialist thinking,14 rapidly transformed into an institution hostile to empires; a development that would become more pronounced as its membership swelled with newly sovereign states of the global South. Within its general assembly, as John Bennett, an astute official in the British Colonial Office, observed in 1947, ‘practically the whole world outside Western Europe’ seemed likely to adopt an anti-​colonial position. Much now turned on the Americans.15 And America’s vision of a post-​war order was far removed from the British: it had already used the 1945 loan as a stick to compel British compliance by insisting that Britain re-​introduce sterling convertibility in 1947. With hindsight, in terms of colonial politics, the British economy, or the international order, we can see how world war had eroded, if not quite swept away, Britain’s remaining imperial foundations in ways both symptomatic and constitutive of broader global changes. During the decades that followed the end of Second World War, a decolonization process occurred across all Britain’s ‘empires’. Among these it is the colonial empire that mostly visibly ‘ended’, as in ceremony after ceremony, the union flag was lowered and new nation states established, first in south Asia and then, from the late 1950s, in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. The handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 left only a handful of remaining British overseas territories. In the old Commonwealth and the ‘informal’ empire in the Middle East, in contrast, there were no independence ceremonies to serve as pegs on which to hang a chronology of change. Decolonization nevertheless proceeded within the same temporal frame as in the colonial empire. In the Commonwealth, decolonization—​or ‘de-​dominionization’—​was more an expression of social, cultural, and economic disengagement than a constitutional process. Still, there was a residual formal decolonizing process in those state and social structures where the dominions had yet fully to assert their autonomy from Britain.16 This was accompanied by ongoing institutional devolution that partly corresponded to that occurring in the dependent empire, as evident in a religious context in the formal independence of the Anglican church in Australia from the Church of England in 1962.17 The dominions, with their mixed settler and indigenous populations, also experienced an ‘internal decolonization’ as the same currents weakening colonialism in Asia and Africa challenged cultures of white superiority and racial discrimination within the old Commonwealth. In terms of chronology, it is a similar story with the demise of British fiscal-​military imperialism in the Middle East, most significantly in Egypt, where a negotiated withdrawal of British forces from the Suez Canal base was swiftly followed by the nationalization of the Canal Company, which triggered the Suez crisis of 1956.

70   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell Whatever reassuring story the British preferred to tell themselves, these developments clearly reflected a combination of pressures including British decline relative to the rise of new centres of power, the strength of anti-​colonial political movements, and the ascendancy internationally of ideologies of anti-​colonialism and self-​determination. Dynamics varied from location to location, as did the lived experience of change, but, as the perspicacious Bennett anticipated in 1947, any ‘significant differences’ in experience were as likely to be between different regions of European colonialism as between empires.18 Palestine provided an early salutary experience of the new geopolitical balance. Deft American manoeuvring saw a proposal for an Anglo-​American committee to consider the problem of European Jewish refugees heading for Palestine recast as an enquiry into the Palestinian problem, in effect rendering the future settlement of the British mandate a joint Anglo-​American enterprise. The British found several of the Committee’s recommendations relating to Jewish interests unacceptable—​in particular a proposal that 100,000 Jews be immediately admitted to the territory; Truman’s public endorsement of this recommendation angered the British and queered the British diplomatic position.19 Britain subsequently announced its intention to withdraw from the mandate, devolving the resolution of the Palestinian question to the United Nations. Beyond Palestine it was in Asia that the effects of war were most immediate. In south Asia, wartime and post-​war developments made independence inevitable. Terrible communal violence coupled with the dilution of the British element in its army and administration had rendered India increasingly ungovernable, and led the Labour government to accelerate withdrawal, conceding both independence and partition in 1947. Indian precedent made it difficult to resist independence also for Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and Burma. Each had significant communal and ethnic divisions, but the circumstances in the two countries were very different. Sri Lanka, where the Soulbury Commission had advised that it was better to concede rather than delay constitutional reform, provided in many ways a textbook example of how to manage a successful transition to independence, with power transferred to a moderate Sinhalese elite who entered into a defence agreement with Britain and accepted Commonwealth membership, overcoming the opposition of a more radical left. In contrast, in Burma, profoundly affected by Japanese occupation, British authorities faced an armed nationalist movement and communal and labour unrest, and, as in India, feared for their ability to maintain control. At independence, the country became a republic and left the Commonwealth. Further east too, labour activism and political radicalism connected the Asian dependencies of all European colonial powers in an ‘arc of protest’.20 Alice Burns, the Scots wife of a tin mine manager, returned to Malaya in 1947 after wartime evacuation from Singapore. She thought the country ‘as beautiful as ever’, but was concerned that the ‘asiatics have lost all their smiles and friendliness’ and noticed a ‘complete change in labour’. ‘Chinese bandits’ were bringing ‘life and business . . . to a standstill’, leaving the community ‘very afraid’.21 A state of emergency was declared the following year, as the British scrambled to protect the white community and what was now Britain’s greatest colonial asset amidst wider fears of communism, exacerbated by civil war in China. In

Britain and decolonization    71 China itself, where save for Hong Kong the British in 1943 had finally renounced concessions granted a century earlier, British influence was brought to a decisive end in 1949 when the Communist Party triumphed over the Kuomintang. Across colonial Africa the late 1940s were also characterized by extensive strike action and the formation of new political organizations led by African politicians, able and willing to mobilize labour activism and popular anti-​colonialism. But in line with Bennett’s insight, developments across European colonies in Africa followed a different chronological trajectory and this post-​war unrest did not prove as immediately threatening to European colonialism as in Asia. Post-​war politicization was of greatest consequence in the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nigeria. In the former, violent anti-​British unrest in 1948 throughout what the British had hitherto perceived as a ‘model colony’, followed by the emergence of a radical popular nationalism under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, led to constitutional reform; the absence of settlers rendering African political advancement more straightforward than was the case in east and central Africa. These developments had a knock-​on effect on Nigeria, and saw Ghana emerge as a poster-​colony for African decolonization when, before all other sub-​ Saharan African dependencies, it achieved partial self-​government in 1951, and independence in 1957.

Into the 1950s: Imperial Reassertion, and Liberal and Illiberal British Imperialism While the retreat from India and Palestine, the onset of the Malayan emergency, and political change in west Africa combined to make 1947–​1948 watershed years in the history of British decolonization, elsewhere for Britain, as for other European colonial powers, continuity was the order of the day, especially in Africa, with little expectation of the speed with which its colonial empire would eventually unravel. Metropolitan weakness seemed initially to counsel not the disposal of Britain’s remaining colonies, but their enhanced value. In keeping hold of its remaining colonies, Britain was assisted by weakening American ideological and material opposition to European colonialism, a consequence of the onset of the Cold War. It was also only later that some of the hostile features of the new colonial and international environment took full effect, notably from the mid-​1950s when the significance of increasingly strong colonial political movements was amplified by transnational anti-​colonialism sponsored by newly decolonized and decolonizing states. In the late 1940s and early 1950s an interlude hence ensued between the first phase of British decolonization in south Asia and Palestine, and a second in Africa, the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and beyond, albeit that a transition to self-​government in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Malaya, and the demise of power in the Middle East, fell somewhat between the two. In the meantime, modernizing

72   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell development became the new justification for colonialism, evident in post-​war expansion of the Colonial Service as professionals and technocrats flooded into British colonies to oversee development projects.22 The history of post-​war developmentalism and the trajectory of British decolonization corresponds closely to that of other European powers. But for a variety of reasons there was more substance remaining to a British imperial project than was the case with the smaller European empires. Crucial elements of the British imperial system, though weakened by war and the wider changes in the international order, survived into the 1940s and 50s as a platform for Britain’s on-​going overseas ambitions. In summer 1947, when sterling proved too weak to permit the restoration of convertibility as required by the terms of the American loan, the mechanisms of the sterling area provided a means by which Britain could profit from the dollar-​trading activities of its colonies, with export earnings especially from Malaya, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria alleviating Britain’s own dollar famine.23 Economic and cultural ties between Britain and the old dominions also remained strong, with a common sense of Britishness enduring into the post-​war era.24 Efforts to develop and acquire nuclear missiles illustrate the degree to which Britain’s aspirations to an independent world role turned in part on its continued influence in all parts of the British imperial system, independent or not. Britain now hoped to source uranium from these areas following a paper-​partition of the non-​Soviet world with the United States for purposes of mineral prospecting and acquisition.25 Post-​war British governments also remained committed to an ongoing role in the Middle East. Britain’s influence in the area underpinned Britain’s continuing claims to great-​power status, as well as forming part of the basis of Britain’s claim to equality in international affairs with the United States. Indisputably the weaker in the Anglo-​ American partnership, successive British governments nevertheless remained convinced of the benefits of their own international leadership. Labour’s foreign secretary Ernest Bevin argued the necessity of Britain remaining in the Middle East and declared that Britain was a ‘last bastion of social democracy’ between the ‘red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia’.26 As Bevin’s words indicate, the idea of a liberal British exceptionalism was part of this imperial repertoire. In the context of post-​war imperial revivalism, Indian independence, and partition, its bloody endgame a challenge to a Whiggish narrative, was carefully spun. British celebrations distracted from the abandonment of British hopes to transfer sovereignty to a united India, and the moral bankruptcy at the heart of British policy—​with details of the partition line between the new states of India and Pakistan withheld by Britain’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, until the eve of independence when British forces were no longer responsible for the maintenance of order. Media-​ savvy Mountbatten played a key role ‘mediating the public image of decolonisation’.27 The achievement of dominion status within the Commonwealth was presented as the triumphant culmination of British rule; it was the context in which Coupland penned his uncritical account. The transfer of the Westminster parliamentary system, and the Commonwealth ideal, were vital to this narrative, and the history of the independent

Britain and decolonization    73 Commonwealth its essential ballast.28 From settler-​responsible government, to the later nineteenth-​century movement for imperial federation—​a ‘Greater Britain’ governed by an imperial parliament29—​and the early twentieth-​century emergence of a looser British Commonwealth of Nations, British imperial ideology and experience offered a template for accommodating colonial self-​government within continuing imperial association. That a liberal mission lay at the heart of British imperialism amounted almost to a national self-​conceit. Successive cadres of British colonial officials fresh from university were educated in this view of British policy and the basics of the British record during the year-​ long training course they attended at Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Commonwealth history was a staple of the course taught by doyens of the subject including Coupland and his successor at Oxford, Vincent Harlow. Admittedly, by 1958 lectures and seminars had been introduced at Oxford on nationalism in the Commonwealth, Africa, and south and south-​east Asia, and by 1961, at Cambridge, on the ‘Growth of Colonial Nationalism’.30 But such developments were easily accommodated within a narrative in which the British continued to transfer power to emergent nationalisms as they had done in earlier periods. Inconvenient parts of this story might be rewritten to conform more readily to the overarching narrative. This was the case in 1947 when the Colonial Office moved to democratize African local government, abandoning a former policy of ‘indirect rule’, which was a feature of British colonialism that differentiated it from the French in (theoretically, at least) upholding the position of hereditary chiefs and elites. The then-​young historian Ronald Robinson, employed as a research officer in the Colonial Office’s African Studies Branch, was charged with producing an account of British ‘native administration’ for incorporation in a policy statement which would establish its evolutionary character, showing ‘quite clearly’ how the new direction was ‘related to the past’.31 When in 1943 secretary of state for the colonies Oliver Stanley stated that the central purpose of British colonial administration was ‘to guide colonial peoples along the road to self-​government within the framework of the British Empire’, it had an invigorating effect on some, even though his assertion that to succeed self-​government must have ‘solid, social and economic foundations’ represented a significant qualification to this pledge.32 Margery Perham, reader in Colonial Administration at Oxford, and a member of the 1943 Asquith Commission on (Colonial) Higher Education,33 argued that British universities now had a ‘more important task’ in relation to the colonies than ‘any handled by the Colonial Office itself ’ in ‘training . . . their leaders and experts so that they may take back from us the control of their own affairs’.34 In the 1950s, more critical and radical commentaries on British imperialism gained currency in response to emerging colonial nationalist movements and to British actions during conflicts such as that in Kenya. However, before the 1950s even those on the left of British politics mostly sought to reform rather than immediately end British imperialism, and, as Nicholas Owen has shown with reference to Indian nationalism, might be inclined to assume an advisory role, ‘speaking for’ colonial politicians to whom their approach was ‘guided more by an ethos of public service to those less fortunate than by one of common struggle’.35

74   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell Britain’s preferred characterization of its imperial role as a liberal civilizing mission demanded an orderly and responsible devolution of power within a gradualist frame. And Attlee’s post-​war government did take some tentative moves towards African political advancement by convening a conference of Britain’s African governors in 1947 to consider the different constitutional stages through which the African colonies might advance to self-​government, although the British authorities believed it would be ‘a generation’ before even the Gold Coast might become self-​governing.36 The conference was a bureaucratic if striking exercise in nation-​building, which suggested that British officials and ministers were confident in their capacity to shape developments. This is not to argue (as some did in the 1980s) that Britain planned decolonization, awakening rather than responding to, African nationalism.37 Nor should the mountains of paperwork generated by such initiatives distract from the frequently chaotic nature of British decolonization. The Labour government’s efforts at planning African constitutional development represent one point at which officials sought to anticipate change; but, as the subsequent rapid succession of events (especially as indicated earlier in relation to British west Africa) shows, even in those places where self-​government was imagined, a variety of pressures overturned or accelerated British plans and timetables. The essentially reactive nature of British policy-​making is hence not in question. Nonetheless, planning exercises spoke to an on-​going imperialism, even as British officials struggled to keep abreast of developments. Not all British planning presupposed the superior claims of nation statehood. Instead, British officials evinced a liking for federations as possible solutions to problems presented by the decolonization process, especially in the case of small-​island or economically marginal dependencies. As the late nineteenth-​century movement for imperial federation shows, federal ideas had a long history within the empire as a way of reconciling self-​determination with imperial association. In the colonial period, however, federal schemes were reconceived as a means of defying ‘the logic of nationalism’ in order to ‘maintain key British spheres of influence’.38 Local particularisms and nationalisms proved the rock on which most would founder. But that Britain’s governing classes thought them viable in the first instance speaks to the same confident mindset that privileged the dictates of administrative and economic rationality over local separatist ideologies, and to the pro-​settler proclivities of the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden that were formed following Labour’s 1951 election defeat. Most notorious was the ill-​fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland established in 1953. Presented as economically rational, it conjoined cash-​strapped Nyasaland (Malawi) with its more prosperous Northern and Southern Rhodesian (Zambia and Zimbabwe) neighbours, for whom it served as reservoir of labour. While some officials perceived federation as a means of limiting South African expansionism, it has been convincingly shown that it was primarily a concession to Rhodesian white settler nationalism.39 Black African opinion was never reconciled to the project, and in 1963, it forced the dissolution of the Federation. In 1965, the white minority regime in Southern Rhodesia made a unilateral declaration of independence. In the West Indies, where

Britain and decolonization    75 closer association had long been favoured in British circles, a federation introduced in 1958 was of similarly short duration. When the larger islands of Jamaica and Trinidad became independent in 1962, only a rump remained. Notwithstanding these failures, hopes of an East African Union remained alive until the early 1960s, and one further federation was created:  the Federation of South Arabia (1962–​1967), which brought together British Aden and a number of south Arabian emirates already under British protection. Other aspects of Britain’s late imperial history are in many respects the antithesis to bureaucratic decolonization and even more to a story of liberal exceptionalism. Foreign secretary Anthony Eden warned in 1953 that in the Middle East, faced with a rising tide of Arab nationalism, Britain could no longer maintain its position via ‘commercial concessions’ benefitting ‘Shahs and Pashas’.40 Nevertheless, in the same year the Conservative government collaborated with the Americans in orchestrating a coup to topple the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, whose government had nationalized the Anglo-​Iranian Oil Company in 1951, and to restore the position of the Shah. Britain’s late colonial wars in particular illustrate how in Benjamin Grob-​ Fitzgibbon’s words liberal imperialism could ‘only be sustained by illiberal dirty wars’ as Britain sought through a ‘concerted imperial strategy to secure the colonies for the Commonwealth in an orderly transfer of power’.41 ‘States of emergency’ enabling the introduction of authoritarian rule were declared in many colonies for varying periods of time in response both to actual unrest and fears of disorder. Malaya (1948–​1960), Kenya (1952–​1960), Cyprus (1955–​1959), and Aden (1963–​1967) experienced more prolonged ‘emergencies’ of sufficient duration that they were wars in all but name. Their causes and character varied in ways which make it hard to devise a common typology, although all reflected deeply rooted problems of colonial economic and political equality and integration in what the British termed ‘plural societies’. These were conflicts in which thousands of British conscripts served, but their designation as ‘emergencies’ ensured that the actions of British-​led forces were not subject to the terms of the Geneva Conventions on war, and British civilian losses not ineligible for compensation under insurance policies. By conveying a sense that these conflicts were merely temporary interruptions to more benign, ‘normal’, colonial conditions, moreover, the characterization of these wars as ‘emergencies’ pandered to the British liberal myth of British exceptionalism among both contemporaries and in some later historical constructions. These late colonial wars were troubling and difficult conflicts. In Malaya, British losses ran high in the early years; among civilian casualties was Alice Burns’s husband, Arthur, killed when his car was ambushed in Kedah in March 1950.42 The Kenyan war also claimed the lives of many loyal to Britain, and, although these were overwhelmingly black African rather than white fatalities, Mau Mau atrocities and notorious oathing ceremonies provided compelling footage for British newsreels. British counter-​ insurgencies were similarly brutal. Alongside measures to win local support or ‘hearts and minds’ (in the phrase popularized by General Templer in Malaya), British-​led forces adapted their tactics to guerrilla warfare, and initiated policies of ‘villagization’, entailing

76   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell the enforced removal of locals to villages in order to cut off their practical support to the insurgents, first in Malaya and subsequently in Kenya. Accounts of the Mau Mau war in Kenya especially provide evidence of systematic abuse of power and place British justice in the dock. Not only were many insurgents detained for prolonged periods without charge, but some were tortured, and at a time when Westminster was debating the abolition of hanging, some 3,000 Kenyans were tried on capital charges in the colony’s Special Emergency Assize Courts, of whom perhaps 1,090 were eventually hanged.43 Over fifty years later the British state was forced to pay nearly £20 million in compensation to more than 5,000 Mau Mau veterans who had suffered under the British administration during the 1950s war.44 In the later 1950s, damaging revelations of British abuses of power and inflammatory moves—​such as the exile of the Christian head of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus Archbishop Makarios, the head of the island’s movement for enosis (union with Greece)—​were already inflicting significant reputational damage both at home and overseas. However, that that they did not attract more contemporary attention may again speak to the influence of a liberal discourse of decolonization as well as to the persistence of racial ideologies.

From Suez to the Wind of Change By then, post-​war decolonization was shaping a new ‘alternative’ international order increasingly favourable to anti-​colonial ideologies and movements, as newly independent Asian states sponsored transnational connections across the global south.45 Former British colonies played a critical role in these developments, puncturing hopes of Commonwealth diplomatic unity even as Britain still clung to the Commonwealth ideal. Most influentially, under Jawaharlal Nehru, India emerged as a leader of the non-​ aligned states which met at Bandung in 1955 with the objective of defeating colonialism and neo-​colonialism, and, within the Commonwealth, as an alternative source of influence among decolonizing African states.46 Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was another influential figure at Bandung. He, too, adopted a neutral position between the Cold War superpowers, and became the leading figure in a pan-​Arab movement. British alarm at his growing regional influence contributed to the decision by Eden’s Conservative government to invade Egypt in collaboration with the French and in secret collusion with the Israelis in 1956 after Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal Company only days after the last British troops had left in a withdrawal negotiated two years before. In independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah similarly sought a regional role and organized a pan-​African meeting at Accra in 1958, from which an informal alliance of African states at the UN emerged. In 1960, the comprehensive French withdrawal from all its sub-​Saharan African colonies and Belgium from the Congo swelled the African anti-​colonial lobby further, and in December 1960 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 1514 calling for a rapid and unconditional end to colonialism. For Britain, the UN had become a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ with Britain ‘public enemy number one’.47

Britain and decolonization    77 Even before then, the Suez Crisis had thrown these new realities into sharp relief. When the United Nations debated a call for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops, only New Zealand and Australia supported Britain.48 With sterling under threat and the United States, angered by British actions which they feared would undermine a western position in the region, unwilling to come to the rescue, Anglo-​ French forces were compelled to retreat. Prime minister Anthony Eden resigned. His successor Harold Macmillan focused on repairing the Anglo-​American relationship. The subsequent British abandonment of plans to be an independent nuclear power highlighted Britain’s subservient position within the Anglo-​American coalition. Within the Middle East, Suez cemented Nasser’s standing and strengthened pan-​Arabism, and coupled with revolution in Iraq in 1958 against Britain’s Hashemite ally, finally terminated British informal imperialism in areas of the Middle East, except in the Persian Gulf. For Britain, Suez marked in effect an end to a period of some fluidity in colonial affairs, which, despite the British retreat from south Asia, had been characterized elsewhere by imperial revivalism. Macmillan quickly showed a more pragmatic approach towards the empire by commissioning a costs-​benefits survey of Britain’s colonies. By then the momentum established by earlier constitutional reform had led to the independence or impending independence of Malaya, Ghana, and Nigeria, as successive British governments sought to accommodate nationalism as the best means of preserving influence and of protecting British interests. With the departure of Britain’s most valuable colonies, and the prospect, finally, of restoring sterling to full convertibility, the results of the costs-​benefits survey did not point firmly in either direction. But it at least opened the way for more rapid decolonization, downplaying the impact on national interests of a British retreat from its remaining dependencies, as did also a new defence policy introduced in 1957, which ended national conscription, and shifted Britain’s emphasis from conventional warfare to nuclear deterrence and reduced the number of overseas garrisons.49 At home the bi-​partisan consensus that had characterized the politics of empire had broken down with the emergence of a more radical anti-​colonial politics of the left. By summer 1959, and with a British general election looming, the increasing reputational costs of hanging on in east and central Africa in the face of strengthening African opposition and damaging revelations of British abuses of power had convinced Macmillan that Africa posed the greatest challenge facing his government. The Conservatives were re-​elected in October 1959, and a sharp acceleration in the pace of colonial constitutional change ensued. This was the result of hard-​headed calculation that in the face of various colonial political and international pressures British interests were now best served by rapid rather than gradual retreat. In January 1960 Macmillan embarked on a six-​week Africa tour, at the end of which he declared before the parliament in Cape Town that a ‘wind of change’ was blowing through the continent. Ten British African colonies or trust territories achieved independence between 1960 and 1964, as well as Cyprus, Malta, Kuwait, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, and (as part of Malaysia) North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore. Developments in the twenty-​first century have cast an illuminating light on one aspect of this process—​as well as illustrating how Britain’s governing elite had an eye to

78   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell the historical record. In 1961, at the height of the accelerated withdrawal from empire, the Colonial Office issued instructions as to which documents should not be left behind as their officers departed. These included those that might later embarrass the British or other governments, as well as members of the police, the military, and public servants.50 That British governments should seek to repatriate such records is hardly surprising; what is remarkable is that the existence of these records (the so-​called ‘migrated’ archives) was only and sensationally disclosed in 2011 as a result of the successful legal action brought by Mau Mau veterans.51 As it reverberated through the old Commonwealth, the ‘wind of change’, with its uncompromising warning to apartheid South Africa, must also, Stuart Ward suggests, be understood as a ‘watershed in the decolonization of the white settler empire’, challenging dominion ideas of solidarity within the British world.52 Macmillan’s decision in 1961 to seek membership of the European Economic Community, which served time on Anglo-​Australian preferential trading arrangements, was yet more corrosive.53 In 1973, when Britain eventually entered the EEC, it seemed to the New Zealand historian J. G. A. Pocock as if the British prime minister were telling his countrymen that the British ‘were now Europeans’, disrupting a ‘concept of Britishness which we had supposed that we share with you’.54 In Canada, a common British identity ‘vanished remarkably quickly in the 1960s’; the result of growing American influence, as well as secularization and internal Canadian politics, rather than material concerns.55

The Imperialism of British Decolonization For all that concurrent developments were already taking the shine off the Commonwealth ideal, the British government was intent on steering the majority of its remaining colonies to independence within the Commonwealth-​sterling area. Protecting British financial and business interests were important considerations behind this objective, but for the British government, they were generally subordinate to the geostrategic imperatives of the Cold War. When in South Africa Macmillan had spoken of a ‘wind of change’, it represented an opportunity to regain the initiative and burnish Britain’s liberal credentials, especially in relation to Africa, which was perceived as a likely new Cold War theatre. British officials could draw on a distinctively British theoretical model of managing a transition from formal to informal imperialism. The last generation of British administrative cadets at Cambridge were taught by the historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, whose influential account of ‘an imperialism of free trade’ published in 1953 not only advanced a thesis about the character of nineteenth-​century British expansionism, but also offered an interpretation of mid-​nineteenth-century decolonizing processes in relation to the white settlement colonies.56 ‘By slackening the formal bond at the appropriate time, it was possible to rely on

Britain and decolonization    79 economic dependence and mutual good-​feeling to keep the colonies bound to Britain’, they wrote.57 Indirectly involved in the business of empire via their role in delivering training to Service recruits, their article might be construed as a commentary on the developments they witnessed unfolding around them; years later Robinson drew a clear parallel between this analysis of the nineteenth century and post-​war developments, invoking its title in what became the single most influential article on British decolonization, co-​authored with W. R. Louis, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’. Relying on ‘mutual goodfeeling’ or, in the terms in which this argument was recast in the later article, ‘winning and keeping African goodwill’,58 was nevertheless a more complex process than it had been a century before, when it had entailed bestowing self-​ government on white settlers, many of whom retained strong affiliations to Britain. Britain’s twentieth-​century dependencies presented a wider array of problems. The future position of white settlers in Britain’s east and central African colonies constituted the greatest difficulty. From 1959, once it was apparent that the ‘multiracialism’ promoted by British Conservatives was unsustainable in the face of black African demands for majority rule, this issue proved acutely inflammatory in domestic politics, especially within the Conservative party. Britain’s own reduced circumstances also rendered the mechanisms employed in the nineteenth century less manageable, the context in which Britain became more reliant on American support. Notwithstanding these challenges, a distinctive British imperial history helped fashion a distinctive British post-​imperial history. Britain’s relations with emergent states were not generally as tightly constituted as those of the French, whose position in its former colonies was more commonly undergirded by the presence of permanent garrisons as well as by the retention of old colonial currency systems. Defence agreements were incorporated in independence settlements in strategically important colonies (notably in Cyprus, where Britain still retains sovereign bases). However, Britain’s policy concentrated on the pursuit of influence by informal association within the Commonwealth. This approach was well suited to Britain’s straitened post-​war financial circumstances and a growing desire to avoid allegations of ‘neo-​colonialism’ in a world in which ‘colonial’ had become a toxic word. But it also reflected a particularly British understanding of managing a transition from empire to after: ‘Political co-​operation fortified by a strong professional link’ was how John Bennett referred to Britain’s future military relations with Ghana.59 At the end of empire, British imperialism was reformulated as developmentalism centred on the Commonwealth; this was a logical conclusion of the development turn in late colonial policy, while consistent with the pursuit of post-​colonial influence. By 1965, forty-​one colonies and ex-​colonies had entered into agreements with the British government under the auspices of the British Overseas Service Aid Scheme introduced in 1961.60 The pursuit of influence was by no means confined to Whitehall and Westminster. Within the British imperial system power emanated from multiple places, which reflected the ways it was dispersed across a range of British institutions and actors who had become to different extents ‘stakeholders in a British imperial project’. Each possessed relevant expertise which could now be deployed to model successor

80   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell institutions in emergent states along British lines.61 Many simply assumed British models and practice were best, and it follows that although Cold War considerations were of crucial significance, not all the British pursuit of influence at the end of empire can easily be accommodated within a Cold War narrative, nor necessarily be understood as designed to advance ‘western’ as opposed to British values. Independence nonetheless meant independence, and for all that Britain sought to substitute influence for control, and there were structural weaknesses that limited the capacity of newly independent countries to exercise their full independence, the significance of the formal transfers of sovereignty should not be underestimated. The decolonization of the colonial empire launched numerous new states onto the international scene whose economies and geo-​politics Britain could no longer control. British capital and institutions competed for influence with those of others, including the Americans, who believed with equal conviction in the superiority of their own approaches to modernization and development. Yet at home and overseas many Britons continued to be involved in Britain’s former empire, and were certainly touched by its institutional legacies, not just in the form of the Commonwealth, but in other areas, from the worldwide Anglican Communion to the law and education. It was once held that the loss of empire was of little consequence for British politics, society, and culture, certainly in comparison to some other European countries. Such a thesis in many ways corresponds to the liberal imperial myth, with decolonization presented as the fulfilment of a British mission rather than a body-​blow to prestige and national interests—​even if those who subscribed to the ‘minimal impact’ thesis would not themselves buy into Coupland’s version of British liberal exceptionalism. Irrespective of the real dynamics behind British imperial decline, the expansion of the Commonwealth probably helped mask from a wider British public the realities of the diminution of Britain’s overseas role. More recent historiography nevertheless now provides the basis for a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the wide variety of ways in which decolonization reverberated within Britain. Empire increasingly came home in more senses than one. Responses to a post-​war influx of Commonwealth immigrants were shaped by ideologies and epistemologies associated with the colonial sphere.62 But, just as in earlier eras, there was not one culture of empire, but many, and enduring imperial cultures and post-​imperial nostalgia resided alongside satirical or hostile critiques of empire as Britain experienced its own internal decolonization.63 The end of empire also removed one foundation to the Union, feeding into regional nationalisms within Britain’s own borders. In this respect, at home as well as overseas, the final chapters to the history of British decolonization are still being written.

Conclusions As John Bennett had foreseen, the late colonial history of the British empire proved in some respects not so different from that of other European colonial powers. Financially

Britain and decolonization    81 crippled and facing a rising anti-​colonial tide, Britain retreated rapidly from India in 1947. It would take another decade for the full effects of global change to wash away most of the rest of Britain’s formal empire as well as an informal one in the Middle East, and weaken Britannic cultures in the old Commonwealth. This did not, however, end British ambitions to an imperial role, and, as this chapter has shown, even as they managed the changes sweeping away the formal structures of empire, British officials and elites evinced an on-​going confidence in their own capacity and right to shape developments overseas. Britain’s particular imperial history, its historic pre-​eminence, and (for all its decline) its continuing strengths produced distinct and enduring ‘imperial’ ideologies which provide the context for its management of post-​war change and its relations with the United States. Through the Commonwealth idea, Britain’s governing elites aimed to recast the journey each colony had travelled—​in all its messiness—​in a comforting language of partnership:  history was important, and British policy-​makers knew it. ‘Decolonization’ was a word that for much of the period British politicians rarely used;64 nor did they generally initiate or welcome imperial retreat. Nevertheless, we might argue that (to paraphrase Todd Shepard’s analysis of French Algeria) they invented—​or perhaps more correctly, reinvented—their own decolonization.65

Notes 1. My thanks to the Keeper of the University Archives, the University of Oxford, and the Syndics of the University of Cambridge Library for permission to quote from papers in the archives of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and also to Arthur Burns for commenting on a draft of this chapter. 2. The National Archives, Kew, London [TNA], FO 953/​5A: circular telegram from the Foreign Office to British embassies and diplomatic representatives, 5 August 1947; Arthur Tout (Publications Division, Central Office of Information) to A. A. Dudley, Information Policy Dept., 10 Sept. 1947. I owe this reference to my former undergraduate student Sam Campbell. 3. TNA, FO 953/​5A, “The Goal of British Rule in India”, esp. 1–​2, 7. 4. See Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–​1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 403. 5. A. G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization”, Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008): 211–​247, esp. 215–​216; John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–​ 2000 (London: Penguin, 2007). 6. Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation:  From “High Imperialism” to Decolonisation”, International History Review, 36, no. 1 (2014): 142–​170, quotation 154. 7. W. R. Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, no. 3 (1994): 462–​511, quotation 462. 8. See W. R. Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1984). 9. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edition (Harlow: Routledge, 2002), 40. 10. C. A. Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Penguin, 2007), 100–​111.

82   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell 11. David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War, 1939–1942 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988). 12. David Killingray and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa and the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). 13. See Cabinet memo by Lord Keynes, 13 August 1945, CAB 129/​1, CP (45)112, Annex, reproduced in British Documents on the End of Empire [hereafter BDEE], Vol. 2: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945–​1951, ed. Ronald Hyam (London: HMSO, 1992), document 74. 14. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 25, 152. 15. CO 537/​2057, no. 48, memo. by J. S. Bennett, 30 April 1947, reproduced in Hyam ed., Labour Government, part III, document no. 174. On Bennett see Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 9. 16. The British Privy Council remained the ultimate court of appeal in Canada until 1949, South Africa in 1961, Australia from 1968–​1986, and New Zealand only in 2004: Hopkins, Rethinking Decolonization, 220, 229. 17. Tom Frame, “Local Differences, Social and National Identity, 1930–​1966”, in Anglicanism in Australia: A History, ed. Bruce Kaye (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 100–​ 123, esp. 108–​109, 119. 18. CO 537/​2057, no. 48, memo. by J. S. Bennett, 30 April 1947, reproduced in Hyam ed., Labour Government, part III, document 174. 19. Benjamin Grob-​Fizgibbon, Imperial Endgame. Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 29–​31, 51–​58. 20. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 190. 21. Alice Burns to her niece in London, 27 June, 1947; private papers in author’s possession. 22. D. A. Low and John Lonsdale, “Introduction: Towards the New Order, 1945–​1963”, in D. A. Low and A. Smith, eds., A History of East Africa, 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 23. Gerold Krozewski, “Sterling, the ‘Minor’ Territories, and the End of Formal Empire, 1939–​ 1958”, Econ. Hist. Review, XLVI, 2 (1993): 239–​265. 24. See e.g. Philip Buckner, “The Long Goodbye:  English Canadians and the British World”, in Philip Bucker and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 181–​207. 25. Sarah Stockwell, “African Prospects:  Mining the Empire for Britain in the 1950s”, in The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival?, ed. M. Lynn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 77–​99, esp. 81–​82. 26. Cited in Grob-​Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame,  41–​42. 27. Chandrika Kaul, “ ‘At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour’: Lord Mountbatten and the British Media at Indian Independence”, in Robert Holland, Susan Williams, and Terry Barringer, eds., The Iconography of Independence (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2010), 29–​45. 28. On the transfer and consequences of the Westminster system, see Harshan Kumarasingham, A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary System in Post-​Colonial India and Sri Lanka (London: Wiley, 2013). 29. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–​1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 30. Archives of the University of Oxford, UR 6/​COL 4/​file 13, Minutes of Courses Sub-​Cttee, CSC, 4 November 1958; Cambridge University Archives (CUA), CDEV 2/​22, Annual Report OSC, 1961–​1962.

Britain and decolonization    83 31. TNA, CO 847/​35/​9, minute by G.  B. Cartland, 29 Dec. 1947, draft historical survey by Robinson. 32. Secretary of State for the Colonies Oliver Stanley: House of Commons, vol. 391, 13 July 1943, cols.  48–​49. 33. Alison Smith and Mary Bull, “Introduction”, in Alison Smith and Mary Bull, eds., Margery Perham and British Rule in Africa (London: Routledge, 1991), 1–​20. 34. Cited in Roland Oliver, “Prologue: The two Miss Perhams” in ibid., 21–​27, citation 24. 35. Nicholas Owen, The British Left and Metropolitan Anti-​Imperialism 1885–​1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–​17. 36. TNA, CO 847/​36/​1, no. 9, A.G.C. No. 2, Report of the Committee on the Conference of African Governors’, 22 May 1947, appendix III, para. 2. 37. R. Pearce, “The Colonial Office and Planned Decolonisation in Africa”, African Affairs, 83 (1984): 77–​93; John Flint, “Planned Decolonization and its failure in British Africa”, African Affairs, 82, (1983): 289–​441. For a critique see John Cell, “On the Eve of Decolonization: the Colonial Office’s plans for the transfer of power in Africa, 1947”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8 (1980): 235–​257. 38. Michael Collins, “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment’”, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 24, no. 1 (2013), 21–​40. 39. Philip Murphy, “‘Government by Blackmail’:  The Origins of the Central African Federation Reconsidered”, in Lynn, British Empire,  53–​76. 40. “Egypt:  the alternatives”:  Cabinet memorandum by Eden, 16 Feb. 1953, CAB 129/​59, C(53)65, reproduced in The Conservative Government and the End of Empire, 1951–​1957, BDEE, Series A, 3, ed. David Goldsworthy (London: HMSO, 1994), part I, document 38. 41. Grob-​Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, 3, 377. 42. The Straits Times, 22 March 1950, 1. 43. D. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: W&N, 2005), esp. 6–​7; C. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Bodley Head, 2005); David Anderson, “Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39, no. 5 (2011): 699–​7 16. 44. “Statement to Parliament on Settlement of Mau Mau Claims”, William Hague, 6 June 2013, http://​www.gov.uk/​government/​announcements; accessed 13 March 2015. 45. Mark Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South and the Cold War, 1919–​1962”, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 464–​484, quotation 480. 46. Gerard McCann, “From Diaspora to Third Worldism and the UN: India and the Politics of Decolonising Africa”, Past and Present, 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 258–​280, quotation 259. 47. W. R. Louis, “Public Enemy Number One: The British Empire in the Dock at the United Nations, 1957–​7 1”, in Lynn, British Empire, 186–​213, esp. 186. 48. Ibid., esp. 191. 49. See Sarah Stockwell and L. J. Butler, “Introduction”, in L. J. Butler and Sarah Stockwell, eds., The Winds of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–​19; Defence: Outline of Future Policy, Cm 124, April 1957. 50. “Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Predecessors. Records of Former Colonial Administrations. The Migrated Archives”, http://​discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/​, accessed 13 March 2015.

84   Sarah Elizabeth Stockwell 51. Now in series FCO 141. 52. Stuart Ward, “Whirlwind, Hurricane, Howling Tempest: The Wind of Change and the British World”, in Butler and Stockwell, Wind of Change, 48–​69, quotation 49. 53. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward, “Epilogue: After Empire”, in Australia’s Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 389–​402. 54. Quoted in Neville Meaney, “Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31, no. 2 (2003), 121–​135, quotation at 123. 55. Buckner, “Long Goodbye”, 201–​202. 56. CUA, CDEV 2/​22, Box 2/​22, Annual Reports of the Colonial [later Overseas] Studies Committee, 1947–​67, see e.g. details of lectures for 1950–​1. 57. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”, Economic History Review, New Series, 6, no. 1 (1953), 1–​15, quotation 4. 58. Louis and Robinson, “Imperialism”, 488. 59. Cited in Sarah Stockwell, “Exporting Britishness: Decolonization in Africa, the British State in Africa and Its Clients”, in António Costa Pinto and Miguel Banderia Jerónimo, eds., Decolonization Compared (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 148–​177, quotation at 159. 60. Cmnd. 2736 (1964–​5), Overseas Development: The Work of the New Ministry (HMSO, Aug. 1965), para. 125; Table 4, p. 66. 61. Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 62. See Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire: White Man’s World (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011); Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 63. See Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). The essays in Ward’s collection exemplify this diversity of approach. See esp. John McKenzie, “The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture”, 21–​36; Antoinette Burton, “India, Inc.? Nostalgia, Memory and the Empire of Things”, 217–​232. 64. My thinking here has been influenced by Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen’s research. 65. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006).

Chapter 5

Franc e The longue durée of French Decolonization Emmanuelle Saada

Introduction In January 2005, a group of young French militants published the ‘Manifesto of the Natives of the Republic’.1 The text denounced the continued legal and social inequities suffered by post-​colonial immigrants and their descendants, equating contemporary deep-​seated forms of discrimination with colonial forms of exclusion. The policy toward French Muslims was described as a revival of the ‘colonial mechanisms of management of Islam’ while the 2004 law banning ostentatious religious signs in French schools was characterized as a ‘law of exception, reeking of colonialism’. Since 2005, the recourse to the colonial metaphor in French political debates has only intensified, with the ‘colonial fracture’ constantly evoked as a cause of the many expressions of French malaise, from urban riots to the rise of radical Islamism and the electoral successes of the National Front.2 To a large extent, French intellectuals and militants do not articulate this presence of the colonial past with the concepts of ‘post-​colonial studies,’ which are often perceived in France as a by-​product of Anglo-​American debates. They more readily denounce an ‘incomplete’ and sometimes a ‘bad’ decolonization.3 This discourse is rather new in France, as decolonization had not been much evoked, and even less discussed, in public debates until the early 2000s, when the subject was revived by vivid testimonies about the widespread use of torture by the French army during the Algerian war.4 The traditional view had long been that, between 1943 (when the French mandate on Syria and Lebanon ended) and 1962 (when Algeria became independent), France had changed profoundly from a formidable empire to a European nation, left with only sundry ‘confetti’ of its former empire. Decolonization had been a swift and radical, if complex, transformative process. Conventional wisdom was that France had clung to its empire more tightly than its counterparts, especially Britain.

86   Emmanuelle Saada Because of its assimilationist political culture, it had been unable to devolve power to local elites and became enmeshed in an extremely violent and lethal conflict in Algeria, which led to a complete break between the two countries. And while it was clear that France had sustained or even intensified its influence within former colonies in Sub-​ Saharan Africa until the late 1990s, through programmes of cultural and economic ‘cooperation’ and military interventions, this form of ‘neo-​colonialism,’ a term whose common usage dated to the 1960s, was considered to be mostly limited to that region of the world. In other places, and notably in North Africa and Asia, decolonization was viewed as a much more straightforward process. The sudden and massive migration of one million French citizens from Algeria in a few weeks in the summer of 1962 was one of the most powerful symbols of this sudden and complete retraction of France into its continental borders and was also of a piece with France’s turn away from an overseas Empire to an ever-​closer union with its Western European partners. Since the early 2000s, this narrative has lost ground in two directions. First, historians as well as activists have questioned the very idea that ‘decolonization’ happened and, instead, have underlined deep continuities beyond the moment of formal devolution of sovereignty to formerly colonized territories. Second, a more recent and maybe more fruitful line of inquiry has envisaged ‘decolonization’ as less of a clear break and more as a long and complex process of reorganization of power relations. This chapter assesses these different interpretations of French decolonization by trying to situate them in the longue durée of French imperialism.

Conflicting Visions In the forty years following the formal dissolution of the French empire, the process of decolonization attracted relatively little interest from historians except among those studying movements of national liberation. No one questioned the view, held by the French political elite and most notably by De Gaulle when faced with the Algerian quagmire, that decolonization was ‘a necessity of history.’5 This perspective relied on several mutually exclusive conceptions of colonialism. First, for some of the supporters of the French ‘colonial idea,’ decolonization was held to be inevitable because it was in fact the natural conclusion of colonization: the main objective of the civilizing nation had been to enable the autonomy of its protégés. This view had long been a staple of French colonial doctrine. Turgot was one of its first proponents when, in his Memoir to the King on the American War, he compared colonies to ‘ripe fruits falling from the tree.’ This thesis crystalized in colonial discourses toward the end of the nineteenth century when colonial doctrinaires could say that colonization’s main objective was to ‘educate societies to self-​government.’ It is important not to overemphasize the liberalism of such views. This form of paternalism did not equate ‘autonomy’ with the progressive emancipation of native populations: any capacity for autonomy was recognized only in territories with colonial settlers.6 Whatever its initial restrictions

The longue durée of French Decolonization    87 might have been, the doctrine establishing independence as the ultimate end of the colonial process was solidly established across the political spectrum after the Second World War. For example, Socialist leader Léon Blum said, when commenting on the war in Indochina in 1946, ‘According to our republican doctrine, colonial possession only reaches its final goal and is justified the day it ceases, that is, the day when a colonized people has been given the capacity to live emancipated and to govern itself.’7 Obviously, it is vital not to give too much credit to such visions, often expressed either as a legitimation of conquest served to a reluctant French public, or, on the other side of the colonial trajectory, as a justification for the fait accompli of colonial loss. Such statements are at odds with the non-​linear character of the French colonial projection of power. The immediate aftermath of the Second World War is a case in point. Local populations in North and sub-​Saharan Africa participated disproportionately in the war effort, leading to demands by their elites for greater local autonomy. But senior French colonial administrators in Africa explicitly refused any serious step in that direction during the Brazzaville conference of January 1944 on the future of the French possessions in Africa. The years following the war witnessed what has been sometimes called a ‘second colonization’: a large fraction of the colonial elite turned to ambitious projects of development to reinvigorate a contested empire.8 The French ‘late colonial state’ was, like its British counterpart, more extensively staffed and more bureaucratized than its predecessors. The Broussards or ‘kings of the bush’ of former times—​administrators whose expertise and legitimacy stemmed from their deep knowledge of a population among which they lived for years—​had been replaced by development specialists who did not see their mission as preparation for decolonization.9 A second version of the ‘necessity of history’ is at odds with the first. At its core is the idea that decolonization was the result of the inner contradictions of the colonial project. Far from being animated by the liberal goal of educating colonized populations to autonomy, in this perspective, colonization is viewed as a project of continued domination and exclusion. The most dramatic formulation of this thesis was penned in the 1990s by Dominique Schnapper, a sociologist and future member of the French constitutional council, who saw colonization as a dreadful exception to the liberal definition of citizenship. She focused on the colonial dichotomy between ‘French citizens’—​all of whom were subject to the French Civil Code and, in the case of adult males, endowed with political rights—​and ‘native subjects’, who were subject to a specific body of laws in the private sphere—​a ‘personal status’ supposedly better suited to their ‘civilization.’ As a consequence, these ‘native subjects’ were stripped of political rights. They were, in addition, subject to a system of legal discrimination. Schnapper saw this colonial divide as in complete contradiction with the main characteristics of French Republicanism. The discrepancy between the ‘civic model’ of the French nation, based on an inclusive social contract, and the colonial reality of the exclusion of the native populations based on their religious or cultural difference was, for her, a ‘legal monster’: because this contradiction was untenable in the long term, it naturally collapsed onto itself. Modern democracies contradicted their own principles when they became imperial and decolonization was the only way out of the contradiction.10

88   Emmanuelle Saada The thesis of the colonial contradictions of the imperial Republic and its inevitable demise had variants. One is the ineluctable rise of nationalism, which, it is often claimed, provoked decolonization. In this perspective, France had needed a modern elite to assist her in her exploitative project, and thus had educated a small fringe of the population. Educational opportunity had introduced this elite to modern political values, including that of the centrality of the nation.11 Nationalists, after all, were only applying the principles of the French Revolution when they, in turn, demanded a sovereign nation. Another and less radical formulation of the ‘contradiction’ thesis is that of the ‘missed occasions’: if only France had been able to devolve more power to local populations and had introduced a certain degree of equality in colonial societies, for example by co-​opting more effectively a fraction of the native elite, colonial relations, albeit in an assuaged form, could have been maintained. One crucial example of such a ‘missed occasion’ is the rejection of the Popular Front’s Blum-​Viollette plan in 1936—​a scheme which would have guaranteed full citizenship to 75,000 Algerians without requiring prior renunciation of their ‘personal status.’12 The flip side of the ‘necessity of history’ thesis is the view that French decolonization never really happened. In this perspective, the devolution of sovereignty is insignificant compared to the maintenance of deep ties between France and its former colonies. These ties were particularly important with countries in sub-​Saharan Africa, from the official policy of ‘cooperation’ that organized programmes of development and education to the much more influential informal networks of ‘Françafrique’ which brought together French and African political, economic, and military elites in an unofficial pact. Starting immediately after the formal independence of former African territories, intelligence material and military and political aid were granted to the African heads of state in exchange for access to natural, agricultural, and monetary resources.13 This form of ‘neo-​colonialism’ abated only in the 2000s, with the passing of the generation associated with Gaullism. Globalization had, by then, both brought new international actors in Africa and anchored France more firmly in the European Community. Another widespread understanding of the limits of formal decolonization is that colonial cultures and structures have shaped ‘metropolitan’ societies so deeply that their effects outlasted the moment of formal decolonization. France may have lost its empire, but it has remained in many ways ‘colonial.’ Evidence for continuity is to be found, for example, in the importation of techniques of management of populations during and immediately after ‘decolonization.’ Low-​ranking agents of the administration handling the flux of immigrants from former colonies were more often than not repatriated officers of ‘native affairs’ in colonies.14 Prominent officials in the ministry of immigration also often had previous colonial experience.15 The ‘civilizing mission’ also followed colonial subjects in the metropolis:  for example, Algerian women were being taught proper norms of domestic life in France at the apex of the Algerian war.16 A less paternalistic and more violent aspect of such colonial continuities is found in practices and doctrines of counterinsurgency developed

The longue durée of French Decolonization    89 to fight anti-​colonial wars, especially in the context of Algeria.17 Other continuities emerged in the use of exceptional power: the ‘state of emergency,’ defined by a 1955 law passed to reinforce repression in Algeria, was subsequently applied in metropolitan France—​first in 2005 in an attempt to quell widespread urban riots, and then after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.18 More generally, contemporary forms of social and spatial segregation have been analysed as long-​term legacies of colonization.19 These opposing perspectives on decolonization—​as a necessary development in the history of the world or, on the contrary, as an incomplete or even non-​existent break—​ have been recently displaced by a more complex vision of the period which constructs a less deterministic reinvention of imperial relations of power, rife with possibilities and experiments. But actors of the time were unable to entirely grasp the openness of the period. According to Todd Shepard, decolonization was ‘invented’ relatively late by the French elite to account for the quick disengagement from Algeria,20 which had been an integral part of France since the 1848 constitution of the Second Republic. During the first phase of the war of independence, the French government had tried to fend off nationalist demands by implementing reforms that promoted political and social equality, which it envisioned as a way of ‘integrating’ Algeria more closely into France. Faced with bitter settler opposition and the intensification of the liberation war, the French government decided that it could no longer stop what it saw as the ‘tide of history’ and organized rapidly, from 1959 to 1962, an abrupt separation of Algeria from France. The ex-​post rationalization of this rupture as ‘necessary’ masked the very large repertoire of political solutions with which colonial agents experimented in a first phase. They did so to adapt to the new international conditions following the Second World War, such as the institutionalization of internationalism and, in the context of the Cold War, the increasing power of the relatively newer world empires which were hostile to older forms of European colonialism. The post-​Second World War moment was a period during which alternatives to the previous organization of empire were imagined, discussed, and tested. Frederick Cooper has underlined the strength of the federalist idea, which had many supporters both among West Africans and French administrators. Gary Wilder has also pointed to the extraordinary political fecundity of a historical moment in which definitions of imperial relations, and also visions of time and history, were reimagined by authors like Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor.21 In considering the ‘decolonial moment’ between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s as a series of attempts by a multiplicity of actors to reorganize imperial power, it could be asked how some of the structural traits of French colonization shaped these experiments. Among them, three are salient: the tendency to treat colonial territories as separate entities, subject to specific administrative and legal regimes; the entrenched regime of discrimination applied first to slaves and, later, to native populations; and, finally, the continued use of violence as an instrument of colonial governance.

90   Emmanuelle Saada

A Multi-​L ayered Process Re-​situating decolonization in the longue durée and thinking in terms of ‘structural traits’ can imply the view that ‘decolonization’ and ‘empire’ are singular formations. This is obviously not the case. First, the process of decolonization varied markedly from one place to the next. Historians usually distinguish between different paths towards disengagement: a political—​and relatively consensual—​process of devolution of sovereignty in West Africa; violent wars, as in Indochina and Algeria (although even here the ideological, political, and military terms of engagement differed markedly in the two cases); and a continuation, albeit under radically different terms, of quasi-​colonial relationships with those territories that opted for closer integration to France as Départements d’outre-​mer and Territoires d’outre-​mer in 1946.22 Further distinctions should be made at the regional level, too. Within West Africa alone there were many different paths to decolonization:  in French Cameroon, an insurgency promoted by the Union des Populations du Cameroon (UPC) in the late 1950s incurred violent repression. Second, the idea that there are ‘distinctive traits’—​or to borrow Marc Bloch’s terminology, ‘basic characteristics’—​of French colonialism which might have shaped the end of the French empire assumes the coherence of a French colonial project, paralleling what John Darwin has called the British ‘empire project.’23 Beyond the realm of ideological discourse there is very little empirical basis for such a characterization in the French case. Instead, throughout the multiple centuries in which France affirmed itself as an empire, diversity and contingency have been so intrinsic to the French projection of power overseas that they undermine any notion of a singular ‘project’ or even of a distinctive experience.24 A long historiographical tradition has opposed the ‘top-​down’ approach to the end of empire with a ‘bottom-up’ interpretation that laid greater emphasis on the consolidation of nationalist demands. Yet decolonization is better understood as a phenomenon happening simultaneously at different levels—​local, regional, and global. It is obvious in the Algerian case. There, anti-​colonial conflict was highly localized but, at the same time, it impacted on the wider empire, with Tunisia and Morocco playing an important role. It also acquired a stronger global dimension once Algerian nationalists began depicting their struggle to international opinion in a language of rights violated and legitimate claims denied.25 The chronology of colonization is also layered. The word ‘decolonization’ most often applies post-​1945 because this period witnessed both the dismantling of large empires and the emergence of a new critique of colonialism by world powers, even those with imperial backgrounds themselves.26 It is, though, worth recalling that there have been several moments of decolonization in modern history, from the national independence movement in the Americas at the turn of the nineteenth century to the late-​twentiethcentury collapse of the Soviet Empire.27 In the context of French imperialism, the first decolonization occurred between the 1763 treaty of Paris and the 1804 declaration of

The longue durée of French Decolonization    91 Haiti’s independence. This half-​century of French disengagement from the Americas was punctuated by a military defeat in 1763, the selling of a vast block of territory through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and the first victorious liberation movement by a subjugated people—​the Haitians—​on what had been France’s largest Caribbean territory: Saint-​Domingue. For all that, this first wave of decolonization did not signify any definitive reversal of French imperial expansion. Over the longer term, it spurred a new wave of conquests in Africa and Asia. For one thing, the end of slavery in the French Caribbean was closely tied to the exploitation of ‘free’ labour in Africa and thus to the colonization of the continent. For another, the liberation war in Haiti cast a very long shadow over colonial governance throughout the nineteenth century. Far from being discrete entities, the so-​called first and second colonial Empires were so profoundly intertwined that the first decolonization might also be viewed as a period of transition from one empire to the other. This leaves the historian wondering about the specificity of the post-​1945 period, which might also be viewed not as an end but as another transition to a different mode of imperial relations. Ironically, for many territories that constituted the remnants of the ‘first’ colonial empire, decolonization actually heralded a closer relationship to France, with the 1946 transformation of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion, and Guiana into ‘overseas departments’ (départements d’outre-​mer). This integrative process went furthest in matters of local administration and French law, although more substantial differences persisted, particularly in relation to public benefits. At the same time, other territories opted for a looser relationship with France, achieving some measure of autonomy as Territoires d’outre-​mer. Of these, some sixty years later, only New Caledonia is now considering independence. Faced with the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front an uncompromising nationalist movement that gained momentum in the 1980s, the French state has been edging towards New Caledonia’s decolonization since 1988. Precise timetables have been put in place for the progressive devolution of responsibility to local assemblies in matters of education, health, environment, and taxes. At the time of writing, a referendum is scheduled for November 2018 regarding the full transfer of sovereignty with a choice being between full independence or the status of a state associated with France. If decolonization never signified an absolute break, it was to some extent always the colonial project’s ultimate destination. The word itself appeared in French in 1836 in the context of the debates over the status of Algeria: for many, it was time to ‘decolonize’ Algeria.28 Throughout its existence, the hypothetical end of empire shaped colonial thinking. Autonomy was sometimes presented as the ultimate goal of the civilizing mission. More profoundly, however, it was the fragility of the colonial state—​structurally underfunded, resisted by local populations, and attracting, at best, tepid support in metropolitan France until the mid-​twentieth century—​that explains why colonial actors operated under the long shadow cast by empire’s eclipse. Finally, another source of complexity is that decolonization is a polymorphous notion that refers, in different contexts, to legal change (the devolution of sovereignty), to

92   Emmanuelle Saada political transition, to a series of socio-​economic transformations, and, lastly, to a form of cultural revolution that signifies a radical change in how power is represented. Taking these different facets into account, decolonization might be more aptly described as a ‘force field’ than a unitary concept insofar as, like its etymological root word ‘colony,’ decolonization ‘organizes visions, imaginaries and futures’ but has no stable material existence.29 With these restrictions in mind, the rest of this chapter examines the second half of the twentieth century as a process of ‘long decolonization.’ It focuses on three key aspects of France’s empire: first, the colonial rule of law, i.e., the way in which French colonies have constantly operated under a ‘special’ legal regime; second, the systemic discrimination directed against the colonized populations and especially the legal distinction between citizen and subject; finally, the continuous recourse to violence in colonial governance.

Unity and Diversity Beginning with the first Republican Constitution in 1792, French constitutions and political culture have held the Republic to be ‘unitary and indivisible.’ This principle translated into a highly centralized state and the sanctification of law as a source of universal norms, applicable uniformly across the territory and its population. Yet, despite the common assumption that Jacobin France sought to govern its colonies in the image of the metropole, the French empire was never centralized. Rule was exercised in many different ways across the territories and local colonial governments were afforded substantial autonomy. As many historians have noted in other imperial contexts, sovereignty was layered.30 Put differently, there was no legal recognition of the fact of empire. Nor was there any over-​arching structure encompassing metropole and colonies until the launch of the French Union immediately after the Second World War. Paradoxically, the Union Française, a framework created by the constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946, marked the first occasion when the French empire acquired a legal existence with specific institutions attached to it.31 Since the seventeenth century, colonial rule had been highly differentiated. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘old colonies’ and the new territories in Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and sub-​Saharan Africa were ruled by the Ministry of Colonies, which was only established in 1894, while the Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, parts of Indochina, and the Mandates of Syria and Lebanon secured after the First World War, were all the domain of the Foreign Ministry because each of these territories retained forms of sovereign local government. Algeria, for its part, was divided into three departments in 1848. These were administered, first by the Ministry of War and, later, by the Ministry of the Interior. Despite these multiple variations, one principle applied to all these territories: that of the exception (spécialité coloniale in French). The exception referred to the fact that the colonies were governed, not by parliamentary laws

The longue durée of French Decolonization    93 but by ‘special’ legislation. This divergence began during the Ancien Régime when the colonies were considered to be a ‘special domain’ administered directly by the king. The principle according to which colonies are ‘ruled by special laws and rules’ (lois et réglements particuliers) persisted in one form or an other from the 1791 Constitution, which declared that the ‘French colonies and possessions in Asia, Africa and America, although they formed part of the French Empire, are not comprised within the present Constitution’ (Title VII, Article 8), to the constitutional laws of the Third Republic, which remained in effect until France’s defeat in 1940.32 Because the Third Republic’s foundational laws of 1875 were silent about the legislative organization of the colonies, older texts remained in force until 1940. Foremost among these was the Senatus-​ Consulte of 1854, which affirmed the colonial principle of rule by decree. As a consequence, while the French National Assembly could legislate in colonial affairs, its decisions were never automatically applicable to colonial territories and needed to mention explicitly the colonies to which they were to be extended. In practice, and especially beyond Algeria, the National Assembly rarely did so. Instead, throughout the empire, law was made by the executive power, and, more concretely, by senior civil servants assisted by a body of experts nominated by the government and known as the ‘High Colonial Council.’ This body was generally comprised of law professors, deputies (members of parliament) representing colonial seats, and members of the colonial economic elite. Clearly, the constitutional principle of the French Republic’s ‘unity and indivisibility’ did not apply to the colonies. Quite the reverse: the colonies were sharply distinguished from the Republic and governed differently. Paradoxically, it is in the period now identified as decolonization—​broadly speaking from 1946 to 1962—​that, for the first time, the French Republic became officially ‘imperial’ under the terms of the constitutions of the Fourth Republic (between 1946 and 1958) and the Fifth Republic (since 1958). Paradoxically, the new institutions they built—​respectively, the French Union and the French Community—​were instrumental in both the formalization of the French Empire and its dissolution. The French Union was the consequence of the widening acceptance over the course of the Second World War that the French colonial order of things needed reform. Change first happened at the symbolic level. Following a tendency already established in the 1930s, the very words relating to ‘colonization’, more and more readily associated with the idea of exploitation and arbitrary power, were progressively abandoned in favour of the semantic field of the ‘overseas’ (outre-​mer).33 This point was made very clearly in the preamble to the Constitution of the Fourth Republic, which states that France is ‘eschewing all system of colonization based on arbitrary rule’ (écarte tout système de colonisation fondée sur l’arbitraire; line 18). But change also occurred at the institutional level: the French Union. It was designed as a very flexible structure in which new types of relationship between France and its colonies could be worked out. During the Second World War, the essential contribution of African troops to the war effort and the increased awareness that France would have to rely on its empire after the

94   Emmanuelle Saada conflict in order to remain a world power provided an important impetus for reform. These stakes were clearly articulated by the elite of the Free French administration in sub-​Saharan Africa when it gave itself the task of rethinking its ‘colonial policy’ at the 1944 Brazzaville conference.34 At the outset, however, the organizers discarded ‘any possibility of evolution outside of the empire (and) the constitution of self-​governments,’ and reaffirmed the paternalist credo that the main object of colonial administration was the ‘material, moral and civic elevation’ of African populations and the ‘valorization of humans, from a moral point of view, and of the milieu, from a material one.’35 They also recognized that the ‘time of majority’ was ‘approaching for our populations’ and, as De Gaulle affirmed in his introductory speech, they wanted to continue the program of ‘mise en valeur . . . on new foundations.’36 They envisioned the representation of both Europeans and natives in the future constitutional assembly and the establishment of a federal structure that would both ‘affirm the infrangible political unity of the French world’ and ‘the local life and liberty of each territory.’37 They also called for the territories to achieve ‘political personality’38—​a rather vague notion. Yet, the very idea of a ‘union’ was introduced for the first time not in the context of Africa, but of Indochina. A few days after the Japanese defeat of the French army and the proclamation of independence of Tonkin and Annam by the Emperor, in March 1945 the French ministry of colonies proclaimed a ‘French Union’ in Indochina conferring both Indochinese citizenship and French Union citizenship, a step that prefigured the double categorization of citizenship put in place by the constitution of the Fourth Republic. The two consultative assemblies (effectively, restored French National Assemblies) successively charged with drafting the Constitution of the Fourth Republic between 1945 and 1946 included, for the first time, representatives of the native populations from Algeria, Africa, and the Pacific Island territories alongside the deputies from the ‘old colonies’ (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion, Guiana, Saint-​Pierre et Miquelon, and the French Establishments in Oceania and in India). The two assemblies led important debates on how to restructure the distribution of power between metropolitan France and its dependencies.39 These discussions translated into the creation of the Union Française in 1946, an event preceded by several landmark items of legislation that dramatically reconfigured the colonial order. For instance, between December 1945 and May 1946 both the harsh penal regime for natives—​the infamous Code de l’indigénat, and forced labour—​were dismantled. Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Reunion were granted the status of departments with the same legal regime as in the metropole (excepting certain caveats mostly related to social policies), and the juridical distinction between citizens and subjects was abolished. Under the eponymously named Lamine-​Guèye Law of May 1946 the inhabitants of all overseas territories were granted the ‘quality of citizen,’ a formulation whose vagueness ushered in more wide-​ranging debates about the concrete meanings of citizenship.40 Institutionalized by the Constitution of the Fourth Republic of October 1946, the Union Française was a composite ensemble whose structure reproduced the layered history of the French empire. It included the French Republic (metropolitan France and its overseas departments and territories, including Algeria) on the one hand and, on

The longue durée of French Decolonization    95 the other, the associated territories (Togo and Cameroon, the former League of Nations Mandates that were later defined as being under French tutelage by the UN charter, and the condominium of New Hebrides). A  final category was the overseas states. This subset included the former Vietnamese protectorates Tonkin and Annam, Laos, and Cambodia, plus Tunisia and Morocco.41 While overseas territories were formally part of the Republic, unlike overseas departments, they were rendered automatically subject to French law. On the contrary, continuing a tradition of legislative exceptionalism, the constitution granted these territories a ‘particular status,’ intended to take their ‘particular interests’ (as defined under Article 74) into account. Aside from the former Protectorates, these overseas states were erstwhile colonies in the strict sense of the term: namely, the French holdings in sub-​Saharan Africa and Madagascar, New Caledonia, and French Establishments in Oceania. The constitutional debates of 1945 and 1946 were an occasion to radically rethink power relations between France and its former colonies. The first constitutional draft, which was rejected by French voters for reasons unrelated to colonial issues, offered a radically new vision of this relationship—​one founded on consent: ‘France forms with overseas territories on one hand and associated states on the other, a union based on free consent’.42 This contractual vision, even though it was deleted from the final version of the Constitution, later informed the process of decolonization. It opened the door to secession by overseas territories while closing it in other places, most notably the Algerian departments whose administrative incorporation within France was not based on ‘free consent.’ In the Algerian case, eventual secession would result from a violent political process, not a peaceful constitutional one. The preamble to the Constitution was ambiguous in affirming the ‘equality of rights and duties’ within the Union while, at the same time, paternalistically reiterating the civilizing mission of France towards ‘the peoples under her responsibility.’43 The tension between ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’ and the openness of the Constitution became the subject of many important debates in the next decade, focusing primarily on defining the actual meanings of ‘citizenship’ and ‘equality.’ These concluded with the 1956 Loi-​cadre instituting universal suffrage and uniform representation throughout the Union and considerably reinforcing the power of territorial assemblies.44 The familiar account of the Fourth Republic’s failure to manage an orderly process of decolonization certainly fits in the Algerian case, which was considered an integral part of France. But it does not do justice to the transformation of the French empire elsewhere. To a large extent, the right to secession included in the 1958 constitution of the Fifth Republic stems from the principle of the ‘freedom to administer themselves’ granted by the Constitution of 1946. This right was double: first, overseas territories were asked if they accepted the new constitution—​only Guinea refused it. Second, it gave to the territories that accepted the constitution the possibility of keeping their status, of assimilating completely into France, or of becoming autonomous within the new ‘French community.’ Smaller territories chose to keep their overseas territory status, while all of the territories in Sub-​Saharan Africa and Madagascar chose autonomy and, a few years later, full independence, which was also offered by the constitution. These dispositions

96   Emmanuelle Saada did not apply to Algeria, which had been granted an ‘organic status’ in 1947 with a local assembly endowed with large legislative powers. Algeria became independent only in 1962 after a long and bloody conflict.

Equality and Difference One of the most striking features of the decolonization period is the affirmation of equality and the concession of enhanced rights to all inhabitants of the French empire. While the exact definition and scope of these rights was very much in question, there was no doubt that this represented a radical break with the pre-​war period: since the mid-​nineteenth century, the French empire had been characterized by official discrimination between French citizens, endowed with an ever-​changing gamut of political, economic, and social rights, and native subjects, excluded from many of these rights and subjected to a stricter criminal code, forced labour, heavy taxation, and other forms of harsh treatment. Private matters related to marriage, filiation, and inheritance were determined by ‘personal status,’ which was highly variable from one place to the other and was supposed to reflect principles of customary law or, in Algeria, Islamic law. Among the subjects, only a few évolués, most often members of a French educated elite, could gain full citizenship, after having officially renounced their personal status and being thoroughly vetted by the French administration. The granting of citizenship instituted by the Lamine-​Guèye Law and the Constitution of 1946 thus together appear as a clear break with this tradition of colonial discrimination since it did not require native people to renounce their personal status. Until then, the French political tradition had made citizenship the attribute of an abstract individual, whose social origin and qualities are to be confined to the private, not public, sphere. The preamble of the 1946 Constitution broke this mould by affirming both the plurality of overseas peoples (les peuples d’outre-​mer) and their equality, without distinction of race and religion (line 16). Yet, for several reasons, the radicalism of the innovation of the 1946 moment should not be overemphasized. Since the nineteenth century there had always been voices within the Republican elite calling for the granting of full citizenship rights to natives without asking them to forego their personal status. For all that, the affirmation of equality and the granting of citizenship in 1945–​6, even if they were vague and less than original, were certainly perceived as revolutionary by actors and commentators at the time. Most importantly, they fed collective demands and policy programmes to transform the empire by eradicating discrimination. The rapid dissolution of the French community cut short any opportunity to see how this generalization of citizenship might have functioned in a reconfigured empire. Yet, subsequent evolutions in the remnants of the French empire indicate that tensions within French conceptions and practices of citizenship have remained after decolonization. Both the 1946 and the 1958 constitutions mention ‘peoples’ in the plural: in 1946, the French union is described as a ‘union between France and overseas peoples,’ founded

The longue durée of French Decolonization    97 on the principle of equality. In 1958, the constitution goes further by mentioning the ‘principle of self-​determination of peoples.’ These formulations occasioned many political and legal debates on the definition of the ‘peoples’ and their rights, especially in the context of the rise of ‘regionalism’ in France in the 1970s and 1980s, with various demands, ranging from cultural dignity to political independence, made by activists in metropolitan France (especially Brittany, the Basque country, and Corsica) and in overseas territories, and most notably in New Caledonia, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and French Polynesia.45 In 1991 in response to these demands, the French Constitutional Council opposed explicit reference to the ‘Corsican people, a component of the French people’ in a law on the status of the island. It did so by underlining that the Constitution distinguished between the ‘French people’ on one hand, and the ‘overseas peoples’ on the other—​only the latter were given a right to self-​determination. This distinction provoked bitter criticism, especially within the overseas departments and territories: a constitutional reform of 2003 put an end to these debates by stating that the French republic ‘recognizes overseas populations within the French people in a common ideal of liberty, equality and fraternity’ (Articles 72–​73). This inclusive vision prevailed in a context of political experimentation with differentiated citizenship in the three places in which a form of local personal status had been maintained. In Mayotte, the 2011 referendum to make the island a formal département meant a progressive implementation of French law and the disappearance of personal status. On the contrary, French Polynesia acquired many of the signs and prerogatives of autonomy through several reforms enacted between 1984 and 2004, including the establishment of a local parliament capable of drafting the country’s laws. A specific cultural identity has been recognized, which strongly promotes public use of local languages. Yet, personal status had already been eviscerated between 1887 and 1945 and today, only land ownership is still regulated by native law.46

Violence Decolonization was far from being simply a legal or political process. It was also—​in many places—​extremely violent. In Indochina, the war for independence from 1946 to 1954 killed 600,000 people. In Algeria, estimates vary widely, but around half a million Algerians were killed during the conflict. Anti-​colonial protests were also met with violent repression, e.g., in Sétif, Algeria in 1945 and in Madagascar in 1947. In New Caledonia, state violence was also deployed in 1988 against independence movements. These events must be considered in the light of a third structural trait of French colonialism: the repeated use of force and the many forms of violence routinely practised. In the early 2000s, the question of torture during the Algerian war, often described in detail within sometimes highly controversial testimonies, as well as in popular novels and academic works, sparked a new interest in colonial history in France and

98   Emmanuelle Saada its legacies in contemporary France. But reassessments of colonial violence expanded beyond the period of decolonization, becoming a means to revaluate the entire colonial period.47 The principal argument advanced was that a distinct culture of violence was invented and implemented in Algeria and later in West Africa—​a culture whose specificity was rooted in modern racism. This thesis relied on the analysis of rhetoric: during political debates over the fate of the French presence in Algeria, certain speakers advocated the extermination of the natives. Critical reassessments of French political thought focused on the contribution of notable French liberal thinkers, including their most respected representative, Alexis de Tocqueville, to a colonial discourse that justified the use of violent means of conquest.48 But the contention that colonial violence was both intrinsic and generic also rested on minute descriptions of many horrific events in which the French colonial army deliberately annihilated native populations: from the enfumades during the ‘pacification’ of Algeria, and the murderous Voulet-​Chanoine expedition to Lake Chad in 1898–​99, through to the violent repression of Kanak rebels during a 1917 uprising.49 Violence was used continually throughout colonial history, because resistance to colonial rule never abated. And when violence was not manifested in the use of blunt force, it was translated into legal codes that codified the arbitrary powers of local agents of the colonial state. Without due process, natives considered a danger to the security of the territory could be punished by these agents, who used administrative internment, collective punishment, or land sequestration. For smaller crimes, after 1881 in Algeria and later on in all French colonies, the ‘native code’ (code de l’indigénat) was designed to keep natives in check, retaining for administrators some of the ‘power of conquests.’ Throughout the colonial period, it granted administrators the power to terrorize the population.50 Such measures were subsequently imported into the metropolis to quell political opposition, from General Bugeaud’s 1848 charges against the June revolutionaries to the violence deployed against protesters against the Algerian war when, in October 1961, dozens of Algerians demonstrating peacefully were killed by the Parisian police. In February 1962 communist militants were again attacked by the police during a demonstration, resulting in the death of nine people, in what is known as the Charonne Metro Station Massacre. Ultimately, decolonization was marked by a deep tension between the recourse to violence and the mediation of political negotiation in attempts to reorganize imperial power. Important constitutional change affecting the relations between metropole and overseas territories, including the first steps towards institutionalized equality, went hand in hand with the use of blunt force, both at the imperial margins and in the metropolitan centre. In that sense, the time known as decolonization reproduced the deep tensions of French colonialism.

Notes 1. ‘Nous sommes les indigènes de la République!’ Le Monde, 16 January 2005. 2. See Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La Fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).

The longue durée of French Decolonization    99 3. Georges Labica, Francis Arzalier, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Pierre Tévanian, and Saïd Bouamama, Une mauvaise decolonization. La France: de l’Empire aux émeutes des quartiers populaires (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2007). 4. This was closely followed by ground-​breaking academic work on this issue. See especially Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) and Sylvie Thénault, Une drôle de justice: Les magistrats dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2001). 5. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 6. For one such formulation, see one of the most influential textbooks on colonial law: Arthur Girault, Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale, 2nd ed., Vol. I (Paris: Sirey, 1921), 70. 7. Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 8. Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept”, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences. Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 64–​92. 9. John Darwin, ‘What was the late colonial state?’ Itinerario 23, no. 3–​4 (1999): 73–​82. 10. Dominique Schnapper, Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 126. 11. Bernard Droz, Histoire de la décolonisation au vingtième siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2009). 12. Two prominent historians, Charles-​André Julien and Charles-​Robert Ageron, have developed this thesis in the context of Algeria. 13. François-​Xavier Vershave, La Françafrique: Le plus long scandale de la République (Paris: Stock, 1999). 14. Alexis Spire, Étrangers à la carte. L’administration de l’immigration en France (1945–​1975) (Paris: Grasset, 2005). 15. Sylvain Laurens, “La noblesse d’État à l’épreuve de ‘l’Algérie’ et de l’après 1962. Contribution à l’histoire d’une ‘cohorte algérienne’ sans communauté de destins”, Politix 4, no. 76 (2006): 75–​96. 16. Amelia Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 17. Mathieu Rigouste, L’ennemi intérieur, la généalogie coloniale et militaire de l’ordre sécuritaire dans la France contemporaine (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). 18. Sylvie Thénault, “L’état d’urgence (1955–​ 2005). De l’Algérie coloniale à la France contemporaine: destin d’une loi”, Le Mouvement Social 1, no. 218 (2007): 63–​78. 19. Charles Tshimanga, Ch. Didier Gondola, Peter J. Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora:  Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 2009). 20. See Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization (n. 5). 21. Yet, this analysis of decolonization as a moment of imperial transformation and political thought experiments does not explain why the new field of possibilities opened during this period closed so quickly. In one way, paradoxically, this perspective could reinforce the ‘tide of history’ thesis: even in the face of alternatives, the national form did prevail in the long term. 22. Since 2003, the ‘territoires d’outre-​mer’ have been replaced by the more fluid category of ‘collectivité d’outre-​mer’.

100   Emmanuelle Saada 23. Marc Bloch, French Rural History:  An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1931), tr. Janet Sondheimer (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Translation of Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française, 1931; John Darwin, The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 24. Véronique Dimier, Le Gouvernement des colonies, regards croisés franco-​britanniques (Bruxelles: Editions de l’université de Bruxelles, 2004). 25. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:  Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 26. Michael Collins, “Decolonization”, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., The Encyclopedia of Empire (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016),  1–​14. 27. Fabian Klose, “Decolonization and Revolution”, European History Online (EGO) [online] (2014). http://​www.ieg-​ego.eu/​klosef-​2014-​en. 28. Charles-​Robert Ageron, La décolonisation française (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 5. 29. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colony”, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1 [online]. http://​www. politicalconcepts.org/​issue1/​colony. 30. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–​ 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 31. Emmanuelle Saada, “The Absent Empire: The Colonies in the French Constitutions”, in Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson, eds., Endless Empires: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, and America’s Decline (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 205–​215. 32. The 1795 constitution was an exception in declaring the colonies an ‘integral part of the Republic’. 33. The Ecole coloniale, which produced the administrative colonial elite, became Ecole de la France d’Outre-​mer in 1934. The ministry of colonies became the Ministère de la France d’Outre-​mer in 1946. 34. La conférence africaine française, Brazzaville. 30 Janvier-​8 février 1944 (Paris: Ministère des colonies, 1945), 8. 35. ‘Valoriser les hommes sur le plan moral et le milieu sur le plan matériel’ In Ibid., p. 25. 36. Ibid., p. 28. 37. Ibid., p. 33. 38. Ibid., p. 34. 39. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–​1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 40. Ibid. 41. Only the Southern part of Vietnam, Cochinchina, had been a colony. Annam and Tonkin had the status of protectorates. 42. “La France forme avec les territoires d’outre-​mer, d’une part, et avec les Etats associés, d’autre part, une union librement consentie”; Article 41 of the project of Constitution, April 19, 1946. 43. “La France entend conduire les peuples dont elle a la charge à la liberté de s’administrer eux-​mêmes et de gérer démocratiquement leurs propres affaires”; line 18 of the preamble of the Fourth Republic Constitution. 44. On this, again, see Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation. 45. On how groups from the French provinces and the oversea territories demanding more autonomy joined forces, see Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

The longue durée of French Decolonization    101 46. Benoît Trépied, “Une nouvelle question indigène outre-​mer?”, La Vie des idées, May 2012, http://​www.laviedesidees.fr/​Une-​nouvelle-​question-​indigene.html. 47. In some cases, the violence of decolonization directly echoes the violence of the period of conquest or stabilization of rule. On this, see Raphaëlle Branche, L’ embuscade de Palestro, Algérie 1956 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010). 48. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’Etat colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 49. William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Bertrand Taithe, The Killer Trail:  A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Alban Bensa, Kacué Yvon Goromoedo, and Adrian Muckle, Les Sanglots de l’aigle pêcheur (Marseille: Anarchasis, 2015). 50. Gregory Mann, “What was the Indigénat? The ‘Empire of Law’ in French West Africa”, Journal of African History 50, no. 3 (2009): 331–​353.

Chapter 6

The first p ostc ol onia l nation in Eu rope ? T h e end of the Germa n e mpi re Andreas Eckert

Introduction: The First Postcolonial European Nation? Until recently, Germany’s1 colonial past was widely ignored by both professional academics and the broader public.2 This ignorance had to do with the widespread conviction that colonialism had to be equated with colonial rule. Thus, Germany was only allocated a place at the margins of colonial involvement. There is no doubt, of course, that the German colonial empire was not very important in economic terms and only lasted for little more than the three decades between the 1880s and World War I. Thus Germany became the first ‘postcolonial’ nation that had participated in the ‘new imperialism’ of the modern era, and consequently is an especially interesting example for the history of the end of empires.3 Moreover, it would be wrong to argue that, because German colonial rule was so short-​lived, it also was irrelevant to German history. Colonial possessions are one thing—​colonialism and colonial thinking are another. Even those who did not directly take part in this project approved it, because it promised markets and raw material, knowledge, progress, and civilization. Thus, one could argue that Germany with and without colonies was a close ally to the colonial project and that the effects of the colonial experience considerably influenced German culture and society not only during the period when Germany possessed colonies, but also after World War I.4 A particularly controversial discussion recently arose around the question of what German colonialism had to do with National Socialism, and to what extent colonial racial doctrines and practices—​especially the genocide of the Herero in German South West Africa—​shaped the Nazi wars of extermination and the Holocaust.5

The end of the German empire    103 This chapter attempts to discuss the wide-​reaching consequences of Germany’s comparatively short-​lived colonial project. It argues that while on the one hand, the German colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific ended abruptly in 1918/​19, the impact of the colonial experience continued after the formal end of the empire. Until today, the legacy of German colonialism is not only evident in the former colonies, but in Germany as well. This legacy shaped Germany’s complex entanglements with the broader history of decolonization. The chapter begins with briefly pointing why historians and politicians have ignored or downplayed Germany’s colonial past. It then looks at the variety of ways in which colonialism shaped interwar Germany and also discusses to what extent the Nazi Empire needs to be placed within the history of German colonialism broadly defined. It finally analyses how Germany shaped and was shaped by the end of the other European empires and the emergence of the ‘Third World’.

Historians, Politicians, and the Colonial Past The reluctance of German historians to deal with colonialism is closely connected with the strong focus on the nation state in German modern history. The overall importance of the Holocaust and the German Sonderweg for the critical historians of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s is crucial here.6 There is a certain irony that representatives of social history, or ‘societal history’, who stood up in the 1960s against the silences of those who had lived as adults under the Nazi regime and sharply criticized the conventional political history mainstream, and who saw themselves as spearheads for a truly modern historiography, primarily stuck to national historical outlooks.7 Social historians investigated patterns, transformations, and constellations of social forces in order to gain all-​encompassing visions of sectors such as politics and culture in German history. Unlike with their peer group in the United States, the growing presence of social historical studies did not lead to efforts to decentre hitherto dominant national frameworks in favour of transnational perspectives. Comparative perspectives with other liberal Western democracies played a certain role, but were often meant to further accentuate the hypothesis of a German Sonderweg. The renewed commitment to conceptualizing German history primarily from inside out also had significant implications for the ways in which Germany’s cultural and political interactions with the world beyond Europe were being depicted. For example, some prominent and often-​cited studies attempted to explain the history of German colonialism primarily as the outcome of domestic tensions.8 In many cases, factors contributing to colonialism, such as the logic of power politics and the international spread of colonial ideologies, were moved to the margins of historiographical considerations. Another factor that came into play was that in Germany after 1945 there were only few national or colonial minorities who could call for their histories. This further marginalized colonialism as a scholarly or media topic. Germany never had the experience

104   Andreas Eckert of an ‘empire striking back’ of hundreds of thousands of ex-​colonial migrants living and working in the metropole, as has been the case elsewhere, e.g., France and Britain. Its contemporary culture rarely references the colonial period itself but instead refers to the post-​World War II immigration of Turkish and other South European ‘guest workers’, or the more recent migration of “refugees” from non-​Western countries.9 In the mid-​ 1980s, a group of feminist African-​German women who operated largely outside established academic circles, attempted to connect the formation of an African-​German identity with the struggle against racism and discrimination in contemporary Germany. Their main concern was to challenge the widespread idea that ‘black’ and ‘German’ constituted an irreconcilable contrast and to establish a counter-​discourse to the dominant nationalist paradigm, which excluded the experiences of Africans.10 It should be added that the ways German historians dealt with colonialism corresponded widely with the attitude of politicians. Germany was apparently left untouched by the problematic consequences of colonial rule. The ‘coping’ with the Nazi past and with the Holocaust, as well as the integration into the West within the framework of the Cold War, ranked high on the political agenda. In this context, German politicians were prepared to concede—​at least to a certain extent—​the fatal role of anti-​Semitism in German history; colonial racism and the economic exploitation of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, however, were seen as something with which other European states had to cope. This attitude continued to be widespread among German politicians and the media after reunification. Take, for example, the negative reaction to the speech of the German minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, at the Durban conference against racism in September 2001, where Fischer excused himself in the name of Germany for slavery and colonialism. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung informed Fischer: ‘Unlike Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands, Germany does not look back on a distinct colonial past’ and sneered at Fischer’s attempts ‘to take the blame for whatever evils’.11 And when in August 2004, the German Minister for Development and Cooperation, Heide Wieczorek-​Zeul, publicly and very emotionally declared that the war of the Germans against the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa between 1904 and 1908 could be defined as a genocide,12 Christian Ruck, a politician of the Christian Democratic Party, immediately launched a press release in the name of his parliamentary party, which stated:  ‘Emotional outburst of Minister for Development can cost millions to German taxpayers’, arguing that Wieczorek-​Zeul’s excuse could provide the legal base for Herero claims for reparations.13 The public debate about the need of an official acknowledgement of the German parliament that the war against the Herero and Nama was a genocide continues apace. More recently, it received new dynamics in the context of the parliament’s recognition of the Armenian genocide.14 After World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany even presented itself as a guiltless partner in development politics with politicians free of neo-​colonial aims. The formerly lamented ‘loss’ of the colonies was re-​interpreted as a virtue. In 1959, for instance, permanent secretary Hasso von Etzdorf noted:  ‘We provide about a great advantage in Africa—​the loss of our colonies forty years ago.’15 On the other hand, the German

The end of the German empire    105 Democratic Republic regarded itself as the ‘natural partner’ of the ‘national liberation movements’ in Africa and tried to uncover the neo-​colonial efforts of the government in Bonn.16 The complexity of development politics and policies provides a pertinent example that, even many decades after the formal end of German colonialism, German policies were still involved in structures which were, in turn, part of the colonial project. The development initiatives after World War II were children of late colonialism and of the crises in the colonial empires of France and Britain.17 Many of the ideologies and practices relevant then are still—​in slightly modified form—​relevant for the development policies of European countries today—​e.g., the belief in the superiority of Europe or of the neglect of local African knowledge.18 At the economic level, many German firms probably took great advantages from ‘colonial situations and constellations’ in the world economy; for example, Africa is still mainly a producer of raw material without any important processing industries. However, to date, there is hardly any systematic research on this topic.19

Colonial Revisionism: the Interwar Years The Treaty of Versailles marked the formal end of German colonial rule, but not the end of German colonial ambitions. Huge crowds turned out to welcome home General von Lettow-​Vorbeck’s colonial army from German East Africa in March 1919. Germany’s military resistance in East Africa, mainly practised in the form of a guerrilla war with mostly African soldiers and at a terribly high price for the local population, was interpreted in the nationalist press as another instance of an army undefeated. However, in spite of von Lettow-​Vorbeck’s triumphant return through the Brandenburg Gate, right-​ wing groups circulated the story that it was the public’s ‘betrayal’ on the home front that forced the German empire to capitulate, and it was this that helped create the ‘stab in the back’ (Dolchstoßlegende) myth so prevalent in the 1920s. On 1 March 1919, the Weimar National Assembly that drew up the constitution of the Weimar Republic had called for the ‘Restoration of Germany’s colonial rights’, with a majority vote of 414 to seven.20

Colonialism: Prefiguring the Third Reich? Medical researchers especially felt the end of the German colonial empire as a dramatic loss of working and experimental opportunities. Doctors became an important part of the revisionist syndrome of the Weimar Republic. They employed the rhetoric of delay, arguing, for example, that in medical and other scientific research, Germany would fall behind the leading nations. Doctors also represented a certain continuity between colonialism and National Socialism, both as personnel and at a more structural level, for instance, in regard to human experiments.21

106   Andreas Eckert In her study on the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that Nazi totalitarianism and the Holocaust were prefigured by, or rooted in, European imperialism.22 Some recent studies haven taken up this idea. Jürgen Zimmerer argues in several publications that the Nazi wars of conquest and extermination with their central terms ‘race’ and ‘space’ stand in a line of tradition to European colonialism.23 However, according to Zimmerer, the Holocaust is not a simple copy of the conquest of America, Australia, and South Africa, but an extremely radicalized variant at best.24 The Nazi crimes cannot be traced back straightforwardly to colonialism; both in ideology and policy, National Socialism was far too complex and eclectic. However, Zimmerer argues that colonialism stands for breaking the last taboo—​that is, not only to contemplate the extermination of other ethnic groups, but to act accordingly. Without this consequence, his argument goes on, the assassination of the European Jews probably would have been unthinkable. There is, according to Zimmerer, one decisive difference between colonialism and National Socialism, which is the different role the state played in colonial genocides. The bureaucratic-​and state-​organized killing depended upon the stage of development of the state. While at the American colonial frontier the settlers and militia led the massacres, the embryonic modern administrative state in German South West Africa established prisoner camps as sites of extermination activities. The genocide of the Herero was not an active, industrial killing, but a passive campaign, as death often occurred through neglect. For instance, the German administration introduced pre-​printed death certificates with the inscription ‘death through exhaustion’.25 Arendt herself offers little empirical evidence and fails to specify the institutional and cultural mechanisms by which ideas and practices developed in the imperial realm were transmitted back to Europe and became the bases for policies instituted decades later.26 Zimmerer’s work created a lot of debate and met with considerable criticism. In essence, the suggestion of a link between colonialism and the Holocaust has brought up more questions than it has answered. It has certainly opened up new ways of seeing events and has placed German twentieth-​century history in new, broader contexts. However, the links suggested by Zimmerer and others were often more complex than they seem to assume, and suggest similarities caused by similar conditions, rather than deliberate transfers or biographical continuities. Moreover, the focus on the Herero war tends to create a new variant of the German Sonderweg and ignores the fact that German colonialism did not stand alone; rather, even after 1919, it was an integral part of the larger European and American colonial project. As some authors have suggested, in discussing the relationship between colonialism and Nazi violence, it might be more useful to think in terms of a shared colonial archive involving behaviours, rituals, forms of knowledge, and imagination, than to locate such links solely within the short-​lived German colonial empire.27 This approach also applies to the question as to whether the Nazis’ expansion towards the east should be placed in the broader context of colonialism.28 As David Blackbourn points out, ‘the real German counterpart to India or Algeria was not Cameroon, it was

The end of the German empire    107 Mitteleuropa.’29 Thus, in many ways, the German colonial empire only ended in 1945! Along these lines it has been suggested, especially with regard to Polish-​speaking areas, that German interventions in and fantasies about the European East can be read as a form of colonialism.30 Moreover, it is true that colonial references to the east during the Nazi period were not confined to the level of discourses; the actual practice of occupational policies exhibited some similarities with colonial rule as well. However, there were major differences between Nazi occupation of the east and German colonial rule in Africa. The Nazis’ expansion towards the east might be best framed within the context of the global transformation of colonial empires.31 Interwar Africa remained an object of German expansion fantasies and plans. Still, there were more pressing interests in foreign policy; in particular, the issue of the eastern borders of Germany. We can nevertheless observe for the period between the two World Wars something which Dirk van Laak has labelled the ‘imaginary elaboration of an imperial infrastructure’.32 Many Germans were very angry about the Allied verdict in the Treaty of Versailles that Germany had proved incapable of colonizing. As if to prove the opposite, during the Weimar Republic a number of individuals presented fantastic ideas and projects about how to make Africa productive and link it to Europe. Munich architect Hermann Sörgel presented a particularly remarkable proposal to partially drain the Mediterranean Sea in order to link Europe and Africa to a single continent ‘Alantropa’.33 In the late 1930s, the Nazi government initiated intensive plans and preparations for a future German colonial Empire. Compared to parallel projects for a new order in Eastern Europe, plans for a colonial German Africa were comparatively moderate.34 The end of the German war expansion to the East marked by Stalingrad also meant the official end of any colonial activities. In 1943, the Nazi authorities officially ordered the end of all colonial planning activities. At this point, the German colonial empire nearly was completed on the drawing board. The historian Wolf Schmokel sarcastically notes that there was never a non-​existing empire that was better administered than this one.35 Outside the realm of politics and planning, colonialism played an important role in its effects on popular imagination. The myth of benevolent German colonial rule was kept alive, most strongly personified in the supposedly ‘loyal Askaris’, the African members of the German armed forces in German East Africa.36 Not least, the new medium of films helped to satisfy a hunger for all things colonial and exotic.37 Most importantly, the genre of colonial literature became even more popular than before the war. By 1945, Hans Grimm’s 1926 novel ‘Nation without Space’ (Volk ohne Raum), which provided the influential slogan for the Nazi expansion in Eastern Europe, had sold over 650,000 copies.38 Colonial recreations that appeared in the context of a masquerade colonial ball held special importance for Germans and served as mechanisms to recreate the emotional frisson of colonialism. Colonialism was also a critical element of fascist pedagogy and appeared in school curricula in whitewashed ways while also adhering to the larger contours of Nazi racial ideology.39

108   Andreas Eckert

The Place of the African in Post-​Colonial Germany While the German empire was not striking back after World War I, a number of Africans lived in Germany in the interwar period. Their histories are increasingly seen as a crucial part of ‘postcolonial Germany’.40 With the formal end of German colonialism in 1919, migrants from the former German colonies became subjects of the new mandatory powers made up of Britain, France, Belgium, and South Africa. In legal terms, this change meant that Africans in Germany came nearer to the status of expatriates. However, the Weimar authorities, and especially the relevant department of the Foreign Office, strictly refused to naturalize Africans. Africans either got the observation ‘stateless’ in their passport, or they got a certificate as ‘formerly belonging to a German protectorate’ or as ‘former German protegé’ (Schutzbefohlener). Thus, the legal status of Africans in Germany remained unclear. Some Africans started to establish cultural and political networks in order to look after their rights and interests. German politicians had mixed feelings about the presence of more or less rightless but increasingly self-​ confident Africans. While some officials preferred to ‘carry these people directly back to Africa’,41 others regarded the small African diaspora in Germany even as a positive factor: as these officials were convinced that Germany would eventually have its colonies returned, the Africans living in metropolitan Germany were seen as potential multipliers who, once back in Africa, would spread a positive image of Germany. Thus, for the time being, forced deportation was beyond question. The Foreign Office employed a strategy that was meant to encourage Africans to leave the country ‘voluntarily’. At the same time, the authorities took care to secure livelihood of Africans during the remaining time of their stay in Germany. For this purpose, the ‘German Society for the Study of Natives’ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Eingeborenenkunde) was engaged to support needy Africans. However, even those German officials who found it useful to treat Africans well vehemently rejected relationships between African men and German women, although there was no legal hold on African-​German marriages in Germany. In the years after World War I there were heightened ‘race anxieties’ due to the so-​called ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’—​the presence of several thousand African soldiers among the French troops that occupied the Rhineland. Additionally, there was a prevalent sense that the ‘proper racial order’ had been inverted by the Versailles Treaty, which treated Germany as an ‘object’ rather than a full subject of international law, and by the ‘reverse colonization’ of the Rhineland with French colonial soldiers.42 In the German public, the African soldiers were presented as ‘cannibals’ and rapists. To quote only one of many similar examples, the Ärztliche Rundschau, a medical journal, wrote in 1920: ‘Shall we silently endure that in future days not the light songs of white, beautiful, well-​built, intelligent, agile, healthy Germans will ring on the shores of the Rhine, but the croaking sounds of grayish, low-​browed, broad-​muzzled, plump, bestial, syphilitic mulattos?’43 Since the mid-​1920s, Germany, especially in Berlin and Hamburg, became an important scene for the activities of ‘black revolutionaries,’ in many cases supported by the Soviet Union and the Comintern. Trinidadian George Padmore was a leading figure in

The end of the German empire    109 the Pan-​Africanist movement and for many years was a member of the Comintern head. He suggests that Moscow did not want to bring attention to itself and carefully chose Germany as the centre of anti-​imperial activities: They assigned the responsibility of organizing the new anti-​imperialist movement to the German Communists. . . . Shorn of her African and other colonies’ defeat in the First World War, Germany was no longer a colonial power; and it was thought that an anti-​imperialist call from Berlin would arouse less suspicion among colonial and dependent peoples than one coming from Western European capitals—​London or Paris—​possessing overseas empires.44

The so-called ‘Negro Bureau,’ established in Hamburg in 1930, served as a centre for the exchange of information. Directives from Moscow came there, and political operations were planned and directed. The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 put an end to these activities.45 After 1933 a number of African political activists migrated from Germany to France and England. For those who stayed in Germany, the situation deteriorated. The German government declared nearly all ‘members of the German protectorates’ as ‘stateless’, and due to the increasingly open racism of the German population, it became impossible for most Africans to continue working as artists, etc., in public. Still, many old colonials were concerned about the negative impact that Nazi race policies might have on former colonial subjects.46 They argued that at least some Africans in Germany had earned membership in German society by virtue of their service as colonial soldiers. As former ‘comrades in the protectorate’, they deserved jobs, and it was more desirable to employ former colonial subjects than to let them become burdens to society. These arguments eventually convinced some higher Nazi leaders, and in 1936 a circular was sent to all district leaders (Gauleiter), stating that: about fifty Neger from our former colonies live with their families in Germany. These natives are almost entirely without secure jobs, and when they find work, the employer is treated with such hostility that he is forced to let the Neger go. I point out that these Neger must be offered a means of living in Germany. It must also be taken into consideration . . . that some of the Neger remain in contact with their homelands and will report about their treatment in Germany. The Foreign Minister and I have therefore agreed that it must be determined which Neger to be put under special protection for their deployment for Germany. These will then be given a permit from the Foreign Office roughly stating that there are no reservations about their employment.47

The idea was that these Africans would serve as colonial propagandists for Germany. For this purpose, the German Africa Show was founded, a travelling exhibit that employed black performers, some of whom were German citizens and almost all of whom had spent many years in Germany, but who played the part of ‘Africans’ for the German crowds.48 The show offered a means of survival to a number of blacks in Germany who

110   Andreas Eckert found it nearly impossible to find employment under the repressive regime established by the Nuremberg Laws. In exchange, however, they were forced to bring forward the political message of colonial revisionists: that German colonizers had not been brutal to their colonial subjects, as the Versailles Treaty has claimed, but had rather been especially benevolent and caring, for which reason Africans wanted nothing more than for Germany to recolonize their continent. The German Africa Show was shut down in 1940. With the outbreak of World War II, and especially after the German government gave up its colonial ambitions after the defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, there were no reasons left to create space for Africans and to exclude them from persecution. In the end, however, as von Joeden-​Forgey states, ‘the Nazis never created a coherent race policy for Africans and other blacks in Germany.’49 The Africa Show’s cancellation in 1940 was supposed to be part of a wider prohibition against the public appearance of blacks. Although the Reich Theatre Chamber officially forbade such appearances, many Africa Show performers still found jobs in the theatre. Others found parts in state-​sponsored colonial nostalgia films that became popular during the war. Despite the availability of film and theatre jobs, many African Germans, especially those categorized as Mischlinge, were forced into concentration camps. The total number of blacks who were murdered in the camps is disputed, but some estimates mention the number of about 2,000; documents indicate that individual Africans received death sentences or were murdered in concentration camps for alleged ‘attempted rape’ or for ‘Rassenschande’ (racial pollution).50 Despite the space created for Africans due to an incoherent race policy, ‘the Nazi state still reserved to murder them on an individual basis as unwanted race aliens.’51

Germany in a Decolonizing World After World War II, Germany was liberated in a fundamental sense:  from the competition for and among empires.52 But even during this period, German yearning for Africa flared again, this time in the context of the newly designed European Union. As a partner of France, West Germany participated in plans to more systematically ‘open up’ Africa’s raw materials. Political journalists formulated new visions to push forward the exploitation of Africa as a common task of Europe. The widely read journalist A. E. Johann stated: The world is not yet portioned: quite the contrary! The world is about to be partitioned again. For Europe and especially for us Germans, the quickly developing African continent offers new and exciting possibilities. But we must realize this, we must realize that there are more important and exciting perspectives than inner-​ German politics. Africa is a common European task, but it is especially a German task. And this is true of Egypt to Cape Town, and from Dakar to Zanzibar and Madagascar.53

The end of the German empire    111 Africa also played an important part in the German-​German relations.54 Walter Hallstein, a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gave his name to the so-​called Hallstein Doctrine, which helped determine West German attitudes towards the new African states. This doctrine implied that the diplomatic acceptance of the GDR by the new African states was regarded by Bonn as an ‘unfriendly act’ which had to be sanctioned, for example, by cutting development aid. Thus, just as the US, the USSR, and the former colonial powers France and Britain took the Cold War to Africa, Germany did it as well.55 The special attachment many Germans seem to have to the tropical rainforest can also be read as evidence that colonialism was a point of reference for cultural phenomenon and practices in the Federal Republic of Germany. Two icons of the post-​World War II period illustrate this attachment. The first is Albert Schweitzer, who spent a considerable part of his life as a medical doctor in Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa.56 After 1945 the then-​already elderly ‘jungle doctor’ Schweitzer rose from the jungle, so-​ to-​speak, and was celebrated by many Europeans and especially in Germany as incarnation of the good Samaritan and alter ego. Moreover, Lambarene became a mythical site, a place where ‘German culture’ survived during ‘the dark years’, and the ‘bad times’. Born in Alsace, Schweitzer was French citizen; this did not prevent Germans from celebrating him as ‘their’ hero. The journalist Rolf Italiander wrote in 1954 that ‘Lambarene is not only a hospital under the Equatorial sun, but far more; a bulwark of good old Europe. For this we not only have to thank Albert Schweitzer, we also have to make efforts to emulate Schweitzer and his exceptional moral force.’57 This strengthened the idea of Africa as a continent without culture and made Africa a particularly suitable site for utopia and dreams—​for worse or for better. The second icon, the extremely popular animal film director Bernhard Grzimek, who won in 1959 an Academy Award for Serengeti Shall Not Die, invoked the colonial day-​dream. In his movie No Place for Wild Animals, he constructed the tropical rainforest as a stage on which the German search for a place in the sun was re-​arranged in the world of animals. The old idea of the ‘people without space’ was transferred in an amazingly open way to the African fauna.58

The Student Movements Engagement with the countries of the later so-​called ‘Third World’ and the postulate of international solidarity was limited to a shadowy existence in the first two decades of the post-​war era in the Federal Republic. With the blossoming of the student movement, these aspects gained a more prominent political significance from the mid-​1960s. The West German student movement was motivated by a catalogue of issues that were linked to each other. The growing outrage about the US waging war in Vietnam counted among these concerns. The preoccupation with the Vietnam War came hand-​in-​hand with an increasing willingness among activists as well as the—​ultimately limited—​ public, to deal with other matters with regard to the ‘Third World’ as well. Nonetheless, it is suggested that the beginnings of such an international consciousness was supported

112   Andreas Eckert only by a small group of committed people. In this context, Quinn Slobodian referred to the long-​overlooked role that students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America assumed since the early 1960s for the mobilization of their West German fellow students.59 Although the public in the Federal Republic were made aware of decolonization processes in Africa around 1960, they did not, however, initially lead to an intense examination of the conditions south of the Sahara. After the murder of Patrice Lumumba, in which the American and Belgian Secret Service were involved (as well as his Congolese opponents), there were small demonstrations in German towns, primarily by German and African students. In Bonn, the police tackled the protesters with water cannons. Closely linked with the dramatic history of the independent Congo, in Berlin in December 1964, there occurred one of the first larger protests of the West German student movements. It targeted the visit of the Congolese minister president, Moïse Tschombé, who had been involved in Lumumba’s murder, and with the help of foreign soldiers (including former members of the Waffen SS) brutally attacked opponents in the country and allowed North-​American and Western European companies to exploit the country’s raw materials, while directing a portion of the income into his own pockets. The demonstrators succeeded in foiling the police with a new tactic and forced their way into the no-​protest zone at a town hall in Schöneberg (Berlin). The ruling mayor Willy Brandt even received a delegation of German and African students.60 Timothy Scott Brown writes that the protests against Tschombé’s visit represented a fusion of the global and the local. Collectively, the demonstrations all constituted a protest against colonialism, the Cold War, and against Communism as an organized principle. They also heralded the start of a series of protests against state visits from foreign dictators that were motivated by Cold War considerations.61 And, in the perception of the leading protagonists of the student movement, they marked a turning point that established new actors, new political strategies, and a new consciousness. In the words of Rudi Dutschke: ‘The anti-​Tschombé demonstration was the first time we took the political initiative in the city. With the benefit of hindsight, we can position it as the start of our cultural revolution, when, generally speaking, all the values and standards of the establishment up till then were called into question.’62 Similarly, in the early 1960s, the controversies in neighbouring France regarding the Algerian war of independence and the brutal French tools of repression caught attention. Years before his related texts were published as German translations, Jean-​Paul Sartre’s heavy criticism of French colonialism had already become an important reference point, at least among the initiated. A particularly revealing episode is the support of the Algerian liberation movement (FLN) through a colourful troupe of a mere 300, with only 20 persons at its core: a mix of long-​standing left-​wing activists who had already fought against National Socialism, representatives of the ‘Generation of the Scholl Siblings’ whose youth had been stolen by the Nazis, and ultimately younger people, often students.63 One text that was closely related to the struggle for liberation in Algeria shaped debates not only in Germany about the liberation of the ‘Third World’ (as few writings in the 1960s and early 1970s did), but also about the issue of violence.

The end of the German empire    113 Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth appeared at the end of 1961, a few days after the author’s death from leukaemia, and its first German edition was published in 1966. The Wretched of the Earth, half socio-​psychological analysis of colonialism, half political polemic, became a key revivalist text for anti-​colonial leftists in many parts of the world. Fanon was not only an important inspiration to the West German student movement, but he is also considered as having been an important source of ideas for terrorist movements. Die Rote Armee Fraktion (The Red Army Faction, RAF) quoted Fanon in order to propagate violence as a legitimate resource against what they considered as the ‘new fascism’ of the Federal Republic.64 By and large, one event in particular inflamed the student movement, and its international dimension. The public demonstrations on the occasion of the state visit of the Shah of Persia (now Iran) led to police brutalities, which reached their climax on June 2, 1967, when a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot by a policeman in West Berlin. This event catapulted the student movement into the public consciousness, and pointed to the significance of international issues within the domestic political arena.

Vietnam and the Third World Above all, Vietnam remained the exemplary model for the key discussion in the eyes of radical students. Would the imperialist forces with the US at the helm prevail and introduce a further period of oppression and exploitation, or would the ‘emancipatory forces’ prevail and effect fundamental changes and precipitate an ‘uprising against the West’? The International Vietnam Congress, which attracted around 5,000 participants to West Berlin in February 1968, put this issue on the agenda and highlighted the international impetus of the student protest. The student initiative found support from the appeal of numerous notable writers and intellectuals, who declared: Vietnam is the Spain of our generation. We should not burden ourselves with guilt by staying silent or being neutral regarding the revolutionary struggle of the Vietnamese people. So we welcome the initiative on the part of the young generation, which is contributing to mobilising the world’s opinion against the United States’ intervention in Vietnam and the destruction of the Vietnamese people caused by it.

This Congress was in many respects characteristic and momentous. In the speeches as well as in the final manifesto, the global unity of the revolutionary struggle was emphasized again and again. Rudi Dutschke called out to the participants:  ‘Comrades! We do not have much more time. In Vietnam, we are also being destroyed on a daily basis’. And the slogan at the major final demonstration (where 15,000 people took part) read: ‘The struggle for the Vietnamese revolution is part of the struggle for the liberation of all peoples from oppression and exploitation.’ Che Guevara’s aspiration to create ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ served the participants as a symbolically eye-​catching incentive for the stated aim of the creation of an ‘anti-​imperialist unity front’.65

114   Andreas Eckert The emphatically internationalist orientation of the student movement, culminating at the Vietnam Congress in Berlin, revealed a rather romanticized identification, not only with the Viet Cong, but with various anti-​imperialist fighters. The consideration of all liberation movements of the ‘Third World’ as equal by important representatives of the student movement was based on a highly selective and often clearly incorrect perception of developments in the various world regions. On the one hand, obvious differences were reduced to the major and crucial challenge of imperialism. On the other hand, at that time activists as well as theorists overlooked the fact that the primary interest of the liberation movements was more about achieving state independence and establishing themselves as the controlling authority of the respective country, and less about the fomenting of the global revolution. The sharp criticism and branding of the misery and exploitation in the ‘Third World’ contrasted in a strange way with the general expectation that, in the language of Mao Zedong, the ‘villages’ would encircle the ‘cities’; therefore, an age of liberation and of socialism would be initiated through a new edition of the Chinese Revolution, which is projected at global level.’ Importantly, among those who, in the late 1960s, had great expectations of the global effectiveness of the ‘Third World’s’ revolutionary potential, there were only a few who had dealt more intensively with these regions, not to mention gathered experiences there. The emergence into the Third World primarily took place in heads, although there were various opportunities for organizing stays. In the field of academic research, regions beyond the North Atlantic remained marginalized for the time being. Ultimately, the question as to what extent the commitment against the Vietnam War can be explained with the guilt complex of the younger generation because of the crimes of their fathers is controversial. Several authors emphatically argue that the extra-​parliamentary opposition activists who grew up after 1945 wanted to avoid ‘burdening themselves with guilt’ through being passive towards the military action rejected by them in Vietnam as their father’s generation had done through silent collusion or by actively supporting National Socialism.66 In a certain way, the Vietnam Congress in February 1968 heralded the end of the ‘Third World’ as an important mobilizing factor for the student movement. Not least after the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke two months later, the focus shifted more significantly towards domestic political matters. However, the Third World by no means disappeared from the agenda. For instance, the ideology of revolutionary anti-​ imperialism remained alive within the milieu of the ‘K Groups’, which was admittedly characterized by sectarianism. A  relationship to the Third World that was increasingly professionalised really blossomed after 1968 in the field of humanity as well as human rights. The West German department of Amnesty International, the organization ‘Doctors without Borders’ or the ‘Society for Threatened Peoples’ have their origins in the movement against the Vietnam War, and also in the involvement against the Biafran War. The south-​eastern Nigerian region of Biafra seceded and proclaimed itself an independent state in May 1967, and what followed was a tough war waged with great bitterness. Complete land blockades led to a drastic supply crisis in the densely populated region, and only deliveries of arms and food by air occasionally managed to break through the blockade. The Biafran War was televised in the same manner as the

The end of the German empire    115 Vietnam War, and pictures of emaciated children appeared in the West German print media. The appeal for assistance was made to the Western audiences, who responded, although the radical West German students did not, as the complex configurations in Nigeria did not fit the scheme of the national liberation movements against the imperialist West and its puppets.67

Colonial Legacy The Biafran War changed the international perception of Africa in the long term. The continent of hope became a continent that was at its worst, crisis ridden and incapable of development, and at best, an object of sympathy and aid. International solidarity was now frequently, if in no way exclusively, about aid for the victims of wars, starvation, and natural disasters in the ‘Third World’.68 The requirement to abide by human rights and the criticism of repressive systems remained an important part of the ‘Third World movement’. Southern Africa clearly stood out within the world of solidarity movement. The anti-​apartheid movement was perhaps the longest active single movement of Federal German Tiersmondisme. In the second half of the 1980s it even experienced a tangible increase in membership, but by the first free elections in South Africa in 1994, it had largely dissolved. The major significance of South Africa to the Third World involvement had not least to do with a quite specific relationship with German politics. There was ample occasion to call the West German government to account with regard to its position on South Africa. The commitment to this region quickly went beyond the circle, which understood itself to be part of a revolutionary student movement. In this way, people who worked in both state and church development cooperation projects belonged to the most active parts of the relevant solidarity projects.69 A scandal such as the West German contribution to the building of the gigantic Cabora Bassa dam in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, which was primarily supposed to provide the apartheid state of South Africa with cheap electricity, provoked criticism not only from the student movement but also from numerous civil societal and church groups; it contributed to putting the commitment for social change in South Africa in favour of the colonized majorities on to a wider and more ongoing basis.70 As part of the politics of “socialist internationalism”, since the late 1970s the GDR hosted “contract workers” from Mozambiquze (and Angola). To meet the need for skilled cadres in recently independent Mozambique, the by now former Portuguese colony and the GDR agreed in 1979 to send young Mozambicans to East Germany on four-​year contracts, where they would receive training and then work side-​by-​side with German colleagues in factories, before returning home to repatriate their technical skills, to bolster Mozambican industry, and their political convictions, to drive the continuing revolution. These Africans’ work in GDR industry was celebrated largely as the manifestation of the German people’s solidarity with their newly independent socialist brothers.71 Parallel to the West German student movement’s engagement with the liberation struggles in the ‘Third World’, the 1960s and early ‘70s saw a more critical encounter

116   Andreas Eckert with the legacies of German colonialism, albeit in a rather limited and superficial way. Universities became the main foci of a critical engagement with the German colonial past, although most of the activities, such as the toppling of the statues at the University of Hamburg of Hermann von Wissmann and Hans Dominik, two German colonial administrators, were mainly framed as a critique of the continuation of ‘fascist’ policies and ‘repressive’ university structures into the 1960s, rather than as a substantial debate about colonialism.72 After decades of being relatively blinkered, there is currently a renewed and heightened interest in colonialism. The claim for reparations launched by the Herero was one factor that brought the colonial past onto the agenda of German society. Moreover, across Germany, debates are under way about whether streets with names referring to certain inglorious episodes from the German colonial era should be renamed. More broadly, present-​day processes of globalization and possible links between colonialism and current global integration are subjects of intense debates in many parts of the world and find their echoes in Germany as well.73

Postcolonial Germany? When is a nation ‘postcolonial’? Many authors referred to the fact that, even if colonialism had come to an end, colonial ‘mentalities’ persisted. For a long time, German decolonization was interpreted as abrupt. It occurred at the stroke of a pen in Versailles and was implemented within a matter of months. For Germany in the interwar period, the loss of overseas colonies led to numerous efforts to reclaim the colonial empire, although in essence, colonial revisionism as a political project remained a side issue. On the other hand, colonialism occupied an important place in popular imaginaries. After World War II, the early ‘loss’ of colonies was re-​interpreted as a virtue, while at the same time efforts to forget the colonial past prevailed. Moreover, the former colonized never reached Germany to engender confrontation, as was the case in France and Britain. The perspective of postcolonial ‘entangled histories’ is thus much rarer in Germany than in other European powers, where ‘public postcolonial memory formation has become enriched with the memories of the former colonized in Britain and France in a way which is incomparable with the rather one-​sided memory formation in the German metropole.’74 However, colonial images are still very much with us—​e.g., schoolbooks, travel reports published in newspapers and weeklies, or statements of German politicians who discuss Africa once there is no microphone or camera present. An investigation about the representation of Africa in German mass media and teaching manuals concluded that ‘especially as far as Africa is concerned, highly problematic ways of presenting the continent continue. This is especially true for schoolbooks covering subjects on colonial Africa, biology, and geography, for example.’75 According to Stuart Hall, a postcolonial society is not merely ‘after’, but ‘going beyond’ the colonial.76 If this definition holds true, then German decolonization is an ongoing process.

The end of the German empire    117

Notes 1. This chapter draws in some parts from Andreas Eckert, “Germany and Africa in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. An Entangled History?”, in Heinz-​Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Comparative and Transnational History. Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 226–​246. 2. Good examples for this ignorance are widely read syntheses of German history such as Hans-​Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 3 (Munich: Beck C. H., 1995); Hagen Schulze, Kleine deutsche Geschichte (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1998). 3. Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany. Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4. Over the last two decades, numerous studies and collective volumes emphasized both the importance of the colonial experience for the German Empire and the crucial role of colonial afterlives for German history after World War I:  See, e.g., Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010); Idem, German Colonialism. A  Short History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–​1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004); Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten. Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne:  Böhlau Verlag, 2003); Idem, ed., Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt a.M:  Campus, 2003); Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox and Suzanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination. German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Eric Ames, Maria Klotz and Lore Wildenthal, eds., Germany’s Colonial Past (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2014); Volker Langbehn and Mohammed Salama, eds., German Colonialism. Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011); Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, eds., German Colonialism Revisited. African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014); Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur. Deutsche Planungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas 1880–​1960 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004); Lore Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–​1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 5. For the Herero case, see Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Genocide in German South-​West Africa. The Colonial War of 1904–​1908 and its Aftermath (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2008). This topic is discussed further later on in this chapter. 6. According to the concept of the German Sonderweg (Special Way) mainly pursued by critical social history, the structures of the German Empire had obstructed the possibility of dealing with crises of industrialization and the construction of the state. The pre-​industrial elites of the Reich, with their preference for authoritarian solutions, had prepared the way for the ‘radical facism’ of the 1930s. National Socialism was seen from this point of view ‘as the anti-​modern final stage of a disastrous special development’. See Thomas Welskopp, “Identität ex negativo. Der ‘deutsche Sonderweg’ als Meistererzählung in der bundesdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft der siebziger und achtziger Jahre,” in Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Die historische Meistererzählung. Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 118f. 7. For the following paragraph, see Dominic Sachsenmeier, Global Perspectives on Global History. Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge:  Cambridge

118   Andreas Eckert University Press, 2012), 116f. A key text for the ‘new’ German social history is Jürgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte. Begriff, Entwicklung, Probleme, 2nd edn. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986). The opus magnum of the arguably most important protagonist of ‘societal history’ is a very good example for the marginalization of Germany’s international entanglements; see Hans-​Ulrich Wehler (n. 2). 8. Hans-​Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1969). 9. Schilling, Postcolonial Germany, 5. See Karin Hunn, ‘Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück . . .’: Die Geschichte der türkischen ‘Gastarbeiter’ in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). 10. See May Opitz et  al., eds., Farbe bekennen:  Afro-​deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin:  Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986); English translation as Showing Our Color:  Afro-​German Women Speak Out (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). For a broad and long-​term history of Afro-​Germans see Sara Lennox, Remapping Black Germany. New Perspectives on Afro-​German History, Politics and Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). 11. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 September 2001. 12. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 August 2004. 13. Janntje Böhlke-​ Itzen, “Die bundesdeutsche Diskussion und die Reparationsfrage. Ein ‘ganz normaler Kolonialkrieg’?” in:  Henning Melber, ed., Genozid und Gedenken. Namibisch-​deutsche Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt a.M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2005), 117f; Henning Melber, “The Genocide in ‘German South West Africa’ and the Politics of Commemoration—​How (Not) to Come to Terms with the Past”, in Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., German Colonialism and National Identity (London: Routledge, 2011), 251–​264. 14. See the controversial statement by the President of the German Parliament, Norbert Lammert, in the German weekly Die Zeit from July 9, 2015: ‘Deutsche ohne Gnade. Wer in der Bundesrepublik vom Armenien-​Genozid spricht, darf vom deutschen Völkermord an den Herero und Nama nicht schweigen.’ Lammert, a Christian Democrat, argued for the recognition of the colonial war in Namibia as a genocide. For the complex development of German-​Namibian attempts to deal with the common past see Reinhart Kößler and Henning Melber, Völkermord –​und was dann? Die Politik deutsch-​namibischer Vergangenheitsbearbeitung (Frankfurt a.M.:  Brandes & Apsel, 2017). 15. Quoted in Ulf Engel, Die Afrikapolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1999. Rollen und Identitäten (Münster/​Hamburg: LIT, 2000), 40. 16. Gareth M. Winrow, The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). 17. See Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society. The Labor Question in British and French Africa (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996); Joseph H. Hodge et al., eds., Developing Africa. Concepts and Practices in Twentieth Century Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 18. See, for example, Hubertus Büschel, Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe. Deutsche Entwicklungsarbeit in Afrika 1960–1975 (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2014). 19. Some hints are provided in studies on the emergence of a German development policy after 1950 and its close connections with German export interests. See Andreas Eckert, “Westdeutsche Entwicklungszusammenarbeit mit Afrika. Ein Blick auf die 1950er bis 1970er Jahre”, in Alexander Gallus et  al., eds., Deutsche Zeitgeschichte—​Transnational

The end of the German empire    119 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 27–​44; Peter Molt, Die Anfänge der Entwicklungspolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Ära Adenauer (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2017). 20. Conrad, German Colonialism, 187f. More broadly:  Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration. Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg, 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003). 21. Wolfgang U. Eckart, Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus. Deutschland 1884–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh Paderborn 1997), 505ff. However, Eckart can only refer to a few examples which may verify this continuity. 22. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Allen & Unwin, 1951). 23. See his collection of related articles:  Von Windhuk nach Ausschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: LIT, 2011). 24. For this context, see Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide. Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008). 25. For a comparative analysis of colonial concentration camps in Southern Africa around 1900, see Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘Ein trauriges Fiasko’: Koloniale Konzentrationslager im südlichen Afrika 1900–​1908 (Hamburg: HIS, 2015), who strongly argues that there were no direct links between the concentration camps in German South West Africa and the Nazi camps. 26. Dirk Moses, “Hannah Arendt: Imperialism, and the Holocaust”, in Langbehn and Salama, German Colonialism,  72–​92. 27. For a substantial and by and large convincing critical evaluation of Zimmerer’s approach, see Stephan Malinowski and Robert Gerwarth, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz”, Central European History 42 (2009), 279–​300. On the shared colonial archive see Christoph Kamissek and Jonas Kreienbaum, “An Imperial Cloud? Conceptualising Interimperial Connections and Transimperial Knowledge”, Journal of Modern European History 14 (2016), 164–​182. 28. On this question, see, among many studies: Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 29. David Blackbourn, “Das Kaiserreich transnational—​ eine Skizze”, in Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 302–​324, here: 322. 30. Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East. Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 31. Conrad, German Colonialism, Ch. 10. 32. Van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur; see also Dirk Van Laak, “ ‘Ist je ein Reich, dass es nicht gab, so gut verwaltet worden?’: Der imaginäre Ausbau der imperialen Infrastruktur in Deutschland nach 1918”, in Kundrus, Phantasiereiche,  71–​90. 33. Dirk van Laak, Weiße Elefanten. Anspruch und Scheitern technischer Großprojekte im 20 Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: DVA, 1999), 166–​173. For the broader context of Sörgel’s efforts see Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism”, American Historical Review 122 (2017), 1137–​1170. 34. On Nazi plans for a German colonial empire in Africa see: Alexandre Kum’a Ndumbe III, Hitler voulait l’Afrique. Les plans secrets pour une Afrique fasciste, 1933–​ 1945 (Paris:  Harmattan, 1980); Karsten Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators? Die NS-​ Kolonialplanungen für Africa (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2008). 35. Wolfe W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire. German Colonialism, 1919–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). 36. See Stefanie Michels, “Der Askari”, in Jürgen Zimmerer, ed., Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2013), 294–​308;

120   Andreas Eckert for a broader social and political history of the Askaris, see Michelle Moyd, Violent Inter­ mediaries. African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). 37. Christian Rogowski, “The ‘Colonial Idea’ in Weimar Cinema”, in Volker Langbehn, ed., German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 220–​238; Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine. Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino (Munich: Text + Kritik, 2009). 38. Conrad, German Colonialism, 188. Also:  Luke Springman, “Exotic Attractions and Imperial Fantasies in Weimar Youth Literature”, in John A. Williams, ed., Weimar Culture Revisited (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 99–​116; Wolfgang Struck, Die Eroberung der Phantasie. Kolonialismus, Literatur und Film zwischen deutschem Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010). 39. Schilling, Postcolonial Germany. 40. Robbie Aitken and Eva Rosenhaft, Black Germany. The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For some life stories, see Andreas Eckert, “Louis Brody (1892–1951) of Cameroon and Mohammed Bayume Hussein (1904–1944) of Former German East Africa: Variety Show Performers and the Black Community in Germany between the Wars”, in Dennis D. Cordell, ed., The Human Tradition in Modern Africa (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 159–​174. 41. The former German Govenor in Cameroon and German Southwest Africa, Theodor Seitz, as quoted in Fatima El-​Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche. Der Diskurs um ‘Rasse’ und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2001), 108. 42. The literature (mostly in German) on this topic is vast. See, for instance, Christian Koller, ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt.’ Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial-​und Militärpolitik (1914–​1930) (Stuttgart:  Franz Steiner, 2001); Iris Wigger, Die ‘Schwarze Schmach am Rhein:’ Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007). 43. Quoted in Fatima El-​Tayeb, “Dangerous Liaisons. Race, Nation, and German Identity”, in Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver, eds., Not So Plain as Black and White: AfroGerman Culture and History, 1890–2000 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 27–​60, here: 49. 44. George Padmore, Pan-​ Africanism or Communism:  The Coming Struggle for Africa (London: Doubleday, 1956), 323. 45. For a comprehensive history of Panafrican activities between the wars and the role of Germany in related networks, see Holger Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (Boston: Brill, 2014). For the history of an important centre of anti-​imperial politics in Europe in the interwar period see Michael Goebel, Anti-​Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 46. For the following paragraph, see Elisa von Joeden-​Forgey, “Race Power in Postcolonial Germany. The German Africa Show and the National Socialist State, 1935–40”, Germany’s Colonial Past, 167–​188, esp. 172f. 47. Quoted by ibid., 173. 48. See Susann Lewerenz, Die Deutsche Afrika-​ Schau (1935–1940). Rassismus, Kolonialrevisionismzus und postkoloniale Auseinandersetzungen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006); Elisa Forgey, “ ‘Die große Negertrommel der

The end of the German empire    121 kolonialen Werbung’:  Die Deutsche Afrika-​Schau 1935–​1943”, Werkstatt Geschichte 3, 9 (1994),  25–​33. 49. Von Joeden-​Forgey, ‘Race Power’, 180f. 50. See Marianne Bechhaus-​Gerst, “Alexander N’doki. Ein Opfer nationalsozialistischer Justiz”, in Peter Martin and Christine Alonzo, eds., Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt. Schwarze im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2004), 557–​565. See also Marianne Bechhaus-​Gerst, Treu bis in den Tod. Von Deutsch-​ Ostafrika nach Sachsenhausen  –​Eine Lebensgeschichte (Berlin:  Ch. Links, 2007). For the autobiography of an African-​German who survived the Nazi period see Theodor Michael, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu. Erinnerungen eines Afro-​Deutschen (Munich: DTV, 2013). 51. Von Joeden-​Forgey, ‘Race Power’, 181. 52. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 438. 53. Quoted in Van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur, 345f. 54. See Ulf Engel and ​Hans-​Georg Schleicher, Die beiden deutschen Staaten in Afrika. Zwischen Konkurrenz und Koexistenz, 1949–​1990 (Hamburg: Institut für Afrika-​Kunde, 1998); Brigitte H. Schulz, Development Policy in the Cold War Era. The Two Germanies and Sub-​Saharan Africa, 1960–​1985 (Hamburg: LIT, 1995). 55. Following this doctrine, Tanzania, for instance, was sanctioned by the Federal Republic for having acknowledged the GDR. See Engel, Afrikapolitik, 117–​145. 56. Caroline Fetscher, “Lambarene und der Dschungel der Deutschen”, in Michael Flitner, ed., Der deutsche Tropenwald. Bilder, Mythen, Politik (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2002), 225–​243. 57. Quoted in ibid., 233. See also Augustin Emane, Docteur Schweitzer, une icône africaine (Paris: Fayard, 2013). 58. See Michael Flitner, “Vom ‘Platz an der Sonne’ zum ‘Platz für Tiere’ ”, Der deutsche Tropenwald, 244–​262. In the meantime, numerous studies on Grzimek’s documentaries and their use of colonial images and ideologies have appeared. See, e.g., Franziska Torma, “Serengeti darf nicht sterben!”, in Frank Uekötter, ed., Ökologische Erinnerungsorte (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Rupprecht, 2014), 133–​156. 59. Quinn Slobodian, “Dissident Guests. Afro-​Asian Students and Transnational Activism in the West German Student Movement”, in Wendy Pojman, ed., Migration and Activism in Europe since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 33–​56. 60. Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front. Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 61. Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties. The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–​1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 23. 62. Quoted in Uwe Bergmann et  al., Rebellion der Studenten oder Die neue Opposition (Reinbek: rororo, 1968), 63. 63. Claus Leggewie, Kofferträger. Das Algerien-​Projekt der Linken im Adenauer Deutschland (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1984). 64. Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance. Student Protest in West Germany & The United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 129–​131. 65. Ingo Juchter, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999); Norbert Frei, 1968. Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich:  DTV), 2008), Quotes in Juchtler, 258, and Frei, 129.

122   Andreas Eckert 66. Reinhart Kößler and Henning Melber, Globale Solidarität? Eine Streitschrift (Frankfurt a.M: Brandes + Apsel, 2002). 67. Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 68. For the history of the competition between the two Germanies in the field of humanitarian activism, see Young-​Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 69. Reinhart Kößler and Henning Melber, “The West German Solidarity Movement with the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa:  A (self-​)critical perspective”, in Ulf Engel and Robert Kappel, eds., Germany’s Africa Policy Revisited. Interests, Images and Incrementalism (Hamburg:  LIT, 2003), 103–​126. See also Zeithistorische Forschungen/​ Studies in Contemporary History:  Apartheid and Anti-​ Apartheid—​ Südafrika und Westeuropa, 13, 2 (2016). 70. See Niels Seibert, Vergessene Proteste. Internationalismus und Anti-​Rassismus 1964–​1983 (Münster:  Unrast, 2008). On the broader history of the dam, see Allen and Barbara Issacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Cabora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–​2007 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013). 71. For this hitherto largely unknown story see Eric Allina, “Between Sozialismus and Socialismo: African workers and public authority in the German Democratic Republic”, in Mahua Sarkar, ed., Work out of Place (Berlin:  De Gruyter, 2017), 77–​99, and especially Maria Schenck, Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives:  Histories and Memories of Angolan and Mozambican Migrants in the German Democratic Republic, 1975–2015 (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2017). 72. Schilling, Postcolonial Germany, 138–​141; Ingo Cornils, “Denkmalsturz:  The German Student Movement and German Colonialism”, in Perraudin and Zimmerer, German Colonialism, 197–​212. 73. For current scholarly and public debates on the importance of the colonial past for German society, see among others, Jürgen Zimmerer, ed., Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2013); Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller, eds., Kolonialismus hierzulande. Eine Spurensuche in Deutschland (Erfurt: Sutton, 2007). One indication of a rising interest in German colonialism is the popular success of a large exhibition on German colonialism in the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 2016. See Deutsches Historisches Museum, ed., Deutscher Kolonialismus. Fragmente seiner Geschichte und Gegenwart (Stuttgart:  Theiss, 2016). Finally, recent controversies about human remains from former colonies stored in numerous German museums refer to the growing importance of questions of provenance research and the restitution of objects. 74. Schilling, Postcolonial Germany, 203. 75. Anke Poenicke, Afrika in den deutschen Medien und Schulbüchern (St. Augustin, 2001), 52. For colonial images in current TV movies, see Wolfgang Struck, “The Persistence of Fantasies: Colonialism as Melodrama on German Television”, in Perraudin and Zimmerer, German Colonialism, 224–​231. For the continuation of colonial stereotypes in media coverage on Africa see Lutz Mükke, Journalisten der Finsternis. Akteure, Strukturen und Potenziale deutscher Afrika-​Berichterstattung (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2009). 76. Stuart Hall, “When Was the ‘Post-​Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”, in  Ian Chanbers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-​Colonial Question. Common Skies—​Divided Horizons (London: Routledge, 1996), 242–​260.

Chapter 7

Excep tional I ta ly? T h e M any Ends of th e I ta l ia n C ol onial  E mpi re Nicola Labanca

Exceptionalism? Often, both the history of Italian colonialism and the ways in which the Italian empire ended have been seen as exceptional. Historians’ views on the matter differ, with some suggesting that the Italian colonial empire was either built too late or remained too small to be compared to the large overseas possessions of other European imperial powers, such as Portugal, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. This depiction of the Italian empire’s exceptionality explains why non-​Italian historians still frequently overlook it.1 Plenty of Italian scholars also consider united Italy’s colonial empire as something exceptional, albeit for different reasons. Italian colonial expansion—​which began in earnest during the early 1880s under a liberal Italian regime ruled by the moderate centre-​left of Agostino Depretis and Marco Minghetti—​was seen by the Liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce as too benevolent and too liberal an undertaking—​one in which Italians distinguished themselves from other European colonizers for their ‘bonhomie’; the idea of the ‘Italians as good folk’ encapsulates this optimistic view.2 At the other end of the spectrum, the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini admired the Italians’ colonial exploits because he thought that they showed how much Fascism’s colonialism differed from the ‘rapacious’ empire-​building of other European countries; colonialism, in Mussolini’s eyes, was also integral to the regime’s creation of the New Man in Italy.3 This explains Mussolini’s hostility, during the war on Ethiopia, to any pictures of Italian soldiers relaxing and playing the mandolin or enjoying card games appearing in the Italian press4. As much as Croce and Mussolini represented opposing viewpoints, each claimed a certain exceptionalism for Italy.

124   Nicola Labanca This exceptionalist interpretation seems to be backed up by a superficial analysis of the end of Italian colonialism. While the major colonial empires underwent long, complex, and often painful ends, Italian colonialism seemed to disappear in a few months, between April 1941 (when Italian troops were defeated in Ethiopia) and January 1943 (when Axis forces left Libya); in less than two years, Italy lost all its colonies in the fury of the Second World War. While, in practice, this exceptionally rapid demise was comparable with that of the German colonial empire in 1918, and its Japanese equivalent in 1945, such a rapid collapse could still be held to negate the very existence of an Italian decolonization process in some respects.5 This chapter argues the case for a different, less exceptionalist version of events. Of course, certain facts are indisputable: united Italy’s colonial empire—​first Liberal and then Fascist—​was short-​lived, geographically circumscribed, and, with one exception, politically ended due to a world war that was lost or, at least, not won. Yet the end of a colonial empire is always a process, rather than a single event. In judging that end, it is important to examine many historical actors, whose actions and ideas may have different timelines. Furthermore, for Italy, the decolonization of empires extended beyond the political end of formal rule. More salient still, as Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank have observed,6 is that the major impact of war (and revolution) is a common factor in the history of all twentieth-​century European colonial empires. If Italy lost everything because of war, the singularity here is more a matter of extent, rather than of the quality of the historical phenomenon. And the Italian empire’s end unfolded as it did precisely because of its particular features. Certain distinctive features may be elucidated with unorthodox methods. For example, the history of colonial rule is not usually written through counterfactual hypotheses. But it may be useful in this case to discuss some similar hypotheses to explain certain features of actual history. For instance, had all the Italian Empire’s colonial subjects defended their colonizers, it would have been considerably more difficult for the anti-​fascist powers, Britain especially, to conquer and then hold those territories after the defeat of Italy. In order to understand why certain possibilities never manifested themselves—​much to the disappointment of Italian settlers—​it is possible to dwell usefully on the features of Italian colonialism and its end. Certain particularities could be more readily understood if historians read more novels. For example, in his 1947 novel set in the Horn of Africa in 1935–​1936, the great writer Ennio Flaiano wrote about admitting hidden sins, or the fear of being accused of them, a telling, if enigmatic observation.7 Other particular features are found in factors as yet little considered by historians. For example, much more research is needed to understand the impact of the Fascist regime’s 1937 formal introduction of a legal system of racial segregation in its colonial empire, which anticipated South African apartheid, and even surpassed it in certain ways. Although this is a familiar subject—​ albeit more so among Italian historians than non-​Italian ones—​it has yet to be studied in detail.8 Introduced by a Fascist regime, racial segregation expressed the Fascists’ intention to extend their ideology to their colonial empire, itself a particular feature that sets the Italian case apart from the empires of other European powers. In practice, a

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    125 colour bar and formal distinctions between whites and indigenous populations, as well as between those populations, had always been an essential feature of European colonial rule. What set the Fascist case apart was the introduction of legislation and consequent regulations intended to govern countless aspects of everyday life in the colony in accordance with Fascist ideology. This was no farce; in 1939, a year after the introduction of anti-​Semitic legislation in Italy in replication of the race laws already applied in the colonies, a theorist of Fascist racism devised a ‘scale of races’ in the Italian colonial empire, saying If we were to delineate a classification, in order to reach conclusions about the personal political statutes of citizenship in the Italian State, it would naturally be as follows: a) Italian citizen of the Aryan race, i.e. an optimo jure citizen; b) Italian Muslim citizen, limited to the Libyan provinces; c) an Italian citizen of Jewish race, which in turn can be divided between the so-​called “discriminated” and the so-​ called “non-​discriminated”; d) the Italian citizen of the Italian Aegean Islands; and the Libyan Italian citizen, including Libyan Jews); f) subjects of Italian East Africa (...) the conditions of the Aegean Italian citizen and Libyan Italian citizen could be in turn divided, taking into account the diminished legal capacity of Jews, who nonetheless still differ from Jewish Italian citizens of the Cismediterranean area in maintaining their personal status and, for the Italian Aegean Islands, their inheritance status as well.9

If discussions of the colonial empires must necessarily keep in mind the particular features of those empires, it seems evident that this ‘scale of races’ was peculiar to Italian (Fascist) colonialism. That being said, following Cooper and Burbank’s general suggestions, normalcy and exceptionality merge in the history of all colonial empires, including the Italian one.10 Thus, it is particularities, rather than outright exceptions, within the Italian colonial empire that should be discussed when analysing the empire’s development, or its end.

Geographies, Demographics, and Diplomatic Ambitions Unfortunately, international historians often pay little attention to the basic features of the Italian colonial empire’s history; for example, even Cooper and Burbank’s remarkable Empires only spends a few lines on the very existence of Italian colonies in Africa,11 despite the fact that, in the late 1930s, it was the third-​largest European empire at the time in terms of geography, and, according to Bouda Etemad’s calculations, fifth in terms of population.12 The first African territory to be conquered was Eritrea. Situated on the Red Sea, it stood at a strategic crossroads between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt. The Italian

126   Nicola Labanca colonialists had always considered this small colony affectionately, nicknaming it the ‘firstborn colony’. Its major centres were the port of Massawa, conquered in 1885, and, later, the highland capital of Asmara. Eritrea’s arable land was limited to the highlands, and both the coastal eastern lowlands and their western counterpart, bordering Sudan, were desert zones. They were poor and sparsely populated by Muslim or animist nomadic peoples. Although Eritrea was long considered the most Italianized of the colonies, and Asmara struck many as being redolent of a small Italian city, the Italian settler population never exceeded 5,000 before 1935.13 With the colonizers taking up little space, the indigenous ruling elite reached several ‘arrangements’, perhaps better described as ‘accommodations’ similar to those they had made before with the Egyptians, Turks, Sudanese, Ethiopians, and others. Typical in this regard was the exceptional status accorded to Eritreans recruited to serve in the colonial military. Tens of thousands of Eritreans chose to serve as askari to satisfy Italy’s urgent need for colonial troops to fight in the colonial wars that Italy had started in Libya and Ethiopia. Between sharing the profits of Massawa’s port trade and paying wages to the askari, the Italians reached workable arrangements in a colony of farmers and semi-​nomadic people of Coptic, animistic, or Muslim faiths. However, the main reason Eritrea was conquered and kept, despite Italy’s 1896 defeat at Adawa, was the politics of diplomatic prestige. ‘Allied’ to the powerful United Kingdom, and adjacent to the vast Ethiopian interior, the ‘first-​born colony’ made Liberal Italy feel ‘great’—​or at least ‘greater’—​even though many Italian colonialists favoured more proximate expansion across the Mediterranean in Tunisia, Libya, or Egypt. Italy’s second colony, Somalia, had a very different history.14 The first Italian administrative presence dated to 1889, but their control of the interior was sporadic at best until the mid-​1920s. The Muslim majority population remained closely bound to the customary ruling elites, both among the coastal merchant class and the landowners of the interior. A  negligible number of Italians settled in Somalia, and military and administrators always outnumbered colonizing entrepreneurs, concessionaires, or livestock farmers. Only the 1922 violent Fascist ‘pacification’ of Somalia rendered the territory more accessible to Italian settlers; it is, however, questionable whether Somalia’s economy and society was significantly altered through settlement. In Somalia, as in Eritrea, the prestige and strategic potential of a large colony on the Indian Ocean far outweighed any revenue accrued, which never covered the colony’s material costs to Italy. The Italian conquest of Libya unfolded differently again.15 In 1911, after patient crafting of diplomatic agreements with all other European powers, which began at least a decade earlier, Giovanni Giolitti’s Liberal Italy struck a major blow to the Ottoman Empire by occupying its remotest vilayets. In an atmosphere of nationalistic fervour, the entire Italian ruling elite (opposed only by the Socialists) pushed Italy into an onerous war—​more than 100,000 men fought for a year and a half on what would become Italy’s ‘fourth shore.’ The results attained were meagre; in 1913, Italy occupied only a few coastal cities, and it achieved meaningful control of the interior

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    127 only twenty years later. However, the Libyan colony differed from the others from the start. Both Liberal Italy and, from 1922, the Fascist government actively encouraged the settlement of Libya. ‘Soldiers of work’—​traders, artisans, farmers, and workers—​ replaced armed soldiers. As this suggests, Italian Libya was, from its inception, a colony of ‘poor whites’ (petits blancs). Though propaganda always outstripped reality, the Fascists having promised to send millions of Italians to Libya to outnumber their French equivalents in Algeria, Libya nonetheless distinguished itself as the colony of ‘demographic imperialism.’16 Strategically, control of Libya bolstered Italy’s presence in the Central Mediterranean, although it failed to turn the Mediterranean into the mare nostrum of Fascist propaganda. More important here is that inter-​communal relations remained tense. Local populations never forgot the harsh Fascist repression epitomized by the concentration camps built in Cyrenaica between 1929 and 1933—​nor did these memories fade when General Rodolfo Graziani, known as the ‘Butcher,’ was replaced by the more palatable Italo Balbo, nor when Benito Mussolini visited Libya in 1937 to take up the ‘Sword of Islam,’ styling himself as the defender of Muslims against their British and French ‘oppressors.’ Italians boasted that they had unified Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan into one Libya, but local ruling elites were much less unified than the colonial authorities supposed. The prestige of the Senussi brotherhood was undiminished, and the memory of the hanged Cyrenaican leader Omar al-​Mukhtar was kept alive (and is to this day) in Libya and throughout the Middle East. The history of Ethiopia as an Italian colony reveals some similarities with that of Libya.17 It was also a colony of settlement, rigidly upheld by armed force, with a barrier of blood dividing the ruled and the rulers, and here, too, material costs far outweighed any presumptive benefits. That said, the differences were more pronounced. Ethiopia was an independent state, not a colony, when the Fascists invaded in 1935. Ethiopia was many times larger, its population more diverse, richer, and with a ‘national’ story of their own built around the histories the Ethiopian monarchy and the Coptic religious elite. As such, in the brief period from 1935 to 1941, Ethiopia was controlled, but never truly conquered. Both the monarchy and prominent Ras regional leaders retained high levels of local support and led a sustained armed resistance. Neither was much affected by Fascist repudiation of Ethiopia’s traditional hierarchies, nor by the colonial administrative preference for the Muslim population at the expense of the Coptic majority, policies reflected in a hateful institutional racism. Nor was the Fascist government’s enormous spending in Ethiopia enough to co-​opt the population or to develop the country. Worse, the seizure of Ethiopia did nothing to raise the Fascist regime’s prestige abroad or domestically. The anti-​Fascist powers knew that closure of the Suez Canal could strangle Italian rule in Ethiopia, and, tellingly, even the flow of Italian immigrants to the new colony started to slow in 1938. Thus, the history of the Italian colonial empire should be broken down into a history of its parts, although some common elements can be found.

128   Nicola Labanca

Fascism and the Italian Colonial Empire Even though the Italian government, like all its imperialist peers, insisted on the uniqueness of its African conquests, the history of Italian colonialism shared common traits with the history of European colonialism of the time. For example, while Eritrea was, in some respects, a typical colonial trading entrepôt, Somalia was more characteristic of other tropical African colonies, and Libya and Ethiopia evinced patterns of racial stratification common to white settlement colonies such as Algeria and Rhodesia (and racist legislation in Ethiopia anticipated South African apartheid legislation). Interestingly, in Italy these different Italian colonial trajectories were long viewed as an agglomeration of different, multiple histories. Italian governments and people acknowledged that the country had once possessed African territories, but there was less consciousness of a single, coherent empire. It is perhaps telling that the first book title that included the term ‘Italian colonial empire’ was only published in 191218—​thirty years after the initial conquests, and the year before a single ministry of colonies was established in 1913. Jingoistic pride in ruling a colonial empire, rather than an accretion of disparate possessions, owed something to the conquest of Libya, perhaps even more to the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–​1936. In a much-​quoted public speech, Mussolini stated that it was the defeat of the Ethiopian negus that brought ‘the empire back to the hills of Rome.’19 It was at that point, according to the Fascist regime, that Italy’s history—​and its standing—​became truly imperial once more. Significantly, it was at this point that King Victor Emmanuel III was elevated to the title of Emperor. Put simply, it was politics, in particular Fascist politics, that created a singular empire out of disparate African possessions. But neither Fascist ideological pronouncements nor Mussolini were specific about exactly what this empire was. Was it a single legislative and regulatory construct? A single administration? Or was it an artifice—​an impression of grandeur lent substance by the addition of the new, large colonial territory of Ethiopia? Answers were never forthcoming. At any rate, it was primarily Fascist propaganda that encouraged Italians to believe that they ruled an empire. The point bears emphasis. When investigating the end of the Italian colonial empire, it is important to note that it was proclaimed ‘born’ with Fascism. Equally, at its end, it was a Fascist empire that died.

Economics and Budgets To understand how that colonial empire lived and how it ended, it is necessary to consider the economic substance underlying its political objectives.20 Some of the lands that Italy conquered were resource poor. The more extensive assets of others, like Ethiopia,

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    129 were difficult to exploit. None were densely populated like British India. Furthermore, as the initial conquests of Eritrea and Somalia unfolded, Italy’s Liberal ruling class remained divided about the usefulness of conquering territories in the Horn of Africa, rather than investing in the ‘Africa’ that Italy had at home: namely, the South and the Italian countryside. One result was that Italy’s annual budget, whether under the liberal democracy or the Fascist regime, was invested minimally in the African colonies.21 Italian colonial trade was similarly marginal. Large outlays of government expenditure were only made in the early years of the conquest of Libya, and then, much more so, of Ethiopia. To be precise, expenditure on the 1935–​36 war was more or less equivalent to an entire year’s budgetary spending. Subsequent costs for maintaining and ‘developing’ Ethiopia were also exceptionally high, and, after such an expensive war, the regime was loath to admit having spent so much for little or no reward. Even with these exceptions, the colonies’ three-​sided poverty—​measured in terms of limited natural resources, trade, and Italian public spending—​had several consequences. On the one hand, it eradicated any belief within local African societies that submitting to Italy as a colonial power might confer economic benefits. On the other hand, it revealed Italy’s minimal commitment to empire: only a few of Italy’s economic interests, in specific, not very lucrative sectors, were directly tied to the colonies; most domestic enterprises were not imperial at all. As such, it is no wonder that, despite the poverty of the Italian countryside, the vast majority of Italian emigrants left, not for the country’s African colonies, but for the Americas22 and the rest of Europe, or even non-​ Italian Mediterranean Africa (Egypt, and particularly Tunisia, where there were always more Italians than French). It is also not surprising that Italy’s imperialist lobby groups always had considerably fewer members relative to their counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, or even Germany. In short, economically, and therefore politically, Italians were less structurally involved in the colonies than the people of other European imperial nations. Given an empire that was so little loved or wanted, it was easier to bring it to an end.

Colonial Sentiments Although it is easy to demonstrate that political considerations of diplomatic advantage and enhanced prestige figured high on the Italian side, and that economic and social calculations were rather marginal, it is more difficult to measure the depth of popular imperialism within Italian society. Of course, this was a sentiment that evolved over time23—​public interest registered more prominently after the (few) conquests, but quickly ebbed during the frequent defeats and reversals, oscillating between these poles in other periods in-​between. These variations mirrored divisions among Italy’s Liberals,24 many of whom remained sceptical of imperial adventurism, while the Socialists and Republicans more unequivocally opposed imperialism. It was only the

130   Nicola Labanca zealous patriotic enthusiasm for the war in Libya and then the destruction of democratic freedoms by the Fascist regime that fostered imperial sentiment at home—​or at least neutralized its opponents. Even so, colonialist propaganda was not matched by civil society activism or imperialist lobby groups to compare with those of other European colonial powers. That being said, having addressed the reasons for popular opposition to empire, there were also feelings of excitement, pride, and even conviction that, in many times and in many cases, made large sections of the Italian population enthusiastically imperialist. Repeated military defeats in the wars of the Risorgimento made Italians more impressed by the successes more easily achieved on the colonial front. Italy’s constant marginalization within European affairs, ‘the last of the great powers’ at best, also increased the public appetite for colonial conquests that created the illusion of placing Italy on a par with the empires of other more longstanding European imperial powers. Misperceptions aside, it is also worth recalling that, had Italian rule in Libya and, later Ethiopia, been effective and enduring, Italy might have built up the commanding position in the Mediterranean and the Horn that successive Italian governments craved. Additionally, the nature of the Fascist regime explains deepening Italian enthusiasm for empire, especially in 1935–​36—​not least as it abolished freedom of expression for two decades between 1922 and 1943 thereby stifling anti-​colonial opposition and press criticism.25 Scholars of Italian colonialism too often overlook this fundamental point: inter-​ war Italian colonialism was Fascist colonialism. When, in 1937, the regime promulgated colonial racial legislation, public sphere criticism was simply unviable. Instead, for twenty years, Italians were conditioned by a Fascist regime’s colonial propaganda.

Local Brokers In order to understand the strength or weakness of the Italian colonial empire—​after 1922 a Fascist empire—​it is necessary to study the local experiences of the different colonies. Although their histories are quite diverse, they ultimately converge in some aspects, and it was at the end of the Empire that this convergence became clearest. No colonial empire could endure without the cooperation of local auxiliaries.26 Much as it is no longer possible to adopt dichotomous ways of seeing African societies split between resistance and collaboration, it remains clear that colonial influence subsisted through the involvement of local brokers, who pursued their own interests for their own purposes, and who bargained their acceptance of European external authority and helped make it acceptable to their local clients. In the Italian colonial case, this layer of brokers and partners was generally quite small. As the Italians exported more workers (principally so-​called ‘poor whites’) than capital, they saturated the colonial administration with their own people, including those in low-​level clerical posts that might otherwise have been held by an indigenous middle class. Compounding the problem was the absence of state support for native education,

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    131 as a result of which Italian colonial government did not develop a substantial cadre of supportive local administrators. Even in the area in which colonial Italy most depended on Africans—​within the military and its ranks of askari, especially in Eritrea—​there was no sustained effort to retrain former colonial soldiers and non-​commissioned officers as local officials.27 This tendency to administrative exclusion, already evident in the liberal era, became more systematic under Fascism, where racist ideology denied substantial positions of authority to local people within colonial society. During the twenty years of Fascism, this broad exclusionary principle was articulated in increasingly radical terms until 1936, at which point it became more absolute; Mussolini’s regime publicly declaring its intention to remove all vestigial power from Ethiopia’s Amharic groups. The official slogan of nessun potre a mezzadria (literally ‘no power to sharecroppers’) effectively signified the official intention to restrict all colonial power to whites. In contrast to the complex French administrative debates over assimilation and association, the abiding British preoccupation with styles of indirect rule, or broader discussions about the nature and purposes of French or British colonial reform, the Fascist principle was simpler: complete segregation, at least insofar as it could be achieved. In practice, this general principle played out differently between colonies, in different phases, and in different localities. Italian rule lasted longer in Eritrea than elsewhere. A unified sense of Eritrean national identity was unlikely to coalesce owing to the high degree of social segmentation and the marked geographical divisions and differing lifestyle patterns between highlands and lowlands, and between urban and rural dwellers, in addition to the colony’s ethnic and religious differences. External identity attachments were, if anything stronger, for instance, Tigrinya connections with Ethiopia, and comparable ethnic and religious bonds with the Sudanese. In this sense, Italian colonialism perhaps strengthened a certain sense of Eritrean identity, if only in opposition to these alternative external connections. It was this that facilitated the emergence of a stratum of local colonial powerbrokers.28 In Somalia, any comparable process proved more difficult, if not impossible, because bonds of local identity remained strong, not, as yet, ‘dismantled’ by colonial power.29 Libya presented still greater challenges. Sub-​divided into Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan, with strong bonds of attachment among Berbers and Arab-​Berbers, and administratively organized around highly complex local qabails, it was inherently difficult to unify any element of the population around the colonial power.30 Nor was the growing strength of the Senussi brotherhood stifled by the initial eradication of anti-​colonial and anti-​Italian resistance. In twenty years of Fascist rule only a dozen local medical doctors had been trained in the country—​a dismal statistic that not only confirms how closed and myopic Italian colonial policy was, but also highlights the almost complete absence of any indigenous Libyan elite promoted through partnership in colonialism. In Ethiopia, any supportive social groups or compliant local ruling elite that might have served as indigenous auxiliaries were even scarcer. Fascist rule was not only more short lived, but also more dramatically anti-​native, and even less administratively effective.31 Based on the discussion thus far, it would be inaccurate to suggest that there was no genuine Italian decolonization simply because Fascist Italy lost its colonies during the

132   Nicola Labanca Second World War. The radicalizing effects of Fascist colonial policy and the regime’s blind refusal to cultivate local elites had already set a sort of decolonization in motion. No nationalist, reformist, or independence movement could operate unmolested in the Italian colonies—​an unchanging repressive environment that contrasted with the greater freedom of manoeuvre exploited by anti-​colonial groups in neighbouring states, for example, the Wafd in Egypt or Tunisia’s Neo-​Destour. By the time the Italian colonial empire faced its greatest external threats there were no local representatives prepared to defend it.

Uncertain Settlers Meanwhile, in the same period, Italians also began to distance themselves from both the Fascist regime’s colonial myths and its radical ideological agenda. There is evidence for this attitudinal shift in the decline in applications for settlement to Ethiopia, and the return home of many of the first-​wave settlers who ventured to the territory immediately after the victorious end of the war in 1936.32 Although at first glance the situation in Libya appeared different, closer examination reveals a similar trend. In 1938–​39, despite the haemorrhaging of settlers from Ethiopia, the regime boasted loudly that it could deliver tens of thousands of Italian emigrants to colonize the lands seized from the anti-​colonial rebels of the Cyrenaican Jebel. In fact, the much-​vaunted twin expeditions, each of 20,000 settlers, eventually established fewer than thirty thousand settlers often in newly built villages. The failure of this late-​stage colonization programme shattered any illusions about Fascism’s ‘new builders of Empire.’ In Libya, these colonization schemes, which were highly discriminatory based as they were on wholesale expropriation of Libyan-​owned lands, also failed to forge any lasting bond between the colonial authorities and the settler populations. It might seem counterintuitive that an overtly racist colonial policy designed to promote settler interests failed to consolidate Fascism among Italians in the Libyan colony. On one hand, Fascist legislation obviously sought to forge a stronger and more racially configured settler identity, encouraging ‘poor whites’ in particular to see themselves as empire builders. On the other hand, implementation of these legislative initiatives encountered numerous obstacles, leaving it open to question whether institutional Fascist racism brought together communities of settlers in new ways.33

Decolonization: An Event or a Process? It is important to keep these diverse socio-​political contexts in mind when analysing the decolonization of the Italian colonial empire. The contextual background helps explain

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    133 the connection between a rapid loss of territorial control owing to the pressures of an external conflict (what we might term the decolonization event) and its impact upon the pre-​existing structural weaknesses of the empire, which dramatically influenced it over time (what we might term the decolonization process). This interaction between the decolonization event and the decolonization process differed according to the territory and the different players within local colonial relationships. Put briefly, the extraneous pressures of the war acted upon pre-​existing colonial structures, speeding up the pace of decolonization: a process that had—​in some respects—​already begun. Framed in this perspective, Italian colonies were subject to the same decolonization processes that had gathered momentum internationally at least since the First World War. At that time, within Libya, for instance, the process of colonization/​decolonization helped catalyse Italy’s perhaps most ambitious experiment in colonial reform through the Politica degli Statuti (literally, Policy of the Statutes), which granted local parliaments and special citizenship status to Italian colonial subjects. Unfortunately, this policy was blocked, first by late Liberal Italy and its resumption of the manu militari conquest of the colony, and then by the arrival of Fascism, which firmly opposed any citizenship concessions to Libya’s colonial population, and was even more hostile to any recognition of nationalistic political movements or any form of colonial parliamentary representation. In none of the Italian colonies did these movements develop substantially either in the years immediately following the First World War or during Mussolini’s dictatorship. Fascist administrators effectively stifled potential sources of civil society opposition. For example, in Ethiopia, the regime took great care not to favour the movement of progressive local intellectuals—​derisively termed ‘jackets’ for usually dressing in western, rather than in local clothing.34 In the meantime, additional administrative barriers made it increasingly difficult for the local Coptic Church and its priests to work as before. Equally significant were regime efforts in Libya and Ethiopia to sabotage a nascent form of unionization among native workers that some Fascist supporters advocated as part of the broader effort to form new worker-​based institutions as part of a colonial corporatist system. Between May 1941 and January 1943, when the Commonwealth’s military units in the Horn of Africa and Northern Africa beat the German and Italian forces, obliterating Italian colonial power, some anti-​colonial actors were already active, but only to the limited extent possible under the previously repressive system. Viewed in relative terms, the impact of Fascist authoritarianism was to prevent the emergence of strong anti-​ colonial movements in any Italian territory that might be compared to those in other European colonies. After the military victory of anti-​Fascist forces, the process of decolonization unfolded in a variety of ways. Ethiopia quickly reverted to its emperor Haile Selassie. The other Italian colonies (Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya) were placed under transitional British military administration. After several years, Eritrea was offered to Ethiopia, and Libya was established as an independent monarchy, although one under close British supervision, headed by the Senussi prince Idriss, who became King in 1951. After an attenuated process which culminated in United Nations authorization, Somalia—​at the time still truncated owing the separate status of the neighbouring

134   Nicola Labanca territories of former British Somaliland and French Djibouti—​was placed under Italian supervision as a UN trust territory, a status that endured for a decade between 1950 and 1960. The variety of these administrative outcomes makes it impossible to identify a definitive end to Italian colonialism: while in military and political terms, the empire folded between 1941 and 1943, each former colony was significantly different in terms of the constitutional arrangements put in place thereafter.

Decolonization as a Passive Revolution From his Fascist prison cell, Antonio Gramsci famously reflected on the history of Italy and the recent politics of the international communist movement. One of the major concepts he developed was that of a ‘passive revolution.’ Gramsci observed that some revolutions were propelled forward by the actions of external states rather than by internal social and political groups. Such had been the experience of certain national independence movements, including the Piedmont-​led Italian Risorgimento. And external actors might play a similarly decisive role in the spread of communist revolution, which, Gramsci anticipated, might be determined not simply by local actors but by the intervention of the Soviet State. These reflections were the basis of the Gramscian idea of passive revolution, that what was involved was not a social group which ‘led’ other groups, but a State which, even though it had limitations as a power, ‘led’ the group which should have been ‘leading’ and was able to put at the latter’s disposal an army and a [State’s] politico-​ diplomatic strength. . . . The important thing is to analyse more profoundly the significance of a ‘Piedmont’-​type function in passive revolutions—​i.e. the fact that a State replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal. It is one of the cases in which these groups have the function of ‘domination’ without that of ‘leadership’: dictatorship without hegemony.35

In essence, the decolonization of the Italian colonies shared many of the features of a passive revolution. In 1941–​1943, the internal anti-​colonial opposition groups in existence were still too weak to achieve independence. However, the colonial system had many structural fragilities even so. The decolonizing ‘revolution’ was achieved by the Commonwealth’s armed forces and the British military administrations that followed, helped, although not directed by, local anti-​colonial and anti-​Italian actors. During the transition from war to peace and independence, and its attendant transitions of power, these administrations each made very different choices (an immediate return to the legitimate ruler, who was in exile, for Ethiopia; the ‘gifting’ to Ethiopia of a province, Eritrea, that it hadn’t possessed in seventy years; and the ‘invention’ of a monarchal dynasty in Libya). Only Somalia, the poorest of these colonies, reverted for a time to the former colonial power Italy.36

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    135 This passive revolution of decolonization within the former Italian colonies made for a rather atypical situation, both for the motherland and the colonies.37 Despite the abiding Ethiopian resistance to colonization, Italy did not face the type of organized anti-​colonial rebellion characteristic of several other cases of decolonization. The anti-​ colonial movements within its imperial territories were not adequately developed or sufficiently widely supported to achieve victory with their own forces alone. Instead, on both sides of the colonial relationship, decolonization took the form of a passive revolution. This soon became clear for the former colonies and was reflected in the particular weakness of the political regimes that emerged from decolonization. All this had some immediate consequences for Italy, which at first failed to understand that it had to thoroughly decolonize its diplomatic corps and former colonial service. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs persisted in believing that Italy could play a privileged role in both its former colonies and, more generally, in the Horn of Africa, in the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, far beyond that to which a defeated state that had lost its colonies could possibly aspire in the first twenty years after the war. But what was perhaps of the greatest significance registered within Italian political culture and only became clear over time. Having lost its colonies during the war, the Italian ‘colonial mind’38 was not forced to confront the searing debates about decolonization and its wars that so altered imperialist thinking in post-​war Britain and France. The Italian colonial mind was not subject to such upsets; if it did change, it did so in response to more general shifts in the international atmosphere between the 1950s and 1960s. For all that, it is true that, compared to other Europeans, many Italians supported Africa’s anti-​colonialist and anti-​Fascist movements with more passion and conviction. But this had less to do with the rethinking of their national colonial history than with the character of Italy’s domestic political struggles in which the Italian Left, including the country’s Communist party, was perhaps the strongest in electoral terms in Western Europe.39 Thus, many common colonial stereotypes persisted within Italian public opinion beyond the years of wartime decolonization and the later transitions to independence, their traits resurfacing between the 1960s and the 1980s when Italy established itself first as a country of immigration, and then as a major destination for African and Asian migrants, and, after the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989–​91, for Eastern Europeans as well. Simply put, the passive revolution of the ‘strange’ Italian decolonization had lasting and diverse effects both within the African territories concerned and within post-​war Italian society.

The Somali Case At first glance, the Somali case seems the most orthodox example of a formal decolonization.40 With the 1949 establishment of the AFIS (Italian Trust Territory of Somalia) the UN granted Italy the powers of a trustee, its responsibility being to guide Somalia to

136   Nicola Labanca independence. In practice, this concession was only made after three landmark events: the signing of a highly punitive peace treaty in February 1947, the installation of a centrist coalition in Rome in April 1948, and Italy’s contribution as a founding member of NATO in April 1949. As much as Italian diplomacy could claim the AFIS as a success, it came with stricter preconditions compared to trusteeship equivalents elsewhere, such as the requirement for constant UN oversight, a special protection council, and a fixed-​term limit of only ten years. After fifty-​two years of Italian colonial rule in Somalia between 1889 and 1941, and the intervening nine years of British military administration, opinions varied on the success of the subsequent AFIS regime. Many in Italy viewed it as a natural ‘return’ to quasi-​ colonial normality. For others in Somalia, who compared erstwhile Italian colonial Italy with the later British military administration, AFIS was recognized as another form of coexistence with a foreign power. Not everyone thought well of the Italians. What became known as the ‘slaughter of Mogadishu’ in January 1949 illustrated the depth of Somali opposition to any return of the Italians, even one that was by that point endorsed by the British military administration. True, democratic 1950s Italy was hardly comparable to its pre-​war fascist forebear. But, owing to shortages of available personnel, numerous Italian AFIS administrators were familiar faces from the earlier colonial regime. In addition, despite many well-​ intentioned efforts, democratic Italy only allocated limited and often poorly monitored financial resources to this administration. Symptomatic of this trend, between 1963 and 1965 a political scandal in Italy erupted over the territory’s banana trade, an episode that confirmed how little post-​war Italy had contributed to Somalia’s economic development. The small number of trained local personnel, itself the result of exclusionary colonial policies and inefficient trusteeship, affected the country’s transition to independence, and left a decolonized Somalia with basic structural deficiencies. Scholars have offered different verdicts about the historical legacies bequeathed to independent Somalia and their connection with the country’s identification as a failed state in the 1990s. Of course, blame for this cannot be placed solely on the decade of trusteeship or even on the earlier colonial period, but self-​interested denials by Italian apologists of any such connections seem equally indefensible.

Different Social Actors Moving from the Somali case to the broader ends of Italian colonialism, there is a notable diversity of colonial cases and equally marked differences in the behaviour of the social and political actors involved in the ‘strange’ decolonization of this empire. It is possible, nonetheless, to pick out certain shared ‘transcolonial’ elements. Unfortunately, a limiting factor here is that, as usual, there are more studies covering the Italian side of the colonial relationship, a state of affairs that constrains the following summary of events. In the initial post-​war years, and especially between 1945 and 1947, Italian foreign policy makers and diplomats worked to restore the country’s presence in the colonies,

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    137 failing to appreciate the depth of international opposition to any such outcome.41 As a result, they found themselves fighting a diplomatic battle that had already been lost. In subsequent years, and more especially after 1950, democratic Italy, then in the midst of its ‘economic miracle,’ tried once more to ‘go back’ to Africa by mobilizing the power of its dynamic economy rather than reconnecting to a colonial political past generally understood to be unconscionable. Ever since then, successive Italian governments considered preferential relationships with the former colonies—​a political card that could be played with less of a taint of neo-​colonialism. The break with the colonial past was clear, even if it was far from complete. There was also a deeper attitudinal continuity among Italy’s politicians. This was not only evident among those nostalgic for the past. Needless to say, members of the far right were completely impervious to the new forces of decolonization, non-​alignment, and Third Worldism, but, on the left as well, especially in the immediate post-​war years, there is evidence of ambiguous attitudes towards the colonial past. Reluctant to break fully with their previous indulgence towards ‘demographic colonialism,’ from 1947 Communist and Socialist representatives briefly championed what they termed the ‘rights of Italian labor in Africa.’ They did so partly to avoid domestic accusations of being excessively internationalist, and partly out of sincere concern that decolonization and independence of the former colonies would come at the cost of poor Italians—​the central players of the ‘demographic colonialism’ idea. By the 1950s and, even more so, in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the Italian Left adopted a more unequivocally anti-​imperialist position. But, on the whole, it should be noted that even from this quarter no one broached or appeared to want a critical discussion of the national colonial past. Former colonial administrators, of course, lost their jobs and had to return to Italy due to the military defeat and loss of the colonies.42 Some specialist professionals sought to transform themselves into development technocrats—​particularly those working in the agro-​economic or veterinary fields. But, aside from these few experts in tropical economies, decolonization quickly erased jobs and positions. Similarly, military defeat and resulting decolonization abruptly changed the lives of Italian settlers, the majority of whom had anyway returned to Italy during the war years.43 The first to leave the colonies under the strains of the war left the Horn of Africa aboard the so-​called ‘white ships’ (merchant vessels painted white like hospital ships to avoid being bombed on the long trip circumnavigating Africa, having been forced to follow this route by British refusal to cede passage through the Suez Canal). As the war escalated, these settlers were followed by thousands more. A small community of die-​hards remained in Eritrea for a few years;44 other sparse groups remained in Ethiopia,45 and a larger community tried to remain in Libya. But the remaining Italians ultimately left Asmara, Benghazi, and Tripoli (in these latter two cases, the Italians were chased out when the nationalistic regime of Muammar al-​ Qaddafi was established in 1969). As a result, a community formed over many decades since the 1880s largely disappeared, along with their dreams of colonial wealth.46 The experience of these colonial settler returnees was especially harsh because they could only

138   Nicola Labanca fall back on the personal resources of their families upon reaching Italy. The country was ill prepared to receive them and the first ‘colonials’ (who returned between 1941 and 1943) were an uncomfortable reminder of the regime’s defeat, while those who arrived after 1943 were often automatically branded as fascists. It is hardly surprising that many of them were for a long time, some even until the 1950s, forced to live in refugee camps, an experience that tended to reinforce settler nostalgia for the former regime, despite its many broken promises to them. Among these broad social groups, perhaps the most interesting was the Italian public as a whole. How did they react to the end of empire? After decades of Liberal and Fascist colonial propaganda, culminating in the regime’s extreme ‘imperial’ propaganda, Italians were probably most sharply struck by the abrupt silence that fell over their national colonial past after the establishment of a post-​war Republican democracy.47 After the failure of the Italian government’s vain attempts ‘to return’ to Africa, a strange silence—​a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ attitude—​seemed to become the official norm. And when colonialism was justly criticized, it was the colonialism of others that was placed in the dock—​as was the case over the Suez crisis in 1956, British actions during Mau Mau after 1952, or French behaviour in Algeria after 1954. It was only very belatedly that a decolonized public discussion began in Italy about its colonial past, and even then, only with great difficulty. Angelo Del Boca’s book about the Ethiopian war, published on its thirtieth anniversary, and his investigation into the use of poisonous gas in 1935–​1936 were met with vehement protests from former settlers and veterans in 1965 and 1969, respectively. Meanwhile, public opinion remained conspicuously silent.48 Even if the colonies were gone, it appeared no one could criticize the Italians who had lived or served in them. Decolonization of the national memory had yet to begin. If decolonization is viewed as a process, while taking into account the distinctive features of the Italian case, and if close attention is paid to its main actors, the conclusions are interesting. Firstly, Italy’s decolonization was measured in terms of the multiple political and social actors involved and the complex legacies left, even if the immediate catalyst was an external one: the wartime loss of colonies. Secondly, this decolonization involved actors not unlike those of other decolonizations, or ends of empires, even though these actors were operating in quite particular contexts such as Fascist colonialism and or the wartime changes of power. Lastly, the pace and outcome of decolonization processes varied markedly between the different actors involved and the particular colonies concerned. Put briefly, what at first looks like a simple, albeit exceptional case—​a colonial empire ended without a long-​contested decolonization because of the abrupt loss of colonies lost in the Second World War—​ends up seeming rather complex and multifaceted.

When did Italian Colonialism End? Where does this leave us? The end of the Italian colonial empire was, of course, different in form and outcome than that of other European colonial empires. But as

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    139 Cooper and Burbank have pointed out, the Second World War disrupted all European colonial empires, although only Italy and Japan lost their overseas territories outright. Putting that aside, whether in terms of the actors involved or the pace of the process, Italian decolonization was more similar to those enacted elsewhere, even though the specific outcomes might be very different. In other words, it seems fair to say that there were particular features rather than utterly exceptional ones in the Italian end of empire. One question remains:  when did Italian colonialism end?49 The termination of the Italian colonial empire varied considerably both between the African territories involved and within Italy itself. The effective end of rule occurred between 1941 and 1943, and the formal end was confirmed, first by the 1947 treaty settlement, which legally abolished the colonies, and then by the UN decision on Somalia’s status as a trust territory in 1949. This difference between formal and effective—​or tangible—​ ends in itself demonstrates both the complexity of the Italian case and some of its particularities. Oddly, the political end of Italian colonialism was determined by an Italian military defeat at the hands of other ‘whites.’ Colonial withdrawal did not occur either as a result of metropolitan support for autonomy, still less for independence, nor as the result of decisive anti-​colonial pressure internal to the African societies involved. The fact that the decision to end the Italian empire was extraneous fed a certain nationalistic sense of victimization among Italians. The lack of sustained African nationalist pressure left Italians with little sense of having been ousted by local ruling elites or peoples. All of these reflections indicate that the basic chronology of Italian decolonization needs to be rethought. A single chronology of the Italian colonial empire’s decolonization, such as would be suggested by a narrowly focused and Eurocentric political history, breaks down into plural time lines when tied more closely to local histories and African trajectories. This also happens if the traditional political-​diplomatic history of the decolonization process is abandoned in favour of a social and cultural history of the different actors and interests involved in overseas expansion whether one is talking in terms of social class, economic interests, colonialist circles, public opinion, intellectuals, settlers, Africans, and so forth. On the Italian side, it is worth noting that the continuity of the state in the transition from Fascism to democracy, and the Italian desire not to be held accountable for their colonial past, were most salient immediately after the Second World War, and ran parallel to the political decision to grant immunity to Italians accused of ‘war crimes’ in Africa.50 It is also worth recording that there remained an Italian Minister for Africa as late as 1953, an oddity that, in a way, echoed the absence of any substantial purge of the former Fascist colonial administration by the Republic. All this inevitably had negative consequences helping to prevent a genuine decolonization of minds and attitudes within national public opinion. Because of this, many Italians absolved themselves of any responsibility, falling back on the ‘Italians as good people’ rhetoric.51 There was no decolonization of memory. The process of revising the imperial past ran aground before it even set sail.

140   Nicola Labanca

Notes 1. Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale (4 vols, Roma-​Bari, Laterza, 1976–84) and Id., Gli italiani in Libia (4 vols, Roma-​Bari, Laterza, 1986–88); and Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna, il Mulino, 2002). 2. Benedetto Croce, Storia d’Italia dal 1870 al 1915 (Bari, Laterza, 1928). See also Nicola Labanca, “Perché ritorna la ‘brava gente’ Revisioni recenti sulla storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana,” in Angelo Del Boca, ed., La storia negata. Il revisionismo e il suo uso politico (Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 2009), 69–​106. 3. Nicola Labanca, ‘Constructing Mussolini’s New Man in Africa? Italian Memories of the Fascist War on Ethiopia’, Italian Studies, 66, no. 2 (2006): 225–​232. 4. Nicola Labanca, Una guerra per l’impero. Memorie dei combattenti della campagna d’Etiopia 1935–​36 (Bologna, il Mulino, 2005). See also Nicola Labanca and Angelo Del Boca, L’impero africano del fascismo. Nelle fotografie dell’Istituto LUCE (Roma, Editori Riuniti, 2002). 5. Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler, The Crises of Empire. Decolonization and Europes Imperial States, 1918–​1975 (London, Hodder Education, 2008); Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (New York, Routledge, 2006); John Springhall, Decolonization since 1945. The Collapse of European Overseas Empires (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001). See also Uta Fenske, Daniel Groth, Klaus-​Michael Guse, and Bärbel P. Kuhn, eds., Colonialism and Decolonization in National Historical Cultures and Memory Politics in Europe. Modules for History Lessons (Bern-​Frankfurt am Main, Lang-​Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2015). But also Martin Thomas, ed., European Decolonization (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007) (The International Library of Essays on Political History); James D. Le Sueur, ed., The Decolonization Reader (New  York, Routlegde, 2003). But see Nicola Labanca, ‘Post-​Colonial Italy. The Case of a Small and Belated Empire:  From Strong Emotions to Bigger Problems’, in Dietmar Rothermund, ed., Memories of Post-​Imperial Nations. The Aftermath of Decolonization 1945–​2013 (Delhi, Cambridge University Press, 2015), 120–​149. 6. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010). 7. Ennio Flaiano, Tempo di uccidere, Romanzo (Milano, Longanesi, 1947). 8. Richard Pankhurst, ‘Lo sviluppo del razzismo nell’impero coloniale italiano (1935–​1941)’, Studi piacentini 3 (1988): 175–​97; Nicola Labanca, ‘Il razzismo istituzionale coloniale: genesi e relazioni con l’antizemitismo fascista,’ in Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam, Marie-​ Anne Matard-​Bonucci, and Enzo Traverso, eds., Storia della Shoah in Italia. Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, vol. I, Le premesse, le persecuzioni, lo sterminio (Torino, Utet, 2010), 192–​219. 9. See Renzo Sertoli Salis, who was full professor at the universities of Milan and Pavia, Quaderni della Scuola di mistica fascista Sandro Italico Mussolini, ‘Introduction: Le leggi razziali italiane (legislazione e documentazione)’, Dottrina fascista, 1 (1939). First cited in Nicola Labanca, La storiografia italiana sulle istituzioni coloniali, in Aldo Mazzacane, ed., Oltremare. Diritto e istituzioni dal colonialismo all’età postcoloniale (Naples, Cuen, 2006). 10. Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference. 11. Ibid.

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    141 12. Bouda Etemad, La possession du monde. Poids et mesures de la colonisation (Bruxelles, Complexe, 2000). 13. Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–​1941. Policies, Praxis and Impact (Uppsala, Uppsala University Press, 1987); Irma Taddia, L’Eritrea-​colonia 1890–1952. Paesaggi, strutture, uomini del colonialismo (Angeli, Milano, 1986). 14. Ioan M. Lewis, Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History, Society (London, Hurst, 2008); see also I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa (Boulder, Westview Press, 1988); Robert L. Hess, Italian Colonialism in Somalia (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966). 15. Federico Cresti, Massimiliano Cricco, Storia della Libia contemporanea. Dal dominio ottomano alla morte di Gheddafi (Roma, Carocci, 2012); Dirk Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006); John Wright, Libya. A  Modern History (London, Croom Helm, 1981); Claudio Segrè, Gli italiani in Libia. Dall’età giolittiana a Gheddafi (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1978). 16. Roberto Michels, L’imperialismo italiano. Studi politico-​demografici (Milano, Società editrice libraria, 1914). 17. Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia 1855–​1991 (Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 1991); Saheed A. Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia (London, Greenwood Press, 2007); Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1994): James C. McCann, People of the Plow. An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990 (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Richard Greenfield, Ethiopia, A New Political History (London, Pall Mall Press, 1969); Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–​1935 (Addis Ababa, Haile Sellassie University Press, 1968); Giampaolo Calchi Novati, Il corno d’Africa nella storia e nella politica. Etiopia, Somalia e Eritrea fra nazionalismi, sottosviluppo e guerra (Torino, Sei, 1994). 18. Arnaldo Faustini, Il nostro impero coloniale (Roma, G. Scotti, 1912). 19. Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, vol. X, Scritti e discorsi dell’impero (14 novembre 1935–​4 novembre 1936 e.f. (Milano, U. Hoepli, 1939); see also B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, a cura di Edoardo e Duilio Susmel, vol. XXVIII, Dalla proclamazione dell’impero al viaggio in Germania, 10 maggio 1936–​30 settembre 1937 (Firenze, La fenice, 1959). 20. Rather poor is G. L. Podestà, Il mito dell’impero. Economia, politica e lavoro nelle colonie italiane dell’Africa orientale, 1898–1941 (Torino, G. Giappichelli, 2004). 21. Giuseppe Maione, ‘I costi delle imprese coloniali’, in A. Del Boca, ed., Le guerre coloniali del fascismo (Laterza, Roma-​Bari 1991). 22. Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York, Routledge, 2003); Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA,  Harvard University Press, 2008); Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina, eds., Storia dell’emigrazione italiana (2 vols. Roma, Donzelli, 2001–​2002). 23. Stressed only the consensus moment. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. I, Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936 (Einaudi, Torino, 1974). 24. Romain Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano da Assab a Adua (1869–1896) (Milano, Comunità, 1971). 25. But see Paul Corner, Italia fascista. Politica e opinione popolare sotto la dittatura (Roma, Carocci, 2015); and ‘L’opinione popolare italiana di fronte alla guerra’, in Riccardo Bottoni, ed., L’Impero fascista. Italia ed Etiopia, 1935–1941 (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008). Also see Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime 1929–1943 (Roma-​Bari, Laterza, 1991).

142   Nicola Labanca 26. Gianni Dore, Chiara Giorgi, Antonio M. Morone, and Massimo Zaccaria, eds., Governare l’Oltremare. Istituzioni, funzionari e società nel colonialismo italiano (Roma, Carocci, 2013). 27. See Alessandro Volterra, Sudditi coloniali. Ascari eritrei 1935–1941 (Milano, Angeli, 2005); and A. Volterra, ed., Progetto Ascari (Roma, Edizioni Efesto, 2014). 28. Gianni Dore, Chiara Giorgi, Antonio M. Morone, and Massimo Zaccaria, eds., Governare l’Oltremare. Istituzioni, funzionari e società nel colonialismo italiano; Ruth Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence. Domination, Resistance, Nationalism, 1941–1993 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). 29. Federico Battera, Dalla tribù allo Stato nella Somalia nord-​orientale. Il caso dei sultanati di Hobiyo e Majeerteen, 1880–​1930 (Trieste, Università, 2004); Francesca Declich, Quando il silenzio è memoria. Identità etnica e storia nella Somalia del sud (Padova, Cleup, 2006). 30. Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986). For a different opinion see Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya. State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830–1932 (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1994). 31. Richard Pankhurst, History of the Ethiopian Patriots (1936–​1940), http://​www.linkethiopia. org/​guide-​to-​ethiopia/​the-​pankhurst-​history-​library/​1-​the-​beginnings-​of-​the-​patriotic-​ resistance/​; see also R. Pankhurst, ‘La resistenza dei patrioti etiopici’, Materiali di lavoro 2, no. 3/​1 (vol. IX-​X) (1992–​1993); Richard Pankhurst, ‘Come il popolo etiopico resistette all’occupazione e alla repressione da parte dell’Italia fascista’, in Angelo Del Boca, ed., Le guerre coloniali del fascismo (Roma-​Bari, Laterza, 1991); Aregawi Berhe, ‘Revisiting Resistance in Italian-​Occupied Ethiopia. The Patriots’ Movement (1936–1941) and the Redefinition of Post-​War Ethiopia’, in J. Abbink, M. E.de Bruijn, and K. van Walraven, eds., Rethinking Resistance. Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden, Brill, 2003), 87–​113; Neelam Srivastava, ‘Anti-​colonialism and the Italian left. Resistances to the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2006): 413–​429. 32. Emanuele Ertola, L’Impero immaginario. I coloni italiani in Etiopia, 1936–1941, PhD diss., Università degli studi di Firenze, 2014–​2015. 33. Giampaolo Calchi Novati, Il corno d’Africa nella storia e nella politica. Etiopia, Somalia e Eritrea fra nazionalismi, sottosviluppo e guerra (Torino, Sei, 1994): see also Novati (ed.), L’Africa d’Italia. Una storia coloniale e postcoloniale (Roma, Carocci, 2011). 34. Bahru Zewde, Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia. The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century (London, Currey, 2002). 35. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal carcere, Valentino Gerratana, ed., 4 vols. (Torino, Einaudi, 1975). 36. Gian Luigi Rossi, L’Africa italiana verso l’indipendenza (1941–1949) (Giuffrè, Milano, 1980); Antonio M. Morone, L’ultima colonia. Come l’Italia è tornata in Africa, 1950–1960 (Roma-​ Bari, Laterza, 2011). 37. Cristina Lombardi-​ Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds., Postcolonial Italy:  Challenging National Homogeneity (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 38. Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-​Diop, Bianco e nero, storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (Firenze, Le Monnier, 2013). 39. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–​1988 (London, Penguin, 1990); see also P. Ginsborg, Italy and its Contents. Family, Civil Society, State, 1980–​2001 (London, Penguin, 2001); John Foot, Modern Italy, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire    143 40. Antonio M. Morone, L’ultima colonia. Come l’Italia è tornata in Africa, 1950–1960 (Rome, Editori Laterza, 2011). 41. Gian Luigi Rossi, L’Africa italiana verso l’indipendenza (1941–1949) (Milan, Giuffrè, 1980). 42. Antonio M. Morone, ‘I custodi della memoria. Il Comitato per la documentazione dell’opera dell’Italia in Africa’, Zapruder 23, (2010): 24–​38. 43. Nicola Labanca, ‘Quaderni di “petit blancs”. Diari e memorie dell’ “imperialismo demografico” italiano’, in N. Labanca, ed., Posti al sole. Diari e memorie di vita e di lavoro dall’Africa italiana (Rovereto, Museo storico della Guerra, 2001), v–​xxv; Emanuele Ertola, L’Impero immaginario. I coloni italiani in Etiopia, 1936–1941. 44. Nicholas Lucchetti, Italiani d’Eritrea, 1941–​1951. Una storia politica (Roma, Aracne, 2012); see also Italico ingegno, all’ombra della Union Jack, breve storia economica degli italiani d’Eritrea sotto occupazione britannica (La Spezia, Cinque Terre, 2013), and Pace coloniale addio. Violenza e lotta politica in Eritrea (1941–1952) (Roma, Aracne, 2014). 45. Fabienne Le Houerou, L’épopée des soldats de Mussolini en Abyssinie 1936–​1938. Les ‘Ensablés’ (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994). 46. Romain H. Rainero, Le navi bianche. Profughi e rimpatriati dall’estero e dalle colonie dopo la seconda guerra mondiale. Una storia italiana dimenticata (1939–1991) (Mergozzo, Sedizioni, 2015). 47. Daniela Baratieri, Memories and Silences Haunted by Fascism. Italian Colonialism 1930–​ 1960 (Bern, Peter Lang, 2010). 48. Angelo Del Boca, La guerra d’Abissinia 1935–​1941 (Chicago, IL,  University of Chicago Press, 1969). 49. Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2007). 50. Filippo Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano. La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Roma-​Bari, Laterza, 2013); Filippo Focardi and Lutz Klinkhammer, ‘La rimozione dei crimini di guerra dell’Italia fascista: la nascita di un mito autoassolutorio (1943–1948)’, in Luigi Goglia, Renato Moro, and Leopoldo Nuti, eds., Guerra e pace nell’Italia del Novecento. Politica estera, cultura politica e correnti dell’opinione pubblica (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006), 251–​290; Filippo Focardi, ‘I mancati processi ai criminali di guerra italiani’, in Luca Baldissara and Paolo Pezzino, eds., Giudicare e punire. I processi per crimini di guerra tra diritto e politica (Napoli, L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2005), 185–​ 214. But see also, more specifically, Nicola Labanca, ‘Compensazioni, passato coloniale, crimini italiani. Il generale e il particolare’, in Giovanni Contini, Filippo Focardi, and Marta Petricioli, eds., Memoria e rimozione. I crimini di guerra del Giappone e dell’Italia (Roma, Viella, 2010), 127–​162. 51. Angelo Del Boca, ‘Le conseguenze per l’Italia del mancato dibattito sul colonialismo’, Studi piacentini 5 (1989); and Nicola Labanca, ‘Perché ritorna la ‘brava gente’. Revisioni recenti sulla storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana’ (n. 2).

Chapter 8

Après nous, le   dé lu ge Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo Matthew G. Stanard 1

Introduction Sometime in 1999, a few of Patrice Lumumba’s teeth came to rest at the bottom of the North Sea, thrown into the waters by Belgian Gérard Soete. Thirty-​eight years earlier, in 1961, Soete was a military policeman in the breakaway State of Katanga, in southern Congo. On 22 January that year he, his brother, and several African assistants were sent on a mission: dispose of some bodies. That night, near Kasenga on the Northern Rhodesia border, they dug up Lumumba’s bullet-​riddled corpse, along with those of Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, who were murdered alongside him. This was a second disinterment, for after being buried where they fell, the three had been exhumed the next day and reburied at the site near Kasenga. It took all night to hack the bodies up and dissolve them in acid. Sickened by what they were doing—​and the smell—​Soete and his brother got loaded. ‘We did things an animal wouldn’t do,’ Soete later recalled. ‘That’s why we were drunk, stone drunk.’2 According to most accounts, they burned any bones the acid failed to dissolve. ‘Nothing was left of the three nationalist leaders; nowhere could their remains, even the most minute trace of them, be found.’3 Not exactly. Soete had torn out two or three of Lumumba’s teeth and cut off two of his fingers as keepsakes.4 The grisly fate of Lumumba’s mortal remains almost overshadows the astonishing fact that he was murdered in the first place, just days earlier, on 17 January, aged thirty-five. Patrice Émery Lumumba: former postal clerk, one-​time beer salesman, eloquent polyglot, champion of African nationalism, a man of great persuasive powers, and Congo’s very first democratically elected leader—​one of Africa’s first ever—​even if his authority as prime minister was disputed at the time of his assassination. His death and dissolution represented a low point in the ‘Congo crisis’: the events from 1960–​1965 that terminated Belgian rule in central Africa.

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    145 We have a much better understanding today of the Congo crisis, in large part due to recent studies of decolonization in the Congo. During the first few decades post-​ independence, there were hardly any Congolese history PhDs and those few Belgian historians who worked on the colonial past, for example Jean Stengers and Jean-​Luc Vellut, were exceptions. Thus, it was mainly non-​Belgians and non-​Congolese who studied imperialism and decolonization in the Congo, and it says much that it was a book by an American, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), that recharged history writing about Belgian colonialism generally. Ludo de Witte’s De moord op Lumumba (1999) refocused attention on decolonization, and it was followed by the centenary of Belgium’s 1908 takeover of the colony and the fiftieth anniversary of Congolese independence in 2010, each of which contributed to an outpouring of research. Prominent scholars including Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, Zana Aziza Etambala, and Guy Vanthemsche have produced landmark studies, and a generation of younger Belgian, and to a lesser extent Congolese, writers is at work on the colonial past, including David Van Reybrouck (b. 1971), author of the bestseller Congo: Een geschiedenis (2010).5 This chapter identifies and develops several themes that have emerged in recent works on the end of Belgium’s empire. The first is how before 1960, it was mainly factors endogenous to the Congo and the Belgian-​Congo colonial relationship that shaped decolonization’s history. Paradoxically, the depth of Belgium’s colonial impact politically and economically also produced changes that undermined colonial control as well as Congo’s cohesion. The wealth to be gained from mining, especially in Katanga, not only fostered separatist impulses in that region, but also enticed Belgians to undermine the Congo’s government as independence approached in order to retain neo-​colonial control. Belgians’ longstanding paternalistic policies meant their African heirs were starting from scratch, contributing to Belgian leaders’ preference for a quick decolonization to sustain Congolese reliance on them. Not only were Congolese leaders in many ways unprepared, they also inherited a state with little legitimacy—​another legacy of the colonial era. Another theme that has emerged in recent histories of Congo’s decolonization is the rapidity with which the former colony was exposed to global influences at independence.6 This is not to say the Congo had been isolated from international developments. It was, after all, an international humanitarian campaign by E. D. Morel and others that helped end Leopold II’s colonial misrule (1885–​1908). Then during the interwar era, the global downturn in primary product prices battered the colony’s economy, and a late-​1950s slowdown also affected business in the Congo. But politically and socially, Belgium thwarted outside involvement, including prohibiting any communist presence. Before 1960, only Czechoslovakia had a consulate in the Belgian Congo, and then only because it was a holdover from the pre-​1948 communist coup era. Belgium also excluded its allies as well as the United Nations (UN), the nascent European Community, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is telling that the United States, an economic powerhouse in the post-​World War II era, held a mere 1–​2% share of investments in the Congo by the late 1950s. Congolese leaders did become more aware of international developments during the 1950s, not only hastening anti-​colonialism, but also conjuring up mixed visions of Congo’s future that helped undermine the social cohesion needed

146   Matthew G. Stanard in a newly independent state. Nonetheless, the speed with which the Congo found itself thrust onto the world stage after 30 June 1960 meant its sudden exposure to a multitude of global developments, including pan-​Africanism, anti-​colonialism, and Cold War competition. Once released from direct Belgian control, the Congo’s problems were quickly globalized. While we now know that many factors shaped decolonization in the Congo, they remain difficult to disentangle from the cascade of events that make up the Congo crisis. The impression endures that Belgian colonialism was peaceful after World War II, especially in contrast to events elsewhere, and that this calm was inexplicably shattered in 1960 by what has been seen as a chaotic debacle: an ill-​prepared decolonization, the conflict attending independence, and Mobutu’s dictatorship that followed.7 The ignominious end to Belgian colonialism thrust one of Africa’s largest and most prosperous countries into vertiginous disorder. Just six months after independence and the Congo’s first Prime Minister had been assassinated, the country was plunged into civil war, two wealthy provinces had seceded, and countless foreign soldiers and advisors were on the ground. The country lurched from emergency to emergency before regaining stability, but at the cost of Mobutu’s decades-​long kleptocracy. When trying to understand these developments, one way to picture the many issues in play is as concentric circles of factors, from local developments in the Congo, to the role of individual actors, to interrelations between Belgium and the Congo. These ‘layers’ of local factors, individual agency, and Belgian-​Congolese relations were in turn overlapped and framed by larger forces, namely, inter-​imperial dynamics and Cold War tensions and rivalries. Before exploring these concentric layers of causation, the chapter begins, pour mémoire, with the story of the Congo crisis.

The Congo Crisis Lumumba’s January 1961 murder was a sign that the situation in the Congo had destabilized radically within months of independence, something few would have predicted. For years, the Congo had been an ‘oasis of stability’ in a changing colonial world, enjoying a prolonged period of economic growth after World War II. Authorities appeared to have things well in hand, until 4 January 1959, when riots broke out in Leopoldville, jolting Belgium’s political establishment. The colonial administration was expected to handle the situation:  the colony’s guiding document, the Charte coloniale (adopted 1908), circumscribed the king’s power, and Parliament had ceded broad authority over internal colonial affairs to administrators in situ. Even so, Belgian monarchs occasionally intervened, as evinced in 1959 when King Baudouin, just 29 years, took to the radio after the riots to announce that Belgium would ‘lead, without harmful delays but without inconsiderate haste, the Congolese populations to independence in prosperity and peace.’ His use of the word ‘independence’ surprised everyone, catalyzing political discussions and the further

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    147 development of Congolese political parties. Just a year later, Africans and Europeans faced off at a first Table ronde meeting in Brussels where Congolese leaders from different parties united behind their demand for freedom, forcing Belgians to accept a 30 June independence date. The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) party won 33 of 137 chamber seats in May 1960 elections, bringing Lumumba to power as Prime Minister atop a coalition government. Lumumba rival and Alliance des Ba-​Kongo (ABAKO) leader Joseph Kasavubu assumed the more symbolic presidency, although there was no clear delineation of executive powers in theory or practice. Independence ceremonies unfolded with but one hitch. Baudouin spoke first, asserting that independence was not something won by Congolese, but instead was: the result of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II, undertaken by him with tenacious courage and continued by Belgium with perseverance. . . . For 80 years Belgium sent to your land the best of her sons, first to deliver the Congo basin from the hateful slave trade  . . .  our thoughts ought to turn toward [these] pioneers of African emancipation and toward those who, after them, made the Congo what it is today . . . They must never be forgotten, neither by Belgium nor by the Congo.

Baudouin exhorted the Congolese to care for the country that Leopold II and Belgium bequeathed to them. Kasavubu followed the king, his bland phrases contrasting with Baudouin’s congratulatory paternalism. Lumumba—​ not scheduled to speak—​ rose after Kasavubu and attacked Belgian rule, speaking of ‘atrocious sufferings,’ ‘massacres,’ and the ‘struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood’ needed ‘to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.’ Baudouin was so upset he had to be persuaded to stay, and that afternoon he heard a more conciliatory speech from Lumumba in a more private setting. That kernel of reconciliation was followed by an immediate deterioration of the situation. On 5 July, soldiers of the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC)—​the former Force publique, a bulwark of control since the 1880s—​mutinied. Other revolts followed in subsequent days. In reaction to spreading disorder, including attacks on Europeans, Belgium sent in troops, violating agreements signed with the Congo before the ink on them had even dried. Lumumba severed diplomatic ties with Brussels in response. On 11 July, Moïse Tshombe, inveterate Lumumba opponent and head of the pro-​Western CONAKAT party (Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga), announced the secession of Katanga province. Kasavubu and Lumumba appealed to the UN for aid and flew to Katanga’s capital Elisabethville on 12 July, but were denied landing rights. As Belgians departed in droves, troops arrived as part of ONUC (Opérations des Nations Unies au Congo), but failed to halt Katanga’s secession. Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish diplomat and UN Secretary-​general since 1953, struggled to reconcile his determination to keep communism out of the Congo with his eagerness to prove the UN’s capacity for neutrality. Hammarskjöld’s fears of Lumumba’s communist sympathies and his goal of strengthening the UN through impartiality led him to rebuff Lumumba’s pleas and

148   Matthew G. Stanard reject military intervention in Katanga. His government undermined, Lumumba was pushed toward the Soviets. Further appeals to the UN yielded naught, as did Lumumba’s requests for assistance during a July visit to the United States. On 9 August, Lumumba’s erstwhile MNC ally Albert Kalonji (MNC-​Kalonji) declared South Kasai province independent, he having grown to despise Lumumba because of attacks against Baluba that he blamed on Lumumba’s government. Lumumba ordered the ANC to retake South Kasai and Katanga, and finally appealed for aid to Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union’s sometimes erratic leader. By late August, Soviet trucks, planes, and technicians began arriving, exacerbating a growing pro-​and anti-​Lumumbist divide. On 5 September, Kasavubu took sides and, with US support, dismissed his prime minister. Lumumba sacked Kasavubu in return. With Western backing, Congo army chief Joseph-​Désiré Mobutu staged a coup on 14 September. Mobutu had been a sergeant in the Force publique before quitting in 1956 to become a journalist. He studied journalism in Belgium, covered the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, advised Lumumba at the first Table ronde, and was appointed ANC Chief of Staff. Now as army chief he was in charge, confining Lumumba to the prime minister’s Leopoldville residence. In response, Antoine Gizenga declared in October that the legitimate government had decamped to the Lumumbist stronghold of Stanleyville, to which Lumumba fled at the end of November after escaping house arrest in the trunk of a car. Lumumba’s freedom was short lived: Mobutu’s forces soon captured him as he and others tried to cross the Sankuru near Port-​Francqui. Lumumba was transported to Leopoldville, then to Camp Hardy at Thysville where he was held with other MNC figures including Minister of Youth and Sports Maurice Mpolo, and Joseph Okito, Vice President of the Senate. Following a mutiny at Thysville on 13 January, and with Belgian and US backing, Kasavubu and Mobutu had Lumumba, Okito, and Mpolo flown to Elisabethville, in Katanga, where they were accepted by agents of the breakaway republic. President Tshombe, his Katangese ministers, and their Belgian advisors took the decision to kill Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito, believing as they did that they were too great a threat. Here the influence of Katanga Minister of the Interior Godefroid Munongo, violent opponent of a unified Congo, was crucial. Munongo’s grandfather was Katangan ruler M’Siri, and whereas others spoke in the early 1960s of the State of Katanga with a wink and a nod, ‘for Munongo “Katanga” had clearly a deep, emotional significance: it meant the power of the chiefs, the hope of preserving, or restoring, a traditional Central African society, like the Katanga ruled over by his ferocious grandfather, the Bayeke paramount chief, M’Siri.’ Munongo’s opposition to Lumumba’s vision of a unitary state was so fierce, it ‘was generally believed in Elisabethville that he had killed Lumumba with his own hands.’8 Not so. On 17 January, Police Commissioner Frans Verscheure, Captain Julien Gat, Gérard Soete, and African soldiers drove the three to a clearing near Tshilatembo and shot them. They announced Lumumba had fled before being caught and killed by villagers—​a lie no one believed.9 Lumumba’s death did little to alter the course of events. With a Gizenga (MNC-​ Lumumba) government in Stanleyville, Leopoldville’s parliament approved a new

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    149 government under Cyrille Adoula in August 1961, and ONUC forces carried out operations Rumpunch and Morthor in August–​September to diminish foreign influence in Katanga. Fallout from those operations led to Hammarskjöld’s September flight to meet Tshombe in Northern Rhodesia, which crashed at Ndola, killing Hammarskjöld. Gizenga was arrested in January 1962, yet attempts to consolidate the situation were hampered by unrest, military operations in various regions, ongoing secessions, and the fact that thousands of the country’s best-​trained people—​Belgian administrators—​had departed. A rebellion led by Pierre Mulele in Leopoldville province, the Conseil National de Libération’s ‘Simba uprising’ in eastern provinces, renewed strikes, and another army revolt in October 1963 led the government to declare a state of emergency. Compromise brought an end to Katanga’s separation and Tshombe to power as Congo’s prime minister by July 1964, yet half the country remained in rebellion, Simba rebels having taken Paulis and Stanleyville, including Western hostages. White mercenaries and joint US-​ Belgian military interventions to evacuate hostages in November—​operations Dragon Rouge and Dragon Noir—​sapped the Simba rebellion. As some stability returned in early 1965, the Kasavubu-​Tshombe rivalry led to the latter’s ouster on 14 October, followed by a second Mobutu coup on 24 November. At this point Mobutu declared himself president, establishing a regime lasting more than three decades.

Local Developments in the Congo A good place to begin analysing what drove the Congo crisis is on the ground in the Belgian colony because local developments were critical to the unfolding of events, especially those leading up to independence. After World War II, the 14–​15 million individuals peopling Congo’s vast territory experienced economic growth, urbanization, rising wages, and population expansion. The contrast with the downturn of the interwar years was patent, not to mention the disastrous Leopoldian era. Belgium’s post-​war development plan décennal (1949–​1959), financed by the Congolese themselves, boosted colonial investments. Belgians touted their achievements in propaganda, and there was some truth to their vision of the colony as wealthy and economically vigorous.10 Once the stifling 1940–​1945 era ended—​intense wartime burdens had provoked seething resentments, a 1944 revolt at Luluabourg, and strikes in 1945 at Matadi—​the colony was free of open, violent resistance for years, contrasting with events like the 1947 Malagasy uprising, Indonesia’s war against the Dutch, the Mau Mau revolt, and the Algerian war against France. Many saw the Congo as an oasis of stability in a world beset by challenges to imperial rule. Economic growth and the colonial budget depended heavily on the mining sector, which would be critical to the unfolding of events around 1960. As Jean-​Luc Vellut puts it, ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that the colonial edifice was built on mining revenue.’11 Belgians and their African subjects mined many things, including tin, diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, and uranium. The largest mining firm was copper giant

150   Matthew G. Stanard Union Minière du Haut-​Katanga (UMHK), and people in Katanga could not have envisaged its independence absent the region’s mining riches. It was the same with diamonds in South Kasai, which Kalonji declared independent in August 1960: his secessionist ‘state’ was almost an extension of the large mining concern Forminière. Other sectors of the economy included infrastructure investment (notably in railways), health care, livestock raising, plantation agriculture (rubber, cotton, palm oil, coffee), and farming. Yet colonialism’s successes hastened changes that eroded Belgian control. Authorities recognized that economic growth and urbanization contributed to rising expectations and changes in Congolese society that undermined traditional forms of religious and political authority, all of which outpaced the growth of colonial controls.12 The populations of cités indigènes exploded, dwarfing ‘white’ urban areas and leading to palpable tensions. Elisabethville’s population grew from 95,559 in 1951 to 182,638 in 1958, Leopoldville’s from 221,757 to 388,961.13 Although the Congo was never a colony of settlement, the number of Belgians living there skyrocketed after the war, reaching 88,913 of the 113,671 non-​Africans (including 1,582 Asians) by 1958, and contributing to calls for tighter policing and anxieties about race-mixing. Many whites were ‘temporary’ residents such as functionaries or company employees on short-​term contracts, increasingly accompanied by their wives and children; 7,557 were missionaries (5,904 Catholics, 1,653 Protestants) from congregations including Baptists, Scheutists, Jesuits, White Fathers, Norbertines, Franciscans, and Trappists.14 Few Europeans were colons, that is, settlers running plantations, managing animal herds, or otherwise working the land. Although the colony appeared peaceful and economic growth was real, Africans suffered from an unofficial but all-​too-​real colour bar as well as abusive violence at the hands of the state and individual colons in an unequal colonial setting. One longstanding means to control the colony was denying all its inhabitants any political rights. The Belgian Congo was an autocratic state ruled by a governor-​general in Leopoldville and six gouverneurs de province (in Équateur, Léopoldville, Katanga, Kivu, Kasai, and Orientale provinces), all of whom followed policies set by the Brussels colonial ministry. Not only were Congolese subjects not citizens, but authorities also controlled which Europeans could move to the colony, imposed restrictions on whites unheard of in Europe, and denied them any say in colonial governance, although whites, of course, enjoyed a system designed for their benefit. Representative government being absent, consensual politics was non-​existent in the 1950s, although there were important African political traditions and emergent organizations. Several kingdoms had existed in or around the Congo River basin in the nineteenth century, including M’Siri’s Garanganze (or Bayeke) kingdom, the Luba-​Lunda kingdoms in southern Congo, and Tippu Tip’s kingdom in the Maniema region. Even the heavily forested equatorial regions, long thought to have been without political organization, had some, although no indigenous political configuration survived the onslaught of colonialism.15 Many Africans had long resisted foreign rule, be it through flight, overt violence, work stoppages, or slow downs.16 Anti-​colonialism and nationalism surfaced during

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    151 the interwar era, for example, the Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale, founded in Brussels in 1927. Paul Panda Farnana (1888–​1930), a Congolese who fought for Belgium in Europe during World War I, spoke out against imperialism at the 1920 Brussels Congrès colonial national and the 2nd Pan-​African Congress in London in 1921.17 Despite the novelty of Panda’s activism, his long-​term influence was nugatory. Colonial authorities clamped down hard, provided no higher education, isolated the colony, and co-​opted elites, including so-​called évolués, all to stop the spread of dangerous ideas such as those espoused by Panda.18 In large measure it worked: ‘As regards the évolués, they could not cultivate the memory of Panda. Careful to remain in the good graces of the colonial power, they could not evoke his memory without risking aggravating their situation.’19 Authorities long feared the Watchtower (Kitawala) movement, a millenarian offshoot of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Kimbanguism, a version of Christianity founded by Simon Kimbangu, whom authorities arrested in 1921 and who died in Elisabethville, still in prison, three decades later. Despite the efforts of communists like Belgian Jean Terfve, Soviet agents, and later would-​be revolutionaries like Pierre Mulele or Che Guevara, communism—​the ultimate bête noire of the colonial regime—​ never took root. In short, the threats Belgians most dreaded played a minimal role in decolonization. New political traditions came into being as Congolese channelled political debate and anti-​colonialism in various ways. Among the greatest challenges for nationalists was the colony’s sheer diversity and size, it being one of the world’s biggest and Africa’s largest, if the vast unpopulated regions of Algeria and Sudan are discounted. It is unsurprising nationalism arrived ‘late’ to the Congo considering its panoply of cultures, ethnicities, and historical experiences; that there existed a mere handful of lingua francas; the extant challenges of travel and communications; and paternalistic colonial policies. ‘In 1955, not a single indigenous organization was even dreaming about an independent Congo.’20 Yet activity there was, and debate took place in publications like the nationalist Conscience Africaine and the évolué La Voix du Congolais, as well as within Catholic and lay voluntary associations such as alumni groups, évolué clubs, trade unions, and political-​cultural associations like ABAKO, which were political parties in all but name. Authorities closely monitored these groups, which sometimes adopted the rhetoric and espoused the norms of colonial authorities, including those regarding family and gender relations. Paralleling patriarchy in Belgium—​women did not get the vote there until 1948—​Congolese voters and political leaders were exclusively male. The marginalization of women from politics during decolonization, ‘despite their active participation in struggle, meant that the men who sat at the negotiating tables did not fight as hard for the women’s rights as they did for their own; women did not vote in the historic elections of 1960.’21 One milestone was the publication by Joseph Iléo, Joseph Ngalulu, and Cyrille Adoula of the ‘Manifeste de la Conscience Africaine’ in 1956, which called for self-​determination and an end to foreign rule. Responding to growing demands from whites and blacks for representation, authorities organized limited municipal elections in 1957 in a handful of larger cities including Elisabethville, Leopoldville, and Jadotville. The 1958 World’s

152   Matthew G. Stanard Fair brought hundreds of Congolese from across the colony to Brussels for several months, enabling contacts with each other and with Belgian political operatives from across the political spectrum. From 1958, numerous political parties emerged, and the January 1959 Leopoldville riots—​sparked by clashes after authorities tried to suppress an ABAKO gathering—​catalyzed political activity, and more parties emerged, setting the stage for the 1960 elections: Jason Sendwe’s BALUBAKAT (Association Générale des Baluba de Katanga); CONAKAT, also in Katanga, which emerged under the influence of UMHK; the Mouvement National Congolais, which divided into branches led by Lumumba (MNC-​L) and Kalonji (MNC-​K); and Antoine Gizenga’s socialist-​leaning Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA). These were just the most prominent, and the acronyms so typically Belgian that streamed forth—​PNP, UNIMO, CEREA, PUNA, ABAZI—​ expressed the frenetic political activity. Struggling to overcome their relative political inexperience, Congolese leaders were also confronted by the exigencies of a complex electoral process and a timetable of independence that outpaced the institutionalization of democratic politics.22 Mass mobilization was limited; many in the lower Congo, the centre of ABAKO’s support, did not even recognize Joseph Kasavubu’s name.23 Although Belgians encouraged a sense of community and fidelity among Congolese, the colonial state, like others in sub-​Saharan Africa, ruled by force backed by an external power (Belgium) and did not develop civil society through elections, a free press, universal education, representative government, or the like.24 This legacy of imperialism manifested itself in unstable politics and the lack of a national political culture. Belgians had tried to develop loyalty among their most educated colonial subjects, but their efforts were disingenuous and failed. Governor General Léon Pétillon evoked the idea of a ‘Belgo-​Congolese community’ in the mid-​1950s, but it was window-​dressing, with Pétillon himself admitting it was a mere slogan.25 Public and interpersonal paternalism and discrimination were all-​pervasive, creating a ‘soft’ apartheid regime of segregation in cities and a colour bar in employment and public life. The creation of a carte de mérite civique and a 1953 decree that overhauled the granting of immatriculé or évolué status—​the latter bestowing all rights enjoyed by whites—​valued only European norms and intruded into aspirants’ personal lives.26 The long process to obtain them was not only frustrating but futile because whites, even more progressive missionaries, never recognized blacks as equals.27 Unsurprisingly, less than 0.01% of the population had obtained the carte de mérite before 1960. That the state Lumumba initially led enjoyed little heritage of legitimacy influenced the actions of politicians and individual Congolese. Politicking by inexperienced leaders was sometimes divisive, naïve, dangerous, and occasionally downright crass. The main organizing principal for political movements was some combination of regional, ethnic, or tribal affiliation, and Lumumba’s MNC was the only major national party. Despite wise objections to the use of the terms ‘ethnicity’ or ‘tribe’ in analyses of African politics, the idea of tribes was important to many at the time. David Van Reybrouck cites the example of the Bangala, ‘a mosaic of cultures in the equatorial forest’ that the Bureau international d’ethnographie classified as a tribe as early as the 1910s. This ‘ethnographic

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    153 invention’ became, ‘thanks to missionary schools, very real in the Kinshasa of the 1950s.’28 Congolese parties disagreed whether an independent Congo should be federal or unitary, and their representatives at the first Brussels Table ronde in January 1960 agreed on little more than independence. Once independent, a number of politicians stooped to begging for money and influence among Belgians, the US, the Soviets, and others.29 Numerous observers were struck by how effortlessly they could influence Congolese leaders, some viewing Lumumba and Munongo as dangerous precisely because they were among the few who could not be manipulated.30 Others matched the worst of modern politicians in their duplicity.31 What is more, Congo’s leaders operated in an environment of dangerous expectations. During a ‘golden era’ from 1945–​1960, Congolese witnessed Belgian colonials enjoying a high standard of living, and many came to believe that independence would usher in their own golden age during which all problems would be solved. The fact that the wealth Belgians enjoyed in the Congo derived from a system of coercion and cheap colonial labour was lost on many, which added to disappointment when independence failed to produce quick, wholesale change. Thus did former Force publique head and new ANC chief General Émile Janssens’s dictum ‘Avant indépendance = Après indépendance’—​jotted on a board in front of African soldiers—​dash hopes for quick promotions, contributing to the July 1960 army mutiny.

Colonial Issues In addition to local matters in the Congo, relations between colonizer and colonized—​ between Belgium and the Congo—​shaped events around 1960. Although the Congo was vastly larger than Belgium at eighty times its size, there were roughly two Belgians for every three Congolese, and the Belgian economy was among the world’s most developed. Belgium’s colonial system rested on three interlocking ‘pillars’:  the colonial administration; the Catholic Church and its missions; and private capital in the form of colonial enterprises. The administration not only set policies and maintained order through the Force publique, but it also subsidized missions and provided the stability and concessions needed for long-​term investments. The administration, in turn, depended on missionaries to provide education and medical care, which helped control the population, as did colonial companies’ labour policies and investments, including worker housing and medical care. The economy was highly concentrated, with just a handful of companies controlling most colonial investments, first among them Société Générale de Belgique, Belgium’s largest company. The Belgian Congo was a ‘portfolio state’ that held major investments in colonial enterprises, a legacy of state ownership dating back to Leopold II. Other factors beyond the triumvirate also underpinned Belgian control, including Protestant missions and confidence in the colonial project among people back home, even if the colony was never an object of widespread, deep affection among Belgians.

154   Matthew G. Stanard Still, the colonizers never constituted a monolithic bloc. Belgium’s French-​Flemish language divide marked one rift. Catholic missionaries were generally more open to political change than were company directors, colonial functionaries, or Protestant missionaries, although views on independence diverged even among Catholics: among those in the Congo, those living in Belgium, and the Vatican; even within the Vatican itself.32 Mutual distrust existed between Leopoldville and whites in Elisabethville, and UMHK director Herman Robiliart formed his own private Sûreté—​the ‘Crocodile’ network—​to track anti-​colonial activity due to his distrust in Leopoldville’s information services.33 Nevertheless, virtually all Belgians remained supremely confident that their programme of development and Christian education would keep Congolese happy and the colony free of nationalism and nefarious foreign influences like communism. When Jef Van Bilsen published A Thirty-​Year Plan for the Political Emancipation of the Belgian Congo (1955), some viewed its publication as both inopportune and dangerous, while others laughed it off as unreasonable. After Baudouin toured the Congo in 1955, hailed by whites and blacks alike, critics claimed André Cauvin’s commemorative film about the voyage, Bwana Kitoko, failed to capture the full outpouring of enthusiasm among African crowds cheering ‘their’ monarch.34 One can also consider representative of Belgian attitudes the celebratory colonial section of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, complete with a ‘native village’ of Congolese displayed behind fences.35 If the public face of Belgian rule was one of security, stability, and paternalistic control, those in the know were not so self-​assured. Rumors circulated of potential strikes and growing dissatisfaction among African workers and their European employers.36 Authorities used imprisonment and banishment to agricultural penal colonies to control and segregate Kimbanguists. Although administration officials banned publications, inspected incoming boats, and seized illicit printed works, they admitted to themselves they could not stop the flow of such materials.37 Even in seemingly placid regions, many forms of resistance continued, some of them subtle, such as villagers giving unappealing nicknames to objectionable administrators.38 Although there were no outright rebellions after 1945, administrators felt it necessary to parade Force publique troops to maintain order.39 The debased character at the centre of former administrator Jef Geeraerts’s autobiographical Gangrene (1968) reveals a sordid underbelly to the ‘civilizing mission’ toward empire’s end. Moreover, political disputes in the metropole spilled over into the colony and undermined colonial authority. Elections in 1954 brought liberal Auguste Buisseret in as Minister of Colonies, and he took steps to break the missions’ monopoly on education, leading to a conflict with conservatives and, in effect, the ‘export’ of a European church-​state conflict to central Africa. Although fresh elections in 1958 brought Christian Democrats back to power, the damage was done. Yet Belgium and the Congo were anything but intertwined. This separation enabled Belgian authorities at the first Table ronde between 20 January and 20 February 1960 to envision severing formal colonial ties in order to maintain control in key areas. Militarily, politically, economically, and culturally, Belgium and its colony remained largely separate from each other, even after decades of colonial rule.40 Administrative control was patchy, and social bonds between Belgians and Congolese were scarce.

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    155 Almost no Congolese visited Europe, and most Belgians in the colony self-​segregated in the cities. Although colonization deeply affected Africans, few were steeped in European culture. Notwithstanding the booming mining sector, many Africans remained agriculturalists. Some 4.2 million Congolese were Catholics, yet missions had begun Africanizing their ranks.41 As noted, the Congo was not a colony of settlement and there was no widespread visceral attachment among Belgians to it. The colony allowed Belgium to play a bigger role internationally than it would have otherwise, to ‘punch above its weight’ in world affairs. If one looks at Belgium’s economy from a sectoral perspective, certain colonial businesses were vital, non-​ferrous metals industries for instance.42 Investors also pocketed higher returns on investments in the colony than from investments back home.43 Nonetheless, the colony played only a small role in Belgium’s economy, representing by 1960 a mere 3% of gross domestic product, 5.7% of imports, and 2.7% of exports.44 When difficulties arose in the late 1950s, control over colonial capital was structured such that Belgians could envision the repatriation of colonial assets. ‘Belgian backroom dealing’ at the spring 1960 Table ronde on economic issues, ‘represented a sharp attack on Congolese independence and well-​being . . . Belgian intentions were nothing less than to retain profits even if this meant undermining Congolese sovereignty.’45 Congolese representatives to that second Table ronde were out of their depth, which was no surprise considering that because of colonial exclusion and paternalistic educational policies, they were poorly educated on complex economic matters.

Inter-​E mpire  Issues Developments in other parts of the colonial world affected the Belgian Congo’s future by either constraining or enabling individuals’ freedom of action. Although colonial bureaucrats in Brussels, Paris, Lisbon, and elsewhere continued to plan for an imperial future, events overtook them.46 Congolese leaders educated themselves about the cascade of post-​war global developments, from India to Indonesia, China to Suez, including the 1955 Bandung Conference, Ghana’s independence, and de Gaulle’s 1958 Brazzaville speech across the Congo River from Leopoldville. Numerous Congolese grasped the momentousness of these events and took advantage of them, Lumumba being only the most prominent example. He participated in the All-​African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in December 1958, travelled to Nigeria in March 1959, spent seven days in Guinea’s capital in April to study that country, then flew to Brussels to give a series of talks. Thus, developments elsewhere galvanized Congolese anti-​colonialism. How could Belgians have remained confident considering the rapid changes taking place around them after 1945? In short, because these changes were not, in fact, taking place around them, and because Belgians thought that their colonialism was different, indeed unique. Belgian officials (like their British and French counterparts) dismissed events in South Asia including India and Indonesia’s independence as any sort of guide

156   Matthew G. Stanard to what might happen in sub-​Saharan Africa.47 True, colonies in French Equatorial Africa were moving towards independence, but the presumption was that they would long remain dependent on France. To the east, Britain’s campaign against the Mau Mau was succeeding by 1956–​1957, and in neither Uganda nor Tanzania did any path to independence seem clear in the 1950s. The Congo remained nestled between Portuguese Angola to the west and Mozambique to the east, where nationalist movements were, as yet, ineffectual. The white-​dominated Central African Federation, created in 1953, cradled Katanga, and even further south apartheid rule was well established in South Africa.48 That independence seemed distant only exacerbated Belgians’ disorientation and their harried improvisation in 1959–​1960. But if Belgians viewed the Congo as a unique oasis of stability, why did they give up the colony so quickly? Here, too, inter-​imperial issues were crucial. Belgians saw what was going on elsewhere, for example, war in Algeria, and sought to avoid the same. Because paternalism had restricted opportunities for Congolese—​fewer than a dozen of whom were university graduates in 1960—​many believed that an independent Congo would be so frail that dependence on the former colonial power was inevitable. When Congolese leaders forced Belgium’s hand and won a June 1960 independence date, many Belgians acquiesced because they believed decolonization would be strictly nominal.

The Cold War Prior to 1960, Belgian authorities objected to any outside interference in the Congo and kept the territory largely isolated from Cold War realities. Debates among Belgians regarding UN powers, US influence, communism, and the European Community were rife with defiance regarding their sovereignty in central Africa. Belgian resistance to outside meddling induced the US to tread more lightly than it would have otherwise.49 Outsiders’ unfamiliarity with sub-​Saharan Africa also helped. The Soviets famously sent snowplows to (tropical) Guinea following its 1958 independence from France. President Dwight Eisenhower, for his part, postponed addressing civil rights at home and decolonization in Africa.50 When he was informed in May 1960 that some eighty political parties existed in the Congo, he said he did not know that that many people in the Congo could read.51 When his interest finally turned to the Congo, combating communism was the goal. Once decoupled from Belgium, the Congo was drawn into the Cold War, and its affairs became internationalized overnight. Foreign involvement exacerbated disorder, contributed to Lumumba’s assassination, diminished Belgian influence, and helped install the dictatorship that ruled the Congo for decades. As mentioned, internationalization of the Congo crisis was punctuated by American, Soviet, and other interventions, for example, French mercenaries fighting for Katanga or Che Guevara’s abortive 1965 visit to promote revolution. The Afro-​Asian bloc of non-​aligned states intervened to support Congo’s independence, sovereignty, and unity. Kwame Nkrumah, who had bonded with Lumumba in Accra in 1958, provided

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    157 Ghanaian troops for ONUC operations and pressured the UN to preserve the Congo’s unity by ending the Katanga secession. In light of the rising Cold War interest in Africa, the frailty of newly independent states, and the persistence of white rule in Kenya, the Rhodesias, South Africa, and Portugal’s colonies, the Congo’s survival as a unified state was, in Nkrumah’s eyes, essential for a prosperous, stable, and self-​determining continent. Aside from Ghanaian troops contributed to ONUC, Afro-​Asian interventions were indirect. Not so for the Americans and Belgians. Uranium was key in this regard. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan were manufactured with uranium from Katanga, and although the US had other uranium sources by the mid-​1950s and the 1949 Soviet atomic test showed they had their own, what exercised imaginations in Washington and Brussels was the possibility that the Soviets might bomb Katanga’s mines or even attempt to seize them. This aggravated longstanding Belgian anxieties, which had given colonialism in the Congo a perennial anti-​communist bent, as in other European empires.52 Admittedly, the US State Department did not produce a major position paper on African affairs until July 1957 and did not open its Bureau of African Affairs until August 1958. As the head of its Africa Division said in April 1960, ‘We are new on the Congo political scene and, with few exceptions, do not have sufficient information on which to base a judgment on who will win or who merits support.’53 Lack of knowledge about central Africa did not prevent Washington from acting. By August 1960 the US was committed to a ‘covert political program in the Congo’ that would eventually last almost seven years, and which ‘initially aimed at eliminating Lumumba from power and replacing him with a more moderate, pro-​Western leader.’54 Paranoia about communism led US officials ‘in high quarters’ to push for ‘aggressive action’ against Lumumba, and CIA Director Allen Dulles and even Eisenhower probably suggested assassination.55 Recent research confirms what we have known for years, namely that American leaders explored many options to kill Lumumba, such as when operative ‘Joe from Paris’ presented himself to CIA station chief Larry Devlin in Leopoldville with a poison he planned to slip to Lumumba, perhaps in his toothpaste.56 A 2001 Belgian parliamentary commission report confirmed Ludo de Witte’s contention that Belgium participated in ‘l’élimination définitive’ of Lumumba, as Minister of African Affairs Harold d’Aspremont Lynden had put it at the time.57 Belgium and the US assisted the hunt for Lumumba after he fled house arrest, and Americans including Devlin participated alongside Belgian officials and Lumumba’s African adversaries in the decision to execute him.58 Paranoia about Lumumba’s communist leanings was merely that, because he remained a non-​ideological nationalist and pan-​Africanist. His murder resulted partly from a ham-​fisted US operation in what became the most important American intervention into a situation of decolonization.59 Communist powers also jockeyed for position in the Congo. Khrushchev’s unfamiliarity with Africa did not stop him from trying to turn decolonization to Soviet advantage, leading him to bond with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Guinea’s Sekou Touré after the latter’s 1958 break with France. Ultimately, Khrushchev was more bark than bite in central Africa, partly to avoid an open confrontation, but also because of the

158   Matthew G. Stanard numerous issues coinciding with the Congo crisis that likely limited the Soviets’ scope of action: the Sino-​Soviet split, Bay of Pigs, U-​2 spy plane overflights, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. China threatened intervention, and even if it provided no direct assistance, suffering as it was the horrors of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, to Western powers the question was what kind of influence China would have should the Congo fall into the communist camp. Not until Mobutu ordered Soviet advisors out of the country after his first coup did the Soviet presence begin to dwindle. Thus, Khrushchev merely threatened, and after the Soviets were kicked out, they never again played a big role.60 Although plagued by internal divisions, the Congo remained in the Western camp.

Epilogue A succession of ups and downs characterized Belgian-​Congolese relations following Mobutu’s second coup, making for bipolar diplomatic relations. Mobutu’s more than thirty years as dictator should not obscure the fact that he could be timid, wanting US support before taking action, from his 1960 coup and arrest of Lumumba to his second coup in 1965. In subsequent years, his stormy relationships with Western powers, most notably France, Belgium, and the US, revealed an enduring need for affirmation and respect from world leaders. Even if Mobutu was his own man, bending events to his advantage, he remained dependent on Western powers. As Belgium grew in importance to Mobutu’s regime, so did the Congo’s significance to Belgium wane. Belgians rebounded from the loss of their colony, and more than half a century after Congo’s independence, Belgium today ranks among the world’s wealthiest countries. The Congo’s fate, by contrast, remains uncertain, mired as it has been in conflict since Mobutu’s 1997 downfall, which followed more than three decades of dictatorship.61 In 1999, the same year he tossed Lumumba’s last mortal remains into the North Sea, Gérard Soete admitted he had participated in the assassination and disposal of the former prime minister. It is often argued that the Congo continues to pay the price for such acts. What price did Soete pay? None. He died peacefully in Bruges in 2000.

Notes 1. The author thanks Amandine Lauro, Laurence Marvin, Martin Thomas, and Andy Thompson for comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2. BBC News, “Who Killed Lumumba?” (21 Oct. 2000), http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​programmes/​correspondent/​974745.stm, accessed 27 March 2015. 3. Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, trans. Ann Wright and Renée Fenby (London: Verso, 2001), 141. 4. INA, “Une mort de style colonial:  l’assassinat de Patrice Lumumba” (3 February 2005), http://​www.ina.fr/​video/​S58139022, accessed 27 March 2015.

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    159 5. Idesbald Goddeeris and Sindani E. Kiangu, “Congomania in Academia: Recent Historical Research on the Belgian Colonial Past”, BMGN 126, no. 4 (2011): 54–​75; Guy Vanthemsche, “The Historiography of Belgian Colonialism in the Congo”, in Csaba Lévai, ed., Europe and the World in European Historiography (Pisa:  Pisa University Press, 2006), 89–​119; Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, “L’historiographie congolaise: Un essai de bilan”, Civilisations 54 (2006): 237–​254. 6. Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa:  Cold War in the Congo, 1960–​1965 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013). 7. Pedro Monaville, “La décolonisation du Congo belge: le sens d’un échec consensual”, in Fabienne Bock, ed., L’échec en politique: Objet d’histoire (Paris: Harmattan, 2008), 330. 8. Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History (New York: Faber and Faber, 1962), 103, 187, 104. 9. Nina D. Howland, David C. Humphrey, and Harriet D. Schwar, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–​1968, Volume XXIII, Congo, 1960–​1968 (hereafter FRUS XXIII Congo) (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 2013), 101–​102. 10. Basil Davidson, The African Awakening (London: Cape, 1955). 11. Jean-​Luc Vellut, “Mining in the Belgian Congo”, in David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin, eds., History of Central Africa. Volume Two (London: Longman, 1983), 130. 12. La Politique Indigène du Gouvernement au Congo (March 1946), 6, liasse AE/​II 1712, portefeuille 3267, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Archives africaines, Brussels, Belgium (hereafter AA). 13. Marvin D. Markowitz, Cross and Sword:  The Political Role of Christian Missions in the Belgian Congo, 1908–​1960 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), 104. 14. Markowitz, Cross, 26. 15. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 16. Osumaka Likaka, “Rural Protest:  The Mbole against Belgian Rule, 1897–​ 1959”, International Journal of African Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (1994): 589–​617. 17. Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, Histoire générale du Congo: De l’héritage ancien à la République Démocratique (Paris-​Brussels: Duculot-​De Boeck, 1998), 439–​444. 18. The misnomer évolué literally meant “evolved” and referred to Africans who had adopted Western norms. 19. Ndaywel è Nziem, Histoire, 443. 20. David Van Reybrouck, Congo:  Une Histoire, trans. Isabelle Rosselin (Arles:  Actes Sud, 2012), 249. 21. Karen Brouwer, Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 10. 22. Zana Aziza Etambala, De Teloorgang van een Modelkolonie:  Belgisch Congo 1958–​1960 (Leuven: Acco, 2008), 134. 23. Van Reybrouck, Congo, 255. 24. Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940:  The Past of the Present (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002). 25. US Consulate Leopoldville to State Department, despatch 156, 22 Dec. 1954, document 755a.00/​12-​2254, 4, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA). 26. Nancy Rose Hunt, “Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s foyer social, 1946–​1960”, Signs 15, no. 3 (1990), 447–​474.

160   Matthew G. Stanard 27. O’Brien, Katanga, 160–​161. 28. Van Reybrouck, Congo, 255. 29. Anne-​Sophie Gijs, “Le pouvoir de l’absent: Les avatars de l’anticommunisme au Congo (1920–1961)”, Ph.D. thesis (Louvain-​la-​Neuve, 2014), 403. 30. Anne-​Sophie Gijs, “Une Ascension Politique Teintée de Rouge: Autorités, Sûreté de l’État et grandes Sociétés face au ‘danger Lumumba’ avant l’indépendance du Congo”, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis 42, no. 1 (2012), 49. 31. O’Brien, Katanga, 112. 32. Guy Vanthemsche, “Le Saint-​Siège et la Fin du Congo belge (1958–​1960)”, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 109, nos. 1–​2 (2014), 196–​233. 33. Gijs, “Pouvoir”, 128–​245. 34. Mathieu Zana Aziza Etambala, “‘Bwana Kitoko’ (1955), un film d’André Cauvin: réalités congolaises ou rêveries belges?”, in Patrimoine d’Afrique Centrale. Archives Films: Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, 1912–​1960, eds. Patricia Van Schuylenbergh and Mathieu Zana Aziza Etambala (Tervuren: KMMA, 2010), 141–​156. 35. Matthew G. Stanard, “ ‘Bilan du monde pour un monde plus déshumanisé’:  The 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and Belgian Perceptions of the Congo”, European History Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2005), 267–​298. 36. Administration de la Sûreté (Congo), Bulletin d’Information, no. 7 (1 January–​30 September 1956), 2, Affaires Indigènes, AA. 37. Administration de la Sûreté (Congo), “Communisme et Congo belge”, Bulletin d’Information (20 June 1959), Affaires Indigènes, AA. 38. Osumaka Likaka, Naming Colonialism:  History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–​1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 39. Folder “Utilisation F.P. comme Gd”, portefeuille FP 2451, Archives de la Force publique, AA. 40. Matthew G. Stanard, “Belgium, the Congo, and Imperial Immobility: A Singular Empire and the Historiography of the Single Analytic Field”, French Colonial History 15 (2014), 87–​109. 41. Vanthemsche, “Saint-​Siège”, 198. 42. Guy Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, 1885–​1980, trans. Alice Cameron and Stephen Windross, revised by Kate Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 43. Frans Buelens and Stefaan Marysse, “Returns on investments during the colonial era: The case of the Belgian Congo”, Economic History Review 62, S1 (2009), 135–​166. 44. André Mommen, The Belgian Economy in the Twentieth Century (London:  Routledge, 1994), 114. 45. Namikas, Battleground,  51–​52. 46. Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–​1975 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). 47. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 58. 48. Thank you to Jean-​Luc Vellut for this insight. 49. Cowen to Secretary of State, 2 July 1952, document 855A.2546/​7-​252, NARA. 50. George White, Jr, Holding the Line:  Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy toward Africa, 1953–​1961 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 51. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–​1960: Volume XIV Africa (hereafter FRUS XIV Africa) (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1992), 274. 52. Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Belgium, Decolonization, and the Congo    161 53. Tweedy to Satterthwaite, 18 April 1960, FRUS XXIII Congo, 8. 54. FRUS XXIII Congo, 1. 55. Dulles quoted in “Editorial Note”, FRUS XIV Africa; FRUS XXIII Congo, 15, 19, 22. 56. Madeleine G. Kalb, The Congo Cables:  The Cold War in Africa—​From Eisenhower to Kennedy (New  York:  Macmillan, 1982); Stephen Weissman, “What Really Happened in Congo: The CIA, the Murder of Lumumba, and the Rise of Mobutu”, Foreign Affairs (July–​August,  2014). 57. Ludo de Witte, Assassination, 47. 58. FRUS XXIII Congo, 60. 59. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136; Weissman, “Congo”. 60. Namikas, Battleground. 61. Vanthemsche, Belgium, 200–​267.

Chapter 9

P ortu g a l Decolonization without Agency Norrie MacQueen

If the term ‘decolonization’ is taken to imply a policy actively pursued by the colonial power, its use in relation to Portugal in 1974–​1975 may be problematic. Portugal’s loss of empire was an unplanned, largely unmanaged, yet utterly irresistible consequence of a military coup in Lisbon in April 1974. It was a process in which a series of weak and unstable provisional governments in Portugal could exercise little agency and were often reduced to hapless observers.1 In Guinea-​Bissau, the first of the African territories to emerge as an independent state in September 1974, Portugal had merely to come to terms with facts more or less established on the ground by a unilateral proclamation of independence a year previously made by the Guinean nationalist African Party for the Liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC: Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde). In Mozambique, the initiative in securing independence in June 1975 unquestionably lay with the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO: Frente de Libertação de Moçambique). The situation in Angola, the jewel in Portugal’s African crown, was more complicated. The anti-​colonial struggle there had become a competitive one fought out between three mutually hostile movements which, by the middle of 1975, were engaged in murderous internecine conflict. In this, Portugal was more or less a bystander before it abandoned the territory to its fate in November 1975. Amidst this vista of metropolitan collapse the two smaller African Atlantic island territories of Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe simply slipped away to independence (both in July 1975) after minimal negotiations with Lisbon. Beyond Africa, Portuguese power in Timor-Leste (East Timor), a small territory nested within the Indonesian archipelago, disintegrated in the face of rapidly developing nationalist pressures and then Indonesian invasion and annexation in December 1975. In the immediate aftermath of this imperial dissolution Portuguese leaders put the bravest possible face on the process, even claiming it, in the words of a minister deeply involved (and later Portuguese President) Mário Soares to have been an ‘exemplary

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    163 decolonization’ (descolonização exemplar).2 But for anyone who followed the day-​by-​ day process and considered its consequences, this was simply untenable.

The Metropolitan Setting: Portuguese Exceptionalism? Beyond Portugal’s lack of initiative in the process, there was another way in which, peculiarly, the Portuguese experience raises questions about the term ‘decolonization’. The Portuguese state, until the point of imperial disintegration, resolutely refused to acknowledge the existence of an ‘empire’. Without colonies, the official argument ran, decolonization was meaningless; Portugal had no colonies, merely ‘overseas provinces’ (províncias ultramarinas). The authoritarian Estado Novo (‘New State’) of António de Oliveira Salazar (and from 1969 his successor as prime minister Marcello Caetano) clung to the idea of Portugal as a ‘pluricontinental’ state rather than an imperial one. ‘Independence’ for Angola or Mozambique or Timor-Leste was, in this formulation, as meaningless as ‘independence’ for the Algarve or greater Lisbon. All were integral parts of ‘the single and indivisible nation’ (a nação uno e indivisível). The presence of around half a million European settlers in the African territories lent physical force to this claim. Thus, Portugal did not face colonial insurgencies in the 1960s and 1970s, but instead, an existential challenge to the nation as a whole. These ideas were both philosophically rationalized and politically expedient. The most celebrated theorist of Portugal’s pluricontinental ‘lusotropical’ vocation was the Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre, whose work extolled the qualities of the Portuguese language and the unifying culture of which it was a vector. (Unquestionably, the Portuguese language helped forge the distinctiveness of the Lusophone territories from their Anglophone and Francophone neighbours in colonial Africa.) In this view, Portugal ‘ultramar’ constituted a unique pax Lusitania within a self-​defining Lusophone community.3 Freyre’s work was enthusiastically adopted by the Estado Novo as a semi-​official statement of the country’s imperial mission. This sense of Portuguese separateness was deepened by the uniquely centralizing character of Lisbon’s colonial administrative and social policies. By practical necessity the ‘assimilated’ (assimilado) elite from the overseas territories had to pursue their higher education in Portugal and could thus be co-​opted into the prevailing lusotropical ideology. But this separateness proved a double-​edged weapon for the Estado Novo. An entire generation of nationalist activists from the empire came together at universities in the metropole in the mid-​twentieth century, unified in resistance to Portugalidade (‘Portugalness’) rather than in support of it. Moreover, these nascent leaders mixed not just with one another but with dissident Portuguese activists as well. This gave a unique tone to nationalism across the Portuguese territories and created an internal unity, but

164   Norrie MacQueen it also linked anti-​colonialism to the clandestine anti-​regime resistance in the metropole. No comparable situation developed anywhere else in Europe in the post-​Second World War years. In that sense, Portuguese claims to exceptionalism were vindicated—​ but in a way wholly antipathetic to the regime’s lusotropical ideology. Yet for the Estado Novo, ruling a small economically and socially backward country on the periphery of Europe with a political mythology rooted in the glories of Portugal’s conquests of the long past, the ultramar served an obvious political purpose. Up until the 1974 Carnation Revolution, every classroom in Portugal and its territories had a wall chart which superimposed Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-​Bissau, and Timor-Leste on a map of Europe with the inscription ‘Portugal não é um país pequeno’ (‘Portugal is not a small country’). The denial of empire in favour of the notion of an extended pluricontinental state was also a diplomatic instrument. After the Second World War years, as the imperial idea fell into disrepute, Portugal constructed a constitutional narrative to deflect criticism and mounting international pressure for decolonization. In 1951, the Colonial Act of 1930, which had first set out the imperial status of the Estado Novo, was superseded by a constitutional amendment which removed all references to the Império Colonial (‘Colonial Empire’).4 Henceforward, all anti-​colonialist criticism of Portugal’s overseas policies could be rebutted by the regime as irrelevant. In line with this self-​ascribed status, Portugal rejected the UN’s landmark 1960 General Assembly Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which demanded ‘immediate steps’ towards the unconditional transfer of power in all non-​self-​governing territories.5 While Portugal’s constitutional sleight of hand was derided in the wider world, it provided a legalistic comfort blanket for the increasingly beleaguered Estado Novo.

The African Wars Portugal alone among the European imperialists fought protracted colonial wars in sub-​ Saharan Africa. Between 1961 and 1964, guerrilla campaigns began in all three of the continental territories of Angola, Guinea-​Bissau, and Mozambique. These continued at varying levels of intensity until the military coup in 1974—​an event for which the wars themselves provided the principal motivation and which then precipitated the rapid disintegration of the empire as a whole. Why did Portugal, itself virtually an impoverished third-​world country with an underdeveloped economy and archaic social structure, fight these apparently irrational wars? One explanation has already been explored:  the Estado Novo’s self-​ constructed identity, which was delusional but perhaps genuinely held, placed Portugal at the hub of a ‘non-​colonial’ pluricontinental entity. Logically, this worldview suggested that Portugal must fight to secure its fundamental territorial integrity. But beyond this there is an alternative explanation which casts Portugal’s behaviour as a ‘rational’ response to a fundamentally impossible set of circumstances. This posits that the African wars were an inevitable consequence of Portugal’s inability to decolonize

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    165 because it was not in a position to ‘neo-​colonize’. In this perspective, decolonization by, for example, Britain and France, was largely meaningless in real economic terms. So-​called ‘flag decolonization’ could be permitted, indeed welcomed, for their territories because the underlying dynamics of economic exploitation were in place and would remain largely unaffected by a change in political structure. This ‘retreat’ from formal empire was advantageous to the colonial power as it removed the financial and political millstone of formal control. Portugal, however, deployed no such economic power and was consequently ‘forced’ to fight to retain formal control in its African territories precisely because of its own economic weakness, not in spite of it. The wars, in other words, were a necessary price to pay for whatever economic advantage Portugal could wring from Africa. Whatever the validity of these alternative (though not necessarily mutually exclusive) explanations of Portuguese inflexibility, the resulting wars fed the sense that Portugal stood outside the mainstream narrative of European imperialism and decolonization. On the other side, for the African nationalists in the different territories the wars resulted in a much higher level of inter-​territorial solidarity than in the empires of Portugal’s fellow imperialist powers. The effect was to foster the impression of a single historic struggle in Portuguese Africa while disguising the very different origins and directions of the liberation movements in each territory. Angola had always had a special place in Portugal’s ‘African vocation’, and provided the greatest economic resources of the African territories, including rich agricultural land on which a range of valuable cash crops from cotton to coffee were produced. It also had considerable mineral wealth; diamonds had long been mined in the centre and north of the territory, but by the 1960s, offshore oil promised to boost the colonial economy to a new level. Angola also had by far the largest number of European settlers: upwards of 300,000 at the time of the 1974 revolution in Portugal. The capital Luanda and the other large urban centres were culturally diverse, vibrant, and sophisticated (many Portuguese spoke of Angola as a ‘new Brazil’ standing apart from the other African territories). This cosmopolitanism was a factor in the development of the nationalist challenge in Angola, or at any rate one strand of it. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA: Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), responsible for the first attacks against colonial installations in 1961 which inaugurated Portugal’s African wars, was led predominantly by mixed race (mestiço) intellectuals, personified in its leader (and independent Angola’s first president) Agostinho Neto. The MPLA had been established in the mid-​1950s as an outgrowth of the Angolan Communist Party, which itself had been founded as a cell of the Portuguese party in the late 1940s.6 So far as the MPLA could be said to have a distinct African ethnic base, this lay among the urbanized Mbundu people who formed the greater part of Luanda’s working class. In March 1961, just weeks after the initial MPLA attacks in Luanda, a different line of anti-​colonial resistance erupted in the north of Angola. The Bakongo people, who provided the main workforce in the agricultural economy of the region, mounted coordinated attacks on the plantations and their Portuguese owners and managers. The

166   Norrie MacQueen movement which emerged from this uprising—​and the brutal Portuguese repression which ensued—​evolved over the following years into the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA: Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola). The FNLA was led by Holden Roberto who had significant backing from Congo (Zaire after 1966) to whose dictator president, Mobutu Sese Seko, Roberto was related by marriage. The divisions within the anti-​colonial movement widened in 1966 when one of the FNLA’s leaders, the charismatic Jonas Savimbi, broke away to form the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA:  União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola). Savimbi was from Angola’s largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu of the country’s central plateau, and his defection dented the FNLA’s claim to represent Angola as a whole rather than just the northern region.7 This divided insurgency continued sporadically throughout the 1960s, but its initial intensity was not sustained. The reality, despite the claims of the nationalist movements, was that the colonial state was never under critical threat from the armed struggle in Angola after 1961. Fighting was desultory and restricted to sparsely populated regions, mostly in the east. The initial urban focus of the MPLA insurgency was not maintained in the face of the ubiquitous Portuguese security apparatus. The limited nature of the armed struggle in Angola (whose deep ethnic, regional, and ideological divisions were ably exploited by the Portuguese) lulled the post-​coup regime in Lisbon during 1974 into a false sense of security.8 After all, the Portuguese position in Angola had been fundamentally sound right up to the coup. Its military forces in the territory stood at a formidable 60,000, with about 40% of them locally recruited. These were pitched against three guerrilla movements divided between (and in the case of the MPLA within) themselves. Reliable figures are difficult to arrive at, but it is unlikely that either the MPLA or the FNLA deployed forces greater than in the very low thousands, with UNITA no more than a few hundred strong. During the whole of 1973 the Portuguese military had suffered only fifteen combat deaths.9 The Lisbon coup had little immediate impact on this relatively stable situation and the European settler population initially greeted the news of it calmly, confident that there would be no sudden or dramatic change in Angola. Developments over the following year would alter this situation dramatically, with catastrophic consequences for the process of transfer of power from Portugal. In contrast to the weak and fragmented armed struggle in Angola, the war in Guinea-​ Bissau, which was the smallest of the three continental territories wedged between Francophone Senegal and Guinea-​Conakry in the bulge of West Africa, posed by far the greatest challenge to Portugal. In many respects the conflict in Guinea, which began at the start of 1963, was the catalyst for the sequence of events in Lisbon that brought the final dissolution of the empire. The dominating figure of the liberation struggle in Guinea-​Bissau up until his assassination in 1973 was Amílcar Cabral. Cabral was not himself Guinean but a mestiço from Cape Verde and the PAIGC, which he founded in 1956, was largely led by Cape Verdeans who had originally been imported to Guinea to serve in the lower levels of the colonial bureaucracy. In a similar way to the MPLA in Angola (in the formation of which Cabral himself had a hand), the PAIGC evolved into

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    167 a liberation movement open to external ideological influences and adept at mobilizing international support.10 Inevitably, perhaps, there were ethnic tensions between the mestiço leadership and the African Guineans who provided the main body of the fighters and these contributed to the circumstances of Cabral’s death in January 1973.11 But this factionalism offered little relief to the Portuguese in the front line of the war. For them, Guinea was known simply as o forno (‘the furnace’). By the eve of the Lisbon coup the Portuguese presence had retreated to the main towns and a few isolated and heavily fortified positions in the bush. In 1973, despite the death of Cabral, the PAIGC turned the screw on the colonial forces further and deployed surface-​to-​air missiles which reduced the Portuguese capacity to mount air strikes and resupply positions. Eventually, some 32,000 Portuguese troops were tied down by no more than 7,000 guerrillas.12 Now the colonial forces in Guinea were reduced to a strategy ruefully described by an officer on the ground as aguentar enquanto fosse possível—​loosely, ‘hang on as best as possible’.13 It was not lost on those required to fight the war in Guinea that their efforts had little material purpose. There was no settler community to defend and little economic benefit of any kind. The regime’s justification for the war was rooted in Portugal’s singular imperial doctrine: to allow Guinea to exit the ‘Portuguese space’ would be to breach fatally the edifice of the pluricontinental state. The irony was that the price of attempting to hold Guinea, the least valuable component of the empire, was ultimately the disintegration of the empire as a whole. Attempts by the military commander and governor-​ general in the territory, General António de Spínola, to negotiate a settlement with the PAIGC in the early 1970s were rejected out of hand by the regime in Lisbon.14 Then, in September 1973, came the PAIGC’s declaration of Guinean independence. Diplomatic recognition by scores of Afro-​Asian and communist bloc countries followed, placing Portugal’s claim to the territory in real legal doubt.15 Long after the final departure of the Portuguese, evidence emerged that at the beginning of 1974 in the last phase of the war in Guinea—​and the last days of the Estado Novo in Lisbon—​the Caetano regime recognized the futility of its position. Clandestine talks organized by the British government were held with the PAIGC in London. Fundamentally, these were designed to bring a negotiated independence for Guinea-​ Bissau. Initial discussions evidently made progress and a further round was agreed. The first encounter took place in March, however, when the dissident officers of the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement (MFA—​Movimento das Forças Armadas) were already planning the overthrow of the regime.16 Despite being overtaken by events, the affair was significant. It represented an implicit admission by Lisbon of the hopelessness of its position in Guinea-​Bissau and more broadly an acceptance that the hitherto sacred principle of ‘national indivisibility’ was now unsustainable. The MFA was particularly strong in Guinea in comparison with the other Portuguese territories. In Guinea, the pressures on the military were much greater than elsewhere and dissent much stronger in consequence.17 When the news of the Lisbon coup reached Bissau, MFA elements moved quickly to arrest the hard-​line governor (appointed the previous year to replace Spínola and reassert the regime’s policies) and to neutralize

168   Norrie MacQueen the secret police. The territory then entered a transitional phase, essentially awaiting Portugal’s formal acceptance of its independence. In Mozambique, where the last of the three wars began in 1964, the intensity and impact of the fighting lay between that in the largely ‘pacified’ Angola and the ferocity of Guinea-​Bissau. The war began with attacks by FRELIMO on government posts in the north of the country. FRELIMO had been formed in the early 1960s from a number of small nationalist groupings.18 It was led by the US-​educated Eduardo Mondlane, an urban intellectual from a similar background to those of Agostinho Neto in Angola and Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-​Bissau. As with its co-​movements in the other territories, FRELIMO’s efforts were aided by the proximity of cross-​border havens (for Mozambique provided mainly by Tanzania). In common with those sister movements, too, FRELIMO suffered from violent spasms of internal division. These were partly ethnic and regional (the military wing was dominated by northerners with a tendency to resent the mainly southern and urban political leadership) and partly ideological between ‘liberal nationalists’ and Marxists. In 1968 Mondlane was assassinated in circumstances similar to those surrounding the death of Cabral five years later. He was succeeded eventually by Samora Machel who redoubled FRELIMO’s commitment to a Marxist path of development and reinvigorated the military campaign. By 1974 FRELIMO had overcome Portuguese counter-​offensives to extend the war southwards. Its fighters now threatened the showpiece Cahora Bassa hydro-​electric scheme on the Zambezi along with towns in the centre of the country and the railway connecting Mozambique with white-​ruled Rhodesia.19 One result of the guerrilla campaign was a crisis in relations between the Portuguese military and the white settler community (which was about 180,000 strong in 1974).20 Meanwhile, as the military was disparaged for its supposed weakness by the whites of Mozambique, it was denounced abroad for its brutality against the native population.21 General Francisco da Costa Gomes, the Chief of the Portuguese General Staff, privately conceded that the Portuguese army in Mozambique had ‘reached the limits of psycho-​neurological exhaustion’ by the time of the coup.22 As in Guinea-​Bissau, the relative personnel strengths of each side did not realistically reflect the balance of military power. Around 50,000 colonial troops faced at most about 10,000 FRELIMO fighters in the final phase of the war, yet the initiative lay with the guerrillas.23 This is not to say that FRELIMO was at all close to outright military victory. By the end of the war it did not hold any significant towns and the fighting remained distant from the capital, Lourenço Marques (Maputo after independence). Its position was far less commanding than that of the PAIGC in Guinea, but it was incomparably stronger than the combined forces of the nationalist movements in Angola. The immediate post-​coup days were strained in Mozambique where the MFA was weaker than in Guinea. There were tensions between pro-​coup junior officers and their less enthusiastic commanders. There were also violent settler demonstrations in the second city of Beira and other centres.24 Moreover, there was restiveness among the 30,000 or so African troops in the colonial army who were concerned for their future.25

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    169 FRELIMO proved adept at exploiting this fraught interregnum by publicly insisting that the war would not end until independence was guaranteed.26 By June 1974, the Lisbon press was describing the situation in Mozambique as ‘a bubbling cauldron’.27 Unsurprisingly, the Portuguese soldiers showed little enthusiasm for risking their lives in what day by day seemed ever more a lost cause. This was summed up in the popular MFA slogan: nem mais uma operação; nem mais um tiro (‘not one more operation; not one more shot’). Tentative contacts between the sides grew and local ceasefires were negotiated.28 Responding to this collapse in morale, General Costa Gomes ordered that Portuguese military operations were to be restricted to self-​defence and protection of civilians.29 The Lisbon coup therefore left the three major African territories in varying states of uncertainty. In Angola, where the Portuguese army clearly held the upper hand, there was no immediate expectation that whole-​scale decolonization would inevitably follow. In Guinea-​Bissau, in contrast, there was no doubt that it would, while in Mozambique a tense and potentially dangerous transition began. In none of the war-​affected territories did the new Lisbon regime clearly state its favoured outcome. The Lisbon coup had taken even those who carried it out by surprise. While the MFA knew what it was against, it was fatally unclear about what it was for in respect of the new Portugal’s place in the world, and in particular, its accommodation with its imperial past. This was evident in the blueprint for the revolution as set out in the ‘Programme of the Armed Forces Movement’. The section dealing with ‘overseas policy’ merely called for ‘recognition that the solution to the (African) wars is political and not military’ and indicated that conditions would be created for ‘a frank and open (national) debate on the overseas problem’.30 The vagueness is explained by the complexity of Portuguese politics in the last years of the Estado Novo.

The Endgame of the Estado Novo There was an intimate relationship between the progress of the wars in Africa and the vicissitudes of metropolitan politics in the final phase of the empire. The term ‘fascist’ has often been applied to the Estado Novo, but in a technical sense this was not an appropriate label. The Estado Novo was not a ‘corporate state’. Far from it, as the various sections of the Portuguese elite frequently pursued conflicting interests and were willing to fight for them among themselves. Political, economic, and military leaders operated in an environment of shifting alliances and hostilities. The end of empire was in many respects shaped by this process. The replacement of Salazar by Caetano in 1968 (after the former became seriously ill) initially raised the hopes of the more liberal sections of the elite. Fundamental change both in domestic and colonial policy now seemed possible. Yet beyond a largely cosmetic proposal in 1970 for greater (mainly settler) autonomy in Africa, Caetano disappointed his more progressive friends. Once in office he appeared unable, if not unwilling, to confront the Salazarist ultras who retained considerable power in the regime. The weakness

170   Norrie MacQueen of what many had hoped would be a reforming wave of ‘Marcelismo’ was nowhere more evident than in his refusal to support Spínola’s initiatives on Guinea-​Bissau. The ‘liberal wing’ (ala liberal) of the late Estado Novo was particularly prominent among the economic elite and in certain key respects its disappointment related to colonial policy. The economic policy of the Estado Novo up to the 1960s had been one of ultra-​protectionism. In Africa, this had favoured the growth of a few dominant industrial and trading conglomerates (or ‘oligopolies’). In Mozambique and Angola, the major players were the Champalimaud group and the Espírito Santo corporation. The giant Companhia União Fabril (CUF) was active in Guinea as well as in the southern African territories. These enterprises were founded and run by families woven tightly into the political and military fabric of the Estado Novo and had great influence over colonial policy. They profited immensely from a boom in the Angolan and Mozambican economies in the 1960s (which was paradoxically driven in part by the demands of the wars).31 But simultaneously, a new dimension was developing in the Portuguese economy. In 1960, just before the outbreak of the African wars, Portugal had joined the European Free Trade Area (EFTA). The patterns of Portuguese trade altered fundamentally during the following decade as a process of ‘Europeanization’ set in. In 1959, 30% of exports had gone to the colonies and 40% to Europe. By 1973 the figures were 15% and 51%, respectively.32 As mentioned, the state protection given to the oligopolies lies at the heart of the nexus between colonialism and neo-​colonialism explaining the perceived necessity to maintain formal control in the empire. Unprotected in Africa, the oligopolies would fall prey to the depredations of the more advanced capitalist systems of other countries. The apparent contradiction between Portugal’s dual position as both the weakest and the most obdurate of the European imperial powers could thus be reconciled. The end of formal colonial control and its replacement by an effective process of neo-​colonial domination was not a viable option. But the tectonic shift in Portugal’s economic orientation during the 1960s brought about by its turn towards Europe changed priorities and threw into doubt the imperative of African protectionism. The oligopolies took different positions on the new economic circumstances of the 1960s. While Espírito Santo favoured the maintenance of the status quo in Africa, the others began to take a different view.33 Both Champalimaud and the CUF questioned the future of the empire as an integrated entity—​or, in terms of Estado Novo ideology, as a pluricontinental state.34 In this way, the regime’s failure to modernize its colonial policies away from the Salazarist model threatened to cut the hitherto close ties between political and economic interests at the top of the regime. If relations between the key economic actors and the political leaders of the Estado Novo provided an underlying motif to the end of empire, the divergent interests of the military and a government held captive by the intractable forces of Salazarism produced the mechanism. Tensions between the military and their supposed political masters were not new in Portugal in the 1970s. In April 1961, just a few months after the outbreak of the Angolan war, Salazar’s government was threatened by a military coup led by its own defence minister, General Botelho Moniz. A few months later the military was in

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    171 its own estimation scapegoated by Salazar for the loss of Goa after its occupation by the Indian army.35 But these schisms became more pronounced as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the African wars were at the centre of developments.36 The MFA’s origins are instructive in this regard. In the aftermath of the 1974 coup, the military tended to re-​cast its recent history. As it came to bask in the image of heroic radicalism attached to it by both the Portuguese and the international left, and to position itself as the vanguard of revolutionary change at home and colonial freedom abroad, so some inconvenient truths were downplayed. As discussed, the MFA initially had no clear commitment to decolonization. In fact, its original grievances were professional and essentially conservative. In 1973, as the demands of war, especially in Guinea, became ever greater, the regime sought to make extended service for conscripted officers (known as milicianos) more attractive. To this end privileges and preferences hitherto restricted to career officers were extended to their conscript colleagues. The so-​called ‘Captains’ Movement’, the precursor of the MFA, emerged to defend the traditional privileges of the professional military caste. Certainly, the wars provided the background to this and, with an organization in place, grievances expanded to embrace the frustrations of apparently interminable and unwinnable conflict. But the radicalism of the MFA and its commitment to decolonization blossomed only after the Caetano regime had been overthrown. It was the regime’s disregard of professional sensitivities along with its apparent refusal to show any flexibility on the lost cause of Guinea that led to the coup, not a fundamental commitment to the end of empire. Increasingly at odds with the political leadership despite his high standing in the Portuguese officer corps, General Spínola had left Guinea in August 1973. Although still on reasonable terms with Caetano, he rejected an invitation to become defence minister, fearing (probably correctly) that this was designed to silence his criticism of the regime’s African policy. He did, however, agree to become deputy chief of the general staff under General Costa Gomes. This undemanding post allowed him the space to produce a detailed critique of colonial policy, Portugal e o Futuro (Portugal and the Future),37 in which he set out an alternative pluricontinental vision based on colonial ‘self-​government’ within a Lusophone federation. Decolonization as commonly understood did not feature in this. But the publication of the book in February 1974 helped seal the regime’s fate. It was taken by the MFA as a tacit approval for a coup from a figure of unassailable national prestige. Spínola’s support for a movement he believed to be committed to realizing his vision was confirmed when he accepted the presidency after the coup had succeeded. Almost immediately, however, a momentum towards a clean break from empire began to build and soon became irresistible.

The Transfers of Power: 1974–​1975 Reluctantly and only gradually, Spinola conceded ground to the new cadre of civilian politicians, many of whom were associated with the previously clandestine Communist

172   Norrie MacQueen Party and the relatively new Socialist Party formed by Mário Soares in exile. But Spínola would never become reconciled to colonial independence and this would be instrumental in his fall from power in September 1974, after only five months in office. Meanwhile, in July, the landmark Law 7/​74 asserted ‘the right to self-​determination, with all of its consequences, including the acceptance of the independence of the overseas territories  . . .’.38 The Spínolist vision of continuing imperial relationships was now unsustainable. The pressures against it were not merely domestic. International opinion, including among Portugal’s allies, showed no sympathy for the project.39 Most importantly, however, the facts on the African ground rendered Spínola’s plans futile. In Guinea-​Bissau, the PAIGC regarded Portugal’s withdrawal as a formality. In Mozambique, FRELIMO was holding the feet of the Portuguese military to the fire pending the inevitable transfer of power. Still Spínola sought to avert decolonization through a plan for consultas, or referendums, in each territory in which the dominant liberation movements would be required to run against ‘third force’ movements committed to continued association with the metropole.40 Needless to say, this was rejected by organizations which had fought long, hard wars for independence and were not now prepared to see the prize being lost amidst a general muddying of the political waters. As António de Almeida Santos, minister for inter-​territorial coordination during the process, noted, Spínola ‘had his own vision . . . and advanced it with a sharp authoritarianism (but) if anything was obvious in the final years of our presence overseas it was the greater power of realities over strong convictions’.41 Increasingly radical, the MFA challenged the Spinolist model by espousing the doctrine of ‘revolutionary legitimacy’. The wars, in this perspective, afforded those who had fought them the right to be the sole recipients of the transfer of power. Against this more attractively anti-​colonialist position, the Spínolist project could make no headway. The final retreat from Guinea came in September 1974, exactly a year after the PAIGC’s independence proclamation. Talks began (or more precisely resumed) in London in late May 1974 and were concluded in Algiers. Bowing to the inevitable, Portugal agreed to the PAIGC’s plan of withdrawal. Lisbon’s only ‘achievement’ in the process was the uncoupling of Cape Verde from the final agreement. In fact, the PAIGC leaders in both Guinea and Cape Verde were fully aware that the unification of the two territories faced so much internal opposition that disaggregation was inevitable. Consequently, Portugal recognized the new state of Guinea-​Bissau as of 10 September 1974, though the PAIGC formally dated independence from its declaration of 24 September the previous year. A separate process began for Cape Verde and was completed in November 1974. There were genuine questions as to whether Cape Verde was really an ‘African’ territory or if it might not be closer in terms of development to Madeira or the Azores and therefore better integrated with the metropole.42 After Spínola’s ejection from the presidency at the end of September, however, the momentum for decolonization proved irresistible. Following a period of transitional government with power shared by Portuguese and PAIGC nominees, Cape Verde became formally independent in July 1975. So, too, did Portugal’s other Atlantic archipelago, São Tomé e Príncipe. Here the process was broadly

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    173 similar. Lisbon agreed to negotiate with a single ‘liberation movement’, the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé & Príncipe (MLSTP: Movimento para a Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe).43 A transitional administration was established after talks in Algiers in November 1974, although the road to independence was not entirely smooth, as labour disputes spread across the territory’s plantation economy. As would be expected, the transfer of power in Mozambique was more complicated than in Guinea and the Atlantic islands. The size of the territory, the complexity of its economic and financial relationships, and, most of all, its large settler population, placed the process there in a different category. Yet here, too, independence was an inevitability. The process was not trouble free. The final arrangements were put in place after talks in Lusaka, Zambia in September 1974, but these were accompanied by violence in Lourenço Marques, where a hastily formed white resistance movement took over the main radio station. The following month brawling between Portuguese troops awaiting repatriation and local youths developed into widespread civil disorder, prompting the first serious wave of settler retornados (returnees) from Africa. The Portuguese-​FRELIMO transitional government put in place by the Lusaka process worked well, however, and the first half of 1975 passed without serious incident. Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975. Angola’s move towards independence in 1974 and 1975 followed a labyrinthine and more destructive narrative. Reflecting the relative weakness of the military threat to the colonial state there, Angola was ostensibly the calmest of the territories immediately following the Lisbon coup. But the challenges to the mechanics of the independence process were to prove much greater than anywhere else. For one thing, Angola’s totemic status in Portugal’s 500-​year history in Africa, along with the size of its settler population, made imperial withdrawal particularly fraught. But the gravest threat came from the divisions between its nationalist movements. The MPLA, the FNLA, and UNITA remained intensely hostile to each other, suspicious of the modalities of Portuguese withdrawal, and anxious to secure their place in the post-​colonial state. Even in the best of circumstances the transfer of power in Angola would have demanded a high degree of authority and diplomatic delicacy. Neither attribute was in abundance in Portugal during the ‘revolutionary process’ of 1974–​1975. Given Angola’s special place in the ‘Portuguese space’, it was to be expected that Spínola and his supporters would be especially energetic in attempting to reserve certain Portuguese privileges. In the immediate aftermath of the coup Spínola appointed his ‘own man’ as the new governor-​general, the right-​leaning General Silvino Silvério Marques. Within a few weeks, however, he had been humiliatingly expelled by the local MFA. Spínola then personally arranged a meeting with President Mobutu of Zaire on Sal island in Cape Verde, which triggered a wave of speculation in a mystified provisional government in Lisbon. A range of conspiracy theories around the Sal talks soon emerged, but by this stage—​mid-​September 1974—​Spínola’s prestige in Portugal was in free fall as the MFA’s more radical elements gained the political initiative. Within two weeks he was removed from the presidency and was succeeded by his old pre-​coup superior, General Costa Gomes.44

174   Norrie MacQueen With Spínolist obstruction thus removed, talks were held with the three Angolan nationalist movements at Alvor in southern Portugal in January 1975. From this emerged an agreement for a tripartite power-​sharing administration with elections to be held in October. These would be followed by Portugal’s final withdrawal in November. Any relief that the provisional government in Lisbon might have felt at this apparently neat arrangement was short-​lived. Within a few months, open civil war had broken out between the three movements.45 By 11 November, the date fixed at Alvor for independence, the MPLA held Luanda, while the now allied FNLA and UNITA controlled much of the rest of the country. At midnight on 10 November, the last elements of the Portuguese colonial state fled to the Luanda waterfront to be evacuated by sea. Sovereignty was transferred formally not to a successor government, as this would involve a taking of sides in the continuing civil war but, on the advice of a panel of constitutional experts, to the ‘Angolan people’.46 If anything, Portugal’s final retreat from Timor-Leste, a remnant of its ‘second’ empire, was even less decorous than that from Angola, the pride of its ‘third’.47 The Portuguese had originally occupied the whole island of Timor in the early sixteenth century, but then eventually lost the western part to the Dutch. With the establishment of Indonesia as the successor state to the Dutch East Indies in 1949, Timor-Leste’s continuing colonial status became increasingly anomalous. The similarities with the position of Goa were striking but Indonesia showed no interest in simply seizing Timor-Leste, as India had Goa in 1961. Up until 1974 the territory had been more or less neglected by Lisbon.48 This official disregard continued after the coup as successive provisional governments in Lisbon struggled to manage the more pressing problems in Africa. In the resulting vacuum the Revolutionary Front of Independent Timor-Leste (FRETILIN—​Frente Revolucionária do Timor-​Leste Independente) emerged, influenced by the ideology and rhetoric of its counterparts in Africa. In November 1974 Portugal finally invested greater attention on Timor-Leste with the appointment a new governor, Mário Lemos Pires, mandated to prepare the territory for independence. Reflecting the current radicalism in Portugal, Lemos Pires was openly sympathetic to FRETILIN.49 No concrete action was forthcoming from Lisbon, however, and in August 1975 fighting broke out between FRETILIN and other movements which had emerged amidst the lassitude pressing for either continued association with Portugal or integration with Indonesia. In response, Lemos Pires transferred the administration to Atauro Island off the capital, Dili, from where he and his officials were finally evacuated at the end of November. FRETILIN responded to this abandonment by unilaterally declaring Timor-Leste’s independence. Alarmed by the prospect of an apparently pro-​communist microstate embedded in its national territory, Indonesia’s authoritarian government invaded, exposing Portuguese powerlessness by annexing Timor-Leste outright.

The Aftermath The consequences of the chaotic end of the Portuguese empire proved to be infinitely worse for the former colonies than for the metropole. In the years following the 1974

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    175 revolution, Portugal seemed to shrug off its imperial past with relative ease.50 Hundreds of thousands of settler retornados were absorbed with surprisingly little social dislocation. Fears of post-​imperial pied-​noir violence of the type inflicted on France after its withdrawal from Algeria did not materialize. Instead, Portugal embraced its new economic and political place at the heart of the then-​rapidly developing European project. In contrast, Angola faced a civil war rooted in the divided independence struggle which ended only with the death of Jonas Savimbi at the hands of the MPLA regime’s forces in 2002. Devastating civil war was also the fate of Mozambique between the later 1970s and 1992 as here, too, conflicts left unresolved at the point of independence were fought out in the absence of the Portuguese. Tensions present in the liberation struggle also came back to afflict Guinea-​Bissau in 1980 in the form of an ‘African’ coup against the still predominantly mestiço governing elite, and began decades of instability and military interventions.51 Timor-Leste suffered a quarter century of pitiless Indonesian occupation during which about a third of the population died from direct violence or starvation employed as a military strategy. Portugal, in fact, was the de jure colonial power as Timor-Leste’s status as a non-​self-​governing territory was maintained by the United Nations (which refused to recognize the Indonesian annexation). Then, in 1999 an agreement was reached between Portugal and post-​authoritarian Indonesia, with the encouragement of the United Nations, for a referendum on the territory’s future.52 The serious violence which followed a decisive anti-​Indonesian vote led to a period of UN administration which ended with independence (or, in the official formulation of the new state of Timor-​Leste, ‘resumption of independence’ from December 1975) only in May 2002. Some sense of the general weakness of the transfers of power from Portugal can be discerned from the fact that between 1990 and 2012 across the former ‘Portuguese space’ the United Nations was required to deploy no fewer than seven major peacekeeping operations (in which, as a final irony, Portuguese military and police personnel played a prominent part).53 By the 1990s, Mário Soares was speaking not of an ‘exemplary’ decolonization but of the only ‘possible’ one (descolonização possível).54 This less self-​congratulatory revision, however overdue, was exactly correct. The end of Portugal’s five centuries of imperialism in Africa and Asia was forced by circumstances in the colonies themselves rebounding to bring radical change in the metropole. The colonial origins of this upheaval and the extent and rapidity of its impact in both Portugal and the empire denied Lisbon any significant role in shaping, let alone directing, the process. In this sense, it was indeed the only possible decolonization for Portugal.

Notes 1. There are few full-​length works in English dealing with the totality of Portuguese decolonization (although there is a considerable body of work on the experiences of the individual territories before and since independence). None of the comprehensive works on decolonization published in Portuguese have been translated. David Birmingham’s Frontline Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique (London: James Currey, 1992) offers an account

176   Norrie MacQueen of the wars of liberation in the two largest African colonies. Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London: Longman, 1997) provides a general overview. Different aspects of the Portuguese withdrawal from empire are dealt with in the collection edited by Stewart Lloyd-​Jones and António Costa Pinto, The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization (Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2003). Witney W. Schneidmann’s Engaging Africa: Washington and the Fall of Portugal’s Colonial Empire (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004) examines American reactions to the end of Portuguese Africa. 2. See Diário de Notícias Global, 16 April 2010 (found at: http://​www.dn.pt/​inicio/​globo/​interior.aspx?content_​id=1546275&seccao=CPLP). 3. An exposition of Gilberto Fryere’s ‘lusotropicalismo’ can to be found in his book O Mundo que os Português Criou (Rio de Janeiro: Livros José Olympio, 1940). 4. On the 1930 Act see James Duffy, “Portuguese Africa 1930–​1960”, in Colonialism in Africa 1870–​1960, vol.2:  The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914–1960, eds. L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 171–​193. On the 1951 amendment, see António de Figueredo, Portugal:  Fifty Years of Dictatorship (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 206. 5. UN General Assembly Resolution A/​RES/​1514 (XV), 15 December 1960. 6. On the origins of the Angolan movements see John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution Vol.1: The Anatomy of an Explosion 1950–​62 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). 7. The ethnic and regional bases of Angolan nationalism are anatomized in Franz-​Wilhelm Heimer, The Decolonization Conflict in Angola: an Essay in Political Sociology (Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1979). 8. In the final phase of the campaign the Portuguese entered into what was effectively an alliance with UNITA against the MPLA. Pedro Pezarat Correia, Descolonização de Angola: A Jóia da Coroa do Império Português (Lisbon: Inquérito, 1991), 37–​40. 9. Kenneth L. Adelman, “Report from Angola”, Foreign Affairs, 53, no. 3 (1975): 563. 10. See Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral as Revolutionary Leader (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11. Although the exact circumstances of Cabral’s death remain opaque, Portugal certainly had a hand in it. José Pedro Castanheiro offers a carefully argued account which divides culpability between the Portuguese secret police and PAIGC dissidents: Quem Mandou Matar Amílcar Cabral? (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água, 1995). 12. Jaime Nogueira Pinto, O Fim do Estado Novo e as Origens do 25 de Abril (Lisbon: Difel, 1995), 430. 13. Carlos Fabião, “A descolonização da Guiné-​Bissau. Spínola: a figura marcante da guerra na Guiné”, Seminário: 25 Abril 10 Anos Depois, (Lisbon: Associação 25 de Abril 1984), 310. 14. Norrie MacQueen, “Portugal’s first domino:  pluricontinentalism and colonial war in Guiné-​Bissau, 1963–​1974”, Contemporary European History, 8, no. 2 (1999): 209–​230. 15. On the diplomatic impact of the PAIGC declaration of independence, see Norrie MacQueen, “Belated decolonization and UN politics against the backdrop of the cold war:  Portugal, Britain and Guinea-​Bissau’s proclamation of independence, 1973–​74”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 8, no. 4 (2006): 29–​46. 16. These events only became public twenty years later after an investigation by the Lisbon weekly Expresso (26 March 1994). Subsequently, the official who represented the Portuguese side published a detailed account of the affair:  José Manuel Villas-​Boas Caderno de Memórias (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2003), 100–​111.

Portugal: Decolonization without Agency    177 17. Jorge Sales Golias, “O MFA na Guiné”, Seminário: 25 de Abril 10 Anos Depois, 317. 18. Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique:  From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–​1982 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983), 80. 19. Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013), 89–​94. 20. José Friere Antunes, O Factor Africano (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1990), 89. 21. In particular, the Portuguese military was accused of massacres in the central province of Tete during 1972. See Bruno C. Reis and Pedro A. Oliveira, “Cutting heads or winning hearts: late colonial Portuguese counterinsurgency and the Wiriyamu massacre of 1972”, Civil Wars, 14, no. 1 (2012): 80–​103. 22. Quoted by Basil Davidson in his introduction to Aquino de Bragança, “Independence without decolonization:  Mozambique 1974–​ 1975”, in Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power 1960–​1980, eds. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 429. 23. This is FRELIMO’s own claim of its strength in 1974. The true figure may well be much lower. See Thomas H. Henriksen, Mozambique: A History (London: Rex Collings, 1978), 204. 24. Grupo de Pesquisa sobre a Descolonização Portuguesa, A Descolonização Portuguesa: Aproximação a um Estudo, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Instituto Amaro da Costa 1982), 38–​39. 25. Vítor Crespo, “Descolonização de Moçambique”, Seminário:  25 de Abril 10 Anos Depois, 320. 26. Henriksen, Mozambique: A History, 220. 27. Expresso, 15 June 1974. 28. Diário de Noticias, 31 July 1974. 29. Interview by Colonel Ernesto Melo Antunes in Expresso Revista, 17 February 1979. 30. Found (in Portuguese) at: http://​www1.ci.uc.pt/​cd25a/​wikka.php?wakka=estrut07. 31. See Eric N. Baklanoff, “The political economy of Portugal’s old regime: growth and change preceding the 1974 revolution”, World Development 7 (1979): 801. 32. Grupo de Pesquisa sobre a Descolonização Portuguesa, A Descolonização Portuguesa: Aproximação a um Estudo, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Instituto Democracia e Liberdade, 1979), 123. 33. Kenneth Maxwell, “Portugal and Africa: the last empire” in Gifford and Louis, 342. 34. See Gervaise Clarence-​Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire 1825–​1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 212. 35. 1961 was something of an annus horribilis for Portuguese imperialism. As well as the conflicts in Angola and the loss of Goa, the fort of São João Baptista de Ajudá, an exclave of Cape Verde within the city of Ouidah in Dahomey (present-day Benin), was seized by Dahomey (then newly independent of France). 36. José Medeiros Ferreira, O Comportamento Político dos Militares: Forças Armadas e Regimes Políticos em Portugal no Século XX (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1992), 264–​273. 37. António de Spínola, Portugal e o Futuro: Análise da Conjuntura Nacional (Lisbon: Arcadia, 1974). A rather poor English translation was published soon after the original: Portugal and the Future (Johannesburg: Perskor, 1974). 38. As published in the official Diário do Governo, 27 July 1974. 39. José Medeiros Fereira, “International ramifications of the Portuguese revolution”, in In Search of Modern Portugal: the Revolution and its Consequences, eds, L.S. Graham and D. L. Wheeler (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 292. 40. The idea was prefigured in Portugal e o Futuro, 146.

178   Norrie MacQueen 41. Interview in Flama, 14 February 1975, and reprinted in António de Almeida Santos, 15 Meses no Governo ao Serviço de Descolonização (Lisbon: Representacões Literária ASA, 1975), 264. 42. This was certainly Spínola’s position and was set out in his apologia of 1976: António de Spínola, País sem Rumo:  Contributo para a História de uma Revolução (Lisbon:  Scire, 1978), 337. It was a view later admitted to by Mário Soares as well: interview with Maria João Avillez, Do Fundo da Revolução (Lisbon: Público, 1994), 274. 43. This arrangement was problematic as the MLSTP had operated only in exile and its support among the population of the islands was uncertain. The point was not lost on Spínola in his pursuit of a referendum: País sem Rumo, 344 fn. 44. Perhaps the most credible account of the Sal meeting is offered by John Marcum who suggests that the aim of the talks was to marginalize the Marxist MPLA and focus negotiations on the FNLA and UNITA. It might then have been possible to agree a continued relationship with Portugal: The Angolan Revolution, vol.2: Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare, 1962–​76 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 251. 45. For a detailed account of the Angolan process see Norrie MacQueen, “An ill wind? Rethinking the Angolan crisis and the Portuguese revolution, 1974–​ 1976”, Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History, 26, no. 2 (2002): 22–​44. 46. Pezarat Correia, Descolonização de Angola, 170. 47. Historically, the ‘first’ Portuguese empire was that in the Americas (Brazil) while the ‘second’ was in Asia (including Goa and Timor-Leste). Africa was the ‘third’ empire. 48. On Timor-Leste’s situation up to the Indonesian annexation, see Jill Joliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1978). 49. A Descolonização Portuguesa: Aproximação a um Estudo, vol. 2, 179–​180. 50. In 1999, the colonial slate was finally cleared when the last fragment of Portugal’s Asian empire, Macau, was returned to China (two years after the return of neighbouring Hong Kong by Britain) after a protracted but amicable process of negotiation. 51. Joshua Forrest, “Guinea-​Bissau” in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, ed. Patrick Chabal (London: Hurst, 2002), 236–​263. 52. UN Security Council document S/​1999/​513, 5 May 1999. 53. Since the 1990s Portugal has attempted to re-​engage with the Lusophone world with a view to establishing a Commonwealth-​type community; see Norrie MacQueen, “Re-​defining the ‘African vocation’:  Portugal’s post-​colonial identity crisis”, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 11, no. 2 (2003): 181–​199. 54. Soares interview with João Paulo Guerra, Descolonização Portuguesa:  o Regresso das Caravelas (Lisbon: Publicacões Dom Quixote, 1996), 130.

Chapter 10

T he C oll apse of t h e Romanov E mpi re Alexey Miller 1

Politicians and historians have produced multiple narratives of the collapse of the Romanov empire. The initial history of the victors (Bolsheviks) stressed both the role of the national movements against ‘the prison of nations’ and the proletarian struggle against ‘the weakest link’ of imperialism. Later the ‘Short Course of the History of the Communist Party’, personally edited by Stalin in the 1930s, marginalized the role of national movements in favour of class struggle,2 while post-​communist national historiographies later did exactly the opposite. Liberal historians, including émigré Russian historians, stressed the undemocratic nature of the political regime and socio-​ economic backwardness of the empire, which prevented lasting solutions for national and social problems.3 World War I for a long time had been described as the final elem­ ent needed to create fertile conditions for the victory of ‘the forces of liberation,’ be it national, or, in the Soviet narrative—​socialist. Recently, the growing literature on the First World War has placed the conflict itself at the centre of the story of imperial collapse and demonstrated how multiple factors, produced by the conditions of war, undermined empire and strengthened the ethnic and social anti-​imperial movements.4 The concepts which focus on the centuries-old ‘geocultural’ struggle of the empires over the Eurasian borderlands are linked to the history of war, but also go beyond it.5 Another explanation poses the question of the importance of the inter-​imperial interaction for stability and, later, collapse of the macro-​system of contiguous empires in Europe.6 Still, in spite of significant progress made in recent years by historians in analysing the collapse of the Russian empire, the comprehensive narrative of the end of the empire is still to be written. One of the best points of departure for reading about the collapse of the Russian empire is the memorandum, forwarded to Tsar Nicholas II, written in February 1914 by conservative politician Peter Durnovo, who served as the Minister of Internal Affairs in the dramatic years of 1905–​1906.7 Durnovo insisted that Russia should stay out of the

180   Alexey Miller imminent European war, because such engagement would lead to the collapse of the empire. Practically all his warnings proved to be true, although he himself was fortunate enough to die in autumn 1915, having seen only the beginning of the nightmare scenario he had predicted. Durnovo discusses at length many dangers which Russia would face in her foreign and internal politics should she participate in the war on the side of the Entente. Regarding nationality issues, Durnovo mentions the possibility of a Polish rebellion, the possibility of a Finnish uprising should Sweden join the war against Russia, and the probable unrest of the Muslims in the Caucasus and Turkestan due to the Ottoman propaganda. Two things are telling in his discussion of nationality policy. First, he attributes major problems in this domain to possible transborder influences of the rival powers. Second, in an otherwise lengthy memorandum he devotes only one passage to discussion of nationality issues. He stresses that, in general, national separatism can be kept in check without much of a problem.8 The lethal danger, in Durnovo’s estimation, would come from the socialist revolution. He predicts that the losing side will first fall victim to social collapse, while the winning side in Russia’s clash with Germany will soon inevitably also suffer socialist revolution, because these empires were so closely entangled. Durnovo was correct—​Russia had her socialist revolution in 1917, while Germany followed suit in 1918. A rather broad consensus among historians describes the period of 1905–​1914 as a time of growth of peripheral nationalisms. However, there are many reasons to think that Durnovo’s evaluation of the limited danger of peripheral nationalisms was not a blind spot in his otherwise quite prophetic analysis. In the context of the revolution of 1905–​1906, nationality movements indeed grew in intensity and developed more radical claims. But, from a conservative perspective, Russia experienced a ‘perfect revolution’, which changed much, introduced freedom of political associations and trade unions, freedom of press and political meetings, and an empire-​wide political representation—​ the State Duma—​ but didn’t destroy the monarchy and the old state structures. Revolutionary chaos was over by late 1906. The empire demonstrated that it was capable of containing peripheral nationalisms even in conditions of revolutionary crisis. The following period between 1906 and 1914 was a window of opportunities, when the monarchy had a chance to learn to live with the parliament, the parliament had a chance to learn to collaborate with the government, the government could introduce some far reaching reforms, and the politically active part of the society could organize itself. However, not all sides were up to the task. Nicholas II never learned to be a constitutional monarch. Liberal opposition never learned to cooperate with the government and rejected several invitations to join the cabinet of Petr Stolypin. Revolutionary parties actively employed political terror. The empire, indeed, was in crisis. However, it would be unfair to say that the fatal outcome of the crisis was predetermined. Stolypin managed to introduce a successful reform of the peasant commune, and launched a grandiose campaign of agricultural migration across the Urals, which involved more than three million peasants. The political goal of the peasant commune reform was to create a politically conservative and economically productive stratum of individual farmers, and it

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    181 was not fully achieved. But it was working. By 1914, peasants had control (through ownership or lease) of almost 90% of arable land. The countryside was not as unanimously radical as in 1905. The number of agrarian uprisings was steadily declining, and in 1913 there was no agrarian unrest altogether. In contrast, the number of strikes in industry dramatically increased between 1911–​ 1913, reaching 2000 in 1912, with approximately half of the strikes proclaiming political demands. Every third worker in Russia participated in strikes in 1912 and 1913. Yet, social democrats were fragmented, and Lenin and Trotsky were fighting more against each other than against the government. Russia was on the eve of industrial boom, with plenty of talented engineers beginning their career9, and labour conditions were bound to improve. The traditional evaluation of the dynamics of nationalism, which stresses the rise of peripheral nationalist parties, is somewhat misleading. After the revolution of 1905–​ 1906 through to 1914, the activity of the peripheral nationalist movements was also declining. For example, in 1906 every significant Ukrainian city had its own Ukrainian newspaper, but by 1908 only ‘Rada’ in Kiev survived, with 2000 subscriptions due to a subsidy of a rich landlord. With the exception of Poland, no other national movement was formulating an ‘exit strategy’. In fact, most of them needed support or protection of the empire. Baltic Germans were challenged by the emancipationist movements of Latvians and Estonians, who enjoyed a cautious support from Saint-​Petersburg. Finns were unhappy with the attempts to limit their autonomy, but didn’t want to risk what was, in fact, a very comfortable arrangement (and having learned the lesson of the Polish uprisings and their dire consequences). The Polish themselves were now critical about the tradition of uprisings, and opted for what got the name of ‘organic work’. They were split about the hierarchy of their enemies, with Roman Dmowski arguing that the alliance with the Russian empire was important to oppose the imminent danger of Germanization. Georgians and Armenians in the Caucasus were always more afraid of the Turks then angry with the Russians. Azeri intellectuals were just making the first steps in shaping a new national identity in the largely cosmopolitan oil rich Baku. Muslim activism in Russia was on the rise, but the attempts to shape a common Muslim front in the empire were far from successful. At the same time, Russian nationalist organizations in the western borderlands were becoming stronger and won municipal elections in major cities like Kiev and Odessa. In Volynia, the most western gubernia of the empire, Orthodox priests managed to mobilize more than 100,000 Little Russian (Maloross) peasants, who hated the Polish landlords and the Jews, into the Union of Russian People. The members of Russian nationalist organizations in the Western borderlands were mostly local people, who identified themselves as Little Russians (Maloross) or White Russians (Belorus), with the meaning of belonging to the Russian nation together with Great Russians (Velikoross).10 Urban growth, which started soon after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, was gathering momentum, particularly in the Western and Central gubernia. In 1860, Kiev had a population of 55,000 (an increase of just 10,000 compared with 1840), Kharkov 50,000, and Odessa 112,000. By 1874, the population of Kiev rose to 127,000; Kharkov

182   Alexey Miller in 1881 had 128,000, and Odessa 220,000 inhabitants.11 In the early twentieth century, Moscow grew from 1,043,000 residents in 1897 to 1,612,000 in 1912. Rapid urbanization, industrialization, especially in the Donbas area, and massive agricultural migrations of the peasants from Ukraine—​all these factors worked in favour of assimilation, as they did in the case of Belarussians. On the eve of the war the systematic increase in state spending for primary education brought Russia very close to the introduction of universal schooling. Over 70% of the draftees in 1914 were literate, and were literate in Russian.12 Joshua Sanborn, who proposed to look at the early twentieth century as the process of decolonization, interprets the period of 1905–​1914 as the first stage of this process, when political forces in the periphery organized themselves and formulated an exit strategy.13 This interpretation is problematic because there was no steady growth of peripheral nationalism through all this period, and the political imagination of peripheral elites continued to oscillate mostly around the question of how to negotiate some sort of autonomy with the imperial centre. Although the Great War had triggered the growth of nationalist movements, the leaders of the peripheral nationalisms in their overwhelming majority well into 1916 were still focused on their bargain with Berlin, Saint-​Petersburg, and the Western Powers. By that time, still very few people on the ground believed that nation-​states, or, rather, states which had been desperately trying for so many decades to become nation-​states, would replace empires in this part of the continent.

The First World War and its Consequences for Imperial Stability The political integration of the empire, the achievements in Russian nation-​building at its expanding core,14 as well as the economic and military potential of the empire were put to a severe test during the Great War. The Romanov empire entered the conflict as a nation-​in-​arms with mass conscription and mobilization of the reservists. Patriotic excitement remained high the early stages of this long war, and Russian nationalist motifs were playing the first fiddle together with traditional peasant monarchism.15 The very beginning of the war triggered mobilization of ethnicity. The war also mobilized expectations and imagination among the activists of peripheral nationalisms. The Great Powers made promises to certain peripheral groups in the first days of the war, which also contributed to this trend. And from the beginning, many groups were (painfully) experiencing that authorities now viewed certain ethnicities as crucial determinants of loyalty/​disloyalty in a war of total mobilization. Jews and Germans immediately became subject to forced displacement and other discrimination by the military command and military administration.16 German property was confiscated almost immediately after the war began.17

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    183 Imperial rule in the western borderlands was significantly destabilized by the introduction of the martial law. Transfer of local administrative power to the military administration was anything but effective and smooth.18 Civil and military authorities immediately engaged in all sorts of conflicts. But the real trouble began with the disastrous summer campaign of 1915, when the Germans, after the success of the Gorlice-​Tarnów operation, managed to move the front-​line several hundred kilometers east.19 This had multiple negative consequences. The Moscow mob immediately reacted with a huge three-​day long pogrom and looted the property of those considered to be German. For two days the authorities hesitated to take decisive action, and through this hesitation brought disorder and paralysis of administration from the western borderlands into the heart of the empire.20 The retreat of the Russian army created a huge wave of refugees. Altogether there were over 6 million refuges, from which comes the title of Peter Gatrell’s powerful book A Whole Empire Walking.21 Refuges put a new burden on the inner gubernias, often for the first time introducing inhabitants of the provincial Russian towns to imperial ethnic diversity. The relief structures, organized along the ethnic lines, gradually transformed themselves into networks of national movements. If we broaden our understanding of massive displacement to include the millions of mobilized soldiers who were abruptly taken out from their normal conditions, mostly from the peasant communities, it becomes clear how displacement became one of the crucial factors that, in various ways, contributed to social upheaval and the brutalization of behavior of the millions of the armed males and mobilization of ethnicity.22 During the retreat of 1915 the Russian army lost huge numbers as POWs. In general, almost three million Russian officers and soldiers became prisoners of war by the end of 1915.23 Both the Russian side, as well as the Central Powers, were engaged in political work conducted in the POW camps, which aimed at changing the loyalties and identities of the prisoners. Germans and Austrians paid particular attention to organization of special separate camps for Ukrainian POWs, where German authorities and Ukrainian nationalists worked with them, gradually shaping their identity as Ukrainian and hostile to Russia.24 By 1916, Germans organized Ukrainian units of 40,000 strong, staffed with POWs. Germans provided them with uniforms, but never with weapons. In the occupied territories, German occupational administration (Ober Ost) forbade Russian language in any official function and supported local languages, making them the official languages of administration. Ober Ost civil servants put together an Atlas of the Division of Peoples of Western Russia, claiming it demonstrated that ‘the state-​ structure, which before the war was considered a uniform Great Russian empire, is to a large extent formed out of territories of independent ethnicities, who do not stand closer to Muscovite nature than to us.’25 The Germans aimed to undermine Russian influence on Belarusians, although they were initially surprised to discover the existence of the Belarusian people and amazed at how ostensibly underdeveloped Belarusian culture and sense of national identity were. However, the occupation authorities soon came to the conclusion that this presented them with an opportunity to influence the process of self-​identification of the local

184   Alexey Miller population as separate from Poles and Russians. In 1916, Ludendorff issued a special directive on the support of Belarusian identity through cultural policy.26 In general, the Germans tried to play the role of tutors and leaders of the local peoples in Ober Ost. As Vejas Liulevicius points out, ‘cultural policy was in fact the military state’s nationalities policy, bracketing native cultures in German institutions imposed from above: press, schools, and working rooms. The German concept of ‘education,’ Bildung, was taken to its literal meaning, of ‘forming.’ As one political section official announced, ‘We are the ones, who bring Bildung, and no one else.’27 Furthermore, the ‘Kultur Program of Ober Ost . . . defined people’s place and ethnic essence by their function, fixing national identity. . . . German national identity was also defined, presented, in its essence, as rule.’28 The activity of the German occupation administration in the western borderlands of the Russian empire was an aspect of a new German geopolitical vision of this space as part of a Mitteleuropa that would have Germany as its dominant centre.29 Local activists were now trying to adopt their visions of future to the emerging geopolitical reality imagining the place for their groups in German-​dominated Eastern Europe.30 This story was an early signal that possible escape from under the control of St Petersburg might mean for most of the ethnic groups just establishment of a new relationship of imperial dependency with an alternative centre. Vienna had its own designs for Ukraine, which are yet to be the subject of a thorough analysis.31 The Austrian Government created its first Ukrainian military formation immediately after the beginning of the war from among Ukrainians of Galicia. The legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (Ukrains’ki Sichovi Stril’tsi) swore loyalty to Austria-​ Hungary on 3 September 1914. In 1915, members of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen were transferred to Russian Ukraine. Among other things, they set up schools with young, educated female teachers recruited from Galicia. The defeat of 1915 triggered an elite crisis, which proved to be crucially important in the collapse of the empire. The German roots of the dynasty were gradually becoming an acute problem in the eyes of the public. Particularly unpopular was the wife of Nicholas II, Alexandra Fedorovna, from the house of Hessen-​Darmstadt. Her patronage of Rasputin only added fuel to the animosity not only among the public, but also within the elite, and even within the ruling family itself. All attempts to convince the Tsar to send the Tsarina away from the capital were in vain. It is striking that by 1916 practically all the ruling family, including all Grand Dukes, were in favour of Tsar Nicholas II abdicating. Almost all commanders of the fighting fronts also saw abdication as the last resort to enhance the war effort.32 It is difficult to judge how many among the upper echelons of the Russian imperial elite saw the abdication as the beginning of a republican era. But definitely the overwhelming majority were indifferent to the need to organize an immediate succession. The central element of the imperial political architecture, the monarchy, still attracted mass loyalty, particularly among lower strata in the core and in the periphery. But, whatever they thought about the future of the monarchy, the initiators of the abdication were so naive that they did not see in the institution of the monarchy an important instrument for managing the crisis.

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    185 The growing hardships of the war by 1916 were gradually turning the nation-​in-​arms into increasingly revolutionized armed peasants and workers, as nationalist mobilization was giving way to class tensions and hatreds. Unlike the German-​French front in the West, in the East the front line moved quite dramatically many times in both directions, which created serious challenges for the imperial integration in the most important and also most vulnerable Western borderlands. In the course of the war, the neighbouring empires—​Russia, Austria-​Hungary, and Germany—​that had previously been extremely reserved about playing up the ethnic card in their interrelations, and were even compelled to a sort of solidarity because of their joint involvement in the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth, were now fully involved in promoting ethnic separatism in the enemy camp. These factors took on a special meaning in Ukraine and Belarus, in the context of a struggle between different versions of identity and loyalty among their population. Germans were also supporting the radical socialist politicians, including Ulyanov/​Lenin. The close entanglement of the continental empires in Europe’s east had previously been the source of their stability, but in conditions of war pitted Russia, Germany, and the Habsburg monarchy against each other, as Durnovo has predicted in 1914, which became one of the main causes of their destabilization.33 Still, the collapse of the Russian empire-​state came very late. The unrest in Petrograd in 1917, which soon became the February revolution, started with protest of women, who had to queue in front of a bakery. At that time, Russia remained the only fighting power which did not have ration cards.34 Prices of the main products were growing, but they really exploded only after the revolution, when the collapse of the transportation system brought a real failure of the state in performing its basic functions.

Revolutions and Civil Wars Fuelled by the Great War With the fall of the monarchy in February 1917, three new factors of imperial collapse became prominent. First, monarchy as the traditional source of legitimacy and loyalty, particularly among the peasants, was now lost. Second, the weak Provisional Government called for the formation of a new administration in the peripheries, without, however, suggesting clear principles of organization or making its stance on autonomy and/​or federation clear. At a time when the influence of Russian nationalists in the borderlands had been curtailed by the previous developments, this provided borderland nationalisms with a new opportunity for political action. Finally, the increase in desertions and Bolshevik influence in the army led the High Command to propose nationalization of military units. Following an order by the Commander in Chief General Lavr Kornilov, the Ukrainization and Belarusization of army corps commenced. Kornilov hoped that this would shield the army from

186   Alexey Miller Bolshevik influence and at the same time serve as a counter-​measure to the actions of the Central Powers on the Ukrainian and Belarusian questions. Pavlo Skoropadskyi, the Hetman of Ukraine in 1918, and a loyal imperial general in 1917, recalled in 1919 how he was tasked with the Ukrainization of his corps: I told Kornilov that I had just been in Kiev, where I observed Ukrainian activists. They made a negative impression on me. The corps could potentially become a major factor in the development of Ukrainiandom in a direction unfavorable for Russia. . . . Kornilov’s simplistic attitude towards this issue revealed his lack of knowledge and understanding. I tried to make him see the gravity of the matter.35

Skoropadskyi was convinced that there was no pressing need to take such a step in the summer of 1917, and he tried to make the danger of Ukrainizing the army evident. However, bowing to discipline, the general still carried out Kornilov’s directive, which soon made him Hetman of Ukraine under the German protection.36 The creation of national units had huge consequences for Ukraine, Belarus, and Bessarabia37, especially after the Bolshevik coup. The period of revolutionary crisis transformed the army from a supporter of the old regime into a whole group of independent actors. In all the empires undergoing crisis, the army leadership used their units, usually the last organized force, to contain the situation in a more limited territorial sphere, often in support of the national idea, once they realized the old regimes were beyond salvation.38 This became especially important after October 1917, when the legitimate centre of power in the empire vanished irretrievably. There are a considerable number of Russian nationalists of all shades who collaborated with the government, including those beyond the borders of the Russian empire. Skoropadskyi was a typical figure in this part of Europe—​high-ranking officers of imperial armies often became the founding fathers of the new states, and/​or performed the role of protectors of the nation from the ‘red menace’. Before the revolution, lieutenant general Karl Mannerheim was the officer of the Tsars entourage. In Finland, he was more successful then Skoropadskiy in Ukraine in consolidating power, and suppressed the ‘red Finns’ in the country and opposed the Bolsheviks in war. He became a Marshal in Finland. Josef Pilsudski in Poland also became a Marshal. While Pilsudski was not a professional officer, he commanded Polish First brigade (legion) in the Habsburg army. He fought his war with Bolsheviks in 1920. This type of military leader turned statesmen was also represented by Admiral Miklós Horthy in Hungary and Marshal Ion Antonescu in Romania. The much darker side of the collapse of the army as a key imperial institution was warlordism, which from 1918 well into 1920s was part of the landscape across the former empire, from the Far East to the western borderlands.39 In 1917, the new stage of decolonization can be described as complete state failure. It was soon followed by collapse of municipal structures, which had carried much of responsibility for the functioning of the urban centres in 1917. In 1918–​1919, municipal bodies in big urban centres lost their role as actors, and gradually the cities became

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    187 objects of rivalry of competing military formations, including various peripheral nationalists, Whites, Bolsheviks, and interventionist forces. From that time on the spread of social disaster, destruction of modern urban systems and dramatic urban depopulation was rampant. In the countryside, growing insecurity of a civil war triggered a revanche of peasant communes, which had ‘swallowed back’ most of those peasants who, in 1906, had decided to become individual farmers. The decisive reorientation of loyalty of the peripheral nationalist elites happened only after the Bolshevik coup in the autumn of 1917, when the legitimate centre of the Russian empire ceased to exist. By that time, even those Russians in Petrograd who didn’t support the Bolsheviks started to invest their hopes in the German occupation of the city. By 1918 the space of the ruined empire was shrinking in the chaos of civil war, or rather multiple civil wars. Bolshevik Reds, in control of the central gubernias, were fighting all sorts of Russian Whites based in the peripheries, from monarchists to liberals and moderate socialists. The majority of the peasants fought their own wars trying to protect their regions both from the Reds and the Whites. Some of these peasant movements adopted nationalist agenda, and others did not, like the famous anarchist Nestor Makhno and his army. In the borderlands, local national forces were desperately trying to drift as far as possible from the Bolshevik centre, sometimes building coalitions with the Whites, more often fighting them, as well as their neighbours, with whom they had to measure strength while trying to establish control over the contested space, projecting mutually conflicting images of a national territory. Several peripheral regions in the South and the North were occupied in 1918–​1919 by British, French, and American forces. In Caucasus and in the Western borderlands peripheral nationalisms soon engaged into conflicts between themselves, trying to draw borders of new nationalizing states in the areas which for decades had lived with the system of gubernias that were not constructed along the ethnic lines. As the Red army (and the Cheka, or political police, which relied mostly on terror) was marching into the peripheral regions of the former empire in the final stages of the civil war, it was first of all hunting the Whites and, more generally, the ‘class enemies’—​ in other words, the bearers of the pre-​revolutionary Russian nationalism, whom Bolsheviks considered to be their main enemy.40 By that time many among the local population were prepared to accept Bolsheviks in hope they bring an end to the ongoing hostilities and disorder. Only two new states—​Finland and Poland—​managed to fight a successful war against the Bolsheviks, and suppress communists inside their countries. Three new Baltic states were too weak to protect themselves from Bolsheviks, but British patronage saved Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from Soviet conquest. As a result of the Bolshevik victory,41 the Russian centre of the post-​imperial space lost its legitimacy not only in the eyes of many peripheral actors, who were initially loyal to the empire, but also for the majority of the old elites who felt themselves part of the Russian nation. These elites suffered the complete destruction of their social and economic status, and huge numerical losses as a result of the war, Red terror, and emigration.

188   Alexey Miller In 1918, many desperate anti-​Bolshevik Russians were dreaming about the German occupation of Petrograd as the only possible salvation. The Germans did not go that far. But they had managed to occupy the industrial heart of the empire, the Donetsk area, and establish Ukrainian authorities there.42

1918: The Collapse of Germany, and the Emergence of the Soviets and Poland Between the October Revolution and 1918, the main question facing political activists in the national borderlands was to figure out which country would win the war, and to attempt to negotiate with Germany about a new status within the framework of German hegemony in Eastern Europe. When it became evident that Germany, too, would be defeated, national movement leaders quickly turned to the Entente. Unlike Russia and Germany, the Entente could not control Eastern Europe directly. However, Entente leaders were in no hurry to fulfill the expectations of borderland nationalists, as they were counting on the fall of the Bolsheviks from power and the restoration of Russia. Consequently, in 1918 conflicts in these spaces gradually became a series of civil wars distinguished by their class or ethnic basis, often between various paramilitary formations over certain territories considered to be their rightful ethnic patrimony (Lviv/​ Lwow, Wilno/​Vilnius). The same is true of Kiev, which had changed hands 14 times during the Great War and revolution; in 1918–​1919 it was often various Ukrainian warlords who claimed the city. The experience of the weak and unstable Ukrainian states in the western and central parts of Ukraine (from the Hetman state of Skoropadskyi and Petliura’s Directorate to the West-​Ukrainian People’s Republic) shows that the mobilizational and organizational capacity of Ukrainian nationalism was rather limited. In the Caucasus, Georgian and Armenian political leadership during the negotiations with the Ottomans proclaimed their loyalty to the Provisional government in Petrograd many months after this government had fallen. The region suffered Ottoman invasion, ethnic massacres, wars about the delimitation of borders between newly emerging states, massive displacement of population, and had lost approximately one-​third of its inhabitants by 1920–​1921, by which time the Bolshevik army captured the region.43 The same pattern of social and economic disaster as the main feature during this stage of decolonization can be observed in almost all the imperial peripheries. The situation in which the empire withdraws from its peripheral territories as a result of the collapse of the centre rather than as a result of anti-​imperial movements, was, in its consequences, very far from the triumph of the new political principle of nation-​state, which only came, in fact, in 1918 when all the actors—​Germans, Wilson, Lenin—​started to talk about national self-​determination and national statehood.44

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    189

Conclusion There are two schools of thinking about the collapse of the Russian empire. The first argues that the crisis of the empire, which was so dramatically manifested in revolution of 1905, was only becoming deeper with time, that social tensions and peripheral nationalisms were growing, and there was no way these problems could be solved. Thus, the First World War became the final element that brought the empire to its end. Another school of thought (to which this author belongs) acknowledges the fact that Russia was in serious crisis. However, the contradictions, conflicts, and limitations of its last decade were not unmanageable. Peripheral nationalisms were not growing before 1914, and peasantry and the countryside in general were changing due to Stolypin reform. The political system was not all-​inclusive. In fact, it became much more restrictive in 1907, but it still offered some space for legal activity and accommodation even to peripheral nationalist politicians. On the other hand, Russian nationalism was growing in strength among Malorussians and Belorussians, thus confirming that the triune project of Russian nation-​building was making progress. Problems were grave, and the political actors were not always up to the task, but still the crisis did not have a predetermined outcome. In fact, many observers at that time saw two massive land-​ based empires (USA and Russia) as two hegemonic imperial powers in the future twentieth century. From this perspective, the Great War becomes the decisive event that dramatically changed the condition of the empire and brought revolution and imperial collapse. Initially, war nationalism45 worked mostly in favour of consolidation and political mobilization within the framework of the loyalty to the empire. The empire was still functioning in 1916, and had chances to come out of the war among the victors. Yet, starting with the defeat of 1915, the empire faced mounting problems. The implosion of the Russian empire happened, first of all, at the core, as it was betrayed by its elites, who managed the abdication of the Tsar in such a way that it resulted in the collapse of the very institution of the monarchy. Besides the factors mentioned in this chapter, war produced masses of soldiers, who when they deserted from the front or were demobilized, brought violence from the battlefields into the imperial interior. They became the main force behind the looting, pogroms, and destruction which dominated the space of the former empire in 1918–​1919.46 Unprecedented waves of violence aggravated even more the situation of social collapse caused by state failure, which was closely followed by the failure of municipal and social structures. As a result of the Bolshevik victory, the Russian centre of the post-​imperial space lost its legitimacy not only in the eyes of many peripheral actors, who were initially loyal to the empire, but also for the majority of the old elites who felt themselves part of the Russian nation. Pierre Pascal, a French emissary to Russia in 1917, spoke to an officer who confided that he felt not Russian, but Caucasian. Pascal remarked in his diary: ‘They don’t want to be Russians anymore, I know this sad talk’.47

190   Alexey Miller The very fact that within just five years after the collapse of the Romanov empire most of its space was re-​consolidated by a new power, which emerged in the core of the former empire, shows that potential for empire-​building in the region was far from exhausted.

Coda The debate about continuity and rupture between the late Romanov empire and the early Soviet Union has been going on for many decades. Probably, the most developed presentation of the novelty of the Soviet political formation in comparison to the Romanov empire was given by Terry Martin.48 He wrote about the positive discrimination of non-​ Russians during the korenizatsia campaign in the1920s, and about the promotion of an anti-​colonialist discourse and critique of Great Russian chauvinism. Something can still be added to his argument. Rejecting and suppressing Russian nationalism as a hostile force and ideology,49 Bolsheviks followed an entirely different project of political consolidation of the space of the former Romanov empire. In the period between 1917 and the early 1920s, Bolsheviks had completely destroyed the economic base of the social strata that were mostly associated with Russian nationalism and imperialism. Nobility, Orthodox clergy, entrepreneurial elite, and Cossacks were expropriated and decimated by Red terror, civil war, and emigration. Soviet national policy institutionalized ethnicity as a key factor of individual identification. The concept of a triune Russian nation, which was supposed to include Velikorossy, Malorossy, and Bielorusy, was rejected by the Soviet power, and Ukrainian and Belarussian identities were promoted as national and exclusive. The all-​Russian version of national identity, which was a key element of Russian nationalism during the imperial period, became ‘orphaned’ with the fall of the Russian empire. The Soviet population census in 1926 made the term ‘Little Russian’ illegal, keeping only ‘Ukrainian’ as the term for identification. The terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Great Russian’ became synonymous. Many achievements of the russification policy in the borderlands were deconstructed first during the collapse of the empire, and later within the logic of the Soviet project of territorialization of ethnicity50 and korenizatsia.51 Russian officials and clergy left most of the borderland regions during the war. Russian agricultural settlement in many regions in the Caucasus, Steppe and Central Asia was proclaimed wrong in the 1920s, and many settlers moved back to central Russia. Cossacks, who performed the role of the armed vanguard of the settlement movement, were targeted with brutal repressions as the foes of the Soviet power, which the majority of them truly were. ‘Correct’ ethnicity became a great career asset in new national republics.52 Liquidation of illiteracy was implemented in the 1920s in the local languages. Several dozens of languages which used to have Cyrillic alphabet were transferred to Latin script.53 The new polity, which emerged on the ruins of the Russian empire, became a profoundly different imperial project. It was based on a new anti-​capitalist ideology and

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    191 proclaimed principle of national self-​determination, which got currency in 1917. The space of the new empire was structured as a conglomerate of ‘national’ spaces of Union and autonomous republics. Decolonization of the period of 1915–​1921 was replaced with a new model of imperial domination, with emphasis on industrial development and migration of Russian proletariat into peripheral urban centres. National cultures were promoted under the patronage and control of the Moscow communist centre, which soon started to use extremely brutal means of control of the loyalty of peripheral elites. Paradoxically, the new imperial project allowed for more peaceful dissolution of the empire in 1991. However, the post-​Soviet decolonization is still a work in progress, and the elements of decolonization become even more obvious with time in some of the former Soviet peripheries—​creation of weak states, persistent civic and ethnic conflicts, civilizational regress, and demographic decline.

Notes 1. This chapter was written with the support of the Russian Scientific Foundation, grant 17-​18-​01589. Without discussions with Alfred Rieber this chapter could not have been written. I am immensely grateful for his criticism and advice. 2. David Brandenberger and Mikhail V. Zelenov, “Stalin’s Answer to the National Question: A Case Study on the Editing of the 1938 Short Course”, Slavic Review 73, no. 4 (2014): 859–​880. 3. See, e.g., Pavel Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revolucii. Sofia, 1921–​1924, Vol. 1–​3; idem, Natsionalnyi vopros (Berlin, 1925); Mikhael T. Florinskii. The End of the Russian Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1931). 4. Peter Holquist was one of the pioneers of this trend, and Joshua Sanborn is currently most active in developing it. See: Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–​1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: the Great War and the destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5. Alfred Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands:  From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 6. Alexei Miller, “The Value and the Limits of a Comparative Approach to the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery,” in Imperiology:  From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire, ed. Kimitaka Matsuzato (Hokkaido: SCR, 2007)  11–​30. 7. Zapiska P. N. Durnovo. Publication and comments by B. S. Kotov and A. A. Ivanov, in: Svet i teni velikoi voiny. Pervaia mirovaia voina v dokumentakh epokhi (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014). The English translation with some important lacunae is available on-​line at http://​ pages.uoregon.edu/​kimball/​durnovo.htm). 8. Actually, his expectations about national separatism proved to be too pessimistic: neither a Polish, nor a Finnish uprising ever happened. 9. After the revolution, these careers continued abroad (Igor Sikorski) or in Stalin’s jail (Andrei Tupolev)—​just to name those busy with aerodynamics. Engineer Genrih Graftio, who became the author of Soviet campaign of electrification of the country, completed his project of the Volkhov electric power station in 1913, etc.

192   Alexey Miller 10. Maloros remained a dominant concept of identification of the local population in what is now Ukraine until the First World War. See Anton Kotenko, Olha Martyniuk and Alexei Miller, “Maloross,” in eds. Alexei Miller et al. Poniatia o Rossii: k istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda, Vol. 2 (Moscow: NLO, 2012), 392–​443. 11. See Patricia Herlihy, “Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century,” in Rethinking Ukrainian History, ed. Ivan L. Rudnytsky (Edmonton: CIUS, 1981), 136–​137. 12. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation:  Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–​1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 13. Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: the Great War and the destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 14. See more in Alexei Miller, “The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation,” in Nationalizing Empire, eds. Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller (Budapest-​New York: CEU Press, 2015), 309–​368. 15. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation:  Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–​1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); idem, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination,” Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (2000): 267–​289. 16. Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” Russian Review 60 (2001): 404–​419. 17. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during the World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). On the other side of the front line, immediate repression targeted Ruthenians in Galicia. See Hannes Leidiger et al., Habsburgs Schmutziger Krieg. Ermittlungen zur österreichisch-​ungarischen Kriegsfürung, 1914–​1918 (St Pölten, Rezidenz Verlag, 2014). 18. Daniel W. Graf, “Military Rule Behind the Russian Front, 1914–​1917:  The Political Ramifications,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 22, no.3 (1974): 390–​411. 19. Richard L. DiNardo, Breakthrough:  the Gorlice-​ Tarnow Campaign, 1915. (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010). 20. See more in E. Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. 21. P. W. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking:  Refugees in Russia during the First World War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). 22. Joshua A. Sanborn, “Unsettling the Empire:  Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History, 77, no. 2 (2005): 290–​324. See also Mark von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity,” in Post-​Soviet Political Order:  Conflict and State-​Building, ed. B. R. Rubin and J. Snyder (London:  Routledge, 1998),  34–​57. 23. N. N. Golovin, Voennye usilia Rossii v mirovoi voine. 2 vol. (Parizh, 1939) wrote about 3,5 of Russan POWs. Golovin’s estimate is the highest, but alternative estimates come up with figures between 2 and 3 million. See: Rossia v mirovoi voine 1914–​1918 gg. (v tsifrakh) (Moskva: Tsentralnoe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR, voenno-​statisticheskii otdel, 1925). 24. Oleksyj Kuraev, “Der Verband ‘Freie Ukraine’ im Kontext der deutschen Ukraine-​Politik des Ersten Weltkriegs,” Mitteilungen, no 35 (Munich: Osteuropa-​Institut, 2000); А. Miller, “A Testament of the All-​Russian Idea:  Foreign Ministry Memoranda to the Imperial, Provisional and Bolshevik Governments,” in Extending the Borders of Russian History. Essays in Honor of Alfred Rieber, ed. Marsha Seifert (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003). 25. Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117. 26. Ibid., 121.

The Collapse of the Romanov Empire    193 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., 122. Ibid., 143–​144. Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: Reimer, 1915). Lithuanian politicians, for example, soon came up with the idea to invite a German prince to become a king of Lithuania. See more in Mikhail D. Dolbilov and Aleksei I. Miller, eds., Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2006). 31. Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Snyder tells the story of Wilhelm von Habsburg and his plans to become a king of Ukraine. 32. Vyacheslav Nikonov, Krushenie Rossii, 1917 (Moscow: Astrel, 2011). In many respects controversial, this book provides a well-​documented description of the elite crisis. 33. See more in A. I. Miller, “The Value and the Limits of a Comparative Approach in the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery,” in Imperiology:  From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire, ed. Kimitaka Matsuzato (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University, 2006), 11–​24. 34. Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I”, Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 696–​721; Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–​1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). 35. Pavlo Skoropadsky, Spohady, kinets 1917—​ hruden’ 1918 (Kyiv:  Institut ukraïns’koï arkheohrafiï ta dzhereloznavstva im. M.S. Hrushevs’koho NAN Ukraïny, 1995), 64. Skoropadsky recalled the following about his youth and family: “We understood Ukraine as a glorious national past which, however, had nothing to do with the present. In other words, there were no political plans for the restoration of Ukraine. My whole family was deeply devoted to the Russian tsars, while also emphasizing that we were not Great Russians—​we were Little Russians of notable ancestry, as the contemporary expression went.” P. Skoropadskyi, Spohady, 387. 36. By that time the Habsburgs had their own (i.e., separate from German) scenario for Ukraine, which had to become a Kingdom under Wilhelm von Habsburg, who learned Ukrainian and became known in Ukraine as Vasyl Vyshyvany. See Snyder, The Red Prince. 37. On Bessarabia see Andrei Cusco, Victor Taki, Bessarabia v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii. 1812–​ 1917. (Moscow: NLO, 2012). 38. In his book on imperial borderlands Alfred Rieber describes the army as the ‘glue and solvent’ of the imperial system. I would qualify this by saying that the army does not become a force of dissolution as long as there is hope for the preservation of order on an imperial scale. Having lost this hope, however, the army takes on the role of organizer of the new regime in the separate regions of the dissolving empire, often attempting later to transform them into nation-​states. 39. Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak. A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014); Joshua Sanborn, “The Genesis of Russian Warlordism: Violence and Governance during the First World War and the Civil War,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 3, (2010): 195–​213; Paul du. Quenoy, “Warlordism ‘a la Russe’: Baron von Ungern-​Sternberg’s Anti-​B olshevik Crusade, 1917–​ 1921,” Revolutionary Russia 16, no. 2 (2003): 1–​27; Jamie Bisher, White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-​Siberian (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 40. Veljko Vujacic, “Stalinism and Russian nationalism: A reconceptualization,” Post-​Soviet Affairs 23 (2007): 156–​183.

194   Alexey Miller 41. W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 42. See Vladimir Kornilov, Donetsko-​ Krivorozhskaia respublika:  rasstereliannaia mechta (Kharkiv: Folio, 2011). 43. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1989); idem. Looking toward Ararat:  Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1993); Arsène Saparov, From Conflict to Autonomy in the Caucasus: The Soviet Union and the Making of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh (New York: Routledge, 2014). 44. Borislav Chernev, “The Brest-​ Litovsk Moment:  Self-​ Determination Discourse in Eastern Europe before Wilsonianism,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 22, no. 3 (2011): 369–​387. 45. See Lohr, War Nationalism. 46. V.P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta: priroda i posledstviia revolutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997). 47. Pierre Pascal, Russkii dnevnik (Jekaterinburg: Gonzo, 2014), 372. 48. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 49. Vujacic, Stalinism, 156–​183. 50. Robert Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 51. Martin, Affirmative Action. 52. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–​452. 53. Juliette Cadiot, Dominique Arel, Larissa Zakharova (eds.) Cacophonies d’empire. Le gouvernement des langues dans l’Empire russe et l’Union sovietique (Paris:  CNRS Editions, 2010).

Chapter 11

E m pire by Im itat i on? U S Ec onom ic Im pe ria l i sm w ithin a B ri t i sh World Syst e m Marc-​W illiam  Palen

Historians have been busy chipping away at the myth of the exceptional American Empire, usually with an eye towards the British Empire. Most comparative studies of the two empires, however, focus on the pre-​1945 British Empire and the post-​1945 American Empire.1 Why this tendency to avoid contemporaneous studies of the two empires? Perhaps because such a study would yield more differences than it would similarities, particularly when examining the imperial trade policies of the two empires from the mid-​nineteenth to mid-​twentieth century. For those imperial histories that have attempted such a side-​by-​side comparison, the so-​called Open Door Empire of the United States is depicted as having copied the free-​trade imperial policies of its estranged motherland by the turn of the century; these imitative policies reached new Anglo-​Saxonist heights following US colonial acquisitions in the Caribbean and the Pacific from the Spanish Empire in 1898, followed closely by the fin-​de-​siècle establishment of the Anglo-​American ‘Great Rapprochement’.2 Gallagher and Robinson’s 1953 ‘imperialism of free trade’ thesis—​which explored the informal British Empire that arose following Britain’s unilateral adoption (and at times coercive international implementation) of free-​trade policies from the late 1840s to the early 1930s—​has played a particularly crucial theoretical role in shaping the historiography of the American Empire. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), William Appleman Williams provided the first iteration of the imitative open-​door imperial thesis, wherein he explicitly used the ‘imperialism of free trade’ theory in order to uncover an American informal empire. ‘The Open Door Policy’, Williams asserted, ‘was America’s version of the liberal policy of informal empire or free-​trade imperialism’.3 The influence of Williams’s provocative thesis led to the creation of the most influential

196   Marc-William Palen school of US imperial history—​the ‘Wisconsin School’—​which would continue in its quest to unearth American open-​door or free-​trade imperialism for decades to come.4 As a result, the contrasting ways in which the American Empire grew in the shadow of the British Empire have largely remained hidden. Comparing the trade policies of the two empires from the beginning to the end of the British Empire’s free-​trade imperial regime (c. 1846–​1932) has the added benefit of allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the ambiguous US position within the British world system. This benefit should not be surprising; economic history has long been central to understanding the rise and decline of the British and American Empires.5 As Peter Cain has recently observed, economic history is also key in grasping the intricacies of the British world.6 The understudied American position within the British world’s imperial economic system has, in no small part, allowed for the perpetuation of the common perception that the trade policies of the US Empire imitated those of ‘free trade England’.7 This mistaken perception is all the more remarkable, considering that their economic ideologies and trade policies from the mid-​nineteenth to mid-​ twentieth century were, in so many ways, polar opposites.8 This raises serious problems for understanding American imperial history between the beginning and the end of British free-​trade imperialism. Thus, a contemporaneous analysis of the trade policies of the American and British Empires from the era of the US Civil War to the 1930s brings to light important differences, as the US sought to pry itself from its dependency upon the British world system of settler colonies—​especially its dependency upon immigration and investment from Great Britain. In bestowing honorary dominion status upon the antebellum US, A. G. Hopkins points out that US historians have for too long assumed that ‘effective independence was synonymous with formal independence’.9 This observation—​and this status—​applies to the US in the decades that followed its civil war nearly as much as it does to the decades that preceded it. Between 1853 and 1920, for example, over 4.3 million people from the British Isles immigrated to the US, eclipsing the combined immigration to the other British settler colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. And from 1853 to 1869 alone, foreign (predominantly British) investment in the US soared from an already staggering $222 million to $1 billion: a trend that would continue for years to come. While independent in name, the US thus remained, in many ways, economically dependent upon Great Britain, a dependency that maintained a precarious American place within the broader economic network of the British world system.10 American economic dependence upon Great Britain was thus an important factor in the growth of the US Empire within a British world system. Approaching US imperial trade policy from a British world perspective also highlights how turn-​of-​the-​century Anglo-​American rapprochement was far from great. The impetus behind the US imperial ‘outward thrust’ stemmed far less from some shared sense of imperial economic co-​operation11 or Anglo-​Saxonist civilizing mission, and far more from imperial trade rivalry and Anglophobia.12 This most noticeably manifested itself in the US imperial realm through the establishment of an American political and ideological predisposition for economic nationalism at home and abroad (c.

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    197 1861–​1934), which led to the country’s ad hoc implementation of protectionist imperial trade policies. Across much of this era of British free-​trade imperial pre-​eminence,13 the US thus sought to carve out an alternative protectionist sphere of imperial influence amid its longstanding attempt to disentangle itself from its British settler colonial past.14 A British world approach therefore illustrates how American Anglophobia, economic nationalism, and imperial expansion influenced the British Empire, even as British immigration, investment, and free-​trade imperialism influenced the development of US economic imperialism. The US began seeking a formal and informal empire of its own not only to rival the British Empire, but also to insulate the developing US domestic economy from an ever more volatile British-​dominated global economic system. The late nineteenth century’s unpredictable boom-​and-​bust economic cycle culminated in the era’s Long Depression (c. 1873–​1896), for which British economic imperialism would take much of the blame in the US; Anglophobic American economic nationalists viewed British free-​trade imperialism and the British-​led gold standard to be the prime culprits behind the panic-​ridden global economic system. Behind the aegis of economic nationalism, the US would thus acquire its formal and informal empire in the late nineteenth century while undergoing rapid industrialization in its effort to compete with, defend itself from, and retaliate against the more advanced industries of free trade England. It was an imperial game of developmental catch-​up that protectionist America played with seeming success by 1898, whereupon the ‘American System’ of economic nationalism—​a national policy of protective tariffs, centralized banking, and subsidization of internal improvements—​ found its complement in the nationalistic outpouring of support for US militarism and colonialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific.15 Granted, in asserting itself on the world stage by defeating the Spanish Empire in 1898, the US Empire would adopt some superficial trappings of British imperialism: informal coercive market expansion and foreign colonial acquisitions. But substantial and oft-​overlooked differences both in imperial theory and in imperial practice lay within these same areas of presumed imperial imitation. Whereas the British implemented the imperialism of free trade through informally gaining coercive access to foreign markets via free trade when possible and by formal annexation when necessary, Republican advocates of an American empire implemented the imperialism of economic nationalism by expanding US imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed US-​controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity, if possible, by formal annexation when necessary. In other words, amid an era in which the Republican Party—​the post-​Civil War party of Anglophobia, economic nationalism, and imperial expansion—​ dominated the executive branch, the US sought to establish a rival regional imperial trade bloc through the imperialism of economic nationalism, in contrast to Britain’s imperialism of free trade. US imperial historians would do better in seeking parallels by instead embracing the decentring tendencies of British world scholarship and by shifting their focus beyond the British imperial metropole. A British world approach allows historians to transcend the more common metropole-​periphery model for the dynamism and fluidity of British

198   Marc-William Palen imperial networks, illuminating the ways in which the settler colonies themselves engaged with one another and influenced British imperial policy. It also allows for a comparison between the United States and the British Empire’s other settler colonies. In other words, when seeking imitative imperial trade policies between the US and British empires, scholars should look beyond free trade England and the British Isles, and look instead to the developmental trade ideologies and policies of the British world system’s other settler colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

American Anglophobia in the British World System The US obtained a colonial empire in 1898. The Republican administration of William McKinley (R-​OH), the ‘Napoleon of Protection’, immediately began devising how best to govern and ‘civilize’ the colonial inhabitants. From Britain, Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem ‘White Man’s Burden’ to encourage the US to take up this ‘noble’ civilizational cause. Alongside other Anglo-​Saxonist literature (such as the Social Gospel writings of Josiah Strong encouraging the Anglo-​Saxon Protestant race to go forth and ‘civilize’ the world), the ‘White Man’s Burden’ has since become a clichéd catch phrase for portraying turn-​of-​the-​century Anglo-​American imperial kinship, giving poetical voice to the presumed development of a shared belief in Anglo-​Saxon responsibility for lifting up ‘uncivilized’ colonial inhabitants such as those of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Samoa, and Guam. The influence of Anglo-​Saxonism and the ‘White Man’s Burden’ has accordingly held a prominent place within histories of the Anglo-​American ‘special relationship’ and American imperialism.16 This is not to deny that racial Anglo-​Saxonism was used in efforts ‘to legitimate U.S. colonialism during and after 1898’, as Paul Kramer has persuasively argued.17 But it is to suggest that, more often than not, racism and Anglo-​ Saxonism helped motivate the opposite tendency: American anti-​imperialism.18 The exaggerated historical presumption of the pervasiveness of Anglo-​Saxonism in late-​nineteenth and early-​twentieth-​century American political culture, and thus in its role in driving US imperialism and Anglo-​American rapprochement, also fits uncomfortably within a growing body of what might now be considered British world literature, which explores the ethnic, political, and economic pervasiveness of Anglophobia in American society from the mid-​nineteenth century onward—​what Steve Tuffnell calls ‘the panoply of Anglophobias’.19 Identifying American Anglophobia’s influence upon US imperial trade policy alongside the influence of US imperial trade upon the British world system allows us to make sense of the seeming contradiction of Anglophobia and Anglo-​Saxonism. The Civil War Era is the common starting point for tracing America’s ‘new empire’ and is considered the high water mark of Anglophobia. Following massive westward expansion in the 1840s and 1850s, the US Civil War itself would help bring about the

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    199 centralization of federal authority, including consolidated control over an increasingly effective fiscal-​military state—​an understood prerequisite for sustained empire-​ building that American economic nationalists like Alexander Hamilton had sought since the country’s founding.20 A deluge of British immigration and a reliance upon British investment for funding American economic development and imperial enterprises further contributed to fast-​growing Anglo-​American financial relations—​further complicating the ambiguous relationship between the US and its estranged motherland. Closer financial ties between New York and London may have helped stave off British intervention in the US Civil War, as Jay Sexton has shown, but they were unable to break a new wave of Anglophobic sentiment that crashed over the American north and west upon war’s end, a dislike compounded by the flood of Anglophobic Irish immigration since the 1840s.21 Nor did such Anglophobic feeling recede in the decades that followed. While national consolidation in the US alongside Canadian confederation and the withdrawal of many British troops from the neighbouring British settler colony in 1867 may have lessened the real geopolitical British threat in North America, its perception only grew stronger among many late-​nineteenth and early-​twentieth-​century Anglophobic Republican defenders of the American System.22 Republican leaders refused to forgive the British for their tacit support of the Confederacy during the bloody internecine conflict, whether through the official British policy of neutrality or the fitting out of Confederate warships in British harbours. The economic nationalist policies of the American System thereby went well beyond merely protecting American industries from the onslaught of more globally competitive British imports—​it also became a punitive Anglophobic Republican weapon for thwarting British free-​trade imperial expansion in the Western Hemisphere. Anglophobia would also be used as a justification for continued US imperial expansion. Immediately following the US Civil War, for instance, Republican Secretary of State William Seward—​himself an exemplar of the confluence between Anglophobia and a desire to mirror the successes of British imperialism—​was quick to rejuvenate the longstanding American desire to wrest Canada from the grasp of the British Empire. It was an ambition that would reappear in Canadian-​American imperial debates for decades to come, as Seward’s imperialistic desire for aggrandizement of British territory would reappear among the Republican Party’s subsequent imperial spokesmen. As late as 1927, Republican administrations had preparations in place for invading the contiguous British dominion to the north due to the continued economic rivalry between the two empires.23 This is not to suggest that Anglophilia was absent during this period, but rather that Anglophiles in the US were in the minority. Whereas most leading Anglophobic advocates were located in the protectionist heartland of Pennsylvania, the relatively small number of American Anglophiles tended to be cosmopolitan intellectuals residing in the metropolitan centres of Boston and New York City. And in contrast to American protectionists, Anglophiles were rarely in positions of power wherein they could demonstrably influence American imperial policy. In those rare instances when Anglophiles did hold some sway over US foreign policy—​as during the Democratic administrations

200   Marc-William Palen of Grover Cleveland (1885–​1889, 1893–​1897)—​American imperial proclivities, both formal and informal, noticeably diminished.24 Put another way, a contemporaneous examination of Anglo-​Saxonism and anti-​ imperialism illuminates the early stirrings of rapprochement much more than does a study of Anglo-​Saxonism and Anglo-​American imperialism.25 In contrast to American Anglophobic imperialists, many of the leading American anti-​imperialists during this period, like Cleveland advisors David Ames Wells, Edward Atkinson, and William Graham Sumner, were Anglophiles with close ties to anti-​imperialists throughout the British world of settler colonies. They were disciples of the anti-​imperial Victorian free-​trade ideology known as Cobdenism. This pacific ideology, famously put forth by England’s free-​trade apostle Richard Cobden (1804–​1865), asserted that the international adoption of free trade and a non-​interventionist foreign policy would bring about prosperity and peace to the world.26 Often in close communication with their British counterparts, Cleveland’s Cobdenite cabinets and advisors were able to temporarily halt Anglophobic imperial expansionist plans, although the Anglophiles were soon ousted from office upon the 1897 presidential ascension of William McKinley, the Republican Party’s lead defender of the American System. These same American Cobdenite free traders would go on to found the Anti-​Imperialist League and other anti-​imperial organizations in order to oppose the US colonial policies that followed the 1898 Spanish-​American War. Focusing too narrowly on the ties that bound racial Anglo-​Saxonism and Anglo-​ American imperial policies makes it easy to miss the much stronger economic ideological ties that bound Anglo-​American anti-​imperialism—​what Oliver MacDonagh called ‘the anti-​imperialism of free trade’27—​which suggests that a more rigorous study of anti-​imperialism and economic ideas across the British world could yield a substantial bounty.28 With the exception of a vocal minority of Anglo-​Saxonist anti-​ imperialists, from the mid-​nineteenth to the mid-​twentieth century American imperial trade policies were largely directed, with an Anglophobic Republican eye, toward rivalling and undermining British hegemonic influence in the Western Hemisphere. And in its struggle to wrest itself from the power of British free-​trade imperialism, the US Empire would implement its formal and informal imperialism by using decidedly different imperial trade policies than those of the British.

The Imperialism of Free Trade vs the Imperialism of Economic Nationalism A closer analysis of British and American imperial theory—​particularly the practical and theoretical roles that the imperialism of free trade has played in both—​ illuminates substantial differences between the two empires from the mid-​nineteenth

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    201 to mid-​twentieth centuries. An examination of Anglo-​American imperial trade policy thus uncovers what could perhaps be described as an American empire by emulation, in that American imperialists sought to rival and surpass the British Empire; however, such emulation did not translate into imitative imperial trade policies. Much of the historiographical confusion stems from the potent influence that ‘the imperialism of free trade’ thesis has had within the history of US economic imperialism, both in theory and in practice. For example, in contrast to British imperial historiography,29 until only very recently, the longstanding free-​trade or open-​door imperial interpretation of US imperialism has gone unchallenged,30 despite numerous critical studies of the school’s interpretation of American informal imperialism.31 The now-​dominant economic interpretation of the American Empire was established by the ‘Wisconsin School’ upon the 1959 publication of W. A. Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, wherein Williams explored what would become commonly known in American imperial historiography as the Open Door Empire, which Williams portrayed as the American version of British free-​trade imperialism.32 The revisionist Wisconsin School, focusing largely on American imperial economic expansion from the US Civil War to the Cold War, thus adopted and adapted ‘the imperialism of free trade’ thesis in seeking to uncover an American informal empire.33 Beginning with The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, many of these influential imperial studies have applied the free-​trade or open-​door imperial thesis to the US Empire from the mid-​nineteenth to the mid-​twentieth centuries by portraying the American political economy as ‘an open marketplace in the tradition of laissez-​faire’, exacerbating what William Novak calls ‘the myth of the “Weak” American state.’34 In doing so, open-​ door imperial histories tend to gloss over the dominant politico-​ideological role played by economic nationalism over both the American political economy and imperial policy throughout this period in which the Republican Party, the party of protectionism, dominated the executive branch from 1861 until 1933—​approximately seventy-​five years that witnessed only two Democratic pro-​free-​trade presidents.35 Reconciling US economic nationalist policies at home and abroad with those of British free-​trade imperial policies paints a clearer picture of how the US Empire grew within the British world system. Far from practising free-​trade imperialism or subscribing to free-​trade ideas, the vast majority of American imperial policymakers were Anglophobes who subscribed to the ideology of economic nationalism. A shining example of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the ‘paranoid style’ in American history,36 these same Republican Anglophobes correspondingly viewed any attempt to dismantle the American System of protectionism to be part of a vast British-​inspired free-​trade conspiracy. The Republican-​controlled Foreign Relations Committee’s 1888 majority report, for example, suggested that ‘the President of the United States may be under influence’ of the British government, owing to Cobdenite Grover Cleveland’s non-​aggressive policy toward Canada over a fisheries dispute. Other Republican Anglophobes charged that the British Parliament lay behind an attempt to ‘surrender our markets . . . to foreign possession’ by instituting freer trade through the proposed 1888 Mills Bill. Further, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge castigated the second

202   Marc-William Palen ‘Cobdenized’ Cleveland Administration, ‘governed as it is by free-​trade influences’, for its attempts in the mid-​1890s to disentangle the country from various Republican formal and informal imperial schemes in the Pacific. ‘We have had something too much of these disciples of the Manchester school’, Lodge pronounced. In an era dominated by Republican economic nationalism and Anglophobia, advocates of the anti-​imperialism of free trade in the US were thus commonly perceived as British agents—​pawns in a British free-​trade imperial conspiracy to re-​colonize American markets, compounded by suspicions of British free-​trade imperialism at work in the Asia Pacific and Latin America.37 Whereas British imperialism stuck to free trade from the mid-​nineteenth century to the early 1930s, the vast majority of American imperialists adhered to economic nationalism. Republican imperialists utilized a combination of coercive trade reciprocity and protective tariffs: the imperialism of economic nationalism. On this point, Republican reciprocity notably differed from the free-​trade conception of reciprocity. The 1860 Cobden-​Chevalier Treaty between Britain and France epitomized the free-​trade conception of reciprocity through its inclusion of an unconditional most-​favoured-​nation clause, wherein Britain extended without conditions the same tariff concessions proffered to France. In contrast, Republican reciprocity contained a conditional most-​ favoured-​nation clause, wherein Republican presidents could coercively discriminate against non-​signatories and retaliate with punitive protective tariffs against signatories if they stepped out of line. The imperialism of economic nationalism became US imperial orthodoxy in the years following the passage of the highly protectionist 1890 McKinley Tariff, which included just such a restrictive reciprocity clause. After 1898, Republican administrations in turn would coercively enforce a closed-​door policy upon its colonial markets in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines while maintaining a policy of high protectionism at home.38 By 1913, the US economic nationalist imperial system was entrenched enough that even Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, for all his espousals on behalf of free trade and self-​determination, would maintain and expand his Republican predecessors’ imperial policies in the Caribbean region. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Empire thus arose through the application of the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade. It provides a vivid illustration of US Anglophobia, imperial rivalry, and oppositional imperial trade policies. It also provides a window into the decades-​ long struggle of the US to disentangle itself from Britain’s free-​trade imperial orbit.

Situating the US Empire Within the British World System From a global historical perspective, Britain’s political, ideological, and imperial adherence to free trade from the late 1840s to the early 1930s was a geopolitical anomaly. The

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    203 mid-​century Cobdenite vision of international trade liberalization, exemplified by the signing of the 1860 Cobden-​Chevalier Treaty, proved to be little more than a mirage. Exacerbated by a mid-​century international movement towards national consolidation followed by the onset of a global economic depression in 1873, economic nationalism became the system of choice throughout much of the developing world. Leading the way, the US turned to protectionism in 1861, a policy that was maintained at home and extended abroad through Republican tariff legislation in 1883, 1890, 1897, 1909, 1922, and 1930. Protective tariffs were similarly instituted in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria-​Hungary, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and Meiji Japan.39 Furthermore, this nationalistic turn to protectionism in many of these countries was often accompanied by imperial expansion. Britain’s advocacy of free-​trade imperialism was even an anomaly when compared to its own settler colonies. Owing to the rather light laissez-​faire touch of British free traders towards colonial policy from the mid-​to late nineteenth century, the British Empire’s settler colonies were granted tariff autonomy, which ironically enabled them to establish infant industrial protectionist policies and to begin developing a system of imperial trade preference. Canada turned to protectionism with the Galt Tariff of 1859, followed by the Canadian Conservative Party’s adoption of its National Policy in 1879. In response to the 1890 McKinley Tariff, Canadian protectionism became entrenched with the Conservative victory in 1891. The Australian colony of Victoria passed the McCulloch Tariff in 1865—​the first avowedly protective tariff among the Australian colonies. New Zealand would follow suit in 1895, as would a federated Australia in 1901. The Cape Colony’s premier, Cecil Rhodes in turn would not only cement a protectionist South African customs union in the early 1890s, but he would also advocate on behalf of establishing an imperial trade preference system, in large part to combat ever more aggressive American protectionist legislation.40 Calls for imperial trade preference would be picked up and acted upon throughout much of the British world; the settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia would unilaterally establish preferential imperial trade policies in 1897, 1903, 1904, and 1907, respectively. In response, the settler colonies’ advocacy for a system of imperial trade preference would be picked up in free trade England itself via Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform movement in the Edwardian period,41 part of a protectionist movement across the British world that would ultimately reach fruition at the 1932 Ottawa Conference, wherein Britain itself finally turned away from free trade in order to join the trade preference system now well established by its settler dominions. The American Empire’s imperialism of economic nationalism provided a necessary spark to fire up the British settler colonial turn to protectionism and imperial trade preference, whereupon the Dominion governments sought at once to retaliate against and mirror the prosperity of Protectionist America. Imperial protectionists throughout the settler colonies turned not only to imperial advocates of Greater Britain like J. R. Seeley and J. A. Froude for inspiration, but also to the writings of US economic nationalist defenders of the American System like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, and Henry Charles Carey.42

204   Marc-William Palen The US Empire’s politico-​ideological adherence to economic nationalism thus finds contemporaneous parallels, not with free trade England, but with the settler colonies of the British world during this period. Fascinatingly, from this perspective, we find much of the British world imitating the American Empire’s imperial trade policies, rather than the other way around. Thus, the US role within the British world becomes at once clearer and more complex if we look beyond free trade England and Anglo-​Saxonist imperialism, and instead examine the trade policies of the American Empire alongside those of the other settler colonies of the British world system.

Conclusion With the establishment of open-door imperial historiography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, histories of US imperial trade policy from the mid-​nineteenth to mid-​twentieth centuries have relied upon British free-​trade imperial theory and the role of racial Anglo-​Saxonism in searching to find common Anglo-​American imperial ground: an empire by imitation. This approach has had the tendency to disguise or ignore the significant differences between the British Empire and its American counterpart at a political, economic, ideological, and theoretical level during this period. Fortunately, this tendency is being rectified owing to enterprising approaches that explore the US Empire as it developed within a British world system. For example, this growing body of work is beginning to come to grips with the fact that most US imperialists were driven by Anglophobia, not Anglophilia. Additionally, where for so long historians have sought parallels between the rival empires’ economic ideologies and trade policies, British world literature is now beginning to reconcile the stark differences. The US establishment of economic nationalism at home and abroad resulted from an era dominated by the Republican Party, the party of Anglophobia, protectionism, and imperialism. The Republican Party’s imperialism of economic nationalism might therefore be seen as the reverse image of Britain’s imperialism of free trade. Also, from a British world perspective, it becomes increasingly clear that the American Empire was rarely imitating the British Empire from the mid-​nineteenth to the mid-​twentieth century. Anglophobia, imperial rivalry, and the imperialism of economic nationalism drove the American Empire far more than any shared sense of brotherhood, partnership, or open doors throughout this period. If anything, it was the British settler colonies that imitated the protectionist ideas and policies of the American Empire. Ample opportunities for exploration yet await discovery through further contemporaneous studies between US imperial trade policies and those of the British world that transcend the British free-​trade imperial metropole. A transnational study of anti-​imperialism across the British world could provide one avenue. Another lies in a rigorous comparative examination of the protectionist politics, policies, and ideologies of the US and the British world’s other settler colonies.

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    205 Adding to the theoretical and historiographical confusion, free-​trade imperial roles reversed at the start of the 1930s, again illuminating how a side-​by-​side examination of British and American imperial trade policies uncovers more differences than it does similarities. The US turn to free-​trade internationalism from the mid-​1930s onward might have indicated an adoption of British-​inspired free-​trade ideas and policies, but here, too, the two empires appear at odds. At nearly the same time that the US was beginning to adopt free-​trade ideas and policies under the direction of FDR’s Cobdenite Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933–​44), Britain was turning away from free trade. After nearly a century of free-​trade advocacy at home and abroad, the country would finally succumb to the protectionist pressures of its dominions, joining the empire’s preferential trade system in the early 1930s, in part as a response to the resurgence of protectionism across the globe. In doing so, Britain also let go of one of its key economic tools for maintaining British hegemony over the global economic system. Only after Britain discarded its free-​trade approach to imperial management would the American Empire pick it up (a) when it took its lead post-​war role within the dollar-​ based gold exchange system of Bretton Woods; (b) when it took over the European colonial reins of power in places like French Indochina; and (c) when it found itself invited to help rebuild post-​war Western Europe, thereby opening their markets to American investments and trade.43 It is thus in the post-​1945 era that the imperialism of free trade might be applied to the informal American Open Door Empire,44 as the US increasingly adopted free-​trade policies at home and encouraged them abroad, sparking an international turn to trade liberalization now commonly called ‘neoliberal’ globalization.45 In other words, only when British free-​trade imperialism came to an end during an ostensible age of decolonization would American free-​trade imperialism make its controversial entrance onto the world stage.

Notes 1. Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa, 1870–​1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Tony Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-​ Industrializing World Since 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Cleese, eds., Two Hegemonies:  Britain 1846–​1914 and the United States 1941–​2001 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2011). Paul Kramer and John Plotz make a similar observation in ‘Pairing Empires: Britain and the United States, 1857–​1947’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2 (2001): 1–​17. 2. Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement:  England and the United States, 1895–​1914 (New York: Scribner, 1968). 3. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New  York:  W.W. Norton & Co., 1972 [1959]), 96–​97.

206   Marc-William Palen 4. See, among others, Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy; Thomas McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–​1901 (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1967); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire:  An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–​1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); Howard Schoonover and Edward P. Crapol, ‘The Shift to Global Expansion, 1865–​1900’, in William Appleman Williams, ed., From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972); Thomas McCormick, ‘From Old Empire to New:  The Changing Dynamics and Tactics of American Empire’, in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible:  Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 5. Among the most important economic studies within British imperial historiography concerning the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include Adam Smith’s chapter on colonies in The Wealth of Nations (1776), J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902), V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s work in the 1950s and 1960s on free-​trade imperialism and informal empire, P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins’s British Imperialism (2002), and Andrew Thompson and Bruce Magee’s Empire and Globalization (2010). Within American imperial historiography, transformative economic studies include Charles Conant’s The Economic Basis of ‘Imperialism’ (1898), John Nearing’s Dollar Diplomacy: a Study in American Imperialism (1925), Charles Beard’s The Idea of National Interest (1934), Williams’s Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire. 6. Peter Cain, ‘The Economics of the “British World”’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 98–​103. 7. Stephen Howe, ‘New Empires, New Dilemmas—​and Some Old Arguments’, Global Dialogue, 5 (2003), available at: http://​www.worlddialogue.org/​content.php?id=216. 8. Marc-​William Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade:  The Anglo-​American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–​ 1896 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016); Palen, ‘The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890–​1913’, Diplomatic History 39 (2015):  157–​185. In contrast, Paul Kramer effectively applies Gallagher and Robinson’s ‘collaborator thesis’ in his study of US imperialism in the Philippines in Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 9. A. G. Hopkins, ‘The United States, 1783–​1861: Britain’s Honorary Dominion?’, Britain and the World 4 (2011), 233. 10. Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–​1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 69; Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–​1873 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 60. On the British world, see also Rachel Bright and Andrew Dilley, ‘After the British World’, Historical Journal 60 (2017): 547–​568; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783–​1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Darwin, The Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, The British World: Culture, Diaspora and Identity (London:  Taylor and Francis, 2003); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks:  Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). 11. Although relatively small in number, US ex-​ patriot communities such as those in the Philippines and London provide notable exceptions. See Stephen Tuffnell,

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    207 ‘Anglo-​American Inter-​Imperialism: US Expansion and the British World, c. 1865–​1914’, Britain and the World 7 (2014): 174–​195; Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-​Saxons’. 12. Anglophobia is defined here as a deep-​seated US fear or hatred of the British Empire. 13. C. P. Kindleberger, ‘The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820–​1875,’ Journal of Economic History 35 (1975):  20–​55; Anthony C. Howe, ‘From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana:  Free Trade, Empire, and Globalisation, 1846–​1948’, Bulletin of Asia-​Pacific Studies 13 (2003): 137–​159; Howe, ‘Free Trade and Global Order: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Vision’, in Duncan Bell, ed., Victorian Visions of Global Order:  Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-​Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 26–​46. 14. From this perspective, the US might be seen as undergoing a long-​term process of decolonization from the 1770s to the early twentieth century. Such gradual US decolonization was reflected in the other British settler colonies, albeit sans the violent revolution. See Hopkins, ‘Britain’s Honorary Dominion?’; Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past and Present 200 (2008):  211–​247. On nineteenth-​century US imperialism as decolonization from the British world, see especially Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 15. Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade; Palen, ‘The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism.’ 16. See, for instance, Perkins, Great Rapprochement; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny:  The Origins of American Racial Anglo-​Saxonism (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1981); Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement:  Anglo-​Saxonism and Anglo-​ American Relations, 1895–​ 1904 (Rutherford, NJ:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Kramer and Plotz, ‘Pairing Empires’; Edward P. Kohn, This Kindred People:  Canadian-​ American Relations and the Anglo-​ Saxon Idea, 1895–​ 1903 (McGill:  Queen’s University Press, 2005); Duncan Bell, ‘The Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order’, in Peter Katzenstein, ed., Anglo-​America and its Discontents: Civilizational Identities beyond West and East (London: Routledge, 2012), 33–​56. 17. Paul Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-​Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–​1910’, Journal of American History 88 (2002): 1318. 18. Love, Race over Empire; Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-​Saxons’, 1338–​1344; Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade; E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-​Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–​1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); David Patterson, Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–​1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 12–​13, 32–​33, 74–​75, 80. 19. Stephen Tuffnell, ‘“Uncle Sam is to be Sacrificed”:  Anglophobia in Late Nineteenth-​ Century Politics and Culture’, American Nineteenth Century History 12 (2011): 77–​99. See Edward P. Crapol, America for Americans:  Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); William C. Reuter, ‘The Anatomy of Political Anglophobia in the United States, 1865–​1900’, Mid-​America 61 (1979): 117–​132; Kinley J. Brauer, ‘The United States and British Imperial Expansion, 1815–​60’, Diplomatic History 12 (1988):  19–​37; Crapol, ‘From Anglophobia to Fragile Rapprochement:  Anglo-​American Relations in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Hans-​ Jurgen Schroder, ed., Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–​1924 (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993), 13–​32; Bradley J. Young, ‘Silver, Discontent, and Conspiracy: The Ideology of the Western Republican Revolt of 1890–​1901’, Pacific Historical Review 64 (1995):  243–​265; Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished

208   Marc-William Palen Revolution:  The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2010); Lawrence A. Peskin, ‘Conspiratorial Anglophobia and the War of 1812’, Journal of American History 98 (2011):  647–​669; Marc-​William Palen, ‘Foreign Relations in the Gilded:  A British Free-​ Trade Conspiracy?’, Diplomatic History 37 (2013): 217–​247; Jay Sexton, ‘Anglophobia in Nineteenth-​Century Elections, Politics, and Diplomacy,’ in Gareth Davies and Julian Zelizer, eds., America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 98–​117. 20. Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan:  The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–​1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Max Edling, Hercules in the Cradle:  War, Money, and the American State, 1783–​1867 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2014). On the British side, see especially John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–​1788 (New  York:  Alfred A.  Knopf, 1989); and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism, 1688–​2000 (London: Pearson Education, 2002 [1993]). 21. Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy. Exemplifying this tension between Anglophobia and Anglo-​ American rapprochement, David Sim presents a nuanced study of how Irish immigration and anti-​British nationalism ironically brought the US and Britain closer together. See David Sim, A Union Forever: The Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 22. Sexton, ‘Anglophobia in Nineteenth-​Century Elections, Politics, and Diplomacy’, 103. 23. Jay Sexton, ‘William H. Seward in the World’, Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (2014): 398–​430; Stephen Scheinberg, ‘Invitation to Empire: Tariffs and American Economic Expansion in Canada’, Business History Review 47 (1973): 227; Kendrick A. Clements, ‘Manifest Destiny and Canadian Reciprocity in 1911’, Pacific Historical Review 42 (1973): 32–​52; R. A. Shields, ‘Imperial Policy and Canadian-​American Reciprocity, 1909–​1911’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 5 (1977):  151–​177; R. E. Hannigan, ‘Reciprocity 1911: Continentalism and American Weltpolitik’, Diplomatic History 4 (1980): 1–​18; Simon J. Potter, ‘The Imperial Significance of the Canadian-​American Reciprocity Proposals of 1911’, Historical Journal 47 (2004): 81–​100; Kevin Lippert, War Plan Red: The United States’ Secret Plan to Invade Canada and Canada’s Secret Plan to Invade the United States (Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015). 24. Palen, ‘Foreign Relations in the Gilded: A British Free-​Trade Conspiracy?’. 25. Michael Patrick Cullinane, ‘Transatlantic Dimensions of the American Anti-​Imperialist Movement, 1899–​1909’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 8 (2010): 301–​314; Leslie Butler, Critical Americans:  Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 26. Anthony Howe, ‘Free Trade and the International Order: The Anglo-​American Tradition, 1846–​1946’, in Fred Leventhal and Roland Quinault, eds., Anglo-​American Attitudes (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999): 142–​167; Marc-​William Palen, ‘Free-​Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 37 (2015): 291–​304; Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade. 27. Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The Anti-​Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review New Series 14 (1962): 489–​501. 28. Jay Sexton and Ian Tyrrell, eds., Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-​Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 14–​16. 29. See especially MacDonagh, ‘The Anti-​ Imperialism of Free Trade’; D. C.  M. Platt, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade—​ Some Reservations’, Economic History Review 21

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    209 (1968):  296–​306; Eric Stokes, ‘Late Nineteenth-​Century Colonial Expansion and the Attack on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?’, Historical Journal 12 (1969): 285–​292; Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976); Andrew Thompson, ‘Informal Empire? An Exploration in the History of Anglo-​Argentine Relations, 1810–​1914’, Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 419–​436. 30. Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade; Palen, ‘The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism’. Some recent observations of the Wisconsin School’s usage of ‘the imperialism of free trade’ include Stephen Howe, ‘New Empires, New Dilemmas—​and Some Old Arguments’, Global Dialogue 5 (2003), available at: http://​www.worlddialogue.org/​content.php?id=216; Paul Kramer, ‘Power and Connection:  Imperial Histories of the United States in the World’, American Historical Review 116 (2011): 1348–​1391; and Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 31. J. A. Thompson, ‘William Appleman Williams and the “American Empire”’, Journal of American Studies 7 (1973):  91–​104; Lewis L. Gould, ‘Tariffs and Markets in the Gilded Age’, Reviews in American History 2 (1974):  266–​271; James A. Field, Jr., ‘American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book’, The American Historical Review 83 (1978): 644–​668; Robin W. Winks, ‘The American Struggle with “Imperialism”: How Words Frighten’, in Rob Kroes, ed., The American Identity Fusion and Fragmentation (Amsterdam:  University of Amsterdam, 1980),  143–​177; Edward P. Crapol, ‘Coming to Terms with Empire: The Historiography of Late-​Nineteenth-​Century American Foreign Relations’, Diplomatic History 16 (1992):  573–​ 598; Kramer, ‘Power and Connection’; Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘Economic Interest and United States Foreign Policy’, in Gordon Martel, ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–​1993 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 37–​51; Joseph A. Fry, ‘From Open Door to World Systems: Economic Interpretations of Late Nineteenth Century American Foreign Relations’, Pacific Historical Review 65 (1996): 277–​303; H. W. Brands, What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Ch. 9; Robert Buzzanco, ‘What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of American Foreign Relations’, Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 575–​607; Justus D. Doenecke, ‘William Appleman Williams and the Anti-​Interventionist Tradition’, Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 283–​291; Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Introduction. 32. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New  York:  W.W. Norton & Co., 1972 [1959]), 97, 55–​56. 33. Along with the aforementioned Wisconsin School works, see Williams, Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Random House, 1969); Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire:  American China Policy, 1895–​ 1901 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1968); Ernest R. May, ‘Robinson and Gallagher and American Imperialism’, in Louis, ed., Imperialism; William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Consortium, 1980); Carl P. Parrini and Martin J. Sklar, ‘New Thinking about the Market, 1896–​1904:  Some American Economists on Investment and the Theory of Surplus Capital’, The Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 559–​578; Paul Wolman, Most Favored Nation:  The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897–​1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Vol. 2:  The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–​1913

210   Marc-William Palen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Notable exceptions are Crapol, America for Americans; and Tom Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874–​1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973). 34. Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 55; William J. Novak, ‘The Myth of the “Weak” American State’, American Historical Review 113 (2008): 752–​772. 35. Recent studies of the United States and economic globalization, in turn, have tended to complement the Wisconsin School’s open-​door narrative. On US economic globalization, see, inter alia, Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Eckes, Jr., Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York W. W. Norton & Company, 2002); Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–​1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Rosenberg, ed., World Connecting, 1870–​ 1945 (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap, 2012); Thomas D. Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization (Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2005); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire:  America’s Advance through Twentieth-​Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment:  American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–​1900 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998); and Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire:  Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–​1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 36. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). 37. Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, 153, 143, 258. Palen, ‘Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-​Trade Conspiracy?’. 38. Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, Ch. 7; Mary Speck, ‘Closed-​Door Imperialism: The Politics of Cuban-​ U.S. Trade, 1902–​ 1933’, Hispanic American Historical Review 85 (2005): 449–​483; Palen, ‘The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism’. 39. Scott C. James and David A. Lake, ‘The Second Face of Hegemony: Britain’s Repeal of the Corn Laws and the American Walker Tariff of 1846’, International Organization 43 (1989):  1–​29; Michael Tracy, Government and Agriculture in Western Europe 1880–​1988 (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1989 [1964]), 20–​32; Tessa Morris-​Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (New York: Routledge, 1989), 50–​53. 40. Anthony Howe, ‘Free Trade and its Enemies’, in Duncan Bell, ed., The Victorian World (New York: Routledge, 2012), 120–​121; Marc-​William Palen, ‘Protection, Federation and Union:  The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890–​94’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38 (2010): 395–​418; Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, Chs. 6 and 8. 41. Andrew S. Thompson, ‘Tariff Reform: An Imperial Strategy, 1903–​1913’, Historical Journal 40 (1997): 1033–​1054; Edmund Rogers, ‘The United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain, 1873–​1913’, Historical Journal 50 (2007): 593–​622. 42. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–​ 1900 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2007); K. Henley, ‘The International Roots of Economic Nationalist Ideology in Canada, 1846–​1885’, Journal of Canadian Studies 24 (1989–​1990): 107–​121; Robin Neill, A History of Canadian Economic Thought (New  York:  Routledge, 1991), 48; Crauford D.  W. Goodwin, Canadian Economic

US Economic Imperialism within a British World system    211 Thought:  The Political Economy of a Developing Nation 1814–​ 1914 (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1961), 46–​70; Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966), 13–​17, 24–​25, 30; Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, 150–​151, 161, 220–​223. 43. Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power:  The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–​1971 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From ‘Empire’ by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 44. Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Ch. 6; Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1964); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War:  The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–​1945 (New  York:  Random House, 1968), 254, 559, 562. The application of the Open Door thesis for the post-​1945 period has also been challenged. See, among others, Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., ‘Open Door Expansionism Reconsidered:  The World War II Experience’, Journal of American History 59 (1973): 909–​924; Eckes and Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century. 45. On neoliberal globalization as imperialism, see, for instance, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked:  Imperialism in the 21st Century (New  York:  Zed Books, 2001); Robert E. Prasch, ‘Neoliberalism and Empire:  How are They Related?’, Review of Radical Political Economics 37 (2005): 281–​287; Ahmet H. Kose, Fikret Sense, and Eric Yeldan, eds., Neoliberal Globalization as New Imperialism:  Case Studies on Reconstruction of the Periphery (New  York:  Nova Science Pub, Inc., 2007); Richard A. Dello Buono and Jose Bell Lara, eds., Imperialism, Neoliberalism and Social Struggles in Latin America (Leiden:  Brill, 2007); Francis Shor, Dying Empire:  US Imperialism and Global Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Chapter 12

Rethinking   E mpi re Lessons from Imperial and Post-​Imperial Japan Louise Young

Like the rest of the modern world, Japan developed in the crucible of empire. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world’s territory was carved into a handful of colonial empires. With few exceptions, the so-​called ‘new imperialism’ of these years incorporated states into the world system either as colonizers or colonized.1 Japan’s case was unusual: the country started out as a victim of imperialism in the nineteenth century, but became an aggressor in the twentieth. Accounts of Japan’s empire have often fixated on this exceptional quality: the peculiarities of a non-​Western, late-​ developing imperial power—​what one of the architects of the field of Japanese colonial studies called ‘an anomaly of modern history.’2 To be sure, a long, hard look at the ways that race and culture set Japan apart from the imperialisms of Britain, France, and others offers much to ponder, as does what it meant for Japanese modernity to break free of the yoke of foreign domination and to acquire an empire of its own. As many have observed, Japan’s spectacular rise as a military and industrial power struck a blow against a ‘400-​year-​old system of European colonial dominance in Asia.’3 Investigating what this signified for the structure of the world order, asking how Japan’s rise was understood by contemporaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemplating how we understand it today—​these are all fruitful vantage points for this history. And yet, we might take a different analytic approach and ask what happens when we eschew singularity in favour of comparability. What might we see if we view the Japanese empire as one among many in the global conjunctures of modern times? Entering a crowded field of old and new empires, Japan became both cause and effect of the ‘new imperialism’ and assembled a colonial empire in Korea, Taiwan, and South Manchuria. In the wake of the First World War, which dismantled the empires of the defeated powers and discredited military expansionism, Japan expanded its footprint in Asia through the creation of new forms of puppet-​state colonialism. After defeat in 1945 and a seven-​year occupation that integrated the state into the US-​Cold War order, Japan recreated a sphere of influence within the ruins of its wartime empire. What lessons can

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    213 imperial Japan teach us about the connections between nations and empires in the late nineteenth century? Of the global moment of the twenties and thirties, when the rise of anti-​colonial nationalism and conflicts between ascending and declining powers brought new pressures on longstanding imperial structures? After the cataclysm of World War Two shattered the foundations of colonial empires and divided the globe up into the first, second, and third worlds, what did this moment of rupture and the end of empire mean for Japan and Asia?

Defensive Modernization/​ Defensive Imperialism The modern/​empire/​Japan story begins in the 1850s, when European and American gunboats forced Japan’s feudal federation to enter the world market and inter-​state system under the disadvantageous terms of the unequal treaties. The political crisis that ensued led a coalition of samurai rebels to overthrow the old regime in 1868, putting into place a host of modernizing reforms that charted a path towards state-​strengthening and national expansion. In the early years of power, even as the new government leaders struggled to overcome the threat of armed insurrection and the economic disruptions of an open market—​the flight of gold from the country, the devastation of the native cotton industry, rampaging inflation—​they pursued an active expansionist agenda. Japan annexed territories along the frontiers of the Tokugawa federation, including the Ainu homeland of Ezochi (renamed Hokkaido) in 1869, the Ryukyu Kingdom (renamed Okinawa) in 1879, as well as the Kurile (confirmed by treaties with Russia in 1855 and 1875) and Bonin (claimed in 1862, renamed Ogasawara and placed under Japanese administration in 1875) islands. The government contemplated a major invasion of Korea in 1873 and a launched a military expedition to Taiwan the following year. Japan sent a gunboat to Korea in 1876—​and forced the Joseon Kingdom to submit to an unequal treaty even while lobbying European diplomats unsuccessfully for the revision of their own unequal treaties. Thus, Japan embarked on imperialism under the imperialist gun and offered an example of the synchronicity of colonization and colonialism as well as a state that was both subject and object of empire. The salience of the Western threat (not just for Japan, but for all East Asia) meant that the revolutionary transformations within the country took place against a geo-​ political realignment of the region. The self-​strengthening movement in Japan both reacted to and affected the inter-​state system in East Asia, an instance of what Jon Halliday called ‘the dialectic of the internal and the external.’4 Gunboat diplomacy and the unequal treaties touched off similar political crises within China and Korea, which intensified mutual influences between the three states. Revolutionaries and reformers circulated between Seoul, Beijing, Tokyo, and beyond, and brought with them boatloads of ideas: the intellectual ferment generated by the threat of European encroachment and

214   Louise Young local engagements with European concepts of politics, economy, and history. Japanese leaders sought to overturn the longstanding Sino-​centric order, triggering a struggle for influence in the Korean court and an arms race that broke out in war with China in 1894–​1895. Japanese victory and the crippling terms of the peace treaty that followed inverted the Sino-​centric regional order and installed Japan as East Asian hegemon and accelerated the ‘carve up’ of China. This brought Japan into the centre of great-​power rivalries in Asia. After a coalition of France, Germany, and Russia forced Japan to relinquish territorial claims in South Manchuria in 1898, Japan joined England in an anti-​ Russian alliance in 1902. Competing ambitions in Korea and Manchuria led Japan and Russia to war in 1904—​a conflict that ended with Japan’s second military victory in the space of ten years. In the midst of these turbulent events, Japanese diplomats succeeded in renegotiating the unequal treaties and acquired full sovereignty in the inter-​state system in 1899. Military victories yielded Japan a colony in Taiwan, a protectorate over Korea, and a sphere of influence in South Manchuria. By the end of the century Japan became an agent, not an object, of the diplomacy of imperialism. Japan’s string of diplomatic and military victories caught the world’s attention. Newspaper headlines underscored the spectacular success of Japan’s economic and military development and the shocking triumph of an Asian over a European army; some raised the specter of a ‘yellow peril.’5 But as spectacular as Japan’s rise to power appeared at the time, the anomaly of a coloured power in a white world order masked ways that Japanese expansionism was part of a broader reaction to British economic hegemony. Indeed, there are more than a few family resemblances between economic nationalisms in Japan, the United States, and Germany that led ‘late developing economies’ to become ‘late-​comer empires.’ The German historical (Friedrich List) and American (Alexander Hamilton) schools of economics found receptive audiences throughout the world, as statesmen and bankers adopted and adapted each other’s policies to push back against Britain’s hegemonic market power and its ‘imperialism of free trade.’6 Economic nationalism prescribed developmental and neo-​mercantilist policies as well as the protection of infant industries at home, but also exclusive spheres of influence and even territorial annexations ‘when necessary’ to shield imperial markets from competition with more powerful British trading interests. In this connection, Japan’s alignment of defensive economic modernization and defensive imperialism was less an exception than is often imagined, and neither was its determination to drive China and Russia out of Korea and lay claim to an exclusive market for Japanese economic activity. While Japan took the process further and to greater effect, other non-​white/​non-​ western states adopted territorial expansion as a strategy of both state building and to resist the imperialist threat. European military campaigns gave rise to modernizing states and the so-​called ‘secondary empires’ of Muhammad Ali in Egypt and the Zulu Kingdom in southern Africa. Gunboat diplomacy and the imposition of the unequal treaties in Asia touched off anti-​western self-​strengthening and defensive modernization movements in China and Turkey. Both states strove, like Japan, to modernize military and economic institutions, and to deploy armed force to maximize territorial claims in a vigorous defense of Qing and Ottoman empires. All this, too, became both cause and

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    215 effect of the ‘new imperialism,’ joining the intensification of European power politics to over-​determine the scramble for territory in the late nineteenth century. Competitive, creeping, and preemptive empire building pitted long-​time rivals against one another; at the same time, the dynamics of defensive imperialisms brought a host of new challengers into the arena. Indeed, a new look at the problem of Japanese expansionism suggests that it was not alone in overthrowing 400 years of European domination. Situated within the entanglements and mutual determinations of a global geometry of empire, the Japanese story helps us script a more multi-​dimensional account of the dynamics of the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century. Looking for comparability instead of singularity likewise brings into view a number of suggestive affinities in the relationship between nation and empire. Indeed, early Meiji foreign policy illustrates a slippage between nation and empire that was pervasive in the nineteenth-​century world, as the forms and technologies of empire-​states and nation-​states became part of a global circuit of exchange, encouraged by the advantages accruing to territorial possessions and military power to maximize (and wield) sovereignty within the inter-​state system. Thus, Japan supports recent arguments that we should look at nation and empire as compatible political forms, rather than representing a linear progression where empires break up into nations or nations develop into empires.7 It was significant, in this regard, that the rebel coalition that overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868 chose the ‘Empire of Japan’ to designate the new state (a more literal translation of Dai Nippon Teikoku is ‘Greater Empire of Japan’), where ‘empire’ was doubly signified to refer to a state in which sovereignty was vested in a restored emperor as well as the territories under imperial rule. In this sense ‘Japan’ represented dual projects of nation-​state and empire-​state. After overthrowing the Tokugawa authorities in 1868, the new government was immediately faced with the task of integrating the former 250 semi-​autonomous domains that had provided the locus of identity and community for the ruling samurai class, while simultaneously clarifying the boundaries of the Empire to encompass frontier zones beyond the limits of the Tokugawa federation. As Japan’s rebel leaders established the legal foundations for a modern state and a nationalized citizenry, they drew from their readings of international law as well as their observations of the international ‘law of the jungle.’ Predicting winners in what they regarded as a struggle between the strong and the weak, government leaders followed institutional models for French law, British industry, American education, and German constitutionalism. At the same time, in speeches, journalism, and a stream of political novels, anti-​government activists set forth alternative models for a ‘little Japan’, anti-​imperialist nation-​state: Parnell’s Ireland, Arabi Pasha’s Egypt, the Carlists in Spain, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Indian, and Hungarian revolutionary and reform movements: a global fraternity joined in spirit against domestic tyranny and foreign aggression.8 All these went into the mix. In 1868, there was no such thing as the Japanese nation, either as a concept or a social formation: this had to be developed through such institutions as the compulsory educational system and a conscript military, as well as a university system with disciplines

216   Louise Young of national literature and intellectual history.9 These and other nationalizing institutions achieved a stability and uniformity by the 1890s, just in time for a decade of imperial warfare to intensify connections between imperialism and nationalism in both material and ideological terms. Classical theories of imperialism linked expansionism with ‘extreme’ nationalism and a mob ‘psychology of jingoism.’10 Such ideas applied to popular support for Sino-​Japanese and Russo-​Japanese Wars, which became moments of outpouring of nationalist fervour, expressed in a growing mass media, and whipped up by politicians and activists, journalists and publishers, and government leaders.11 The embrace of imperial ambitions made fateful choices for economic and political structures within the new nation-​state, and served to cement support for state goals under the slogan ‘rich country-​strong military.’ Early political parties made common cause with military authoritarianism; both found anti-​foreignism and racist nationalism an effective rallying cry. The turn to an aggressive foreign policy brought in train a set of consequences, of which extreme nationalism represented only one expression. It is important to recall that adapting the nation-​state form, Japanese reformers did not always imagine the nation as a single ethnicity, which complicated the formulation of ‘one people, one state, one territory.’ The ambiguity of Japan’s constitution as both empire-​state and nation-​state was expressed in diverging theories on the ethnic origins of the Japanese nation, culture, and civilization. One camp adhered to the idea of a single bloodline—​the Yamato race—​that traced its roots to the mytho-​historical origins of the Yamato state in 660 BC. Another, equally influential, line of thought argued that the ancestors of the Yamato people that populated the four main islands of the archipelago represented a multi-​ethnic mix of peoples from Northeast, Southeast, and Pacific Asia. In the latter case, imagining the hybrid anthropological origins of the population of the Japanese archipelago made it easy to contemplate the incorporation of the Ryukyu Kingdom to the south and the Ainu lands to the north; indeed, with the annexation of Korea in 1910, an estimated 30% of Japanese subjects of the emperor were not ‘Japanese’.12 The pure race and multi-​ethnic nation camps mapped onto alternate strategies for managing difference, which in any case did not imply equality. As the boundaries of the Empire expanded, growing numbers of ‘non-​Japanese’ subjects became the targets of competing projects of assimilation and separation. The nationalist imaginary held possibilities for both racist and pan-​Asian anti-​imperialisms that pushed back against the Western threat, just as nationalist discourse could justify the spread of Japanese sovereignty over the Pacific and Asia in the name of historical mission.13 Though the turn-​of-​the century wars with China and Russia tilted the ideological field in favour of an alliance of nationalism and expansionism, both visions of a ‘greater’ and a ‘little’ Japan remain immanent to the nation-​state, even to the present day. During the late nineteenth-​century conjuncture when the international law of the jungle appeared to pose the choice of either sitting down at the table or being served up as the feast, defensive modernization became linked to defensive imperialism and the idea that Japan needed an empire as a matter of national survival took root. While advocates for a ‘greater Japan’ were often the loudest voices in the room, critics of imperialism envisioned a path to the future without territorial expansion; such ‘little Japan’

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    217 imaginaries remained part of an alternative tradition in foreign policy thinking. Though historians have often misrecognized the winning arguments in this debate for ‘realism,’ underpinning the triumph of pro-​imperialism over anti-​imperialism was the false choice between expansion and destruction.14

Imperialists Against Imperialism Japanese expansion from the teens through World War Two took place within a terrain dramatically altered by the First World War. Although Asia was mostly a side story in the military and diplomatic history of the Great War, it became an important staging ground for a paradigm shift in the norms and forms of empire. China, Korea, Indochina, and India all generated powerful anti-​colonial nationalist movements that sent both ideas and organizational models in global motion. Asian nationalists attended the Paris Peace Conference and reported in the nationalist press on Wilson’s endorsement of the principal of national self-​determination and the territorial settlements that embodied it. They saw in the League of Nations a repudiation of gunboat diplomacy and military conquest, as well as the possibilities of international law to reclaim lost sovereignty. The Russian Revolution sent shock waves throughout Asia, as a central player in the imperialist alliance switched sides and exposed the perfidy of the Allied powers with the publication of the secret treaties declaring opposition to imperialism and providing technical and organizational assistance through the network of Comintern advisers to communist and nationalist organizations throughout Asia. Within Japan, the Comintern influenced the Japan Communist Party, the Japan Socialist Party, and a generation of intellectuals that matriculated Tokyo Imperial University. Liberal anti-​imperialists embraced Wilson’s vision; radical anti-​imperialists championed Lenin’s ideas; self-​proclaimed ‘Japanists’ issued calls for a pan-​Asian union under Japan’s leadership. Within Japan and throughout Asia, nationalists mobilized ideas of Wilsonianism and the Russian revolution to endorse competing projects to reorganize the region.15 Changes in Asia articulated with global conditions for a ‘new-​new imperialism’ after the First World War, one that pushed back everywhere against the old imperialism of the scramble. As Prasenjit Duara notes, the late nineteenth-​century alignment of nationalism and imperialism broke apart in the wake of World War One and created a division between imperialist nationalisms on the one hand and anti-​imperialist nationalisms on the other.16 The World War One settlement rejected what William Langer called the ‘diplomacy of imperialism’ and framed empires and imperialist ultra-​nationalism as part of a passing international order.17 Rendered hollow by the carnage of the Great War, the European civilizational discourse of progress and humanism became vulnerable to reproach by anti-​colonial nationalisms, further eviscerating the legitimacy of Western imperialism. This process took place unevenly across the globe, and went further and faster in regions like the Middle East where the vanquished watched their colonial empires dismantled than in Africa where the victors left their colonial empires mostly intact.

218   Louise Young New empires sanctioned by new ideologies arose, even while the old order and its old beneficiaries came under withering critique. In the Americas and the Caribbean, a US empire of client states and corporate colonies took shape, assembled through military interventions justified in the name of democracy and free enterprise; in Asia a Soviet ‘empire of nations’ emerged, ennobled by a vision of communist fraternity, ethnic pluralism, and autarky. Self-​proclaimed ‘have not’ nations like Germany and Italy defended their expansionisms as a matter of national survival and called for an equal share of world resources, denouncing as hypocrisy efforts to obstruct them while leaving in place the vast colonial empires established under the old order. Empires of liberty, just­ ice, and equality emerged in the changed world after World War One, as imperialism took new forms and new justifications that advocated colonization under the cloak of anti-​imperialism or declared itself to be something else entirely.18 Japan joined this crowded field of states making territorial claims in the name of opposing old-style imperialism, a project that in this case was less a repudiation of earlier tactics of expansionism than an embrace of the possibilities opened up by European retreat and the rise of anti-​colonial nationalism. From the turn of the century through World War One and beyond, Japan engaged in a steady pursuit of an expanding menu of imperial interests in the face of a rapidly changing international context. The outbreak of World War One and the withdrawal of European power from the region provided an opening for Japanese commercial, military, and diplomatic interests to aggressively expand their influence in Asia. Japan forced concessions on China for railway development, factories, military garrisons, and political advisors, dramatically extending the scope of Japanese control in Manchuria and establishing a foothold all along the coast. Japanese trading firms temporarily captured European export markets from China to India. Japan entered the war on the Allied side and took over German holdings in Micronesia and North China. The Japanese army took part in the Allied Siberian Expedition against the Bolshevik Red Army in 1918 and remained fighting in Siberia until 1922, two long years after the other armies departed. As one of the victorious Allied powers, Japan joined the ‘Big Five’ at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, coming to the table with its own list of demands and becoming part of the theater of diplomacy on the world stage. The speed and force of Japan’s play for regional power, as well as the challenge posed by Chinese nationalism, prompted American diplomats to organize the Washington Conference of 1921–​1922. New realities on the ground gave rise to a treaty structure that dismantled the Anglo-​Japanese Alliance, initiated naval disarmament in the Pacific, and endorsed China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Although the new diplomacy that emerged from the Paris and Washington Conferences of 1919–​1922 did not change many minds about the importance of keeping and growing the empire, it generated lively debate on the meaning of the new world order, and Japan’s place within it. For many civic and political leaders, Japan’s takeover of Germany’s Asia-​Pacific empire, a new rivalry with Great Britain in China, and engagement with Asian reformers in the British and French empires all signalled a shift in the balance of power between West and East. In their eyes, Japanese representation at the Peace Conference and in the League of Nations created a voice for a newly assertive

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    219 Asia in world affairs; Japan’s rise as a great power meant that Asia, too, had arrived. The liberal-​minded intelligentsia and foreign policy elite embraced these changes as conducive to ‘peaceful expansionism’ and advocated modifications to accommodate nationalist demands in Korea, Taiwan, and China.19 But others read the record in less sanguine terms. They regarded America with suspicion and US diplomacy as an effort to reverse Japan’s hard won gains. They took umbrage at Japan’s exclusion from the councils of the ‘big four’ and the ‘big three’ in Paris and questioned the willingness of a white club of nations to ever include Japan. They noted that Japan’s request to place a ‘racial equality clause’ in the preamble of the Covenant of the League of Nations went down in humiliating defeat, even after diplomats offered draft after draft of increasingly anodyne language.20 As the racial diplomacy in Paris was quickly followed by the enactment of Japanese Exclusion with the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act in the US Congress, the race issue poisoned relations with America in some quarters and haunted China diplomacy of the 1920s. Japanese thus regarded the new world order with ambivalence: some saw a new ‘cosmopolitanism’ that recognized the rise of Japan as a world power and East and West as co-​equals, others, a racial double standard applied to their imperial aspirations. Tensions in the messaging of World War One reverberated within a politics of empire grown increasingly layered, the result of proliferating entanglements between an empire-​state and a nation-​state that were no longer mere abstractions. With the military build-​ups and economic booms of a rapid succession of wars between 1894 and 1922, big business grew fat on army contracts and became a formidable military-​industrial complex. As the national boundary expanded, key sectors of the economy became locked into the empire for strategic resources and export markets: sugar in Okinawa and Taiwan, rice in Korea and Taiwan, iron, coal, and soybeans in Manchuria, and an outlet for growing textile manufactures throughout East and Southeast Asia. Colonial railroads and banks, a colonial civil service (police, education, administration), and military garrisons were established as extensions of state institutions that connected the home islands with the empire and constituted a host of sub-​imperialist interests that used their positions as springboards for further expansion. Since sub-​imperial interests did not speak with a single voice, sub-​imperial projects competed with one another to be heard. Army officers did battle with diplomats; textile exporters shouted over railway interests. Taiwan became a staging ground for a push South that competed with a Manchurian faction advocating the priority of the North.21 Even while multiplying interests and projects deepened and complicated the stakes in empire, imperial expansion meant a national politics increasingly geared to the world stage. Politics became both local and imperial. Activists promoted workers’ rights at home and participation in the International Labor Organization. The army established a propaganda wing and mobilized a network of reservist associations to encourage support for army budgets and alert the public to the dangers of disarmament. Membership in the League of Nations buoyed up domestic support for a ‘little Japan’ vision of foreign relations articulated by liberal intellectuals, political leaders, and the business press. Socialists and Communist intellectuals from Japan connected through Comintern

220   Louise Young networks to intellectuals from China, Taiwan, and Korea. Radical rightwing organizations speechified about the ‘red peril’ that interlinked threats of communism in the home islands and in the empire. For left, right, and centre, a political stance on domestic concerns implied a particular position on China, Korea, and Taiwan. The increasing interpenetration of empire and nation made it easy to turn to the colonies as spatial fix to the gathering national crisis of the late 1920s, a crisis experienced on multiple fronts. The 1920s were challenging years for all industrialized societies, Japan not the least as a decade of ‘economic muddle’ ended in a 1927 bank panic and a tottering national economy slid ignominiously into the global crash of 1929.22 The multi-​ front socio-​economic crisis of the early 1930s—​agrarian stagnation and mass starvation in Japan’s Northeast, unprecedented urban unemployment in cities large and small, plummeting exports to all of Japan’s critical markets, the devastating decision to return to the gold standard in 1930 only to abandon it a year later—​fed an atmosphere of desperation and panic. The demonstrable failure of existing political, economic, and social institutions to ‘overcome the deadlock’ encouraged calls for state renovation and radical solutions, and ennobled the seductions of fascism. Attention turned to the Asian continent, where Japan’s position appeared embattled by a rising Chinese nationalist movement. Focused increasingly on overturning the legal structure that underpinned Japan’s railroad imperialism in Northeast China, the Chinese boycotted Japanese goods and struck Japanese-​owned factories to demand the recovery of rights signed away over decades of gunboat diplomacy. Against the backdrop of global trade friction and tariff wars, the China market became Japan’s ‘imperial lifeline’ and the justification for an army-​led the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Widely popular, the Japanese public vigorously supported the occupation of Northeast China and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, as well as the withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. Japan embarked on a wave of aggressive military expansionism and the construction of a new order over the 1930s and 1940s that signified the creation of new colonial forms in Asia as well as radical transformation in metropolitan institutions within Japan. An army ascendant in China empowered military ambitions at home and the success of conspirators in Manchuria licensed a wave of coup attempts and political assassinations in the imperial capital. Establishment elites joined army officers in the fascization of the state from above, with the creation of the ‘thought police,’ the ‘controlled economy,’ and a single mass political party (the Imperial Rule Assistance Association) as instruments of the national defense state and total war. The New Order at home articulated with a New Order in Asia whose expanding boundaries were expressed through the series of official slogans that punctuated the decade: the declaration of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia in 1934 (colonial empire plus Manchukuo), the New Order for East Asia in 1938 (adding China), and the Greater East Asia Co-​Prosperity Sphere in 1940 (adding Southeast Asia). Official Asianism embraced a vision of regional autarky—​the ‘Yen bloc’—​among an Asian family of nations headed by Japan as well as a mission to push the West out of Asia. Asianism tried to align Japan’s interests with demands of anti-​colonial nationalism by heralding programs of coordinated industrial development and the co-​prosperity of trade in the yen bloc.

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    221 Starting with Manchukuo, Japan sponsored client regimes and mass parties throughout its newly occupied territories, where teams of Japanese ‘advisors’ dictated policy to new Asian leaders. By claiming common cause with Asian nationalists in the fight against the White Peril of imperialism on the one hand and the Red Peril of communism on the other, pan-​Asianism provided a mantle of legitimacy for Japan’s new colonial projects. While mass party organizations like the Concordia Association in Manchukuo proclaimed pan-​Asianism through such slogans as the ‘harmony of the five races’ (Japanese, Manchu, Korean, Han Chinese, Mongolian), this was aimed as much at the Japanese population in the main islands as it was at the subjects of the multi-​ethnic state. Though architects of Japanese pan-​Asianism were transfixed by the potency of an ideology that led to Japan being ‘greeted as liberators’ in Southeast Asia, in the long run this comforting delusion probably made the greater impact by drumming up enthusiasm for a vastly expanded war front among a public that had been at war for nearly ten years.23 Though pan-​Asianism is frequently viewed as a peculiar expression of Japanese ultra-​ nationalism, there are family resemblances between the many ‘pan’ movements that arose in the twentieth century—​pan-​Africanism, pan-​Germanism, and pan-​Asianism among them. In the latter case, at least, pan-​Asianism absorbed a host of competing nationalist agendas—​anticolonial nationalisms, self-​determining ethnonationalisms, imperialist ultranationalisms, Occidentalisms, self-​ Orientalisms, jingoisms, xenophobias—​that brought theories of imperialism and theories of nationalism into a tangled web of confusions and contradictions. And yet, pan-​Asianism managed to sustain its force as a transcendent idea across the twentieth century and even into the new millennium. This is more than just a ‘Japan and Asia’ story, and suggests we explore the ways that nationalisms of all stripes aligned themselves with expansionism in the name of justice, liberty, and equality. As the global appearance of the ‘pan’ movements makes clear, the circulation of ideologies of imperialism and nationalism, as well as the global synchronicities that helped such ideas gain traction, confound models of diffusion or convergence. While it is common to note the ways the tactics and ideology of Japanese imperialism imitated the West, the reverse was also true. In this connection, the strange career of Manchukuo bears a close look. As an instance of an empire that tried hard to disguise itself as something else, Manchukuo offered to later crypto-​colonialisms an important source of tactics and ideas. Perhaps most striking were ways Manchukuo was mined as a laboratory for counter-​insurgency warfare against Communist guerilla forces, especially those using Maoist tactics. American military planners in Vietnam studied the Japanese campaigns in Manchuria carefully, taking note of the so-​called ‘three all’ policy (kill all, burn all, loot all), and the efforts to isolate and secure rural peasants as allies, reformulated by Americans as the ‘strategic hamlet program.’24 Japanese organizers of the ‘independence movement’ that launched Manchukuo went to considerable trouble to provide a veneer of sovereignty, disguising colonialism under a bilateral treaty structure that legalized Manchukuo’s position under Japan’s security umbrella. The similarities between the colonialism of the wartime yen bloc and America’s Cold War ‘empire of bases’ were not lost on Japanese critics of the US–​Japan alliance system established

222   Louise Young in 1952, who denounced the humiliation of becoming ‘America’s Manchukuo’.25 What Geir Lundestad famously called an American ‘empire by invitation’ became a doppelganger for Manchukuo in other ways as well: by cloaking expansionism with support for ‘independence movements’ and proclaiming a US-​led democratic ‘revolution in Asia’; by using the soft power of Americanism as handmaiden to economic expansionism; by deploying the imperialism of development for the development of imperialism. Thus America, like Japan, imitated and adapted models of empire building that were discursively co-​constituted within the inter-​state system and the global capitalist market. Much as Benedict Anderson observed for the technology of nationalism, the tactics and ideologies of empire proved transplantable and portable across spaces and times connected through modern knowledge economies and other mediums of intellectual exchange.

Client State/Client Empire In the aftermath of defeat in 1945, the ‘Great Empire of Japan’ collapsed into the ‘island nation of Japan.’ The seven-​year occupation that followed surrender served to integrate the new Japan into an American-​dominated economic and security bloc in Asia as the boundaries of the nation-​state shrunk to the four main islands of the archipelago and their adjacent islands and islets. Many things changed for Japan in the new and rigidly divided regional order—​most notably economic ties with Mainland China were cut off. But other things remained much the same, as Japan reestablished a dominant trading and investment position within its former empire in Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The mechanisms of this reorganization of regional order emerged from the particularities of Asia as a zone of action in the Cold War and made Japan at once the workshop of Asia—​regional nexus of free market capitalism and engine of regional economic growth—​as well as the super domino that would never fall to Communist revolution.26 Conversion from America’s main enemy in a hot war in the Pacific to its principal ally in a cold war in Asia relied on a quid pro quo: in exchange for submission to American military and foreign policy, Japan gained privileged access to Asian markets within the American bloc, becoming at once a client state and a client empire. This inaugurated an arrangement that effectively divided the military and economic labour of domination between Japan and the US: America used its network of bases in Northeast and Southeast Asia to carry out a new variant of gunboat diplomacy that helped recreate and sustain Japanese economic hegemony in the region. In contrast with Cold War structures in Europe, America managed its relationships in Asia through a system of bilateral security treaties that channelled trade and investment flows in bilateral directions as well, and placed the US in the middle of virtually all forms of exchange between Asian countries. In the early phase of this history, Japan reestablished an informal trading imperium within what Chalmers Johnson called America’s ‘empire of bases’ in Asia.27 Client states like Japan permitted a permanent

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    223 military occupation by US forces and agreed to serve as launching points for ‘containment,’ a voluntary subordination that was facilitated by large amounts of military and economic aid and that weighted the domestic political order towards conservative anti-​communism. In Japan’s case, a bureaucratic single party state reemerged in the wake of the US occupation, underpinned by an ‘iron triangle’ linking big business, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the bureaucracy—​a political order captured in such phrases as ‘Japan, Inc.’ and ‘corporatism without labor.’28 Among the occupation reforms aimed broadly at Japan’s democratization and demilitarization were sweeping changes in education, land tenure, civil rights, and most significant for the nature of the state: the renunciation of the right to wage war enshrined in Article 9 of the new constitution. Like the wide-​ranging transformations of the Meiji period that instituted defensive modernization nearly a century before, postwar reforms took place within a set of international pressures, which helped conservatives win battles with progressives over labour law, the reappearance of wartime elites in the postwar state, and the question of alignment in the new world order. The constraints and the opportunities of American power inclined government leaders to provide a supporting role for the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both of which offered timely economic stimulus in the form of special procurements as well as integrating Japan’s reconstituted Self Defense Forces under US command and control. In the early years of the Cold War, the ‘dialectic of the internal and the external’ meant that profiteering from US wars in Asia financed economic recovery and high growth, even the fate of the new state and its iron triangle stakeholders became bound to export-​led development and the reestablishment of economic hegemony over parts of the former yen bloc.29 In this way, a partially reconstituted bureaucratic-​authoritarian state (with its military arm amputated) was linked to a partially reconstituted Asian empire (with its military operations outsourced). Japan’s privileged position within America’s empire of bases relied on rebuilding key parts of the wartime yen bloc, a process that differed between its southern and northern spheres and changed over time. American policy makers initially sought to set up Southeast Asia as replacement for lost markets in China and Korea, reestablishing the Co-​prosperity Sphere within the territories of French, British, and Dutch empires once lost, then regained, then lost once again to Japan. With American complicity, reparations for Japanese war crimes became the instrument for economic penetration of Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Advised by the same handful of large trading firms who dominated the wartime economy, the Japanese government tied reparations payments to purchases of goods and services, allowing Japanese companies to reestablish a foothold in Southeast Asia as a market for light industrial products and for purchases of natural resources.30 This laid the groundwork for a transformation of Japan’s economic footprint in the 1970s, when Southeast Asia became a ‘pollution haven’ for companies facing pressure from community movements within Japan that opposed environmental degradation and pollution-​related diseases.31 Direct investment overtook trade as the prime mechanism of economic imperialism, and Japanese firms transformed themselves into

224   Louise Young multi-​national companies, dividing production between components manufacture in the home islands and assembly in Southeast Asia. This division of labour had the advantage of turning Southeast Asian assembly plants into proxy exporters to western markets, evading the trade restrictions beginning to be placed on Japanese products. All this accelerated after 1985, when the Plaza Accords reset exchange rates, sent the yen skyrocketing, and created huge capital reserves that flowed outward to the US, Europe, and Asia. New Japanese investments now concentrated in low-​cost components factories intended to supply Japanese-​owned assembly plants nearby.32 South Korea and Taiwan became additions to a Japanese sphere of influence within the American bloc slightly later and followed a different pattern. Themselves client states and under semi-​permanent US occupation, leaders of both countries welcomed teams of American advisors to direct economic policy and agreed to the reentry of Japanese capital on a large scale in the 1960s. This process established asymmetrical patterns of trade, where Japan occupied a much larger share of South Korean and Taiwanese markets than the reverse. At the same time, both countries became receptacles for Japan’s declining industries. Rising wages within Japan drove textile firms to offshore their production to Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s, followed by consumer electronics, steel, and automobiles from the 1980s. Japan’s expanding presence in Taiwanese and South Korean economies compromised American capacity to unilaterally dictate policy to their leaders, and provided more political autonomy from the US in exchange for greater dependence on Japanese capital. In the triangular relationships that emerged, the US maintained regional dominance through military strength and by monopolizing strategic supplies of oil and grain, while Japanese big business exercised commanding power via market share and ownership of production.33 Patterns of postwar political economy connected imperial formations in the prewar to imperial formations in the postwar. The relationship between developmental states in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan traced its roots back to the prewar yen bloc that offshored some Japanese production and coordinated regional industry through a state-​ directed division of labour among Japan’s colonies and its home islands. Beginning in the 1960s, Japanese investment in South Korea and Taiwan helped finance import-​ substitution and a modified command economy as strategies for industrial development. As with exports, a small group of large enterprises monopolized Japan’s direct foreign investment. Their investment strategies in both North and Southeast Asia underpinned a conversion to multinational capital beginning in the 1970s. Repeating a process integral to the development of capitalism in prewar Japan, big business went multinational through a regional division of labour between Japanese-​owned plants throughout the northern and southern spheres of the reconstituted yen bloc. Interconnected developmental states tilted domestic political fields towards conservative rule and guaranteed an oversized influence of a few large multinational firms in state governance in all three countries. This set up the conditions for Japanese imperial ideology to reemerge under the new guise of the East Asian developmental state, putatively invented by Japan in the late nineteenth century and characterized by weak democracies, Confucian values, and the

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    225 privileging of economic growth over all else. The imperialism of East Asian development was captured in the resurrection of the 1930s ‘flying geese’ theory in the 1970s.34 As the lead goose (Japan) moved through cycles of product development, it transferred its older technologies to the geese flying directly behind (Taiwan and South Korea), which in turn passed their declining industries to the next row (Southeast Asia). Much as claims of ‘development’ that brought railroads and education to the colonies justified Japanese military occupation before 1945, the flying geese metaphor euphemized Japanese economic domination after 1945 as ‘Asian-​style industrialization’ that benefitted the follower geese; at the same time, it occluded the military alliance structure and the omnipresence of American soldiers and sailors that kept all geese in their proper place. This did not strike many observers as an imperialist ideology perhaps because it was the ideology of American imperialism as well. Indeed, from the early years of the Cold War to the present, American soft power served as an important supplement to hard power in the Asian regional order. Exports of US-​based modernization theory that made Japan (and more recently Korea) into models for development; Americanism and an American dream that celebrated consumption and ever-​improving lifestyle; ‘peace and prosperity’ under the shelter of the American security umbrella (that also sheltered Asia from a remilitarized Japan): all became naturalized as a Japanese dream of postwar national rebirth, even while they disguised Japanese-​American imperialism under the cloak of a paternalistic American hegemony. The reluctance to admit continuities between the Japanese empire before and after 1945 connected to a more general ‘amnesia of empire’ in public memory and a near absence of a ‘post-​imperial’ subjectivity.35 A disavowal of the imperial past was abetted by the circumstances of decolonization, which occurred in the context of defeat by allies rather than an anti-​colonial revolution or under pressure from a nationalist movement. In most of the Japanese empire, new powers tried to assert control almost immediately in the wake of defeat:  Russia took over the former empire in Manchuria and North Korea; the US occupied South Korea and the Pacific islands; the British, French, and Dutch laid claim to their former empires in Southeast Asia; and the Chinese Nationalist Party recolonized Taiwan. These multiple new colonialisms and Cold War imperialisms provided an easy alibi for ‘The Great Empire of Japan’ to escape judgement from its own citizens and from others. Nothing symbolized this better than the invitation, in 1955, for Japan to attend the Bandung Conference along with twenty-​four newly independent Asian and African states. For much of the world, Bandung represented the birth of the nonaligned movement and raised a collective cry of opposition to colonialism and neo-​colonialism. For Japan, it signalled an ironic inversion of prewar exceptionalism: before the war Japan had entered the Western great power club as the single ‘honorary white imperialist’; after the war it joined the club of newly independent states as the single ‘honorary victim of colonialism.’ At home, intellectuals embraced the ‘Bandung spirit,’ but mostly as a critique of the US-​Japan Mutual Security Treaty that made Japan into an object of American neo-​ colonialism, rather than as an opportunity to rethink Japan’s own imperial history. In

226   Louise Young fact, identification with postwar ‘third worldism’ became another way for both left and right to claim semi-​colonial status and disavow an imperialist subjectivity.36 Instead of looking to the empire, over the postwar decades public memory has remained transfixed with the question of war responsibility and historical revisionism. Especially in its final days, Japan’s colonial empire was the province and project of the army and navy; it was indelibly inked with militarism. When Japan lost the war, the public blamed their military leaders for defeat and lost their appetite for imperialism along with their appetite for militarism. This conceptual fusing of imperialism with militarism and their mutual discrediting profoundly shaped the ways empire was figured in public memory. The legacies of empire became sublimated into the long list of debates about the conduct of the war: the treatment of the war in public school textbooks; the designation of a national anthem and its ritual singing at school events; the status of the Yasukuni shrine, where the war dead were interred; the issue of forced prostitution and the euphemistically named ‘comfort women’; the battles over denying the Nanjing massacre; to name a few. The so-​called history wars surrounding these various issues are folded into debates about fascism and militarism, but in fact speak to questions of military imperialism.37 With the sublimation of imperialism into militarism, Japan could endlessly debate how to come to terms with one past without directly engaging another. In the process, public memory served as handmaiden to a crypto-​imperialism that outsourced military operations to its American patron—​a postwar empire without militarism that connected seamlessly to a prewar militarism without empire. In this way, operations of memory helped constitute an empire that remained largely invisible to the imperialists, the Japanese public who chose not to acknowledge economic hegemony over a refashioned yen bloc, the slow violence of their pollution industries in Southeast Asia, or the role of Japanese capital in shoring up Asian police states, as examples of postwar Japan as empire.38 Where does this leave us in terms of thinking about the ends of empire? As the Japanese case illustrates, imperial endings can be deceiving. Just as an early modern age of empire was swept aside by a wave of political revolutions, the global reverberations of the advent of industrial capitalism and nationalism ushered in a new age of empire. The ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century gave way to a colonialism of puppet states during the interwar decades; this was followed in the wake of World War Two by decolonization and ‘imperialism without colonies.’ Within these global conjunctures, changes in the forms of Japanese imperialism were dictated by a host of factors: international norms about instrumental violence and the law of war, human rights and questions of citizenship, sovereignty and nationalism; the evolution of the inter-​state system, international law, and organizations of world government that set the conditions of possibility for state action; and transformations and residues within the nation-​empire-​ state that both acted and reacted within a global environment. Yet even as new structures emerged, older forms bled into new realities and newer forms assimilated existing ‘facts on the ground.’ Thus, Japanese imperialism in the era of treaty ports and gunboat diplomacy drew on a longstanding Confucian logic of the Sino-​centric tribute system. Both pan-​Asianism in the 1930s and crypto-​imperialism in the 1960s contended with the inheritance of earlier imperial moments.

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    227 This chapter has focused on three global conjunctures when one form of empire gave way to another. The turning points were event-​driven and bear out William Sewell’s concept of ‘eventful temporality’: that causal structures are not uniform through time because events transform both social structure and social causality.39 In East Asia the Opium Wars and the treaty port system in the mid-​nineteenth century; the establishment of a new order in Asia after World War One; and the rise of American cold war hegemony after World War Two represented such big events and their consecutive reconfigurations of regional social relations. These events over-determined transformations in states, nations, and empires, as well as the ways these articulated with each other and the regional order. Thinking the larger story of empire through the Japanese example offers one way of grasping the persistence of imperial structures through these times of momentous transformation, even into the turn of the millennium and the present day.40

Notes 1. Historians use the term ‘new imperialism’ to describe the acceleration of European military expansion in the late nineteenth century, epitomized by the ‘scramble for Africa.’ The Wisconsin School speaks of a new American imperialism emerging at the same time, using diplomacy and economic power to expand interests abroad. My own use of this term seeks to place the nineteenth-​century conjuncture within a longer history of European expansion that begins in the sixteenth century with the colonization of the Americas and the establishment of coastal footholds in Asia. With the first wave of decolonization in the Americas, the ‘age of empire’ was followed by an ‘age of revolution.’ Over the course of the nineteenth-​century nationalism and industrialization triggered a second wave of European expansion creating both informal ‘empires of free trade’ and formal colonies of rule in Asia, Africa, and the Americas—​the ‘new imperialism’ of which Japan was a part. 2. Mark R. Peattie, “Introduction,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–​1945, eds. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peatte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 6. 3. Gavin McCormack makes this argument in The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (New York: Routledge, 1996), 153–​159. 4. Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 14. 5. For one example, see Daniel A. Métraux, “Jack London and the Yellow Peril,” Education About Asia, 14, no. 1 (2009): 29–​33. 6. This phrase comes from the famous essay written by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review New Series, 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–​15. 7. This argument is elaborated in Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). See also Krishan Kumar, “Empires and Nations:  Convergence or Divergence?” in George Steinmetz, Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 279–​299. 8. Since history is told by the victors, this ‘little Japan’ vision is a largely forgotten tradition. For one example, see “Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Volume 1:  From Restoration to Occupation,

228   Louise Young 1868–​1945, eds. J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 30–​45. See also Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) on alternative views of nation in China, drawing on similar views of global possibilities and models. 9. Kevin Doak, “What is a Nation and Who Belongs? National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth Century Japan,” American Historical Review 102, no.  2 (1997): 283–​309. 10. The phrase comes from J. A. Hobson’s book by the same title, published in 1901. See also works of Hannah Arendt, David Fieldhouse, and George Lichtheim discussed in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 11. Donald Keene, “The Sino-​Japanese War of 1894–​95 and Japanese Culture,” in Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1971), 259–​299; Naoko Shimazu, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-​Japanese War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); Charles Schencking, Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy 1868–​1922 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2005). 12. Oguma Eiji’s influential book, recently translated by David Askew as A Geneology of ‘Japanese’ Self Images (Melbourne:  Trans Pacific Press, 2002) exploded the widespread narrative of the ‘myth of Japanese homogeneity’ as a postwar invention. 13. Several wonderful collections on nationalism and Asianism have been published recently:  Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–​1945 (London:  Routledge, 2003); Dick Stegewerns, ed., Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan: Autonomy, Asian Brotherhood, or World Citizenship? (London:  Routledge, 2003); Sven Saaler and Christopher W.  A. Szpilman, eds., Pan-​ Asianism: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). 14. To a surprising extent, scholars have accepted without question arguments government leaders made at the time to defend expansionist policies in the name of ‘self defense’ and as the only course of action available:  see Hillary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea 1868–​1910:  A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960); James Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–​1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Noam Chomsky, “The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War” in his American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: The New Press, 1969). 15. To read more on the aftermath of World War One for Japan, see Frederick Dickinson, World War One and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–​1930 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015); Thomas Burkheim, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–​1938 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), and Akira Iriye, After Imperialism:  The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–​1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 16. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity:  Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 17. William Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935). 18. Scholarship in the twenties and thirties theorized the emergence of new forms of informal empire in Latin America and Nazi Germany: George Steinmetz, “Empires, Imperial States, and Colonial Societies,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology, eds., Masamichi Sasaki, Jack Goldstone, Ekkart Zimmermann, Stephen K. Sanderson (Boston: Brill, 2014),

Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan    229 66. On American and Soviet ‘new imperialisms’: Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (London: Owl Books, 2006) and his Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Icon Books, 2009); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire:  Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939 (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2001) and Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 19. Louise Young, “Japan’s New International History,” American Historical Review 119, 4 (2014): 1117–​1128. 20. For a wonderfully detailed study of the diplomacy of the racial equality clause, see Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 2009). 21. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–​1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For two recent studies focusing on ‘sub-​ imperialist’ interests: Seiji Shirane, “Mediated Empire: Colonial Taiwan in Japan’s Imperial Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–​1945” (Princeton University PhD, 2014) and Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 22. The phrase comes from Hugh Patrick, “The Economic Muddle of the 1920s,” in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James Morley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 23. I deal with this history in more depth in Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 24. Chong Sik Lee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria:  The Japanese Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). 25. This critique has recently resurfaced in debates about constitutional revision:  see Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “The ‘Manchukuo-​ization’ of Japan,” [Manshūkokka suru Nihon], Asahi Shinbun 10 January 2014. I am grateful to Okamoto Koichi for pointing this article out to me. On the idea of American revolution in Asia: John W. Dower, “EH Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History,” Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 47–​48. See also Prasendjit Duara, “The New Imperialism and the Post-​Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo in comparative perspective,” Asia-​Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 4, no. 1 ( 2006): 1–​18. 26. John W. Dower’s work remains the best analysis of Japan in the Cold War order: “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia,” in Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: The New Press, 1994), pp. 155–​207, and “The Superdomino In and Out of the Pentagon Papers,” in The Pentagon Papers:  The Senator Gravel Edition, vol. 5, eds. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 101–​142. 27. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 28. The catchphrase ‘Japan, Inc’ circulated widely in the 1980s, during the peak of the so-​called Japanese miracle, another buzzword of the day. T.J. Pempel and Keiichi Tsunekawa coined the phrase ‘corporatism without labor’ in “Corporatism without Labor? The Japanese Anomaly” in Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation, eds., Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe C. Schmitter (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), 231–​270. 29. Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism (Pantheon, 1975), 14. 30. Jon Halliday and Gavin McCormack, Japanese Imperialism Today:  ‘Co-​Prosperity in Greater East Asia’ (New York: Pelican, 1973).

230   Louise Young 31. Derek Hall, “Environmental Change, Protest, and Havens of Environmental Degradation: Evidence from Asia,” Global Environmental Politics 2, no. 2 (2002): 20–​28. 32. A special supplement of The Economist laid out the contours of the new yen bloc and its forty-​year history: “Together Under the Sun; A Survey of the Yen Block,” The Economist, 15 July 1989; T.J. Pempel, “Trans-​Pacific Torii: Japan and the Emerging Asian Regionalism,” in Network Power:  Japan and Asia, eds. Peter Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 47–​82. 33. Bruce Cummings, “The origins and development of the Northeast Asian political economy:  industrial sectors, product cycles, and political consequences,” International Organization 38, no. 1 (1984): 1–​40. 34. Kaname Akamatsu’s original conception:  “Shinkoku kōgyō koku no sangyō hatten” [Industrial development in newly industrializing countries], in Ueda Teijiro Hakushi Kinen Rombunsho, vol. 4 (1940), and picked up by Kiyoshi Kojima, Japanese Direct Foreign Investment: A Model of Multinational Business Operations (1978), cited in T.J. Pempel, op cit, 52. Popularized by Kojima, the flying geese model became a pervasive description of Japan’s role in Asian regionalism, as in The Economist ‘Yen Block Survey’ of 1989 and in political science literature such as Mitchell Bernard and John Ravenhill, “Beyond Product Cycles and Flying Geese:  Regionalization, Hierarchy, and the Industrialization of East Asia,” World Politics 47, no. 2 (1995): 171–​209. 35. On ‘amnesia of empire’, see Carol Gluck, “The ‘End’ of the Postwar: Japan at the Turn of the Millennium,” Public Culture, 10, no. 1 (1997): 1–​23; and John W. Dower, “Remembering the Criminals, Forgetting their Crimes,” in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1999), 508–​521. Post-​imperial Japan is virtually invisible historiographically. Aside from Lori Watt’s book When Empire Comes Home; Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Andrew Barshay, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–​1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) on the repatriation of Japanese nationals after 1945, there is very little else dealing with the process of transitioning from empire to post-​empire. 36. Kristine Dennehy, “The Bandung Spirit in Post-​war Japan,” in Bandung 1955; little histories, eds. Antonia Finnane and Derek McDougall (Victoria, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 2010),  57–​74. 37. For an entry point into the huge literature on war memory and the history wars, see T.T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories:  The Asia-​ Pacific War(s) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) and Marc Gallicchio, ed., The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia-​Pacific War in U.S.-​East Asian Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 38. The phrase ‘slow violence’ is from Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 39. William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–​12. 40. Acknowledgements: I thank Kim Brandt, Shelly Chan, Charles Kim, Viren Murthy, Sarah Thal, Crawford Young, and editor Martin Thomas for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Chapter 13

T he Eclipse of E mpi re in Chi na From the Manchus to Mao Tehyun Ma

A complex imperial situation made the end of empire in China a protracted and uneven process: one that almost seven decades after its conclusion continues to exert a hold on the national imagination. Between 1842 and 1937, over a dozen foreign powers acquired a foothold in China, but despite considerable privileges they never secured—​and rarely sought—​anything more than small pockets of territory. China’s semi-​colonial condition, as Jurgen Osterhammel calls it, was complicated by foreigners’ fraught relationship with the Qing dynasty prior to the 1911 Revolution and its divided republican successors.1 The fortunes of the Qing, the Republic of China, and interested foreign powers intersected at crucial points. Both the Qing emperors and the Chinese Nationalist Party, indeed, suffered for their failure to deal with colonial incursions as anti-​imperialist movements and wartime pressures took their toll. To explore these entwined histories, this chapter considers the fates of three different empires in China: the Manchurian Qing dynasty; the Western powers; and the Japanese, whose designs for a new kind of empire in China led to the 1937–​1945 Sino-​Japanese War. Comparing the land-​based Qing empire to Western maritime powers and Japanese expansionists may raise eyebrows, but despite their vast differences, there is good reason to do so. Chinese reformers in the late nineteenth century increasingly saw the Manchus as alien conquerors, whose inept rule had opened the door to new hordes of ‘foreign devils’. This chapter tries to explain how the Qing vanquished, held, then lost a vast and diverse domain, and explores how the end of their empire was closely bound up with overseas intervention in China’s internal affairs.

232   Tehyun Ma

The Empire of the Great Qing In 1644, Manchu warriors and their Mongol allies swept down from beyond the Great Wall, defeated disintegrating Ming forces, and established China’s last and largest dynastic empire:  the Great Qing. Through eighteenth-​century campaigns in Inner Asia, the Manchus more than doubled the Ming inheritance. Their expanded domain encompassed a multitude of languages, religions, and peoples, and boasted a population twice that of Europe. Yet the Manchus, as a foreign invader distinguished by language, dress, and martial tradition from China’s earlier rulers, remained suspect in the eyes of their subjects. Although Qing emperors largely adopted Chinese ways, they found their foreignness a heavy burden when a new wave of invaders threatened the Middle Kingdom after 1839. Still, their achievement in extending the empire, incorporating remote territories, and maintaining control was considerable. After a violent initial phase of consolidation, the Qing swiftly moved to accommodate their new subjects within the Wall through adopting Han Chinese culture. They not only reestablished the imperial civil service exams—​a long-​standing route for social mobility in China—​but also embraced the neo-​Confucianism of the Chinese world.2 Confucianism, based on the teachings of Confucius (551–​479 BC) and his disciples, provided a moral path to social harmony. Confucius’ prescriptions, set down in an age of warring kingdoms, made order contingent on the performance of proper roles within nested hierarchies: sons obeyed fathers, wives obeyed husbands, and everyone obeyed the Emperor. But Confucianism placed obligations not only on the ruled, but also on the rulers who were expected to look after the weak. Manchu emperors therefore visibly strove to live up to Confucian expectations of civilized rule through extravagant displays of benevolence and piety. Confucianism, however, was not merely a form of symbolic legitimation but also central to the Qing’s imperial administration. Because rulers deliberately kept the state small to avoid burdening their subjects with ruinous taxation, the central authorities had limited resources and reach.3 Formal bureaucratic control stopped at the county with the metropolitan-​appointed magistrate, who ran an underfunded and undermanned office. Officials thus relied on the gentry—​generally degree-​holders or wealthy landholders—​to do at local level the everyday work of government, like collecting taxes, organizing militias, and managing public works. Paternalistic acts, of course, yielded their own rewards by enhancing the social power of wealthy and learned families. The gentry, however, took up the social burden because they subscribed to the same Confucian principles as their emperor, acting as moral exemplars and benevolent providers in their spheres.4 Imperial exams helped to reproduce the Confucian order, for social mobility among the swollen ranks of aspiring civil servants was contingent on the memorization of its precepts, and candidates carried its teachings across the Qing domain.

The Eclipse of Empire in China    233 The ecosystem of Qing rule, however, was delicately balanced. A Confucian order, as Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski have pointed out, could flourish ‘so long as the ideal of government service remained attractive and the . . . philosophy on which the examinations were based remained convincing’.5 In the nineteenth century, however, imperialism, rebellion, and economic upheaval subjected the Qing’s harmonious empire to severe stress. Administering the lands that lay beyond the old Ming boundaries—​including modern day Mongolia, Tibet, and Muslim Xinjiang—​required different forms of statecraft. Mongol tribes in the east were already part of the Qing military before the conquest of China. Today’s Xinjiang came under imperial rule in the late seventeenth century in a campaign to stave off the Zunghar Mongols and Russian empires. Though the Zunghars were more or less a spent force by the early 1700s, their meddling in Tibet brought the Qing to that region, too.6 In extending territory, the Manchus—​ much like empire-​ builders elsewhere in the world—​demarcated boundaries, mapped terrain, classified cultures, and taxed subjects.7 However, rather than the ‘centralized bureaucratic’ structures seen in Han territory, frontier administration possessed feudal features of indirect rule.8 Manchus co-​opted traditional elites—​princes and nobles in Mongol regions, lamas and clerics in Tibet, and Muslim begs in Xinjiang—​and left local legal systems in place.9 In Beijing, meanwhile, the Lifanyuan (the Court of Frontier Dependencies) was staffed only by Mongols and Manchus, who were attuned to the traditions of nomadic people.10 The Qing ultimately monopolized military power, and appointed metropolitan officials to oversee garrisons, but they granted indigenous authorities significant latitude.11 As part of its arsenal of legitimation, the Qing also appropriated the kingly traditions of frontier people. Among the southern Mongols, the Qing established themselves as the ‘Khan of Khans’; in Tibet, the Manchus assumed the traditional role of patron and protector of clerics.12 To bolster their spiritual basis of authority, the Manchus ‘appropriated the symbolic vocabulary’ of Tibetan Buddhism, which was important in the cultural worlds of Mongols and Tibetans alike.13 Qing emperors even represented themselves as the reincarnation of Buddhist messianic-​kings or warrior kings from the nomadic north in imperial portraits.14 This performance of multiple kingship casts light on the apparent ‘sinicization’ of the Manchu emperors in Han Chinese territories.15 The emperor’s seasonal journey to the imperial hunting grounds around Chengde—​an essential ritual of Mongol-​Manchu kingship—​could be considered a parallel performance to public displays of Confucian piety in the Han homelands. Similarly, imperial sponsorship of Chinese arts fits within a broader provision of patronage for subject cultures. Imperial steles dotting the land were carved in the scripts of the five peoples of the realm: the Manchus, Han, Mongols, Uyghurs, and Tibetans.16 The summer palace of Chengde, meanwhile, was erected on a similar symbolic principle: located at the intersection of Han China, Manchuria, and Mongolia, it drew in its design on the empire’s vast expanse, including for instance a replica of the Potala Palace at Lhasa.17

234   Tehyun Ma Yet this performance of simultaneous emperorship was part of an ‘individuated claim to authority’, in which the emperor ‘related separately’ to each culture as its supreme authority.18 Despite embracing Confucianism, the Manchus distinguished themselves from their subject population in hairstyle, clothing, and martial culture.19 Therefore, rather than seeking a unifying culture to bind the empire together, the emperor himself became ‘the crucial link that unified these diverse people.’20 When the Qing Empire fell in 1911, Tibetans could claim their allegiance to China dissolved with the Son of Heaven’s abdication. Like their authority over Han China, Qing power in Inner Asia was similarly fragile, resting on a mix of military strength, sensitivity to local custom, and the emperor’s person. By the nineteenth century, this carefully calibrated system of imperial rule had begun to disintegrate.

Falling Apart The First Opium War of 1839–​1842 is often the starting point for studying the history of modern China. China’s defeat to Britain marked the first in a series of disasters that culminated in the Qing’s fall. British designs to open China to Indian-​grown opium lay behind the conflict. Although the Qing were less rigid in their foreign relations than historians once thought, the empire restricted sea-​borne commerce to the southern port of Canton, where alien merchants faced stringent regulations. British attempts to bypass the restrictions, coupled with the debilitating effects of opium addiction on Chinese society, led imperial officials to clamp down on the trade, which quickly led to war. It proved a lop-​sided contest: the Royal Navy soon outgunned Chinese forces and forced the Qing to terms. In the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, and a series of subsequent ‘unequal treaties,’ the British (joined afterwards by other Western powers) opened China to trade, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers. More importantly, these agreements circumscribed the Qing’s sovereignty over tariffs and territory, exempting foreign individuals and investments from Chinese justice (extraterritoriality) and allowing Western gunboats to enforce treaty terms. Small but strategically important enclaves, such as the international settlements in Shanghai and Tianjin, meanwhile, were removed from Chinese jurisdiction and became mini-​colonies under direct foreign rule. The imperial incursions in the years that followed the First Opium War have led some historians to characterize China as a ‘semi-​colonial’ country.21 Western powers never claimed sovereignty over the empire’s entire domain, but did ensure they had a controlling hand where their interests mattered. Ironically, the Manchus, following their own precedent for managing ‘barbarians’, signed away many of their rights without fully understanding the long-​term repercussions.22 But within China, opposition to the ‘foreign devils’ extended from the court to the countryside. By the mid-​1800s, though, the Qing faced larger internal problems, consequences in part of the dynasty’s success in the previous century. Innovations in agriculture, the introduction of New World crops, land reclamation campaigns, and imperial

The Eclipse of Empire in China    235 anti-​infanticide drives brought about a population explosion, with China expanding from 100 million people in the late 1600s to 450 million by 1850.23 Demographic growth significantly outpaced food production, and by the nineteenth century, little new land could be brought under cultivation.24 The tradition of dividing family holdings among sons intensified pressure. In ethnically heterogeneous areas, such as the southwest periphery, competition over land and resources often turned violent. Other structural factors destabilized the empire around the time of the Opium War. Plummeting international demand for Chinese goods, tied to a scarcity of silver at home and abroad, led to an economic depression.25 Meanwhile, the safety-​valve for social discontent—​the examination system—​faced a severe bottleneck. Eager to keep taxes low, the Qing proved reluctant to expand the civil service to meet population growth, which limited opportunities for talented young men from the middle ranks of society to advance.26 Meanwhile, the already overextended county magistrate increasingly relied on graft and coercion to supplement personal and government income, and major public works fell into disrepair. This combination of a decline in state power and a rise in economic distress proved combustible. An epidemic of popular uprisings ravaged the empire from the late eighteenth century onwards. The largest of these, the Taiping Rebellion, claimed an estimated thirty million lives, triggered further uprisings on the Qing’s frontier, and took a decade to subdue. The insurgency illustrated both the brewing discontent within the empire and the destabilizing effects of Western presence. A frustrated examination candidate, who had picked up a missionary tract in the treaty port of Canton, instigated the rebellion after his conversion to Christianity. Though Taiping Christianity was an idiosyncratic blend of Confucian and millenarian themes—​the leader believed he was Christ’s brother—​it offered marginalized people like the disaffected minorities in the Southwest and pirates driven off the seas by the Royal Navy an appealing egalitarian future based around a fairer division of land, equality between men and women, and religious salvation.27 Though the reality of Taiping rule soon departed from the ideal, the promise, popularity, and military success of the movement presented an existential challenge to the Qing. Yet the Manchus managed to weather the onslaught of these mid-​century rebellions. Ironically, imperial rulers found an ally in Western powers eager to avoid China’s disintegration, but they survived, too, by holding officials and gentry to their Confucian obligation to organize militias and armies and defend their dependents.28 Also central to imperial survival was the decision to selectively adopt the ‘barbarian’ science and technology of the West. The piecemeal nature of these ‘self-​strengthening’ initiatives—​ based on the principle of using practical Western techniques to preserve the essence of Chinese culture—​has been blamed for China’s lacklustre modernization in the Age of Empire, and is often contrasted to the rapid success of state strengthening in post-​1868 Japan.29 But the reformers’ achievements remained considerable: in marshalling imperial resources in war and reconstruction, they breathed life into a moribund empire. In this they were helped by the catastrophic human cost of the rebellion: like the Black Death, the loss of life raised wages, opened new land for farmers, and spurred a rural to urban migration that stimulated commercial growth.30

236   Tehyun Ma Any hopes that the Qing may have shored up their position, however, proved short-​ lived, as new political opposition threatened to destabilize the imperial authorities. The empire’s continual failure to defend China from foreign incursion weakened its legitimacy. Japanese raids on Taiwan in 1874, Russian occupation of Xinjiang in the same decade, and France’s defeat of a Chinese fleet in 1884–​1885—​a humiliation over in two hours that cost the Qing the tributary state of Vietnam—​each undermined national prestige. So did the tendency of hapless officials who were eager to avoid provoking diplomatic incidents to side with foreign missionaries when they came into conflict with local communities.31 But it was China’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1895 that shook educated society to the core. Despite years of self-​strengthening, the Qing were overpowered by so-​ called ‘dwarf pirates.’32 Japanese forces drove China out of Korea, destroyed the Qing navy, and overran major port cities in the Northeast. The victor’s peace nevertheless seemed unduly severe. Alongside the usual stipulations for indemnity payments and treaty ports, the Treaty of Shimonoseki allowed direct foreign investment in China for the first time, giving the Japanese the right to build factories on Chinese soil. The Qing also had to recognize Korea—​another former tribute state—​as a de facto protectorate of Japan, and cede the province of Taiwan and the Liuqiu islands to their adversary. Japan’s success then triggered a desperate ‘scramble’ for concessions among the Great Powers to limit Tokyo’s influence. Russia, France, Germany, and Britain all managed to secure long-​term territorial leaseholds in China, some of which contained monopoly rights for developing mines and building railways. The sense of national impotence triggered an intellectual crisis among even the most committed of Confucians, and discredited the conservative modernization of self-​ strengthening. Many began to question the foundations of their cultural and moral order. Indeed, to spur more drastic reforms, respected scholars like Kang Youwei even tried to re-​read Confucius as a radical reformer, arguing the familiar conservative take on his teachings came from forgeries. Kang’s heretical essays were often read in tandem with a myriad of translated works by the likes of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and John Stuart Mill, as learned subjects strove to understand the threat of national demise.33 Fuelled by the same crises that drove Kang’s intellectual forays, the Chinese press provided another forum for circulating increasingly radical proposals for imperial reform. Subscriptions to Shenbao, the first Chinese language newspaper, leapt by 50% around the short-​lived Sino-​French conflict in 1884, and proved influential enough for the government to shut it down.34 The new print culture initially provided a space for critiquing policies and officials, and no writer dared call for the dynasty’s overthrow, but by the early 1900s, journalists openly targeted the Qing and its Confucian system for allowing the ‘death of the nation.’ Such criticism was not unwarranted. Factional court politics had scuppered a flurry of reform initiatives in 1898 which had concluded in the execution and exile of its leaders, and it was only after the traumatic occupation of Beijing by foreign powers in 1901 that the Qing committed to radical change. The occupation came about after the court backed the Boxer Uprising: a popular anti-​foreign peasant movement that swept

The Eclipse of Empire in China    237 through North China around 1900. Rural poverty and prolonged drought gave rise to the movement, but the Boxers blamed their plight on the presence of foreign missionaries, whom they believed had disturbed the cosmic order. Foreigners and Chinese converts soon came under attack along with symbols of Western influence like railways and telegraph lines. Seeing in the Boxers a way to solve the ‘foreign problem’, the court endorsed the movement and declared war on the imperial powers, who responded with brutal swiftness. The powers sent an 18,000-​strong multinational expeditionary force that overran the capital, executed thousands of Boxers (troops sent postcards depicting the mass killings back to Europe), and forced the emperor to flee inland. For the Qing’s intransigence, the Eight-​Nation Alliance imposed punitive terms: the stationing of foreign troops on Chinese soil, a crippling indemnity, and the execution of Qing officials.35 The financial burden was so great that the Qing had to hand over its main source of revenue—​its maritime customs—​to the victors. The Boxer catastrophe inspired a revolution from within in a desperate attempt to stave off imperial disintegration. The New Policies (Xinzheng) sought to transform the Qing government into a powerful modern state. Here the Manchus abandoned a system heavily weighted towards ritual observance for a ministerial form of government. Since 1861, anything to do with Westerners—​from foreign relations to railroad operations—​had been handled by one branch of government, the Zongli Yamen. Now, proposals were drawn up for agencies specializing in communications, commerce, and foreign affairs.36 Military reforms, meanwhile, sought to create a centralized, professional standing army. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905—​seeming proof of the wisdom of state-​led modernization—​accelerated the pace of change. A month after the war’s denouement, the Qing abolished the civil service exams, and announced a timeline for the adoption of a constitutional government.37 But both decisions, though initially designed to re-​concentrate power in the centre while strengthening China internationally, actually had a centrifugal effect when imposed on a rapidly changing society. The unintended consequences of the reforms soon became clear. Civil service exams may not have been the route to social mobility they once were, but the system did provide both a structural backbone that extended Qing rule down to smallest village and an ideological glue that held Han China together.38 In treaty ports, meanwhile, New Policy architects looked to civil society for salvation, but in encouraging economic growth through the formation of organizations like chambers of commerce and educational associations, they empowered institutions that had few ties to the court and would come to serve as fulcrums of opposition to Qing rule.39 The 1906 edict promising constitutional reform, meanwhile, only nurtured the political aspirations of an ever-​more assertive elite. This group already enjoyed a measure of autonomy in their localities but their social power had enhanced significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century. To combat the Taiping, the Qing devolved powers over raising troops and taxes to trusted local leaders.40 In the short term the strategy strengthened the hand of the embattled dynasty, but over the following decades imperial administrators could never fully repatriate these powers to the centre.

238   Tehyun Ma The growing gulf between state and society, most evident in cities with an increasingly active public sphere, became especially pronounced in battles over imperialism in the last few years of the dynasty. When the Qing attempted to nationalize the railways in 1910, for instance, they tried to buy out foreign and domestic investors with overseas loans, which provoked a huge protest in Sichuan. Opposition to Manchu rule now extended beyond the educated middle-​class elite and had begun to cross social boundaries.41 The New Policies therefore had dynamic and contradictory consequences. First, a more assertive state was set on extending its reach and recentralizing power through creating institutions to harness popular energy. Ironically, however, those same institutions provided a forum for critics of the dynasty to challenge the Qing on its failure to rein in imperialism.42 Second, state-​sponsored modernization proved a costly endeavour. With its post-​Boxer revenue largely controlled by foreign powers, the cash-​strapped government reallocated resources from the hinterland to port cities, and devised new taxes.43 Those on the lowest rung bore the brunt of the changes. The political and financial reforms ‘necessary to modernize China’, Peter Zarrow points out, thus ‘seemed to fracture its social unity.’44 Self-​identified revolutionaries tried to harness growing frustration with the Qing. Though never a particularly powerful group, the revolutionaries were important in broadening anti-​Manchu sentiment in China. Many were Chinese students who returned from studying abroad in the early years of the twentieth century. Those studying in Japan, for instance, had not only felt the sting of Chinese inferiority, but also mixed with professional revolutionaries and political exiles, like the founder of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), Sun Yat-​sen. Influenced by fashionable Social Darwinism, young intellectuals began to articulate their disenchantment with the Qing in a virulent racial idiom once they returned to China. Their race, they warned, faced extinction in the face of Qing impotence; an alien dynasty of ‘hairy monsters’ had denigrated the Chinese and made them ‘the slaves of slaves’. In the dying days of dynastic rule, indeed, a ‘Han’ ethnicity based on essentialized Chinese characteristics—​a basis for later nationalist thought—​took shape as part of anti-​Manchu discourse.45 This had fatal consequences: when armies revolted in 1911, Chinese troops torched Manchu neighourhoods and massacred their women and children in a number of cities.46 These massacres were part of a wider insurrection that delivered the coup de grace to a stricken Qing state. In October 1911, an explosion in Wuchang triggered an army mutiny that spread to other provinces. Provincial assemblies and chambers of commerce declared their support. By February 1912, the Qing had capitulated. Yet many who supported the revolution did so out of fear at wider disorder and never embraced radical aims to challenge rural inequality.47 Even if the revolutionaries’ backing was broad but shallow, though, their actions brought to an end two millennia of dynastic rule. The republic that was declared at the death of the imperial system would soon be torn apart by the same disintegrative forces that had beset the Qing: not least the regional militarists, whose support for the insurrectionists in 1911 had hampered the Manchu’s capacity to resist. Sun Yat-​sen, the Chinese Nationalist revolutionary, briefly became

The Eclipse of Empire in China    239 president of the post-​imperial nation, but he and his small band of followers were no match for well-​armed military leaders like Yuan Shikai, a former Qing official who declared himself emperor shortly before his death in 1916. In the two decades that followed the Revolution, the Chinese lived through an era of strongmen and warlords. Historians have done much in recent years to rehabilitate some of these figures, recasting men usually seen as self-​seeking opportunists as skilful federalists, but fragmentation rather than unity was now the norm. Competition between these rival fiefs nevertheless stoked nationalist feelings that would manifest themselves in renewed opposition to China’s other empires: the Western and Japanese states that had established imperial footholds over the preceding century.

The End of Qing Rule on the Frontier A similar decoupling between subjects and rulers is evident in the western parts of the empire. The Qing’s strategy of divide and rule, which often involved paying careful heed to local notables and customs, attenuated over time. Qing policies on property, religion, and territorial boundaries meanwhile inadvertently encouraged nascent concepts of nationhood among the semi-​nomadic peoples of the frontier.48 Instability on the fringes of the Qing’s domain, however, is hard to separate from troubles in the heartland; take Xinjiang, for example. Up to the mid-​nineteenth century, the court shored up its rule with regular shipments of gold, but these subsidies stopped in the hard times of the 1850s.49 In a pattern repeated elsewhere in the empire, local officials turned to ‘creative’ and coercive means of extraction. Consequently, when Taiping violence spread westward in the mid-​1860s, it triggered secondary rebellions, and even ambitions of independence on the periphery. The Muslim general Ya’qub Beg, for instance, made overtures to the Russian, British, and Ottoman empire in a bid for autonomy.50 As elsewhere in China, such foreign intrigue prompted the refashioning of relations between the political centre and the frontier, although ultimately at the cost of long-​ term stability. To ward off Russian Great Game ambitions in northern Xinjiang and Japanese forays into Taiwan in the 1870s, the Qing tightened its hold on hitherto largely autonomous regions by converting them into fully fledged provinces. Provincialization was an attempt to assert Qing territorial sovereignty by legally demarcating liminal borderlands as Chinese territory. Provincialization involved both infrastructural and administrative innovation. The Qing built roads, established schools, and set up offices for commerce and agriculture to draw these areas closer to the core. But like the New Policies in the Han heartland, these measures had disintegrative effects. In the rush to extend the reach of the state, the Qing relinquished its successful policy of cultural accommodation. Official posts in Xinjiang province, for instance, were no longer the preserve of Mongols and Manchus familiar with the nomadic cultures of the Central Asia, but went to Han Chinese. New schools

240   Tehyun Ma meanwhile tried to instil Confucian values in the borderlands, but their sinicizing agenda became more aggressive in the New Policy era.51 Likewise, the tightening grip on religious institutions (to meet the British threat in Tibet in 1903–​1904) stoked discontent among Mongol leaders and Tibetan clerics.52 The flood of land-​hungry Han settlers, encouraged to migrate by imperial administrators eager to bring the steppe into cultivation, and who outnumbered natives in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria by the early twentieth century, enflamed ethnic tensions.53 As James Millward has pointed out, the project of provincialization to meet the foreign challenge marked a new mode of colonization for the Qing: ‘the extension of China into Inner Asia.’54 The 1911 Revolution gave frontier regions that had dodged provincialization an opportunity to break free. Outer Mongolians and Tibetans, backed by Russia and Britain respectively, immediately declared their independence. Although the new Republic claimed these territories, the new Han-​led regime held little appeal: loyalty, after all, lay with the person of the Emperor rather than the abstraction of the nation.55 Mongolia would remain independent, while Xinjiang and Tibet—​until 1949—​retained their autonomy. The dissolution of the Qing therefore marked the end of imperial rule on China’s frontier as well as its core.

The End of Overseas Empires Though the Manchus had gone, foreign empires endured in China, from the familiar (Britain, Germany, Russia, France, United States, and Japan) to the lesser known (Italy, Portugal, Austro-​Hungary, Belgium, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands). The ‘unequal treaties’ signed after the Opium War helped secure economic advantages to imperial powers and kept China ‘semicolonial’ through legal and institutional means. Yet since the treaty system was an ‘agglomeration of piecemeal deals’, imperialism in China varied from place to place.56 Some treaty ports had no foreign settlements, while others, like Shanghai, remained partly under the control of overseas powers. Sometimes these arrangements prove hard to classify. Take for instance the Chinese Maritime Customs Service: part of the Qing—​and later the Republican—​civil service, but largely staffed by Europeans. Westerners who designed and ran it worked honestly enough to boost the revenue-​gathering capacity of their Chinese employers. In taxonomies of imperial rule its place as an in-​between institution is difficult to determine.57 Although the patchwork quilt of overseas imperialism in China suggests the absence of any systematic colonial project, foreign powers more or less worked in concert with one another prior to World War I.58 Commercial benefits conferred on one power were generally enjoyed by all. ‘Most favoured nation’ status discouraged bilateral arrangements with China, and restricted the ability of individual powers to operate autonomously, instead encouraging cooperation between foreign governments—​epitomized in the joint campaign against the Boxers—​that might have been at loggerheads elsewhere.

The Eclipse of Empire in China    241 In fracturing that unity and spurring Chinese nationalism, World War I marked the beginning of the end for western empires. By 1919, with the Russians otherwise engaged, and Germany and Austro-​Hungary’s expulsion from East Asia at the Paris Peace Conference, space had opened for the United States and Japan to reshape China’s imperial geography. The territorial disintegration of the Republic into warlord enclaves after 1911 encouraged them to work independently with regional strongmen to secure foreign interests. Great power conflict and republican fragmentation had begun to whittle down the number of prominent players in China’s Great Game. But the primary challenge to foreign powers in China was the intensification of anti-​ imperialist nationalism. Anti-​imperial activity can already be seen before the fall of the Qing in the railway rights recovery movement and organized boycotts of foreign goods, but protests had often been directed at the Manchus. After the 1911 Revolution the target of popular protest shifted. From Canton, for example, Sun Yat-​sen’s Nationalist Party began to rebuild. The growth of nationalism in 1910s and 1920s had much to do with both the maturation of political organizations in China and the economic vibrancy of treaty ports themselves, which became fertile ground for anti-​imperialist agitation. These cosmopolitan hubs underwent an economic boom around the First World War as imports dried up and domestic industries flourished. Cities became beacons of modernity with consumer goods and radical ideas flowing through the streets. In treaty ports, usually beyond Chinese jurisdiction, radicalism had flourished before, and now once more they served as a haven for the intellectuals and revolutionaries who were challenging old patterns of thought.59 It was also in these lively and prosperous urban areas that the semicolonial arrangements between China and the West were most visible. Grand social clubs that lined Shanghai’s riverfront remained the preserve of foreigners. Spaces like the Public Garden only welcomed Westerners and Japanese (giving rise to the myth of the sign that read ‘No Dogs and Chinese Allowed’).60 Meanwhile, Chinese industrialists and merchants had no voice on the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which ran the International Settlement. Factories in the Settlement were subject only to the oversight of the SMC which left a growing urban proletariat with little protection from the state. Students in the city, moreover, were well-​versed in Western ideas and shaped by the anti-​Confucian culture of the preceding years. In the maelstrom of urban life revolutionary radicals flourished. Shanghai, indeed, saw the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. China’s communist pioneers built on earlier anti-​imperialist organizing:  the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The May Fourth protestors—​ an alliance of workers, businessmen, and students—​took to the streets when news of the Versailles Treaty reached China. China had joined the war in 1917 on the side of the eventual victors, sent 100,000 labourers to the Western front, and hoped their efforts would secure it a privileged place at the negotiating table: especially given Japan’s seizure of German concessions in North China when the war first broke out. But instead of restoring the German rights to China, the victorious powers confirmed their transfer to Japan, who

242   Tehyun Ma had also backed the winning side. News of the settlement immediately brought 3,000 students to the streets of Beijing, and the discontent quickly spread to other cities as strikes and boycotts targeted foreign powers. Cosmopolitan leaders in the movement, like other nationalists and intellectuals in Asia, had seized on American President Woodrow Wilson’s promise of national self-​ determination, promoted by the US Information Agency during the war years.61 But at this juncture, the Great Powers’ betrayal of ‘small nations’ led some to reject Western liberalism and join the global turn against imperialism. Communists would ultimately reap the harvest. But it was not until 1925 that Britain—​still the most prominent of the Western powers in China—​confronted the limits of its power. The May 30th Movement of 1925 came about after Shanghai’s British-​run police force fired into a crowd of people protesting the death of a Chinese worker at a Japanese factory: eleven died and scores were wounded. The response was dramatic—​150,000 Chinese workers in foreign employment walked out of their jobs in the International Settlement. By the end of June, the protests had spread to other cities, with similarly bloody consequences. A sympathy march in the British and French concession of Canton (Guangzhou), for instance, ended in the deaths of fifty-​three Chinese. The Canton killings radicalized the reluctant majority. Alongside a boycott of British goods that would last until October 1926, Cantonese dock workers and others staged a general strike, while those who worked in Hong Kong left the island in droves. Britain’s share of trade in China dropped dramatically that year, from 12.4% to 9.8%.62 Popular protest was making the familiar resort to force on the part of imperial powers an expensive option. In this politically charged environment, the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party launched a joint military expedition, the Northern Expedition, to reunite the nation. Given the civil war between the two that soon followed their cooperation from 1924–​1927 may seem improbable. But they shared common roots in the anti-​imperialist politics of the early twentieth century and were closer ideologically than at any subsequent point in their history. Sun Yat-​sen, the Guomindang leader, embraced socialism (although he rejected class conflict) and built a vanguard party on the Leninist model, while on Comintern orders the Communists prioritized national liberation ahead of socialist revolution. Starting from Canton, where Soviet advisors had helped train Nationalist troops, the alliance—​led by Sun’s future brother-​in-​ law Chiang Kai-​shek—​quickly swept northwards. Popular mobilization paved the way for battlefield success. Anti-​imperialist labour militancy brought cities to a standstill as Chiang’s army approached. In this high-​tide of anti-​imperialist agitation and national unification, crowds took over the foreign concessions of Hankow and Jiujiang on the Yangtze and violence broke out in Nanjing.63 The scale of the unrest led Britain to back away from gunboat diplomacy and focus its efforts on preserving lucrative commercial interests in the likes of Shanghai.64 But nor was Britain alone in imperial retreat. By the early 1930s, foreign powers had conceded tariff autonomy, relinquished concessions, and returned revenue streams to the Chinese. Even the institutional basis of the treaty system—​extraterritoriality—​looked to be in terminal decline.

The Eclipse of Empire in China    243 These measures were markers of diplomatic as much as military success on the part of Chinese Nationalists, who became the recognized government of China in 1927 after the conclusion of the Northern Expedition. Though the party rode to power on a wave of patriotic sentiment, it proved conciliatory rather than confrontational in government, toning down its anti-​foreign rhetoric.65 The Nationalist government tried to claw back the sovereignty lost in the unequal treaties through a mix of legalistic manoeuvring and the promise of self-​reform.66 Guomindang leaders hoped here to keep Western nations onside. The party’s developmental programme required overseas expertise which could come through bilateral relations with the likes of Germany and the United States, or via cooperation with international agencies like the League of the Nations and International Labor Organization.67 Meanwhile the interests of foreign businessmen and Guomindang leaders often overlapped. In 1927, after seizing Shanghai, Chiang turned on the Communists, massacring scores of labour agitators and their allies. The strikers who had helped to propel the Nationalists into power now found their rights tightly curbed. Both Chiang and his new-​found friends in the Western business community, though, would soon confront a more pressing threat than militant workers: the Japanese empire.

The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in China The 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki heralded the start of Japanese empire-​building in China. Before the Sino-​Japanese War, Japan lacked many of the privileges enjoyed by Western powers, but its decisive victory gave it a seat at the table.68 The treaty gave Japan and other empires the opportunity to invest directly in China, and colonial development gathered pace after Japan’s 1905 defeat of Russia, from whom Tokyo inherited a windfall of leases, rights, and concessions in Manchuria. Development in the region fuelled industrial growth on the home islands, and by 1930, Japan had superseded Britain as the most important economic power.69 Japan’s extensive involvement in China made it especially susceptible to anti-​ imperialist agitation. May Fourth protests had arisen after the Versailles Treaty confirmed Japan’s claim to German concessions in North China and amid fierce resentment at Japan’s attempt to turn China into a protectorate during World War I. Yet Japan’s response to anti-​imperialist protest differed from other powers. Where Britain and others retreated after 1925, Tokyo ‘attempted deeper political penetration’, seeing its presence as an antidote to the weakness of central authority in China: something even Chiang’s precarious unification of the country after 1927 had struggled to address.70 Indeed, Nationalist authority remained concentrated in the cities of the southeast and had little reach in large parts of the country. In 1931, a division of the Japanese army took matters into its own hands, invaded Manchuria, and established the puppet state of Manchukuo.

244   Tehyun Ma The Chinese government was ill-​placed to resist; Chiang was preoccupied with eradicating the Chinese communists, and Japan was too formidable an enemy to fight. The Nationalists’ protest to the League of Nation achieved little, for Western powers feared that condemning Japanese aggression might undermine their own claims in the country. Japanese land grabs thus continued in spite of widespread outrage. At a moment when imperialism seemed to be on the wane thanks to the Nationalists, Japan raised the prospect of re-​colonization. Ironically, though, the end of foreign empires in China came about as a result of Japanese imperial overreach, albeit at catastrophic human cost. In 1936, a displaced Manchurian warlord kidnapped Chiang, and forced him to ally with the Communists against Japan. A year later, though, the wisdom of Chiang’s appeasement became apparent when, after spirited Chinese resistance to another incursion, Japanese forces overran China’s eastern seaboard. The Nationalist government retreated up the Yangtze to the remote western province of Sichuan, leaving the way for the Japanese to establish puppet governments in its wake. Japan, hoping to keep the Western powers neutral, left foreign interests alone and tried to avoid collateral damage to overseas people and property. However, on 8 December 1941—​a day after Pearl Harbor—​Japanese troops marched into the International Concession in Shanghai and the British concession in Tianjin and brought to an end almost a century of European territorial enclaves in China. China’s participation in the war elevated its international status. Its role in ensuring the bulk of the Japanese military remained bogged down in China helped bring about the most symbolically important treaty revision of all:  the abolition of extraterritoriality in 1943. For its immense sacrifice, it was promised the return of territories lost to the Japanese empire, although Western powers were quieter when it came to the status of their former imperial holdings. And under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision of the postwar future, China was anointed an important player in the global balance of power, one of the ‘Big Four’ nations that would shape a new era. Chinese leaders seemed to have succeeded where their predecessors had failed in 1919 by securing an equal footing with other great powers and turning military alliance into an anti-​imperialist weapon. In practice, some were more equal than others—​China was left out of the critical Yalta summit and leading American military figures mocked Chiang—​but legally at least, European empires were done in China. Japan’s end would come, too, when the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 heralded the dawn of the atomic age.

End of Empires in China? The end of empires in China was a process rather than an event. Dynastic collapse in 1911—​British retreat from 1926—​abolition of extraterritoriality in 1943—​Japan’s

The Eclipse of Empire in China    245 defeat in 1945: all these were markers of imperial retreat, but to plot them as points on a map implies that imperial power slowly declined, when in actuality the process was far more uneven, and often marked by dramatic changes in the nature, identity, and reach of the colonial power in question. Moreover, to conclude in 1945 may seem premature. The Nationalist government, enervated by an eight-​year long struggle for survival, soon succumbed to a resurgent Communist party in a renewal of the Civil War, and Chiang beat a retreat in 1949 to the former Japanese colony of Taiwan. Mao’s new People’s Republic initially negotiated with the holdovers of European empires—​foreign businessmen and missionaries—​but soon forced them out in the fraught atmosphere of the Korean War.71 When Mao grew frustrated with the Soviet Union a few years later he revived the old anti-​imperialist slogans of his youth but directed them at Moscow rather than London and Tokyo. He claimed spiritual leadership of a Third World emerging from colonialism itself.72 Chinese historians, meanwhile, could rightfully point out that the treaty system did not extinguish itself completely until the departure of the last British governor of Hong Kong in 1997. However, the PRC’s self-​proclaimed ‘liberation’ of Xinjiang and Tibet, which had enjoyed de facto independence during the Republican era, indicates how China’s new Communist leaders took the broad frontiers of the Qing domain as their national boundary. Though the end of empire cannot hold a precise date, its legacy—​whether of the Qing, British, or Japanese variety—​exerts a profound hold on Chinese identity. Lingering questions over the relationship between state and citizen, the role of democracy, and the boundaries of nation—​all of which arose near the final years of Qing rule—​were never resolved satisfactorily. The abortive attempts of warlords and strongmen that vied for supremacy for most of the republican era, along with China’s forced incorporation into a global state system in an age of imperialism, led to a lasting preference for a strong central state that could speak with a single voice. Meanwhile, the determination of early republican nationalists to claim the territory of the Qing empire for the new republic has left its mark in the resurgence of ethnic conflicts on the periphery in the last few decades: race riots in Xinjiang and struggles over Tibetan independence are conflicts with histories that go back to the eighteenth century. The post-​imperial hangover also appears in the social memory of national humiliation: the textbook trope (which can be traced back to late nineteenth-​century reformers) of a weak China left at the mercy of foreigners by rulers who prioritized their own selfish interests over the patriotic good. This writing of history contains more than a grain of truth, but declining faith in the Communist Party after Tiananmen Square has given the story renewed importance, even if ‘patriotic education’ today is more likely to be directed against Japanese invaders than Western powers. China in this regard remains as much a post-​colonial nation as it was in 1949, when Mao declared that his nation had ‘finally stood up.’73 And if it has learned from the experience of colonialism, as Shugo Suzuki has suggested, that force and might rule in international affairs, then the legacy of empire in East Asia may resonate with us once more.74

246   Tehyun Ma

Notes 1. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-​Colonialism and Informal Empire in the Twentieth Century China:  Towards a Framework of Analysis”, in Imperialism and After:  Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen (London: Harper Collins, 1986). 2. Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 27–​28. 3. William Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 33. 4. Mary Rankin and Joseph Esherick, “Concluding Remarks,” in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance, eds. Mary Rankin and Joseph Esherick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 344. 5. Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 20–​21. 6. Melvyn Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon:  China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley:  University of California Pres, 1997), 13–​ 14; James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 90. 7. Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” International Historical Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 380–​381. 8. Joseph Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” in Empire to Nation:  Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, eds. J. Esherick, H. Kayah, and E. Van Young (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 231. 9. Ibid., 232. 10. Nicola Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration in Inner Asia,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 294–​295. 11. Goldstein, Snow Lion, 14. This pattern could be found in Xinjiang and Tibet, which were more unstable. 12. Evelyn Rawski, “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1996): 834. 13. Ibid., 835. 14. Pamela Crossley, “Review: The Rulerships of China”, American Historical Review 97, no. 2 (1992): 1474–​1475. 15. Crossley, “Review”, passim. 16. Elliot, Manchu Way, 22. 17. Phillipe Forêt, Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 15. 18. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” 231. 19. Elliott, Manchu Way, 8. 20. Rawski, “Presidential Address,” 835. 21. Jürgen Osterhammel, “China,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol.5, eds. Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999). 22. Peter Duus, “Introduction: Japan’s Informal Empire in China, 1895–​1937: An Overview”, in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–​1937, eds. P. Duus, R. Myers, M. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), xviii. 23. Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 91. 24. Ibid., 95–​96, 150. 25. Ibid., 157.

The Eclipse of Empire in China    247 26. Ibid., 151–​152. 27. Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son:  The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (New  York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 1996). 28. Rankin and Esherick, “Concluding Remarks,” 312. 29. Allen Fung, “Testing Self Strengthening: The Chinese Army in the Sino-​Japanese War of 1894–​1895,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1996): 1007–​1031. 30. Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 197. 31. Paul Cohen, “Christian Mission and Their Impact to 1900,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, ed. J. K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 572. 32. Mary Backus Rankin, “Alarming Crises/​Enticing Possibilities:  Political and Cultural Changes in Late Nineteenth-​Century China,” Late Imperial China 29, no. 1 (2008): 229. 33. Joan Judge, “Public Opinion and the New Politics of Contestation in the Late Qing, 1904–​1911,” Modern China 20, no. 1 (1994): 81. 34. Rankin, “Alarming Crises/​Enticing Possibilities,” 44. 35. James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), part 3. 36. Richard Horowitz, “Breaking the Bonds of Precedent: The 1905–​6 Government Reform Commission and the Remaking of the Qing Central State,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2005): 775–​797. 37. Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898–​1912:  The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 87. 38. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 332. 39. Marianne Bastid-​Bruguière, “Currents of Social Change,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 11, eds. John K. Fairbank and Kwang Ching Liu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 548–​559; Peter Zarrow, War and Revolution, 1895–​1949 (London: Routledge, 2005), 113. 40. Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 204–​206. 41. Mary B. Rankin, “Nationalistic Contestation and Mobilization Politics:  Practice and Rhetoric of Railway-​Rights Recovery at the End of Qing,” Modern China 28, no. 3 (2002): 315. 42. Ibid., 338. 43. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–​1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 44. Zarrow, War and Nationalism, 43. 45. Rawski, “Presidential Address,” 839; Zarrow, War and Nationalism, 69. 46. Edward Rhoads, Manchu and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–​1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 188. 47. Young-​Tsu Wong, “Popular Unrest and the 1911 Revolution in Jiangsu,” Modern China 3, no. 3 (1977): 321–​344. 48. Uradyn E. Bulag, “Inner Mongolia: The Dialectics of Colonization and Ethnicity Building,” in Governing China’s Multiethnic Frontiers, ed. Morris Rossabi (Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 2004), 85. 49. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 105. 50. Bruce Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare (London: Routledge, 2001), 74. 51. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 138–​158. 52. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” 241. 53. Bulag, “Inner Mongolia,” 86; Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 136; Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” 240.

248   Tehyun Ma 54. Milward, Eurasian Crossroads, 118. 55. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” 242. 56. B. Goodman and D. Goodman, “Introduction:  Colonialism in China,” in Twentieth-​ century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World, eds. B. Goodman and D. S. G. Goodman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 1. 57. Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China:  Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (London: Penguin, 2012), c­ hapter 9. 58. Osterhammel, “China,” 643; William Kirby, “Internationalization of China:  Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era,” China Quarterly 150 (1997): 442. 59. Wen-​hsin Yeh, “Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City,” China Quarterly 150 (1997): 378. 60. Robert Bickers and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Shanghai’s ‘Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted’ Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol,” China Quarterly 142 (1995): 444–​466. 61. Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-​West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1327–​1351. 62. Edmund S. K. Fung, The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat: Britain’s South China Policy 1924–​ 1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 50. 63. Michael Murdock, “Exploiting Anti-​ Imperialism:  Popular Forces and Nation-​ State Building during China’s Northern Expedition,” Modern China 35, no. 1 (2009): 73–​80. 64. Fung, Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat, 101. 65. Osterhammel, “China,” 652–​653. 66. Ibid., 652. 67. Margherita Zanasi, “Exporting Development:  The League of Nations and Republican China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 1 (2007): 143–​169. 68. Peter Duus, “Introduction: Japan’s Informal Empire in China, 1895–​1937,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, eds. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), xxi. 69. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity:  Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 48. 70. Duus, “Introduction,” xxv. 71. Jonathan Howlett, “ ‘The British Boss is Gone and Will Never Return’:  Communist Takeovers of British Companies in Shanghai (1949–​1954),” Modern Asian Studies 47, no.6 (2013): 1960–​1961. 72. Eva-​Marie Stolber, “People’s Warfare Versus Peaceful Coexistence:  Vietnam and the Sino-​Soviet Struggle for Ideological Supremacy,” in America, the Vietnam War, the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, eds. A. W. Daum, L. C. Gardner, W. Mausbauh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 73. William Callahan, “National Insecurities:  Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 2 (2004): 200. 74. Shogo Suzuki, “China’s Perceptions of International Society in the Nineteenth Century: Learning More about Power Politics?,” Asian Perspective 28, no. 3 (2004), 115–​144.

Pa rt   I I

R E G IONA L P E R SP E C T I V E S

Chapter 14

Dec ol oniz at i on i n Sou th Asia The Long View Joya Chatterji

Decolonization was a global process whose scale, pace, and implications are not best captured by a regional study. Thus, one might ask: what is gained by approaching the process from the perspective of South Asia? There are, I believe, compelling reasons for giving decolonization in the region special attention in this volume. India was the first colony to achieve independence, albeit as two separate nation states, India and Pakistan. Britain’s abrupt withdrawal from India after the Second World War—​so swift that many have denounced it as a scuttle—​raised questions that have helped frame the debate about decolonization, not just in India, but elsewhere. Did Britain jump, or was she pushed? If she jumped, was the prime agency of decolonization situated in the metropolis, as some historians argue? In their view, Attlee’s Labour government chose to ‘transfer power’ to independent nations from a Britain battered by War and mired in debt, thereby engineering a convenient ‘escape’ from their Indian empire,1 while retaining, so it was hoped, informal influence over the region. Others who insist that ‘she was pushed’, by contrast, are more attentive to local or ‘peripheral’ forces and pressures: wide-​spread disorder during the Quit India movement, communal riots and famine, demoralization in the lower rungs of government2 and disorder in the ranks3 and on the streets,4 to wave upon wave of strike action5, and above all, to nationalism, on the road Towards Freedom.6 For decades this debate, launched by political historians in the 1980s, made little progress, stuck in a groove much like a needle in a vinyl record of that era, scratching away at the same refrains. That fundamental disagreement reverberated, as Shipway notes, through the study of decolonization in other parts of the world.7 The independence of India and Pakistan has powerfully influenced this wider debate, if not always in a helpful way. In recent decades, however, a new generation of scholars has moved the subject forward. Taken together, their work shows—​and this is

252   Joya Chatterji an argument this chapter will pursue—​that decolonization cannot be reduced to one or other of these single drivers. It was a process simultaneously ‘local’ and ‘global’. For one thing, in geo-​strategic terms, India was never merely ‘local’ or ‘peripheral’: the subcontinent always played a pivotal part in wider British imperial strategy. Even after India and Pakistan became independent, for the rest of the world they represented ‘exogenous factors’ in their own right—​for the colonized, a beacon of hope of what they could achieve,8 and for colonizers, a template of how they could ‘manage’ retreat in parts of the world that were becoming too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to govern. Posing the question in either/​or terms does not advance our understanding. By eschewing these polarities, this chapter suggests that it was at conjunctures when local and global crises violently collided that decolonization—​never a smooth process—​jolted forward. The particularities of the process in this region are another compelling reason to focus on South Asia: above all, the fact that decolonization was achieved by a radical partition. In turn, the vivisection of British India would become a model for partitions elsewhere, notably Palestine in 1948. But partition is also important because it has a profound bearing upon the second great issue of the subject—​namely, what did decolonization actually achieve? Did it merely involve the capture of the imperial state by local elites,9 who perpetuated imperial ‘customs of governance’10 to secure their own dominance? What, if anything, changed on the ground, for the ‘ordinary citizen’ (he or she a product of the decolonizing imaginary), after the ‘transfer of power’? Is there merit in ‘the continuity thesis’, which holds that freedom in South Asia did not meaningfully transform of colonial structures of power?11 The chapter builds upon recent scholarship to interrogate this powerful and durable thesis, and challenges some of its conclusions. It argues that the imperial state was not a monolith, easily handed over, like a baton in a relay race, to local elites, but that it was rather an assemblage of power—​‘fluid, frequently irrational and often self-​limiting’12—​ spread patchily over different regions and articulated differently across different social spaces. Decolonization was, therefore, and could only ever have been, an irregular process by which the imperial order was disaggregated—​unevenly, haphazardly, and incompletely—​and replaced (also incompletely) by two fragile and nascent national orders. Such a process was not, and could never have been, seamless. Acknowledging this incompleteness has led historians to re-​evaluate the significance of 1947, and to question the timing (and periodization) of decolonization. Did it occur, in some definitive way, in 1947? Or, if indeed it was a more long-​drawn-​out process (as Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested, spread over about forty years,13 or more), where does 1947 stand in that longer course of events? I offer here some new ways of thinking about 1947, which suggest that while many (but not all) imperial structures of governance stayed in place after independence, partition saw off many of the old social structures. Another major change was that the independent states in South Asia had goals and purposes that their imperial counterpart had never envisaged. They derived their legitimacy from different sources, and had to be seen to deliver different goods. They were subject, therefore, to

Decolonization in South Asia    253 far greater (and very different) pressures from the imperial regimes they replaced.14 The way the nation states evolved as they faced these new challenges is, I argue, a crucial part of ‘decolonization’.15 By focusing on some of the questions raised by the recent historiography on South Asian decolonization, which have lent the subject fresh levels of empirical granularity and theoretical sophistication, this chapter hopes to pose new issues for the field as a whole.

1914–​1922: From Flanders to Chauri-​C haura Colonial rule in India was a bricolage. A congeries of complex and fluid relationships, it was never spread evenly across the subcontinent; it penetrated some regions more deeply than others, and caught particular social groups more intensely in ever-​shifting webs of collaboration and extraction. For purposes of analysis, three types of relationship might be identified. First, there were the (unequal and often uneasy) alliances between the British imperial establishment and their so-​called ‘collaborators’, drawn from Indian elites: ‘princes’, landlords, ‘community leaders’, mercantile elites, and high-​caste, or ashraf, educated Indians who helped govern the empire. Second, there were relationships based upon the extraction of labour: peasants growing cash crops for export, workers in the public and industrial sectors, bonded and indentured labourers on the plantations, lascars who travelled the high seas in the service of the imperial economy, sepoys who manned the Indian army, as well as huge cohorts of lowly constables, village chaukidars,16 and patwaris who represented ‘the realities of rule . . . closer to the ground’.17 Third, and at the broadest level, there were the connections that existed between the Raj and its ordinary subjects who, more or less, abided by the law and paid taxes. But these were fragile linkages and bonds. Some were built on face-​to-​face interactions between rulers and ruled; most were rather more intangible relationships derived from notions of subjecthood, or namak,18 the fealty to the hukum or will of the British Sarkar. Given how thinly the British presence was spread, Indian intermediaries mediated between the Raj and its numerous subjects in almost every sphere of governance. Decolonization in South Asia is best understood as the intricate process by which these relationships unravelled, at different levels of imperial engagement, at different speeds, and in different locations. The process was never a smooth linear movement along the high road to freedom. Along the way, there were starts and stops, spurts and lulls, with more crises and corners to be negotiated than open roads and clear destinations. It is only by recognizing the intricacies and complex interplays, both temporal and spatial, that we can begin to grasp what decolonization ‘was’, and still ‘is’, today. But when, and where, did that process begin? With no singular origin for a process of this complexity, I focus instead on critical junctures, moments of acceleration, and of

254   Joya Chatterji crisis. The First World War and its aftermath—​sadly, still an understudied subject, from Indian perspectives19—​was the first such major occasion when the concerns of Indians were propelled into an unprecedented confrontation with worldwide crises. For one, the War drew Britain into a head-​on collision with the Ottoman sultan and caliph of Islam, in ways that deeply tested the loyalty to the Raj of India’s Muslims. As Mohamed Ali wrote, ‘The attitude of England towards the enemies of Turkey, Persia and Morocco had begun to alienate the sympathies of Indian Mussalmans ever since 1911 . . . . The international developments which had resulted in the disintegration of the already enfeebled power of Islam’ after the War pushed Indian Muslim supporters of the Caliph into open confrontation with the British.20 Not unlike the revolutionary Ghadar revolt, with which it was loosely connected, the Khilafat movement was simultaneously local, national, and ‘global’: its most expansive goals, as Maia Ramnath has noted, ‘could only really be imagined and enacted . . . outside the country’.21 But it was also substantially located within India, in local communities, rallied by ulema, students, and journalists writing for a buoyant Urdu press, in a formidable agitation against the government. The First World War also sucked labour out of India and flung it abroad into strange lands. ‘Never before’, as Ravi Ahuja writes, ‘had rural people from the Indo-​Afghan frontier region and Nepal, from the Punjab and other military recruitment grounds of ‘British India’ engaged with European societies as intensively’.22 Many were non-​ combatants,23 but most were soldiers, and almost half of them were from the Punjab. Ever since the Mutiny, the Punjab was the province on whose loyalty the Raj had relied most heavily and where hundreds of thousands of sepoys were now recruited for wartime duty outside India. In peacetime, annual recruitment into the Indian army was about 15,000 men; during the War, it rocketed upwards to almost 1.3 million men over four years, almost a million of whom were pressed into service overseas. ‘At no previous moment in history had South Asians entered Europe in comparable numbers’, Ahuja reminds us.24 Many of these sepoys were Punjabi villagers, who, by 1919, totalled a staggering 44.5% of the entire Indian army.25 They found themselves fighting at Flanders, the Somme, Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, and Gallipoli, in conditions for which they were hopelessly ill prepared. For the first time in the history of the sepoy armies of the Raj (other than the very different context of the Mutiny), they engaged ‘white’ troops in battle.26 Tens of thousands died. One Sikh sepoy from the Punjab, Santa Singh, wrote to his mother from the hospital in Britain where he lay wounded: Many sons of mothers, brothers of sisters, and brothers of mothers have been lying dead for a whole year on the field of battle. A year has passed and there they lie. He who sees them for the first time says there is no place empty. So many corpses are there, and all have perished in forty seconds. . . . They too are the children of mothers.27

Like Santa Singh, many more were injured. While some were treated in Britain at the fanciful, faux Indo-​Islamic, pavilion at Brighton, large numbers ended up in German prison camps, where the potential for subversion was enormous. At these camps, the

Decolonization in South Asia    255 POWs learned, in the aphoristic words of Sib Singh, a Sikh peasant from Amritsar, about the frailties of empire: The Angrez [Englishman] is badshah [Emperor] in India and we did not know there were other badshahs [elsewhere]. When the War began we heard of several badshahs. One flaw in India is that people are without ilm [knowledge] . . . 28

Returning from the front, they brought back from Europe this ‘knowledge’ to the villages and towns of upper India, as well as other ‘seditious’ ideas. For half a century, the Raj had done its utmost to insulate the Punjab—​and above all, its soldiery—​from the contagion of politics. But now, paradoxically, it was the Punjab that became a critical site from which the politics of decolonization were set into motion, and which was an epicentre from where protest radiated outwards. In the Punjab and beyond, the taxation burden upon Indians, already heavy before hostilities, grew increasingly onerous during the war. In 1917 India had to contribute ‘an outright gift’ to its imperial overlord of £100,000,000—​a sum nearly twice India’s net annual revenue before 1914.29 Indian mercantile groups resented the heavy taxes on sales, and on ‘super profits’ now slapped upon them. Even the Government of India, previously Westminster’s compliant agency in Delhi, began to sense that this unremitting pressure on Indian taxpayers was unsustainable, and had begun to endanger its political purposes. In 1918, the Army Department in Delhi told the India Office in no uncertain terms that ‘the drain . . . in money and material on the resources of India cannot any longer be met without the gravest embarrassment’.30 In December 1919, the Viceroy, Chelmsford, was even more blunt: I must . . . point out to you that India [is] in this way being exploited by the War Office because they find that they can maintain Indian troops abroad without those extremely objectionable questions in Parliament which would be asked if they were British and not Indian forces.31

This growing discord between the perspectives of HMG in London and the Government of India in Delhi, which came to a head after the war ended, is a striking—​and often overlooked—​dimension of decolonization. In this period, this parting of the ways was reflected, above all, in India’s increasing autonomy on tariffs, particularly on cotton. ‘Seemingly so omnipotent in the nineteenth century’, Dewey notes, ‘Lancashire’s ability to dictate Indian tariffs ended with the First World War’.32 In 1917, the Government of India more than doubled the duty on cotton imports, in the main from the United Kingdom, from 3.5 to 7.5%; in the 1920s it rose further to 11%, and in the 1930s it stood at approximately 25% on all British piece goods (and 50% on any goods from elsewhere).33 Already by the end of the War, India was beginning to emerge as a distinct ‘national’ market.34 The army, Britain’s imperial garrison in eastern seas, also faced serious questions about its future use—​above all about who would pay: London or Delhi—​when it was deployed outside India for imperial purposes.

256   Joya Chatterji Even before the First World War ended, then, much had changed in the structure of colonial relationships, which provided the context for the historic announcement by Montagu, Secretary of State, in August 1917, who promised ‘an increasing association of Indians in every branch of government’. The significance of the Government’s failure to keep its word promptly must be set against this backdrop. Promises are dangerous things, particularly when they are as large and imprecise as the Government’s hint that (an undefined) ‘responsible’ government was on its way. They unleashed hopes that the cautious reforms of the post-​war Raj could never satisfy. In March 1919, Gandhi launched a nationwide campaign—​a hartaal, or strike. Contrary to his intentions, it turned violent in some places, notably in the Punjab. The Raj was nervous, particularly about the loyalty of a province that had long been a bulwark of its rule. The public mood turned ugly after the government reacted by ‘externing’ popular political leaders from the province. The ‘Black’ Rowlatt Bill, which extended the draconian powers of wartime government into an era of peace, was another flashpoint. On 13 April 1919—​Baisakhi day, the start of the Punjabi New Year and the anniversary of the birth of Sikhism—​General Dyer ordered troops to fire on a peaceful crowd gathered at Jallianwalla Bagh, an enclosed, walled park in Amritsar in the heart of the Punjab, just a stone’s throw from the Golden Temple. Casualty figures remain in dispute, but in the carnage of that garden, over 500 people lost their lives.35 The event marked a profound, and irreversible, blow to the Raj’s claims to legitimacy in their Indian empire, well beyond the Punjab where these atrocities took place. For a great many Indians outside that province—​particularly the educated middle classes, who had valued the liberal possibilities of imperial subjecthood36—​that dream ended abruptly with Jallianwalla Bagh. Among those for whom this was a Damascene moment was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi, it is well known, had served as a loyal subject of the King Emperor in the Imperial Ambulance Corps in South Africa during the Boer War, and as a staunch supporter, sometimes even a recruiting sergeant, of the Allied cause during the Great War. But after 1918, in a concatenation of global and local concerns, the Khilafat and Punjab ‘wrongs’, as Gandhi described them, convinced him that Albion was perfidious and the Raj morally bankrupt. Gandhi’s political message represented a frontal assault on the relationships of imperial collaboration and a clarion call to cut the ties of sentiment that underpinned British rule. In his seminal treatise, Hind Swaraj, written in 1908 on board a ship to India from South Africa, Gandhi had insisted that British rule in India rested not on conquest, but on the collaboration and collusion of Indians seduced by western materialism and the siren calls of modernity. If Indians withdrew their cooperation from the Raj, so Gandhi’s thesis implied, it could not survive. Now, he signalled, the time had come for them to take that step. At the 1920 Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi urged Indians not to cooperate with British rule, and to refuse, non-​violently, to obey its ‘unjust’ laws: If . . . the acts of . . . the Government be wrong . . . it is clear that we must refuse to submit to this official violence. Appeal to Parliament by all means if necessary, but if

Decolonization in South Asia    257 the parliament fails us and we are worthy to call ourselves a nation, we must refuse to uphold the Government by withdrawing cooperation from it.37

At Nagpur, Gandhi got his ‘non-​cooperation’ resolution through at a session packed with angry Muslim Khilafatists. By skilful tactics and opportunism combined with a brilliant grand strategy, Gandhi captured Congress, outflanking many more-​established Congress leaders who were puzzled by his idiosyncrasies, alarmed by his alliance with Muslim Khilafat leaders, and unconvinced by the merits of his policy of boycotting elected Councils in the provinces. A year later, when he launched the non-​cooperation movement, Gandhi promised to achieve swaraj (self-​rule) within twelve months. He could not, of course, deliver. But the movement gained a far larger, more broad-​based and disparate following than anything the Congress had achieved before. In part, this was because Gandhi had already enlisted powerful friends and constituents in regions outside the usual bases of the Congress—​rich peasants, mill owners, and mill-​workers in Gujarat, prohibitionists in Karnataka, and Khilafatists in North India in Bengal–​who were able to mobilize their own networks behind local campaigns of unprecedented strength. In these campaigns, they enlisted social groups the Raj had previously relied upon to be neutral, if not actively loyal to the imperial order. But ‘winds of change’ were blowing. Gandhi couched his political message in a language—​both symbolic and semantic—​which unlettered Indians understood and with which they could identify. When Gandhi discarded suits made from British cloth and instead wore a tiny strip of fabric he had woven on a simple spinning wheel, he advertised the predicament of India’s weavers and artisans. For centuries in sub-​continental statecraft, just rule required the government to tax fairly and lightly, to patronize handicrafts, and to husband the resources of the land.38 By adopting the spinning wheel and khadi (hand-​loom cloth), Gandhi signalled to every Indian that British rule was failing in these duties, and was hence illegitimate. By urging Indians to break Government’s monopoly over the production of salt, Gandhi drew attention, again symbolically (since the cess on salt was minuscule) to the unjust burdens of taxation that British rule had placed on India. Since salt was a metaphor in India for the symbiotic relations of obligation and loyalty between rulers and ruled, by urging the people to make their own salt, Gandhi had sent out a highly charged signal that the people of India should withdraw their fealty to their British overlords. As Rajnarayan Chandavarkar suggested, India’s working classes were often inspired by Gandhi’s rhetoric because of his canny ability to develop ‘the blandest metaphor and the most platitudinous axiom in a distinctly subversive direction’.39 Ironically, however, Gandhi’s success in becoming the ‘Mahatma’ of the masses compromised his control over the direction of the movement he had started. The denouement came at Chauri Chaura, a village in the north Indian district of Gorakhpur. Inhabitants of this hamlet, convinced the new utopia was just over the horizon, burnt hapless Indian policemen alive for standing in their way and put their little station to the torch.40 This dramatic instance of violence prompted Gandhi abruptly to call off the non-​cooperation. The movement of 1921–​1922 thus ended in confusion and disarray. Of

258   Joya Chatterji course, the politics of non-​cooperation floundered after this. And of course, as scholars have noted, the end of non-​cooperation was followed by a decade of apparent calm. But the events between 1917 and 1922 represented a decisive shift in the relationship between rulers and ruled. Much had been damaged in the fragile web of imperial relationships. It was the first major crisis on the bumpy road to decolonization.

The Inter-​War Years—​Deceleration? The Raj responded to Gandhian protests by devising novel strategies to reassert its authority. It strove to hold on to power by building new alliances and resurrecting old ones. The plan was to devolve, in two stages, a measure of power to some Indians in the provinces. The goal of both the Government of India Acts of 1920 and 1935 was to recruit new collaborators in the provinces and strengthen the hand of old friends. The British hoped to achieve this by giving certain provincial groups (men with wealth, land, and education) a share in provincial government, plus the right to raise and spend local taxes, thereby fortifying their local power and patronage (and, it was hoped, their loyalty). Historians have observed that this ‘retreat to the centre’ worked for a while, at least in terms of quelling major disturbances. Provincial parties and provincial questions dominated India’s politics in the 1920s, much as the British had intended them to do. Until 1929, when Lord Simon’s visit to India heralded a new round of reforms, politics at the all-​India level appeared to have lost all momentum. Yet, the interwar interlude watered down British sovereignty over India in subtle, but significant, ways. To make their strategies work, the Raj had to concede to the provinces the right to certain heads of revenue, degrading substantially its powers of extraction. Under the 1920 Constitution, the centre in New Delhi had to transfer about £6 million to the provinces.41 It also began the ‘Indianization’ of government. In 1920, ‘dyarchy’ (as this exercise in power-​sharing was called) gave Indian politicians in the provinces some say over certain areas of governance that today would be described as ‘development’ (whether schools, sanitation, or roads), which were of vital importance to Indian lives in the localities, but which the Raj regarded as secondary to its core purposes. After the Government of India Act of 1935, the vote was increased seven-​fold, to about thirty-​five million voters, who now could elect their own provincial governments, which were presided over by Indian premiers. But the terms of the 1935 Act ensured that these governments would be dominated by ‘communal majorities’. This raised fears of permanent minority status among increasingly bitter and vocal political minorities, Hindu and Muslims alike, in different provincial settings, most notably in the Punjab, Bengal,42 and the United Provinces.43 In the elections of 1937, the Congress, revived by another round of civil disobedience led by Gandhi in the 1930s, won the support of most Hindu voters, and came into office in every Hindu-​majority province in British India. In some Muslim-​majority

Decolonization in South Asia    259 provinces, ‘loyalists’ did rather better, particularly in the Punjab, where the cross-​ communal Unionist Party came to power. However, in Bengal, the largest province in India, the ‘Krishak Praja’ party, backed by rural Muslims with anti-​establishment views, seized control. This polarization of provincial legislatures along communal lines would have far-​reaching implications in the 1940s. The ‘Indianisation of government’ in the provinces whittled away, meanwhile, at the morale of British civil servants, who, as Bhattacharya has shown, found it hard to take orders from Indian ministers.44 The ‘steel frame’ of the Indian Civil Service was becoming less secure. Among civil servants, the introduction of popular government challenged their singular focus of loyalty. Competing commitments to different political masters, the Raj on the one hand and provincial ministers on the other, forced government servants to make their allegiances ‘both more explicit and more flexible’.45 This did not bode well for the empire. In the inter-​war years, the Raj might have persuaded itself that it still controlled the ‘vital attributes of sovereignty’46 by beating a strategic retreat to the centre. The Viceroy continued to sit in splendour in his grand new Viceregal Lodge on Raisina Hill, apparently the commander of all he surveyed. But that was increasingly a chimera. The old balances had changed. By wresting fiscal autonomy from the Treasury in London, Delhi had tipped the scales in India’s favour. Meanwhile, in the provinces, British rule was starting to look rather less secure. In 1935, the British had given the vote to hundreds of thousands of richer peasants, confident that these rustic men would remain loyal to their ‘salt’. But they got it badly wrong, as the votes for Congress (and for the Krishak Praja Party,) suggest. This blunder revealed how patchy was the British understanding of the India they ruled (all their censuses and surveys notwithstanding), and how little they had grasped about the impact of the global Depression on the Indian countryside. Already by 1939, J. S. Furnivall—​colonial civil servant and historian of South East Asia—​had concluded that the Depression marks the close of a period. For the crisis of 1929 brought to a head the changes due to the War in the economic relations between Europe and Asia, with their necessary reactions on social and political relations; it marks the close of a period of sixty years, beginning with the opening of the Suez Canal, and, although less definitely, the close of the period of four hundred years from the first landing of Vasco da Gama in Calicut.47

In his rare and valuable essays on the Depression, Christopher Baker shows how the finely balanced interdependence of the south and south-east Asian region fell apart after 1928, with the most immediate and profound shock-​waves being experienced in those parts of the region which grew produce for the global market.48 In many localities in the Tamil countryside, landed magnates lost their former overweening dominance with their loss of control over the liquidity of the agrarian economy. Grain riots, protests against the government’s revenue demands, kisan,49 and communist

260   Joya Chatterji agitations suggested old structures of dominance, subordination, and deference were breaking down.50 In Bengal, the world’s largest producer of raw jute, high prices in the global market place had created a rich peasantry in the first decades of the century. Now, as prices tumbled, these men, known as jotedars, grew restive.51 As for poorer peasants—​whom the British had assumed to be law-​abiding, simple folk, loyal to the maa-​baap traditions of subservience, suddenly stopped paying interest, rents, and taxes.52 Localized, but shocking, violence against moneylenders and landlords grew commonplace. Stepping back, it is apparent in those parts of the country where the Depression hit hard that the assumptions of social control on which the British systems of collaboration rested were coming unstuck. The ‘big men’ upon whom the British relied to impose order upon the countryside no longer seemed comfortably in charge. There were warning signs, too, about the Raj’s capacity to rely on other social groups whose loyalty it had once taken for granted. Indian businessmen began to join Congress in droves, if only better to influence it in the path of moderation.53 In 1930, in Peshawar, two platoons of the Royal Garhwal Rifles—​who had won plaudits for their courage and loyalty during the War—​refused to board buses into the city to contain rioting and disorder. At Jallianwalla Bagh, men from the Garhwal Rifles had obeyed orders by Dyer to shoot low, into the crowd, to kill. Now, the ‘Warrior Gentlemen’ of British martial race theory54 were sending out a disturbingly different message to their paymasters. Even the princes, with their nominal sovereignty over a third of India, showed signs of edginess. Despite British attempts to bend the principalities to their purposes, and to rule them firmly (if indirectly), rajas and nawabs found ways of resisting British intrusion into many areas of courtly life, religious affairs, and secular patronage, by adapting or ‘inventing’ new institutions, traditions, and ‘duties of kingship’—​ rajadharma—​by which they entrenched a sort of ‘monarchical modernity’55 or established ‘minor sovereignty’56 over their subjects, sometimes projecting their influence well beyond the boundaries their states.57 In 1928, frustrated by the Indian States Committee’s refusal of to define paramountcy and to place limits on British interference in their durbars,58 many princes began to see merit in parleying with nationalists in the run up to first Round Table Conference in London in 1930.59 Significantly, they refused to join the federation the British offered them in 1935. Barbara Ramusack, the leading historian of the princely states, characterizes the inter-​war era as a period of ‘dissolution’ of this ‘patron-​client system’, which had served the British so well for almost a century. The social history of the inter-​war years, in particular the global Depression and its checkered impact across India, requires much more research. When that history is written, it may well show the era—​often characterized as the calm before the storm—​to be a time of gathering clouds. Much was changing, albeit at micro levels, where impact of a global economic crisis hit hardest. Understanding these changes, in all their vernacular intricacy, will be crucial to achieving a more sure-​footed grasp of the long history of decolonization.

Decolonization in South Asia    261

The Second World War, Independence, and Partition The Second World War brought with it another dramatic collision of Indian localities with global events. The Great War undoubtedly had had far-​reaching repercussions on India, notably (but not only) in the Punjab. The Second World War was a much more proximate crisis, and its direct impact was felt across larger swathes of India. The conflict was in large measure, as Bayly and Harper have reminded us, an Asian one.60 This time round, however, the government—​which had taken India into the War without so much as a by-​your-​leave from its national leaders—​encountered ‘anti-​ recruitment propaganda’, even in regions that had traditionally produced fighting men. A political agent seeking to recruit Rajputs was told politely by one magnate, ‘Now there is not a single Rajput available for recruitment in the Indian Army’.61 In the Punjab, ‘a small Muslim boy’ was arrested in Lahore for singing an anti-​recruitment song.62 Popular support for the War effort beyond these parts was, at best tepid, with large numbers preferring to tune into German radio broadcasts in Hindustani than to the All India Radio broadcasts in the allied cause.63 The role of the eastern theatre was crucial to its outcome. Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in 1937, and its bold advance between 1939 and 1942 through China, South East Asia, and the Pacific, followed by the fall of Singapore, sent shockwaves around the world and provoked ‘public outcry and bitter introspection by politicians in London’.64 As Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary, The Singapore surrender has been a terrific blow to all of us. It is not merely the immediate dangers which threaten the Indian Ocean and the menace to our communications in the Middle East. It is dread that we are only half hearted in fighting the whole-​hearted.65

When Japan then attacked Burma, and took Rangoon in 1942, it propelled India directly into the frontline. Between January 1941 and October 1944, 1.3 million Indian recruits were persuaded or press-​ganged into the army, and most were stationed along India’s eastern front. They were brought in from far and wide—​the Punjab once again provided almost half the fighting forces—​but they were billeted mainly in Bengal, and, to a lesser degree, in Ceylon.66 To get troops to the front, the eastern region’s infrastructure needed urgent improvement. Japanese airstrikes in the Bay of Bengal forced the closure of all ports on the eastern seaboard, and acute shortages of rolling stock crippled the railways. Road building, long neglected, finally came of age. Assam was rapidly connected to Bengal and Burma by a great new arc of metalled road, thousands of miles long.67 Government had to mobilize huge resources to pay for these public works: the budget of the Engineering Department increased twenty-​five-​fold, from Rs 40 million in 1939–​1940, to Rs 1000 million in 1944.68

262   Joya Chatterji But roads, though necessary, were not sufficient: airpower was essential to push back against Japan. Before the War, Calcutta alone had an adequate airstrip. By the end of the War, the region was equipped with 145 aerodromes and runways.69 In the same period, labourers had built ‘a fine network of . . . feeder roads’ to the aerodromes. Protecting the health of American airmen, and that of British and Indian troops required massive scrub clearance and anti-​malarial programmes, and all required labour.70 To meet the demands of ‘War work’, specialized ‘labour battalions’ were established that were composed largely of ‘aboriginal tribes’ recruited from Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.71 Bayly and Harper discovered that the Indian Tea Association supplied 100,000 porters to complete roadworks between 1942 and 1945.72 ‘War work’ and its spectacular demands on labour, were spread unevenly across the subcontinent, with the Punjab, north, and eastern India bearing the brunt. This was not all:  the fall of Burma pushed the government to intervene in the economy in other unprecedented ways. The ‘Limited Denial’ policy, intended to starve the advancing Japanese army of essential resources, led the government to remove or destroy boats and vehicles which might fall into enemy hands, and to move foodgrains en masse from the coast to the interior. The Foodgrains Control Order of 1942 and the Bengal Rationing Order of 1943 are now widely deemed to have had disastrous effects: each formed part of a chain of events that led to the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1942–​1943, in which between three and six million people died. These interventions, as the Census Commissioner, looking back, remarked in 1951, ended ‘free trade for the rest of the decade’.73 These wartime measures on the eastern Indian front were the backcloth to a snowballing political crisis. Upon the outbreak of the War, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had declared war on behalf of India. Described by Nehru as a ‘slow’ man, ‘as solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness’,74 Linlithgow engaged India as a combatant without even the pretence of consultation with Indian politicians. Outraged, and ready to exploit Britain’s wartime troubles, the Congress High Command forced its ministries in the provinces to resign, and demanded an immediate share of power at the centre, as well as a say in the defence of India. Churchill and Linlithgow had no intention of budging an inch, and so the British and the Congress were once more set on a collision course. Conveniently for the British, however, Congress was also by this time caught up in a stand-​off with the Muslim League, a party that had re-​emerged on the national stage in 1937 under the leadership of the enigmatic Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah’s ambiguous Lahore Resolution of 1940, which called for an ill-​defined Pakistan, was his response to the 1935 Act and the permanent communal minorities it had created in provincial assemblies. It was also a reaction to the Congress reneging on pledges to the Muslim League made before the 1937 elections.75 The new demands of the League are properly understood as a consequence of earlier phases of decolonization, as well as a significant force shaping its next stage. None of this was appreciated at the time, of course. Churchill and his Viceroy seized upon the excuse the Lahore resolution presented them to put the question of India’s

Decolonization in South Asia    263 constitutional future into cold storage during the War. For its part, the Congress leadership made the fatal mistake of underestimating Jinnah and his demands as unwelcome and insignificant distractions. Those on the left of the Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru among them, tended to brush the League aside as ‘unrepresentative’, and denounced the Resolution as the self-​serving, anti-​democratic, posturing of ‘backward-​looking’ Muslim elites. They ignored the growing—​albeit dispersed and fractured—​movements for Pakistan, which (while imagined in a variety of ways), were attracting support in different regions from wide range of constituents.76 (Those on the right of the Congress, meanwhile, in a party increasingly polarized along a left-​right axis, denounced Jinnah’s demands as illegitimate—​even treasonable—​attacks on Akhand Bharat, the ‘integrity of the nation’.) The British, meanwhile, gave tacit and opportunistic encouragement to Jinnah’s claims to speak for a united ‘Muslim nation’.77 This stalemate came to an end with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It brought America into the War, and both Roosevelt and Chiang Kai Shek now began to put intense pressure upon Britain to mend fences with the Congress in an effort to bring India’s people more whole-​heartedly behind the War effort. In 1942, Stafford Cripps tried to strike a deal with the Congress that would bring it on side. On behalf of the National Government, he offered India dominion status after the end of War and the right to draft its own constitution (also post-​war). He promised the princes that Britain would protect their treaty rights when the British withdrew from India; and he also promised individual provinces the right to opt out of a federal union, in an apparent concession to the concerns of Jinnah and the Muslim League. There was much in this ‘offer’ to infuriate the Congress. This is why historians have concluded that Churchill intended the Cripps Mission to fail.78 If that was the plan, it succeeded. Gandhi denounced the offer as ‘a post-​dated cheque on a crashing bank’. In his famous ‘Quit India’ speech on 8 August 1942, he asked Indians to ‘do or die’. But before they could do either, and before the August ‘kranti’ (revolution) could begin, the police were ordered to arrest the entire leadership of the Congress party, keeping them in jail for the war’s duration. This, too, was a dangerous mistake. Leaderless, the Quit India movement (or more properly, movements) proved far more violent, and far less disciplined, than anything Gandhi would have countenanced. Pubic meetings, strikes, and demonstrations were held all the major cities of North India.79 In the Tamluk and Contai subdivisions of Midnapore in Bengal, local leaderships sprang up which drove out the British administration altogether and established parallel governments of their own.80 In Ballia, North India, people broke open the jail, released the arrested Congress leaders and established ‘independent rule’. Several leaders who escaped arrest went underground, and continued the struggle by broadcasting messages over clandestine radio stations. By the end of 1942, Taylor Sherman estimates, 250 railway stations had been destroyed, and 550 post offices had been attacked, of which 50 were burnt to the ground. There were 3,500 instances of wire cutting that shattered communications, and demonstrators had set upon 80 government buildings and 70 police stations and their outposts, and 31 policemen and 11 military personnel had been killed, several by being burnt to death.81 Linlithgow

264   Joya Chatterji conceded that these protests, dispersed though they were, represented ‘by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857’.82 It was only with a combination of aerial bombardment, shooting to kill protesters, public flogging, and collective fines on whole villages—​ in other words, applying the full arsenal of what Sherman describes as the Raj’s ‘coercive network’83—​that the British re-​established control. Sadly, no major work has as yet been done on Quit India,84 so it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty who the ‘August revolutionaries’ were. But these events, in conjunction with the uprising of the ‘Indian National Army’ in Burma85 among soldiers captured by the Japanese,86 represented a point of no return for the Raj. Wavell replaced Linlithgow as Viceroy. A thoughtful man, and a soldier with a deep love of literature and poetry,87 he had little stomach for a re-​conquest of India, which he believed would be unavoidable if the British were to stay on and rule after the War. He began to give thought to a planned exit.

Independence with Partition: Assessing 1947 The Second World War shattered Britain’s metropolitan economy and fundamentally altered the equations of profit and power that had for so long sustained the Raj in India. It destroyed both its capacity and its will to hold onto an empire that was in turmoil, ravaged by famine and by the swelling tides of communal violence and labour unrest.88 Another casualty of the war was the Conservative faction in Britain that wanted to hold onto India at any price. After Labour won Britain’s 1945 election, Attlee’s government declared its intention to transfer power to Indians as soon as possible. The ‘end game’, as it has been characterized, had begun. In that game, the power, priorities, and timetables of the key players shifted. During the war, London had wanted to hang onto power in India and found the Muslim League’s demands a convenient bulwark against Congress. So, it had made promises to Muslims (and also to Indian princes) that their concerns would be addressed in the final constitutional settlement of India’s future. After the war, however, when London wanted to get out of India as quickly as possible, these pledges were deeply inconvenient; and while it hoped to be able to brush assurances to the princes under the carpet, it could not ignore the ‘Muslim question’. For its part, the Congress leadership grew increasingly hostile to any concessions to the Muslim League liable to weaken that centre and encourage particularist demands by others. The Congress had always insisted that India was indivisible, but now, with the capture of the centralized apparatus of the British Raj almost within its grasp, it changed tack. In the swift but intricate tripartite negotiations for the transfer of power in 1946 and early 1947, the Congress high command settled for a limited partition that would cut out the troublesome Muslim-​majority districts in the North West and East, and allow them to inherit the rest of British India, with a union centre uncompromised by having to share power with the Muslim League.

Decolonization in South Asia    265 In arriving at this historic decision, there was a rare unanimity between Congress leaders: liberals, socialists, and the hard men of the Hindu right all backed the high command’s line. It also had the support of Hindu nationalists in Bengal, the largest Muslim-​majority province—​who refused to be subjected to ‘Muslim tyranny’ and demanded a partition (ironically not dissimilar to Curzon’s partition of 1905) that would give them a homeland of their own inside a divided India.89 The departing Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, lacked the vision or the will to resist a solution that offered Britain a quick exit from a desperate and dangerous situation. With his particular mix of opportunism and vainglory, he persuaded London to accept the Congress’ demand for a limited partition, pushed it through and presented it to India and the world as his own idea. In one of the great ironies of modern times, Pakistan was as much the product of Muslim aspirations for freedom (for ‘the Land of Eternal Eid’, in the words of the charismatic alim, Maulana Bhashani)90 as of Congress imperatives and the dramatic collapse of British power, and its will to rule India. The Congress Party’s single-​minded unitarism forced a de-​territorialized, variously imagined, ‘Muslim nation’ into a ‘moth-​ eaten and truncated’ state. Cyril Radcliffe, the architect of the final partition lines, may have tried to cleave to his instructions,91 but since these were influenced by Congress, ultimately he carved Pakistan out, like an inexpert butcher, from those parts of the empire that Congress leaders no longer wanted.92 Astonishing as it may seem in retrospect, no one expected the carnage that followed. No one anticipated the refugees, the looting, the mayhem, and the massacres. A state and army in the simultaneous process of a transfer of power, and dividing itself into two parts, was ill-​prepared to cope with the riots that spread across the Punjab killing three quarters of a million people. Contrary to Devji’s assertion that Pakistan was intended to be a ‘Muslim Zion’,93 there is little evidence to suggest that Jinnah expected all of India’s Muslims to migrate there, or that he welcomed them. Mounting evidence instead suggests that the governments of both Pakistan and India were desperate to stop the tides of refugees spilling over the new borders and engulfing their nascent states.94 These upheavals have been the subject of much scholarly attention. Some historians, notably Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, challenge what they see as an overdrawn emphasis on the impact of partition, and one that overshadows the moment of freedom.95 But the evidence for partition’s consequences continues to grow, and cannot be ignored. By 1951, fifteen million people had legally crossed the western border between India and Pakistan.96 By 1964, another ten million people had migrated between East and West Bengal.97 Delhi,98 Mewat,99 Rajputana,100 Sindh,101 Assam,102 Kashmir,103 Tripura, Hyderabad (both in Indian Deccan104 and in Pakistani Gujarat105), Uttar Pradesh,106 and Kutchh107 were sites of mass migration. Literally, hundreds of princely states—​from the huge desert state of Bahawalpur108 to the tiny principality of Dholpur—​were destinations that attracted refugees in huge numbers that are only just beginning to be measured.109 Those who remained, in millions, who were marginalized by political change but unable to move, and impoverished by this concatenation of circumstances—​have only just begun to attract scholarly attention.110

266   Joya Chatterji Research has shown that in myriad ways, refugees drove change. In the Indian state of Punjab (whose borders were redrawn), the government redistributed agrarian land among the millions of peasant refugees, which achieved land reforms in this deeply conservative province.111 In West Bengal, where landed elites resisted reforms for all they were worth, refugees threw themselves behind communist agitations and propelled the Communists to power in 1969. They squatted upon vacant land and demanded full rehabilitation as a matter of right, pushing and stretching the vocabulary of ‘rights’ in India’s emergent democracy.112 In Karachi, refugee muhajirs were no less militant and organized themselves into a formidable political force that still controls the city’s streets and its politics.113 In Delhi, refugee working women have ‘feminized’ and ‘commercialized’ the domestic and residential spaces of the city, and have subtly but irreversibly changed the structures and rhythms of family life and sociability.114 In Calcutta, they have gone to school, and then to college, and joined the ranks of the clerical classes in their thousands.115 Numerous studies have shown that family size and structure have changed, and changed fundamentally, as a result. Even caste boundaries have been breached, and in some refugee areas have relaxed to the point where ‘love marriage’ and exogamy have become everyday realities of life.116 Unquestionably, the states of South Asia bear the imprimatur of their colonial past—​ above all in their policies of ‘salutary neglect’ towards public order.117 But it would be a mistake to overstate these continuities. For good and ill, 1947 ushered in large changes to ‘the everyday states’ of the subcontinent. Partition profoundly shaped and marked citizenship in India and Pakistan, and later, in Bangladesh.118 It framed notions of belonging, and coloured attitudes towards government servants and the state itself. As Gould, Sherman, and Ansari have pointed out, assumptions about the loyalty of officers and men were fundamentally altered, everywhere in the subcontinent, by partition, even in its most remote district. Government workers who did not belong to the majority community were particularly vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and corruption, even as popular perceptions of corruption and partiality among bureaucrats grew more commonplace.119 The discourses of ‘corruption’ and ‘anti-​corruption’, Gould notes, were ‘often used as a means of creating or consolidating social advantage’.120And in a context where flux and change intensified these struggles for advantage, the discourse of corruption undermined public faith in government itself. It quickly fostered disillusionment that dampened the euphoria of freedom in a mood brilliantly captured in R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi novels. This is not to say that the colonial state was not political; of course it was. But the post-​colonial state was political in a different way—​the battles to capture its resources were more vocal, often more violent, and were couched in different terms, in which the discourse of loyalty, corruption, and anti-​corruption, and group rights played an ever-​ larger part. The post-​colonial state also imposed, or strove to impose, the hegemony of the nation-​state over regions where the empire had barely penetrated, and this often met resistance.121 In 1950, the adoption of universal adult suffrage was another remarkable and dramatic change in India. (Whether this would have been achievable so quickly without the

Decolonization in South Asia    267 changes partition wrought is moot.) As Shani notes, this involved deliberate ‘ruptures from colonial practice’122 that had deemed full democracy ‘impracticable’ in Indian circumstances. Bold in their imagination of ‘all eligible adults as procedurally equal individuals’,123 with an equal right to vote, India’s constitution-​makers also made provisions for affirmative action to ‘uplift’ the ‘downtrodden’ scheduled castes and tribes. While scholars identified certain continuities in this approach with colonial constitutionalism and its communal safeguards,124 many agree that the 1950 constitution, and the rights and redresses it gives citizens, has assumed a status almost larger than life in India’s public culture. Rohit De vividly describes how ‘a document with alien antecedents that was the product of an elite consensus’ became ‘part of the lived experience of ordinary Indians’ and became ‘the dominant field for Indian politics’.125 The constitution’s procedural provisions, which ‘empower citizens to challenge laws and administrative actions before the courts, and greatly enhance the powers of judicial review’, have afforded the citizen his or her say in ‘an elite conversation’. Writ petitions forced state authorities to defend their policies before courts, and the government suffered huge reverses in these bruising encounters. The courtroom, far from being a dreary and corrupt site that entrenched the social order and perpetuated ‘customs of governance’ became, as De concludes, ‘the space of the unexpected’.126

Decolonization ‘Beyond the Flags’? How, in the light of this chapter’s approach to decolonization, might we rethink the significance of 1947 ‘beyond the flags’? Perhaps it is best understood as a year of crisis, not as the end of an era, nor a definitive moment in a revolution. Independence and partition ushered in yet another series of complex rearrangements of power—​they did not mark a new beginning. On 15 August, in unseemly haste, the British quit India a year sooner than planned. Their physical surrender of formal rule had enormous significance, not least for ‘abandoned collaborators’127 who had to find their way and forge new alliances within new, and often hostile, dispensations, whether in India or in Pakistan. Princes were the most visible losers. Bullied into signing instruments of accession with the successor states, they gave up most of their remaining powers and were forced into accommodation within the new order.128 Other losers were Sikhs, who lost much of their land and many of their holy places to Pakistan: upon their migration to India they had no special status, but had to make their way among the millions of other refugees who crossed the Radcliffe Line into India in search of shelter. Other erstwhile allies of the British found themselves wrong-​footed by the abrupt departure of the Raj, at least temporarily, until they made adjustments to the new order: old Unionists, for instance, had to come to terms with the Muslim League’s power in Pakistan. By and large, ‘collaborating aristocracies’ of empire found their local standing compromised when the Union Jack came down. Yet, lower down the scale, former allies of the British now simply

268   Joya Chatterji switched allegiance. Landlords, magnates, and mercantile elites, having increasingly hedged their bets, now plumped for the new rulers of India and Pakistan as pragmatically as they had served the Raj in the past. Servants of the state in lesser and subordinate capacities—​some of whom had been given the option to serve either India or Pakistan—​rushed to serve the ‘right’ new nations. Their support was gratefully received by both the Congress and the League, each desperate to restore stability and secure ‘law and order’, which depended on having allies and functionaries in place. These new alliances with old allies of the Raj, and the admitted persistence of many imperial ‘customs of governance’, explain the tenacity of the ‘continuity thesis’—​the view that nothing much really changed after independence. This misses a great deal, however, at many levels. On the wider global stage, the British hoped, when they left India, to retain informal influence over the subcontinent, and to cement this through the Commonwealth. But they were largely frustrated in this goal. Jinnah was so furious with Mountbatten for his bias towards Congress during the transfer of power negotiations that he rejected the latter’s offer to be Pakistan’s Governor General, taking on that role himself. After the Qaid-​i-​Azam’s death in 1948, Pakistan’s governments were ‘rather grudging and unenthusiastic participants in Commonwealth proceedings’, staying in mainly ‘to keep an eye on India’.129 India was more amenable, but not much. The role of British officers in the first Kashmir War had so infuriated Patel that he asked them all to resign.130 The sterling balances question was another matter of considerable friction—​not only between India and Pakistan, but between both countries and Britain.131 Nehru’s government, moreover, had a strong anti-​imperialist and anti-​racist agenda at the United Nations. As Mazower notes, this period saw the emergence in the General Assembly of ‘an entirely new conception of world order—​one premised on the break-​up of empire, rather than its continuation’. The Assembly proved more unmanageable than the drafters of the UN charters had anticipated. And given the fact that the Security Council, which was designed to keep the Assembly in order, was hamstrung by Cold War rivalries, ‘for a time, it was more powerful too.’132 India used the Assembly to build the influence of the Afro-​ Asian bloc against the colonial powers, and also to build up its standing as a leader of the ‘non-​aligned’ nations. But British influence did persist in ‘soft ways’—​in the Anglophilia of Indian elites, the persistence of liberalism, and the endurance of structures of thought embedded in the ‘colonial knowledge’ in which these elites had been schooled. It was only in the 1990s that these really began to crumble against the countervailing intellectual influences of post-​colonialism on the one hand, and religious fundamentalism on the other. While giving ‘the meanings of freedom’ their due, this chapter has argued that partition and independence were twinned processes. In Pakistan, freedom and nationhood could not have been realized without a partition; in India, a strong centralized state and a largely unitary constitution could not have been achieved if Pakistan had not been cut out of it. The euphoria and agony of 1947 were two sides of the same coin. Partition’s upheavals, the death of three-​quarters of a million people, and the massive migration of over twenty million people across (and millions more within) the

Decolonization in South Asia    269 new borders simply cannot be discounted in any account of decolonization in South Asia. The spatial impact of the migrations had its main focus on the northern part of the subcontinent—​but this was a vast swathe of territory. Sind in the west, the Rajputana states, Bahawalpur, West and East Punjab, both parts of Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, West and East Bengal, Assam, and Tripura were all in the front line, and were in many ways transformed by the mass migrations of partition. Peninsular India, too, witnessed huge migrations when the premier princely state of Hyderabad133 was annexed and lesser (Muslim) principalities taken over. The research on refugees confirms that most were monied elites and educated middle classes, and most government servants (up and down the social scale) who were given the option of serving either country. Poorer people, with few transferable assets, and tied into networks of dependence at home, tended to stay behind, and were pushed into ever-​deeper poverty.134 Mass migration created new forms of stratification, and new forms of poverty and powerlessness. These movements and countervailing immobilities are proof that much changed, sometimes under the surface, and sometimes very visibly. The landed ashraf elites of North India left their estates and fled as refugees to Pakistan (mainly to Karachi, smaller numbers to Dhaka). In the main, they became service groups in their new country, but their efforts to dominate it did not succeed—​or at least, not for very long. That was also true of Hindu zamindars and rentiers fleeing East Bengal. Their estates were often grabbed by lesser folk. In eastern Bengal, for instance, bhatia peasants, who traditionally migrated each year in search of new land, grabbed much of the best land vacated by departing Hindus. In cities across the subcontinent, refugees swarmed into the vacant properties of emigrants, squatting illegally and refusing to move. Their militancy fuelled anti-​establishment politics, whether of communism in Bengal, Hindu nationalism in Delhi, or the mujahir qaum in Karachi, their voices joining those of other groups who expected much of freedom, but who had been swiftly disenchanted by its jhoothi azadi (‘false freedom’). Neither India nor Pakistan—​simultaneously trying to deliver ‘development’ to their people on a scale never dreamt of by the Raj—​were able easily to counter the depth of disillusionment and frustration, which frequently turned into the open resistance of ‘the people’ against ‘their’ governments. The state structures they had inherited or captured from the Raj were not suited for these new challenges. Small wonder, then, that both India and Pakistan have sought ever greater powers of repression and have developed—​ despite their differences—​ever greater tendencies towards authoritarianism. These developments, too, must be understood to be part and parcel of the ‘long history’ of decolonization.

Notes 1. R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire. The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Also see the eponymous twelve Transfer of Power volumes, edited by Nicholas Mansergh and published by HMSO between 1970 and 1982.

270   Joya Chatterji 2. Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Propaganda and Information in Eastern India. A Necessary Weapon of War (Richmond: Curzon Routledge, 2001). 3. Indivar Kamtekar, “A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–1945”, Past and Present 176 (2002): 187–​221; Anirudh Deshpande, “Sailors and the Crowd: Popular Protest in Karachi, 1946”, Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR), 26, no. 1 (1989):  1–​28; and, also by Anirudh Deshpande, “Hopes and Disillusionment: Recruitment, demobilization and the emergence of discontent in the Indian armed forces after the Second World War”, IESHR, 33, no. 2 (1996): 175–​207. 4. Sumit Sarkar, “Popular Movements and National Leadership, 1945–1947”, Economic and Political Weekly, 17, no. 14/​16 (1982): 677–​689. 5. Ravi Ahuja, “ ‘Produce or perish’. The crisis of the late 1940s and the place of labour in postcolonial India”, Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming. 6. Bipan Chandra, Salil Mitra, Visalakshi Menon and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, eds., Towards Freedom. Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, Part 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016); Gyanendra Pandey, ed., The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi and Sons, 1988); Anita Inder Singh, The Origins of the Partition of India, 1936–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 7. Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact. A Comparative Approach to the End of Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 8. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 9. Sarkar, “Popular Movements”. 10. Rajanarayan Chandavarkar, “Customs of Governance? Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India”, Modern Asian Studies, 41:3 (2007): 441–​470. 11. The boldest and most brilliant statement of this statement remains Chandavarkar, “Customs of Governance”. Also see Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India after Independence (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 12. Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (Routledge:  London and New York, 2010), 178. 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Introduction”, in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori, eds., From the Colonial to the Post-​Colonial. India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 14. William Gould, Taylor C. Sherman and Sarah Ansari, “The Flux of The Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the ‘Everyday State’ in the Post-​Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan”, Past and Present, 219, no. 1 (2013): 237–​279. 15. Ornit Shani, “Making India’s Democracy. Rewriting the Bureaucratic Imagination in the Preparation of the First Elections”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36:1 (2016): 83–​101. 16. Village watchman, menial servant or guard. See Erin M. Giuliani, “Strangers in the Village? Colonial policing in rural Bengal, 1861 to 1892”, Modern Asian Studies, 49:5 (2015), 1378–​1404. Also see Partha Pratim Shil, “Police labour and state-​formation in Bengal c.1860–c.1950” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2016) for a brilliant account of the labour that constituted the colonial state. 17. Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact, 19. 18. Literally ‘salt’; denotes ties of loyalty between subject and ruler.

Decolonization in South Asia    271 19. Although see Kaushik Roy, War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945 (New Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 2010); and Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars:  Between Self and Sepoy (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 20. Maulana Mohamed Ali, My Life: A Fragment (Lahore: Sheikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1942), pp.  40–​41. 21. Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia. How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 169. 22. Ravi Ahuja, “Lost Engagements? Traces of South Asian Soldiers in German Captivity, 1915–1918”, in Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau, and Ravi Ahuja, eds., “When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings”: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011), 19. 23. Radhika Singha, “The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France, 1917–1919”, International Journal of Labor and Working Class History, 87 (2015):  27–​62; and, by the same author, “Finding Labor from India for the War in Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labor Corps, 1916–​1920”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, no. 2 (2007): 412–​445. 24. Ravi Ahuja, “Lost Engagements?”, 19. 25. Rajit K Majumdar, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 18, table 1.5. 26. Ravi Ahuja, “Lost Engagements?”, 19. 27. Santa Singh to his mother, (translated from Gurmukhi), 20 July, 1915. In David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 80. 28. Cited in Ahuja, “Lost Engagements”, 44. 29. General Sir H. V. Cox Montagu papers, Trinity College, Cambridge, “Note on finance”, AS/​ I/​56; cited in Keith Jeffery, “ ‘An English Barrack in Oriental Seas?’ India in the Aftermath of the First World War”, Modern Asian Studies, 15, no. 3 (1981): 369–​386. 30. Jeffery, “India in the Aftermath”, 376. 31. Chelmsford to Montagu, 17 October 1919, cited in Jeffrey, “India in the Aftermath”. 32. Clive Dewey, “The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade: The Eclipse of the Lancashire Lobby and the Concession of Fiscal Autonomy to India”, in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London: Athlone Press, 1978), 36. 33. Dewey, “The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade”, 36. 34. Manu Goswami, Producing India. From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 35. Sherman, State Violence, 16. 36. Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens. Indians in the Late-​Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 37. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, 245. 38. Modern nationalism took root so swiftly in an illiterate society, Bayly argues, because its proponents were able to appeal to widely held traditional ideas of ethics and political legitimacy. See his The Origins of Nationality. 39. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

272   Joya Chatterji 40. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 41. John Gallagher and Anil Seal, “Britain and India between the Wars”, Modern Asian Studies, 15, no. 3 (1981): 387–​414. 42. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided. Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 43. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman. Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 44. Bhattacharya, Propaganda and Information in Eastern India. 45. Gould, Sherman, and Ansari, “The Flux of the Matter”, 219. 46. Gallagher and Seal, “Britain and India between the Wars”, 406. 47. J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India. A Study of a Plural Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939) 428. 48. Christopher Baker, “Economic Reorganisation and the Slump in South and Southeast Asia”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23, no. 3 (1981): 325–​349. 49. Farmer, cultivator. 50. Christopher Baker, “Debt and the Depression in Madras, 1929–1936”, in Dewey and Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact, 238. 51. Christopher Baker, “Economic Reorganisation and the Slump”; Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal. Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 52. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided. Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 53. Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics. The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 54. Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen. ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995). 55. Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern. Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011). 56. Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India and the World. Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 57. Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire. Dissolution of a Patron-​Client Sysytem, 1914–1939 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978). 58. Indian States Committee 1928. Replies Received to the Questionnaire issued by the Committee. 59. Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States. The New Cambridge History of India, III.6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 245–​257. 60. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies. Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005). 61. Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War. A  People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), 23. 62. Khan, The Raj at War, 16. 63. Khan, The Raj at War, 40. 64. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 154. 65. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930–1967 (London, 1980), entry for 17 February, 1942, cited in Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 154. 66. Ashley Jackson, “The Evolution and Use of British Imperial Military Formations”, in Alan Jeffreys and Patrick Rose, eds., The Indian Army, 1939–47, Experience and Development (Farnham: Ashgate, 1988), 28. 67. Bhattacharya, Propaganda, 19.

Decolonization in South Asia    273 68. Bhattacharya, Propaganda, 20, table 1.1. 69. Bhattacharya, Propaganda, 19. 70. Census of India, 1951, vol. VI, part I-​A, 75–​78. 71. Bhattacharya, Propaganda, 20. 72. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 2004, 185. 73. Census of India, 1951, 84. 74. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1960), 446, cited in Khan, The Raj at War, 5. 75. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman. Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 76. For recent work that argues, contra Jalal, for the range and depth of the influence of the Pakistan idea, see Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a new Medina. State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late-​Colonial North India (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Neilesh Bose, “Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940–1947”, Modern Asian Studies, 48, no. 1 (2014): 1–​36; Layli Uddin, “In the Land of Eternal Eid: Maulana Bhashani and the Political Mobilisation of Peasants and Lower-​Class Urban Workers in East Pakistan, c. 1930s-​1971” (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2015). Also see Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion. Pakistan as a Political Idea (London: Hurst, 2013). 77. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman. 78. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman. 79. Sherman, State Violence, 121. 80. Bidyut Chakrabarty, “Political Mobilization in the Localities:  The 1942 Quit India Movement in Midnapur”, Modern Asian Studies, 26, no. 4 (1992): 791–​814. 81. Sherman, State Violence, 121. 82. Linlithgow to Churchill, 31 August 1942, in Nicholas Mansergh, ed., Transfer of Power, vol. II, Document 662. 83. Sherman, State Violence. 84. Although see Gyandendra Pandey, ed., The Indian Nation in 1942; and Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises; and Indivar Kamtekar, “The Shiver of 1942”. 85. With Japanese support, Subhas Chandra Bose, who escaped from India in 1941, revamped the Indian National Army (INA), then composed of Indian soldiers of the British Indian army who had been captured in the Battle of Singapore. To these, after Bose’s arrival, were added enlisting Indian civilians in Malaya and Singapore. Despite Bose’s drive and charisma, his military effort was short lived. 86. For fascinating depositions and accounts of some of the ‘INA’ accused, see Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers. 87. Lord Archibald Wavell, Other Men’s Flowers: An Anthology of Poetry (London: Cape, 1977 [first edition, 1944]). 88. Ahuja, “ ‘Produce or perish’ ”. 89. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided. Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 90. Uddin, “In the Land of Eternal Eid”. 91. Lucy Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia. The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 92. Joya Chatterji, “The Fashioning of a Frontier:  The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–​52”, Modern Asian Studies, 33, no. 1 (1999): 185–​242; and, by the same author, The Spoils of Partition, Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995).

274   Joya Chatterji 93. Devji, Muslim Zion. 94. Vazira Fazila-​Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Joya Chatterji, “South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970”, The Historical Journal, 55, no. 4 (2012): 1049–​1071. 95. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Meanings of Freedom in Post-​Independence West Bengal, 1947–52 (London: Routledge, 2009). 96. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition. The Making of India and Pakistan (London:  Yale University Press, 2007). 97. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition. 98. Anjali Bhardwaj Datta, “Rebuilding Lives, Redefining Spaces: Women in Post-​Colonial Delhi” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2014). 99. Shail Mayaram Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 100. Ian Copland, “The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan 1947”, Past and Present 160 (1998): 203–​239. 101. Sarah Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh 1947–​1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press Pakistan, 2005). 102. Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji, and Annu Jalais, The Bengal Diaspora. Rethinking Muslim Migration (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 103. Mohita Bhatia, “Dominant discourse and marginal realities: Hindus in Jammu” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2011); Ilyas Chattha, Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration, and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot 1947–1961 (Karachi:  OUP Pakistan, 2011). 104. Taylor C. Sherman, “Migration, citizenship and belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–​1956”, Modern Asian Studies, 45, no. 1 (2011): 81–​107. 105. Oskar Verkaaik Migrants and Militants:  Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 106. Aishwarya Pandit, “From the United Provinces to Uttar Pradesh:  Heartland Politics 1947–1970” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2016). 107. Farhana Ibrahim, Settlers, Saints and Sovereigns: An Ethnography of State Formation in Western India (Routledge:  Abingdon, 2008); Rita Kothari, Memories and Movements: Borders and Communities in Banni, Kutch, Gujarat (Hyderabad:  Orient Black Swan, 2013). 108. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit. An Eyewitness Account of the Partition of India (New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1998). 109. Joya Chatterji, “Alternatives to citizenship at the end of empire”. B. R. Nanda Memorial Lecture, New Delhi, December 2015. 110. Cristophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer, Muslims in Indian Cities:  Trajectories of Marginalisation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Joya Chatterji, “On being stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘age of migration’ ”, Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 2 (2017): 511–​541. 111. Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). 112. Joya Chatterji, “Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–​1950” in Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory. The Afterlife of the Division of India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Decolonization in South Asia    275 113. Ansari, Life After Partition; Laurent Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 114. Bhardwaj Datta, “Rebuilding Lives”. 115. Manas Ray, “Growing Up Refugee:  On Memory and Locality”, Language, Discourse, Writing 1, 3–​4 (2001). 116. Eg, S. L. De and A. K. Bhattacharjee, “Social consciousness and fertility patterns of the refugee settlers in the Sundarbans”, National Library, Calcutta, c. 1974. 117. Chandavarkar, “Customs of Governance”. 118. Zamindar, The Long Partition; Chatterji, “South Asian Histories”; Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India:  Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015); Victoria Redclift, Statelessness and Citizenship:  Camps and the Creation of Political Space (Abingdon:  Routledge, 2013); Haimanti Roy, Partitioned Lives. Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–​ 1965 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). 119. Gould, Sherman, and Ansari, “The Flux of the Matter”. 120. William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India. Society and the State, 1930s-​1960s (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 2. 121. Berenice Guyot Rechard, Shadow States:  India, China and the Eastern Himalayas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 122. Shani, “Making India’s Democracy”, 85. 123. Shani, “Making India’s Democracy”, 87. 124. Rochana Bajpai, Debating difference: group rights and liberal democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011). 125. Rohit De, “Litigious Citizens: Constitutional Law, Everyday Life and the Making of the Indian Republic” (PhD diss., University of Princeton, 2013), 4. 126. Rohit De, “Litigious Citizens”, 32. 127. Ian Talbot, “Deserted Collaborators”. 128. Eg, Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India:  Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 129. Editorial, “Pakistan and the Commonwealth”, Roundtable: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 89: 354 (2000): 157–​160. 130. C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947–​48 (Delhi: Sage, 2002). 131. Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, “Britain as a debtor:  Indian sterling balances, 1940–​1953”, Economic History Review 70, no. 2 (2017): 586–​604. 132. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 185. 133. Sherman, Muslim Belonging. 134. Joya Chatterji, “Stuck in Bengal”.

Chapter 15

Gl obal Wa rs a nd De c ol oniz at i on i n E ast and Sou th- ​E ast Asia ( 193 7–​1 9 54 ) Christopher Goscha

Introduction: Global Wars and Asian Decolonization Between 1937 and 1954, two global conflicts—​the Second World War and the Cold War—​intertwined to deeply affect the course of East and South-​East Asian decolonization. Although the First World War (1914–​1918) had generated anti-​colonialist energy from which Asian decolonization would draw much strength,1 the Second World War set it into motion in ways unimaginable in 1918. Unlike the First World War, Asia was, from start to finish, an essential part of the Second World War.2 Hostilities began in Asia in 1937 when the Japanese attacked China and ended there in 1945 when the Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. Those eight years resulted in far-​reaching political and socio-​economic change—​the overturning of Euro-​American empires, the end of the Japanese imperial order, the mobilization of millions of Asians, and human suffering and material destruction on an unprecedented scale. When the Japanese officially surrendered on 2 September 1945, upwards of thirty million Asians had perished, cities lay in ruin, factories were bombed out, and hunger stalked the land. By shattering the political sovereignty and the social fabric of so many East and South-​East Asian polities, the Japanese created conditions allowing decolonization to take off in Asia in ways very different from other parts of the colonized world. A second global conflict—​the Cold War—​emerged from the ruins of this upheaval, which would also influence the course of decolonization. This conflagration opposed the Soviet Union and the United States—​the two superpowers that the end of the Second

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    277 World War had propelled to the top of the international order. Although they had jointly defeated their common Axis enemies on both sides of Eurasia, their ideologies were so intrinsically opposed that neither could ultimately agree upon what a new post-​war world order should look like. Would it be of a Marxist-​Leninist design, run by an alliance of single-​party communist states in charge of collectivist economies, or would the spread of democratic states embedded in a liberal capitalist order serve as the guiding light? Where would the newly emerging post-​colonial states fit into these two competing orders, especially in Asia where the Second World War had already allowed Asian anti-​colonialists to start creating their own independent nation-​states? This question became particularly divisive when the Chinese communist victory of 1949 ensured that the Cold War spread to Asia and, in complex ways, entangled itself with the process of decolonization. The Americans were determined to prevent Communism from spreading any further into Asia, even if it meant supporting struggling European empires and backing illiberal post-​ colonial Asian states. The Chinese communists committed themselves to supporting sister-​states in North Korea and Vietnam in order to grow the communist bloc and to protect themselves from any hostile American action along their vulnerable coastline. This chapter discusses how these two profoundly global conflicts—​the Second World War and the Cold War—​intertwined to affect the course of decolonization in East and South-​East Asia between 1937 when the Japanese attacked China, and 1954 when the French finally relinquished their Indochinese colony following their military defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. It first provides an analytical overview of the imperial lay of the land during the early twentieth century and how the Japanese military surge across the Asia-​Pacific during the Second World War changed power relations in Asia and devastated societies there in ways that ended empires in unexpected ways. It then examines the Franco-​Vietnamese War of 1945–​1954 as a case study to understand how the Cold War and decolonization intersected in ways that differentiated the Vietnamese struggle against the French from other independence movements in Southeast Asia and beyond. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive explanation of decolonization in East and South-​East Asia. Instead it seeks to understand better how these two global wars interconnected and deeply influenced the nature and course of decolonization in this part of the world. It begins on the cusp of the twentieth century, and then continues with a discussion of the imperial landscape of East and South-​East Asia on the eve of the war.

The Second World War and the Breakup of Asian-​Pacific Imperial States The Fall of the Chinese Empire and the Rise of the Japanese Imperium Nineteenth-​century European powers were not the first to create imperial states in Asia, nor were Western empires the first to fall in the twentieth century. One of the most

278   Christopher Goscha important to disintegrate in the early 1900s was the sprawling Chinese empire ruled by the Qing dynasty since 1644. In 1911, this millenarian Chinese imperium shattered under the weight of massive socio-​economic upheavals on the inside and aggressive attacks on its sovereignty from the outside. While foreign imperial powers were unable to swallow China whole, by the start of the First World War the Europeans, Americans, Japanese, and Russians had colonized its long coastline through the creation of a series of unequal treaty ports, concessions, leases, and indemnities.3 The geopolitical implications of the Chinese Empire’s disintegration left nationalists with the daunting task of supplanting it with some form of nation-​state, a process to which hungry foreign imperialists were deeply opposed. In 1928, after years of upheaval, Chinese nationalists allied with Chiang Kai-​shek tried to stitch the pieces back together in the form of the Republic of China, doing so by subduing powerful warlords and sending their communist rivals on a ‘Long March’ into the remote northern prov­ ince of Yan’an. With alarm, the Japanese watched the rebirth of imperial China in nationalist form. Determined since the nineteenth century to grow their own empire at China’s expense, they cut Chiang Kai-​shek short in 1931 by colonizing Manchuria by force; this colonial conquest was built upon earlier victories that had given them Taiwan and Korea. In 1937, such expansionism resumed with a vengeance when the Empire of Japan attacked the Republic of China in a bid to make it part of its new Asian imperial order. In so doing, the Japanese wrecked Chiang Kai-​shek’s efforts to reunite China. Indeed, within a few short years, four Chinese wartime states competed for control over the country: Chiang Kai-​shek’s Republic of China operated in southwestern China where it had withdrawn following the Japanese attack of 1937; Mao Zedong’s communist regime rebuilt itself in Yan’an in northern China; the Japanese maintained their colonial government for Manchuria; and Beijing housed a pro-​Japanese Chinese government, essentially a protectorate to cover Tokyo’s control of what remained of China. From the ruins of one of the world’s oldest and largest empires, the Japanese attempted to carve out their own new imperial order.

Shattered Empires and Social Change: The Japanese Wartime Surge across Asia In many ways, Japan made the Second World War global in 1941 by attacking the US, its increasingly powerful imperial competitor in the Asia-​Pacific. As colonizers themselves, the Americans had taken the Pacific Islands of Guam and Hawaii in 1898, while in the same year forcibly seizing the Philippines and Cuba from the Spanish. The Japanese and Americans had been eying each other suspiciously ever since the break-​up of China at the turn of the twentieth century. Tensions came to a head in the 1930s as the Great Depression allowed an aggressive and expansionist-​minded military class to take charge of Japan, resume the country’s violent assault on China, and prepare to expand their Asian order southwards. On 7 December 1941, the Japanese struck the American naval base of Pearl Harbor at Hawaii. The Americans

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    279 immediately entered the war on both sides of Eurasia, declaring war on the Germans and the Japanese. Having slowed the American navy in the Pacific, the Japanese immediately dispatched troops and ships southwards to take control of vital natural resources and markets needed to keep Japan alive and secure from American attack. Following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese toppled Western imperial states one after the other across Southeast Asia—​ the Dutch in Indonesia (March 1942); the British in Malaya (January 1942), in Singapore (February 1942), and Burma (May 1942); and the Americans in the Philippines (May 1942). To the north, the Japanese seized Western-​administered Chinese port cities running from the Shanghai International Settlements to British Hong Kong, both of which had been colonized as a result of the Opium Wars of the mid-​nineteenth century. Although obtained by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, Macau maintained its independence only because the Japanese preferred to rule it indirectly as they did Indochina via the French (whose Vichy leaders collaborated with the Axis following the fall of France in June 1940). If collaboration was not forthcoming, the Japanese took over by force. While Tokyo did not push its overland expansion beyond Burma to the west, its navy seized in the Indian Ocean the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, first colonized by the Dutch in the eighteenth century. To the east in the Pacific, the Japanese removed Guam as well as the Mariana, Midway, and Solomon islands from American and British imperial hold. The Japanese even briefly occupied two islands in the American Aleutian archipelago. To the south, they detached Papua New Guinea from the Australian Commonwealth and pushed the Portuguese aside in Timor. This massive Japanese military surge thus overturned a host of Western overland and seaborne empires in Asia that dated from the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511. It also destroyed what remained of the Chinese empire. It is difficult to imagine another power in world history that upended so many imperial states in so little time. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper are surely right to compare what the Japanese did in Asia in the mid-​twentieth century to the thirteenth-​century Eurasian upheavals caused by Mongol invasions (which brought down the Song and the Abbasid empires on each side of this landmass).4 By toppling so many imperial structures, the Japanese transformed countless local power relationships and opened up new possibilities for Asians keen on changing the political lay of the land when the right time came. From the ruins of this truly global conflagration emerged new political constellations and power bases throughout Asia. Overturning anciens régimes was one thing, but building a new imperial order on top of them was another. This is why we should not exaggerate the ability of the Japanese (like the Nazis in Europe) to actually create a functional imperial order from the chaos they created across East and South-​East Asia. From start to finish, the Japanese were badly informed about the peoples and lands they ruled, woefully undermanned on the administrative front, pitifully equipped, and, because of all this, easily frustrated and prone to the use of excessive, indiscriminate, and always counterproductive violence. Military officers—​rarely professional colonial administrators—​ran these conquered territories through indirect rule when they could, but always with the aim of feeding their war machine and protecting the homeland. In practice, the ‘Greater East Asian

280   Christopher Goscha Sphere of Co-​Prosperity’ and the ‘New Order’ were never much more than military rule and some sort of a compromise graft onto pre-​existing political structures.5 The violence and destruction the Japanese unleashed as they marched across the region was, however, very real and its impact on Asian people, societies, and ethnic relations is essential to understanding the subsequent course of Asian decolonization. Asians—​civilians and combatants, young and old, men and women—​died in the millions between 1937 and 1945. Nearly twenty million Chinese lost their lives during this period, second only to the Soviet Union in the total number of dead and missing. Well over half were civilians. One million Vietnamese, three million Indonesians, one million Filipinos, and two million Indians perished because of combat, war-​related violence (bombings and massacres), famine, and disease. Although the Japanese locked up Western settlers and Allied POWs in atrocious conditions, forced many into hard labour, and killed thousands in so doing, at almost thirty million suffering and death was a profoundly Asian experience.6 Asian industries and infrastructure collapsed under bombings, food production plummeted as people abandoned their fields, inflation skyrocketed as black markets proliferated, and families separated, with many people leaving their homes never to return. The consequences of this massive social suffering did not disappear because the war ended in August 1945. Grief, sorrow, hate, and revenge would continue to run roughshod over the region for years to come. And, as in post-​war Europe, such human suffering and emotions could transform themselves into political action.7 Of all the colonial settlers in Asia, the Chinese probably had it worst under the Japanese in Southeast Asia. Since the nineteenth century, leaders of the French, Dutch, and British colonial states had brought in hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants to work on mainly South-​East Asian colonial plantations and mines. Others had already been coming to these areas for centuries as merchants, bankers, and workers, and many were quite integrated into local societies. At war against the Chinese to the north, the Japanese mistrusted these large overseas communities in South-​East Asia and often singled them out for attack for their assumed resistance to Japanese colonial rule. For example, upon taking control of the British Straits in early 1942, Japanese troops massacred at least 5,000 Chinese in Singapore (some say 50,000) before pursuing them elsewhere in the region.8 In order to rule locally, the Japanese thus tended to shun Chinese elites in favour of supporting the ethnic Malay. As a result, the war created opportunities for some while it eliminated them for others. The Japanese also supported the large Indian populations in the Straits. They, too, had immigrated in large numbers to Burma and Malaya under the British. However, in contrast to their distrust of the Chinese, the Japanese saw in the overseas Indians possible allies who could join them in the fight against the British. Starting in 1942, the Japanese helped Indian anti-​colonialists in South-​East Asia to build the Indian National Army promising them eventual independence on the subcontinent in exchange for their military collaboration against the British now.9 This difference in Japanese attitudes towards local Asian partners helps to explain why so many more Chinese entered the resistance against the Japanese in the Straits and the Communist Party at its helm.

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    281 These war-​generated social transformations continued to affect post-​war Asia, both the ability of Western colonizers to re-​establish their colonial states and nationalists to replace them with independent nation-​states. In Malaya, for example, ethnic violence broke out in 1945 when the Chinese-​led Malayan Communist Party started taking over the levers of power from the defeated Japanese. Shocked, many Malays rapidly turned to the British to help them stop what they saw as a Chinese ‘takeover.’ Violence against the Chinese reignited and these ethnic tensions continued to create real problems across post-​colonial South-​East Asia for decades to come. War-​generated social transformations fed into post-​war political change in other ways, too. Following the Japanese capitulation in August 1945, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and Indonesia’s Sukarno both declared the independence of their countries. Their colonial detractors, many of whom watched helplessly from Japanese internment at the time, claimed upon regaining their freedom that the only thing that had allowed these ‘August Revolutions’ to occur in the first place had been the absence of colonial armies to stop them. While there is truth to this claim, such indignant colonial observers conveniently forgot how the war might have also mobilized Asians in the cities and the countryside. Indeed, far too many Western settlers and officials seeking to retake their empires after the Axis defeat failed to empathize with the suffering experienced by millions of Asians or to consider how traumatic wartime experiences could push common people to act in ways that even revolutionary leaders could not control. For example, ebullient Indonesian youth groups had propelled an initially reluctant Sukarno forward in claiming the country’s independence in 1945, while the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh’s communist-​led nationalist front, rode a famine-​driven wave of peasant anger to power.10 Both social groups—​the well-​off youth and the down-​and-​out poor—​would continue to fill the ranks of anti-​colonialist forces for years to come. That is why these region-​wide, socio-​economic factors forged in wartime mattered as much in ending empires (or forcing them to reform) as did any politico-​military ‘power vacuums.’ That said, the Japanese did indeed transform the military dynamics in Asia by dismantling Western colonial armies, police forces, and intelligence services and by mobilizing and eventually arming local Asian groups, some of whose leaders understandably believed the Japanese would help them regain their independence. This was the case of Chandra Bose, who relied on the Japanese to create the Indian National Army. Other examples occurred in Burma, Indonesia, and Indochina. Colonial defenders would accuse such nationalists of treason for collaborating with the Japanese, but many Asians saw in the Japanese the possibility of liberation from decades of Western domination, and embraced the chance to implement socio-​political revolutions that had always been blocked by the colonizers. They would be deeply disappointed, but they could not know it at the time.11 Japanese occupation also led anti-​Axis communist nationalists in Asia to start forming armies locally for the first time. Given their opposition to the Germans and the Japanese, they often did so with the material support of the British and the Americans. In 1942, the British helped Chinese communists in the Straits arm the Malaya Peoples’ Anti-​ Japanese Army, while the Americans helped Vo Nguyen Giap, the future

282   Christopher Goscha Vietnamese communist victor of Dien Bien Phu, train the Vietnamese Liberation Army. In 1942, again with the help of the Americans, Filipino leftists established the Huks, or the People’s Army Against the Japanese. At the same time, Chinese communists in Yan’an also rebuilt their army and expanded their territorial control. The Allies backed the alliance between the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong and nationalists under Chiang Kai-​shek (US President Roosevelt sent the ‘Dixie Mission’ to Yan’an in a sign of support). Between 1937 and 1945, the Empire of Japan thus defeated Western colonial armies across the region and built up non-​communist Asian ones, but also drove the emergence of anti-​Japanese communist forces in China, Vietnam, Malaya, and the Philippines. All of this created conditions for Asians to oppose Western efforts to restore their colonial regimes after the Japanese defeat as well as to fight other Asians in civil conflicts over the ideological nature of the future post-​colonial state. Lastly, the Sino-​Vietnamese nature of inter-​war Asian communism gave rise to some notable transnational connections. Ho Chi Minh had not only joined Chinese and European revolutionaries in establishing the Vietnamese, Thai, and Malayan Communist Parties in the early 1930s, but he also developed an ally in Lai Tek, a Sino-​ Vietnamese man who ran the Malaya Communist Party until his 1947 assassination. Born in colonial Saigon and deeply involved in building communism in the Straits, Lai Tek later shipped weapons to Ho’s fledgling army fighting the returning French. Meanwhile, in 1946, the Chinese sent to Vietnam Nguyen Son, a Vietnamese who had joined Mao Zedong’s Long March to Yan’an in the 1930s and risen to the top of the Chinese Communist Party and Red Army during the Second World War. As a result of his revolutionary globetrotting—​from Paris to Hong Kong by way of Moscow—​Ho Chi Minh knew many of the Chinese communists leaders who were, by the late 1940s, poised to take over China.12 These connections would prove useful to the Vietnamese communists in their war against the French.

Japanese Imperial Defeat and Contested Sovereignties in Asia (1945–​1947) The US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in Asia earlier than anyone had expected. On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito ordered his imperial troops to lay down their arms in East and South-​East Asia. On that day, an estimated six million Japanese soldiers and civilians were still scattered across the Asian mainland, the South-​ East Asian archipelago, and the Western Pacific, including 1.2 million in Manchuria, 750,000 in Korea, 1.5 million in China, and 700,000 in South-​East Asia.13 While Allied forces ultimately did not have to invade Tokyo to end the conflict, intense fighting since 1941 allowed the Americans to roll back Japan’s maritime empire in the Western Pacific and to retake Guam, Midway, and other islands before re-​occupying the Philippines by force in 1944. To the west, the British colonial army fought the Japanese in Burma as the Soviet Red Army started pouring into Manchuria in early August. However, in vast areas of continental Asia, where the Allies had not arrived by the time the Emperor ordered

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    283 his troops to stand down, Japanese soldiers often looked on as Asian nationalists took matters into their own hands, a situation very different from the late-​1942 Allied liberation of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. How the Allies arrived on the scene, dismantled the Japanese armies and polities they found there, and interacted with Asian nationalists and returning colonialists deeply influenced the configuration of post-​war political sovereignties in Asia. Of paramount importance was Allied General Order No. 1, approved by US President Harry Truman on 15 August. This document defined how Allied forces would occupy areas held by the Empire of Japan. Specific military commands received authorization to accept the Japanese surrender, care for Allied POWs, and maintain order in the following zones: 1) Soviet forces were in charge in Manchuria, the Kurile islands, Karafuto, and Korea above the 38th parallel; 2) Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican forces did so in China (except Manchuria), Taiwan, and French Indochina above the 16th parallel; 3) the British-led South East Asia Command was in charge of the Andamans, Nicobars, Burma, Thailand, French Indochina below the 16th parallel, Malaya, and the Netherland Indies and host of surrounding islands; 4) the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet occupied the Japanese Mandated islands, the Bonins, and “other Pacific Islands”; and 5) the Commander in Chief, U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific, took charge of the Japanese main islands, the Ryukyus (including Okinawa), Korea below the 38th parallel, and the Philippines.14 Just as no account of the configuration of post-​war Europe is complete without understanding the impact of Allied decisions made at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam, General Order No. 1 is essential to explain the ability of Western colonial powers to regain and rebuild their lost colonial regimes, that of nationalists to create nation-​states in their place, and the problems both sides encountered as they competed to absorb the remnants of the Japanese empire. On continental Asia, immediately after the Japanese capitulation, Allied forces remained largely absent on the ground for several crucial weeks in August and September 1945. Power vacuums and local races for power instantly opened up. Without clear instructions to follow after the imperial cease-​fire, local Japanese officers often looked the other way as Asians occupied government buildings, raised new flags, and marched out their nascent armies to thrilled crowds. Additionally, Japanese authorities only took orders from the Allies, not the Dutch in Indonesia nor the French in Indochina, where Sukarno and Ho had already begun establishing their new nations. Furthermore, even when the Allies arrived, they lacked sufficient troops, administrators, and resources needed to take control. All sorts of makeshift compromises necessarily occurred on the ground. Some officials favoured the Asian nationalists they encountered if they could help maintain order, while others preferred the European colonizers who were desperately trying to win over Allied support and get their people ‘back in.’ These messy situations faced by the Europeans were not encountered in the American Philippines. Via military re-​occupation, the Americans enjoyed the strongest position of all the Western powers seeking to recover their empires. There was no real lag time between Japanese defeat and Allied arrival in the Philippines. Indeed, of all the Allies, the Americans had moved their troops the furthest into Asia and caused the retreat of the Japanese and their hold over the Pacific, much as the Soviets had pushed the Germans

284   Christopher Goscha out of central Europe. General Douglas MacArthur rapidly sidelined the Huks despite their earlier collaboration with the Allies and, on 4 July 1946, Washington granted independence to the Philippines on terms that continued to connect the former colony to the United States in a web of economic, military, and security arrangements of an indirect nature. The Americans were in a similarly favourable position in Japan, where they occupied the home islands until 1952, administered the Ryukyu Islands until 1972 in something close to a protectorate, and, as in the Philippines, wove Japan into a global economic and security system. The Americans never had to share their Pro-​Consul over Japan with the Soviets, as they had to do in post-​war Germany.15 The Americans also gained the most from forcibly decolonizing Japan’s maritime empire. Their now-​unrivaled naval hold over the Pacific, including a string of naval bases, allowed Washington to expand and consolidate its own Asian imperium with little competition from weakened European colonizers or a Soviet Union whose supreme leader was much more focused on eastern Europe and Germany. Thus, while the Americans may have decolonized the Philippines in 1946, the Second World War and the naval supremacy it had generated for the Americans reinforced their ability to grow their empire informally without serious competition from the Japanese, the Soviets, or the Europeans. The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet—​initiated in Brisbane, Australia in 1943 to roll back the Empire of Japan—​patrols the Indian and Pacific Oceans to this day. If the US Navy dismantled Japan’s maritime empire, the Soviets were in the best position at war’s end to begin forcibly decolonizing the continental heart of Japan’s empire in northern China and Korea. Starting on 9 August 1945, 1.5 million Soviet troops began rolling into Manchuria. Scores of Manchurians and Chinese welcomed their Soviet liberators, who freed them from over fifteen years of colonial rule as thousands of Japanese settlers and administrators ran for their lives. The Soviets also de-​ industrialized much of the Japanese Manchurian colony, hauling off machines, tools, and power-​generating equipment needed to rebuild devastated Soviet industry. They demilitarized Manchuria, too, sending most Japanese soldiers back home, but not before forcibly removing over 600,000 POWs to work in the Soviet Union. Stalin further dismantled Japan’s Asian empire by annexing the southern half of Sakhalin Island. Finally, the Soviets occupied the northern half of Japan’s Korean colony down to the 38th parallel, sharing the other half with the Americans. Together, the Americans and the Soviets ended almost a half-​century of Japanese colonial rule over this strategically important peninsula. In China, the Japanese surrender removed the raison d’être for the united front of 1937 between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-​shek and set off a race between them as to who would finally reshape the two-​thousand-​year-​old Chinese Empire into a territorially unified nation-​state—​or not. The nationalists had 1.5 million soldiers in their ranks at war’s end, but they were concentrated in lower China, where the Chiang Kai-​ shek’s Republic of China quickly restored its control. The communists counted 900,000 troops in Yan’an, situated next door to Manchuria, where they immediately moved in to the ‘power vacuum’ to help their Soviet counterparts administer the former Japanese

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    285 colony. Chinese Red Army forces spread further into northern China, taking control of roads, ports, and railways, and then went as far as Mukden, Beijing, and Shanghai, technically under the Republic of China’s sovereign jurisdiction under Order No. 1. With the Japanese out of the way, the Chinese Civil War threatened to resume. Chiang Kai-​shek did several things to stop the communists from denying him all of China. On 14 August, he and Stalin concluded the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, in which Stalin agreed to recognize the Republic of China’s ‘full sovereignty’ over Manchuria, withdraw his troops following Japanese defeat, and implicitly temper his support of the Chinese communists. In exchange, Chiang Kai-​shek recognized the independence of a pro-​Soviet Mongolian People’s Republic, free of the imperial hold the Qing had imposed upon it centuries earlier. He also granted the Soviets joint use of Port Arthur, Dalian, and the Manchurian railway. Russian imperial interests in northeastern China dating from the nineteenth century had not necessarily disappeared under communist rule. Next, Chiang Kai-​shek relied heavily on the US to transport his troops as well as American forces to the north so that he could take control before the communists could. Here, the competition between Chinese communists and nationalists became so intense that Chiang Kai-​shek ordered Japanese officers in the north not to turn over power to Mao’s people. As late as 1946, the Republican government had used 80,000 Japanese imperial troops to help maintain its territorial control. Though defeated, the Japanese continued to play an important role in post-​war Asian state-​building. While the Second World War had greatly weakened Chiang Kai-​shek’s hold on China and, in so doing, given his communist adversaries a new lease on life, Chiang Kai-​shek nonetheless played a pivotal role in ending Western imperial regimes in his country. Although he did not recover British Hong Kong and Portuguese Macau, the Chinese leader did successfully negotiate the end of the International Concessions in Shanghai, the return of Taiwan and Manchuria, and the protection of millions of Chinese living abroad in colonial Southeast Asia. Chiang Kai-​shek—​and not Mao Zedong—​effectively used the Second World War and his country’s participation in the Allied effort to promote China’s position in the new international order emerging from this global conflagration. He sat with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in Cairo in late 1943, and he negotiated directly with Stalin. China’s newly recovered international prestige was clear when Allied Order No. 1 authorized Republican troops to occupy northern French Indochina above the 16th parallel. Despite General Charles de Gaulle’s fierce opposition, he could do nothing. The French had not been at the table in Potsdam. And whatever the Republic of China and Chiang Kai-​shek’s weaknesses were (and they were many), the humiliation the Allies visited upon his country at Versailles in 1919 was not repeated in 1945.16 French prestige in Asia, however, suffered a serious blow. During the war, Vichy France had collaborated with the Germans and served the Japanese in Indochina until the latter finally overthrew them in March 1945 as the Allies closed in. The Allied decision to consign the surrender of Japanese troops in Indochina to the Chinese and British without consulting de Gaulle left no doubt that France had lost its status as a ‘Great Power’ in Asia for the first time since the mid-​nineteenth-century Opium

286   Christopher Goscha Wars. De Gaulle’s delegates who parachuted into Indochina at the end of the war got a bitter taste of this when defeated Japanese officers refused to take orders from them. Order No. 1 left no doubt that the French, like the Dutch, were not among the victorious Allies in Asia in 1945. None of this was lost on Indonesian and Vietnamese nationalists. The French would return and they would be more successful in re-​establishing France’s position as a ‘Great Power’ in Asia than Chiang Kai-​shek was in maintaining it. Indeed, the latter failed to re-​establish his Republic’s sovereignty over all of China, despite American support. War weary, neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted to get bogged down in the Chinese Civil War when it resumed in mid-​1946. In 1949, after a bloody conflagration costing another two million Chinese lives, Mao Zedong’s Red Army finally emerged victorious from its decades-​old struggle against the nationalists, and, in the end, it was Mao and his disciples who held the Chinese empire together in the form of a communist-​run nation-​state. The Soviets had also successfully assumed direction of the sprawling empire the Tsars had built. In early 1950, the leaders of these two massive communist states perched on top of Eurasia signed the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Significantly, Stalin also transferred to Mao the leadership of the two other Asian communist states born of the Second World War:  Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and North Korea under Kim Il-​sung. Significantly, Vietnam and North Korea bordered China on one side, and, on the other, the maritime imperium the Americans had pushed across the Pacific. Not all empires perished after the Second World War. They often recast themselves in new forms.

Global Cold War and Asian Decolonization (1945–​1954): Vietnam Vietnam provides a particularly useful case study for understanding how the Cold War intersected with the decolonization process unleashed across Asia by the Japanese. There are several reasons for this. Due to its location on the eastern rim of Eurasia and its long coastline on the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Vietnam is located in an area of the globe traditionally inviting to imperial powers. The Chinese first administered Vietnam as its southernmost province for a thousand years to trade with Asia and the Middle East. Following the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, the Americans closely followed Japanese movements down the Chinese coast and imposed an embargo on Tokyo in 1940 as Japanese troops started occupying northern Vietnam. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese occupied all of the country and concentrated their ships in the French-​built naval base of Cam Ranh Bay before striking as far as the Indian Ocean. The Americans worried that the Chinese communists would use the same gateway to march into Asia. The Chinese, on the

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    287 other hand, feared an American attack on their long coastline, as both Western and Japanese imperial powers had done precisely that with their gunboat diplomacy since the eighteenth century. Second, unlike the Indonesian Republicans fighting the Dutch to the south under Sukarno, communist nationalists led the war of national liberation against the French in Indochina. Vietnamese communists like Ho Chi Minh had longstanding ties to Soviet and Chinese communists. Vietnamese communists welcomed the Chinese victory of 1949 and used the Cold War and Sino-​Soviet assistance to help them defeat the colonizers and engineer a communist transformation of their army, state, and society. In so doing, the communists connected decolonization to the Cold War much more closely than in other parts of the colonial world. Lastly, the Americans, who were determined to stop communist expansion in Asia, intervened, directly in North Korea against the Chinese, and indirectly in Vietnam by supporting the French war effort, even if it meant prolonging the life of the colonial state in Indochina. In short, by 1950 Vietnam was positioned on a dangerous fault line where the historical phenomena of the Cold War and decolonization met and intertwined dangerously. This case study does not seek to exceptionalize the Vietnamese case, but rather, by comparing the Vietnamese case with other experiences, it sheds light on the nature and course of decolonization elsewhere in East and South-​East Asia and beyond.

Contested Sovereignties in Post-​Japanese Vietnam (1945–​1949) On 2 September 1945, the day the Japanese signed the surrender documents on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Ho Chi Minh stepped before tens of thousands of cheering Vietnamese in Hanoi to declare Vietnam’s independence. The Japanese had overthrown their Indochinese state a few months earlier and incarcerated the orphaned Vichy colonial army and administration. Although a power vacuum had allowed Ho to take power, popular support for Vietnamese independence was real. Indeed, the Communist Party had ridden a groundswell of social discontent to power, generated by decades of colonial neglect and a terrible famine, and now defeated, the Japanese watched the ceremonies from the sidelines, waiting for the Allies to arrive so that they could go home. However, during those crucial weeks of late August and early September 1945, Ho and his lieutenants did everything they could in their power to take control of the colonial state, build their armed forces, create as many alliances as possible, and appeal to the Allies to recognize the newly created Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Ho played down his impressive communist résumé—​he was, after all, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party and had helped create the Communist parties in Malaya and Thailand. This member of the internationalist communist club now cast himself as the aesthetic, Confucian father of a proud, timeless Vietnamese

288   Christopher Goscha nation. He preferred citing the American Declaration of Independence to American officers arriving to repatriate POWs in 1945, rather than quoting from the Marxist–​ Leninist canon he knew best. Most importantly, Vietnam’s first president knew that ships were steaming their way across the Indian Ocean towards Vietnam carrying the French Expeditionary Corps, and their planes, tanks, and machine-​guns. He knew, too, that the Allies would arrive within days in Saigon and Hanoi to accept the Japanese surrender. On 9 September Chinese Republican troops entered Vietnam to accept the Japanese surrender above the 16th parallel in accordance with Allied Order No. 1, and the British landed their first troops in Saigon on 13 September to take control of Indochina below that same line. Arriving, too, were colonial administrators and officers whom Charles de Gaulle had rushed to Asia, with instructions to rebuild French Indochina in its pre-​war colonial form. To that end, they joined veteran colonial hands emerging from Japanese internment. In the north, anti-​communist Vietnamese nationalists, who had lived in political exile in southern China for years, landed in Hanoi with the Chinese. They were confident that the anti-​communist Chiang Kai-​shek would overthrow Ho’s Republic, or at least put them in charge of it. Tensions ran particularly high in southern Vietnam. This was the area where the communists were weakest, the DRV’s territorial control spottiest, Vietnamese competitors strongest, and the French settler community largest (around 35,000 in 1940). In the weeks following the Japanese capitulation in mid-​August, French settlers, colonial administrators, and soldiers watched with a mix of anger and anxiety as the Vietnamese nationalism they had always feared surged before their eyes. They could do little to stop it as, for the time being, the Japanese refused to recognize the French as an Allied power and kept the Vichy army locked up. Like the Dutch in Indonesia, the French community in Indochina felt doubly humiliated in that the Japanese had removed them from the summit of the colonial hierarchy while the Allies had refused to count them among the victors following the Axis defeat. Most French and Dutch settlers aimed to put the Vietnamese and Indonesians back in their colonial places and turn back the clock to imperial time. Hard at work building new nation-​states, the Vietnamese and Indonesians had no intention of going back in time. Tensions ran increasingly high. In Saigon a major clash occurred on 2 September 1945, when gunfire broke out during celebrations marking Vietnamese Independence Day and the Allied victory over the Japanese (VJ Day). Dozens of French and Vietnamese civilians died. The violence paralleled the bloodshed that had occurred in Algeria on 8 May 1945 during celebrations of German defeat in Europe (VE Day) and cries for Algerian independence (readers are referred to Chapter 16 in this volume).17 When British troops under General Douglas Gracey began debarking in Saigon, the Vietnamese and French begged him to take sides. Woefully undermanned, Gracey and his Indian troops desperately tried to maintain order as tensions continued to rise. With the arrival of the Expeditionary Corps still three weeks away, Gracey finally agreed to free incarcerated Vichy colonial troops and used them on 23 September to wrest control of the city from Ho’s administrators and officers. This play for power resulted in chaos as

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    289 colonial troops and French settlers pillaged Saigon. The Vietnamese retaliated the next night—​committing a gruesome massacre in the southern city. Furious, Gracey ordered the French colonial troops back to their barracks and ordered defeated Japanese imperial soldiers to help him maintain order. Although the French Expeditionary Corps soon arrived in the south to take control of roads, bridges, and provincial towns (and officially relieved the British in early 1946), the thirty-​year Franco-​Vietnamese war had begun.18 The French were not alone in their use of Japanese soldiers to help them restore order. The British did the same in Indonesia, and Chiang Kai-​shek conscripted them in his race against Mao Zedong. Thousands of Japanese soldiers also crossed over to support Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians nationalists in building new nation-​states and armies.19 In Indonesia and Indochina, the British also relied on their own imperial troops to help them restore order and retake Vietnam below the 16th parallel from Ho Chi Minh. Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist and emerging leader of independent India, was aghast to learn that the British were using Indian and Nepalese Gurkha troops in Indochina to conquer fellow Asian patriots.20 The global nature of the Second World War had effectively ensured that the 1945 wars of decolonization would be very internationalized. In the north, the French negotiated intensely with Chiang Kai-​shek to secure the withdrawal of his troops from northern Vietnam, the sine qua non for the re-​ establishment of French sovereignty to all of Vietnam. However, rather than risk the outbreak of a destabilizing colonial war similar to that caused by the British in the south, Chinese officers refused to re-​arm interned Vichy colonial troops or to allow the French Expeditionary Corps to attack the Vietnamese above the 16th parallel before an agreement could be reached. They also refused to overthrow Ho Chi Minh’s government for fear of unleashing civil war. Instead, the Chinese required Ho to share power with the non-​communist nationalist parties in the form of a coalition government. Ho’s Vietnam thus owed its early existence and consolidation (above the 16th parallel at least) to Chiang Kai-​shek, not Mao Zedong—​another example of how Order No. 1 directly influenced the configuration of Vietnamese decolonization. Aware of just how badly the French wanted to re-​colonize Indochina, Chiang Kai-​ shek adroitly advanced the full decolonization of his country in negotiations with Paris. To reach a deal with the Chinese, the French quickly agreed to relinquish their colonial possessions in China and provide special privileges to the large Chinese settler community living in Indochina. In exchange, the 28 February accord of 1946 held the Chinese to the withdrawal of troops from northern Indochina. However, when the French rushed their warships into Haiphong Harbor a few days later, Chinese officers on the ground objected, loath to getting dragged into a Franco-​Vietnamese war. The Chinese required the French and the Vietnamese to negotiate first a provisional compromise and sign a further accord on 6 March before the French could land their troops.21 The French introduced 15,000 troops to the north to replace the Chinese, but had to allow the DRV to continue operating in the north until the signing of a final agreement. While negotiations continued in Paris over the summer of 1946, French authorities in Saigon

290   Christopher Goscha aggressively challenged the DRV’s sovereignty above the 16th parallel (and did so in line with de Gaulle’s initial instructions to restore French Indochina, ante bellum).22 When the last Chinese Allied troops had withdrawn from northern Indochina in September 1946, the French and the Vietnamese prepared for a showdown. In November 1946, when the Vietnamese refused to turn over control of the port city of Haiphong, French warships opened fire, killing several thousand civilians. A month later, on 19 December 1946, the Vietnamese lashed out in Hanoi, resulting in full-​scale war. While Ho had evacuated his government to the hills, he ordered his regular units and militia to hold the capital for two months. During the Battle for Hanoi, French bombs and artillery reduced the old quarter of the capital to a heap of rubble. In Indonesia a year earlier, a similar urban battle had taken place between British forces and Republican nationalists, who refused to turn over the city of Surabaya. These urban showdowns in Asia occurred a decade before the famous Battle of Algiers, during which the French carefully refrained from using artillery and bombs. In Indonesia and in Vietnam in 1945–​1947, there was no Cold War. Like the Dutch, the French did not go to war to stop communism. They fought to stop Vietnamese nationalism and to rebuild their colonial state. Even had Ho been a non-​communist nationalist leader like Sukarno or Nehru, war would still have broken out. For the next three years, the DRV fought the French, who went after the nationalist resistance government and army. Vietnamese communists put radical revolution on hold in favour of building up the widest nationalist front possible, and guerilla warfare was the mot d’ordre. Vo Nguyen Giap’s fledgling army carefully avoided set-​piece battles in order to avoid French artillery barrages, aerial strafing, and frontal attacks. Despite military campaigns designed to defeat the DRV in late 1947, the French never had enough troops or administrators to constantly control all of Vietnam, and the offensive failed when Vietnamese troops and administrators melted into the jungle. The result was DRV-​and French-​controlled archipelago-​like territories that were scattered across the country. The Communist Party did its best, but its control was initially weak and the widespread nature of the fighting left a range of non-​communist nationalists in control at local levels.23 Vietnamese communists were in a stronger position to direct such a broad-​based nationalist front in Vietnam than the ethnic Chinese communists leading the resistance to the re-​imposition of British colonial rule in Malaya. In 1948, when the Malaya Communist Party took up arms against the British, the British found it considerably easier to isolate the Chinese ethnic minority running the movement from the majority Malay population, many of whom resented the Chinese. The French would certainly practice the policy of ‘divide and rule’, too, but they instead dealt with an overwhelmingly ethnic Vietnamese Communist Party that operated across a majority ethnic Vietnamese population deeply affected by the Second World War. The predominantly ethnic Chinese role in leading the anti-​colonial resistance in Malaya parallels efforts made by Vietnamese communists to run the anti-​colonial movements and revolutionary state-​ making in Laos via the Lao Issara/​Free Lao, as well as in Cambodia through the Khmer Issarak/​Free Khmer. While in 1945 the Malay worried that the Chinese communists were going to take over the country, many Lao feared the same of the Vietnamese. And just as

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    291 the Chinese communists relied heavily on the overseas Chinese community in Malaya to advance their struggle, Vietnamese communists turned to the large Vietnamese diaspora in Laos and Cambodia.24

When Colonial and Cold Wars Collide: The Limits on Vietnam’s Decolonization From its inception in 1945, the DRV enjoyed no official diplomatic recognition and received little backing from Asian and international organizations. Unlike the Indonesians, who increasingly gained the support of the Indians, the United Nations, and eventually the Americans in their resistance against the Dutch, the communist core of the DRV made it harder for Ho to win over such non-​communist assistance for his independence movement. Nehru provided ‘moral support’ to Ho, but refused to send military assistance, economic aid, or even to bring the Vietnamese question before the United Nations. Even Stalin had doubts about Ho Chi Minh at the start.25 However, the DRV’s diplomatic isolation changed dramatically thanks to the Chinese communist victory in October 1949 and Mao’s willingness to assist Vietnamese and Korean communists. Although the intensification of the Cold War in Europe may have made itself felt in Indochina as early as 1948,26 the combination of the 1949 Chinese communist victory in Asia and the June 1950 outbreak of the Korean War firmly shifted the Cold War into East Asia over the northern Vietnamese land border with China as Chinese communist troops consolidated their hold over the southern half of their country. Ho and his party welcomed this development, as it would break their diplomatic isolation, provide the military assistance needed to force the French to decolonize, and help transform the DRV into a communist state. Ho was no stranger to the Chinese leadership: he had known Mao since the 1930s, and had befriended Mao’s right hand man, Zhou Enlai, a decade earlier. Following Ho’s visit to Beijing, Chinese communists agreed to back him, his communist revolution, and war of liberation. The Chinese convinced the Soviets to do likewise. In January 1950, Beijing accorded diplomatic recognition to the DRV, and Moscow followed suit. In so doing, the communist bloc broke Vietnam’s diplomatic isolation in spectacular terms. The communist Chinese Advisory Group, consisting of military and political subgroups, arrived in DRV Vietnam as the Korean War began. The military delegation channelled aid to the Vietnamese army, trained troops and officers in northern Vietnam and southern China, and helped devise battle plans. In 1950, thanks to Chinese support, the People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN) emerged under Vo Nguyen Giap’s command. The political advisory group provided Maoist models to help Ho transform the DRV into a single-​party state capable of waging conventional war and transforming the society to more communist ways of thinking and rule. This included helping the Vietnamese to implement Maoist land reform, rectification campaigns, and economic measures. During the rest of the conflict, the Chinese helped their Vietnamese counterparts push through a military, political, and social revolution. In Vietnam, the

292   Christopher Goscha Cold War intertwined with decolonization in ways very different from other parts of the colonial world. Meanwhile, in order to stop Eurasian communism from spreading any further, the Americans rapidly increased their support of the French and the Associated States of Indochina the latter had created in 1949.27 The Americans gave diplomatic recognition to the Associated State of Vietnam, which was led by the ex-​emperor Bao Dai in opposition to the DRV. The US also supported its Lao and Cambodian counterparts in opposition to the Vietnamese communist-​backed Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak. As the Chinese dispatched their advisors to the DRV, the Americans sent their own delegations to Indochina and opened the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to preside over the distribution of military and economic aid. Both sides of the Cold War now provided increasingly large amounts of military aid to their respective clients in Vietnam and helped them create professional armies: the PAVN for Vo Nguyen Giap, and the Associate State of Vietnam’s Army for Bao Dai. By 1954, the Americans were paying over seventy per cent of French war costs in Indochina. However, unlike in Korea (where the Chinese clashed directly with American troops), in Indochina the Chinese and Americans conducted their Cold War in Asia indirectly through their respective proxies. Thus, Communist Vietnam and Korea, on China’s eastern border and looking into the western rim of America’s Pacific imperium, became the single deadliest battlefields in the global Cold War at the time. Like their Vietnamese adversaries, the French also embraced the coming of the Cold War to Indochina, though for different reasons. This global conflagration allowed Paris to prolong its colonial foothold in Indochina by recasting their colonial war, as well as the Associated State of Vietnam, as an integral part of the American global fight against Communism. Unlike the Dutch in Indonesia, who fought an anti-​communist nationalist movement, the French had a communist-​led nationalist movement before them. As a result, they used the Cold War and Washington’s communist fears to secure greater American support for their fight against the DRV. France provided information to ‘prove’ that Ho Chi Minh was an ‘internationalist communist’ of the worst kind rather than the nationalist patriot they had fought in 1945–​1946. Unlike the Dutch, who renounced Indonesia in 1949, the French were never pressured by the UN, nor by Asian and American actors, to act similarly. The full arrival in 1950 of the Cold War in Asia also allowed the French to recover much of their lost international prestige during the Second World War. The Asian Cold War provided the French with a place at the table in discussions on the Western containment of communism in Asia and Europe; they dispatched troops from Indochina to help the Americans fight the communists in Korea; and French leaders used their commitment to the Indochina War as a way of demonstrating their commitment to the Atlantic Alliance and obtaining American aid to continue prosecuting the war in Indochina as part of the global effort to contain Eurasian communism. In exchange, the French expected that Indochina would remain in the French Union and that they would return to the ‘Great Powers’ club, again. For the Americans, the need to counter communism now took precedence over pushing the French to decolonize. In addition to

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    293 Indochina, Washington also needed the French militarily to carry their anti-​communist weight in Europe by accepting German re-​armament and the creation of a European Army. Neither the Dutch nor their Indonesian colony ever simultaneously held such a crucial place in American Cold War strategy in Europe and Asia. The French did, and they knew it. By committing more troops to Indochina in 1951, Georges Bidault, one of France’s strongest defenders of the Atlantic Alliance and of the French Union, pointed out that ‘our action in Tonkin preserves us on the Rhine, since it preserves the Atlantic community’.28 Although the French were content to hold on to Indochina, it came at a cost for non-​ communist Vietnamese nationalists opposed to the DRV’s communist core. For if the Americans increasingly pressured the Dutch to renounce Indonesia in favour of non-​ communist nationalists, they counselled the non-​communist Vietnamese not to push the French too hard on decolonization until the bigger communist threat was defeated. Indonesian Republicans had attacked their communist allies in 1948 in the ‘Madiun affair’, allaying any latent American fears of their ideological purity and preventing the Dutch from tainting them as communists. Only in 1953–​1954, when it became clear that the French wanted out of the war, did the Americans begin to shift their support directly to Vietnamese nationalists, associated with one of the best known non-​communist anti-​ colonialists of the time, Ngo Dinh Diem. The Cold War also gave rise to a very different type of state and warfare in Vietnam. Until 1950, guerilla tactics had guided Giap’s war against the French, as it did in scores of wars of liberation across the colonial world. However, Chinese communist military assistance and political models allowed Vietnamese communists to transition to a new type of war in Indochina and a new type of state. From 1950, the Vietnamese Communist Party’s military goal was to secure decolonization by force. This meant creating a modern army, the PAVN. It consisted of seven main force divisions. The PAVN, carefully modelled on the Sino-​Soviet example, was placed under close party supervision, and equipped and often trained in China. This transition to conventional warfare in a full-​blown colonial war distinguishes the Vietnamese war state from its Indonesian, Malayan, and, further beyond, Algerian counterparts. Before 1950, local DRV commanders organized guerilla logistics on the spot. These small-​scale hit-​and-​run operations never required massive amounts of labour, food, or soldiers. However, the decision to create regular divisions changed all that. Vietnamese communists now needed large numbers of men, human transporters, and food in order to support a large army fighting set piece battles across all of Indochina. And yet the Party had no mechanized transport before late 1953 –​no trucks, planes, or helicopters. To make the transition to modern war, the DRV had no choice but to mobilize on an unprecedented social scale and in record time. To do so, the government incorporated mandatory military service in late 1949, declared a state of general mobilization in early 1950, and initiated full-​scale land reform from 1953 to induce its majority peasant population to defeat the French as well as the feudal, landowning class. By 1954, the PAVN numbered an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 men.

294   Christopher Goscha With these laws on the books, the party dispersed its cadres across DRV territories, backed by the police and the army, to begin work with district and village authorities to recruit, organize, and mobilize civilian manpower for the war effort. These groups relied on local mass organizations, kinship ties, personal relations, and the peasant, youth, and women’s associations in particular, to recruit soldiers and labour. But the Party’s need to implement such massive social mobilization on such short notice also meant that it had to assert its control over the state. Conventional war thus required a new type of state—​a single party regime reaching down to the lowest levels of society. Maoist mobilization techniques such as land reform, rectification, and emulation campaigns were designed to place the state under Party control, as well as to initiate a social revolution favouring the peasant and worker classes over the landowners and bourgeois. It was no accident that Ho Chi Minh’s Party initiated land reform in late 1953 as preparations for the battle of Dien Bien Phu got under way. The level of social mobilization this new party-​state achieved between 1950 and 1954 is mindboggling. During the French retreat from Cao Bang in late 1950, the first major battle of the Indochina War, the DRV mobilized 122,000 civilians who clocked in a total of 1,716,000 working days. Similar rates of mobilization occurred for all eight battles leading to General Vo Nguyen Giap’s victory over the French army at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954. In all, between 1950 and 1954, the DRV mobilized 1.7 million people as civilian porters, almost all of them peasants. Of the DRV’s 10 million people, twenty per cent of the population thus experienced at least several months of war. The PAVN’s massive manpower needs led teams to recruit more women into its logistical ranks. Women pushed rice-​laden bikes across rugged territory, carried heavy packs over hundreds of kilometres, and helped rebuild bombed-​out roads and bridges, often exposing themselves to heavy French strafing. It was physically gruelling work and psychologically traumatic. According to one Vietnamese study, of the 122,000 civilians mobilized for the battle of Cao Bang in late 1950, ‘the majority were women.’ If true, this would mean that at least 61,000 women were involved. Vietnamese sources claim that this level of female participation remained the case for the following set-​piece battles. If the term ‘majority’ meant at least fifty-​one per cent were women, then the total number of women civilians involved in military logistics between 1950 and 1954 would equal around 850,000 (half of the 1.7 million number). Vietnamese women did not hold combat roles in the PAVN, but they found themselves in the line of fire as porters and paramedics. Between 1950 and 1954, General Vo Nguyen Giap thus commanded a divisional army, the only one of its kind in South-​East Asia, and engaged the French in a series of set-​ piece battles. This army, with Chinese support, carefully organized the epic siege of the fortified French camp at Dien Bien Phu between November 1953 and May 1954. Tens of thousands of porters carried artillery across mountainous terrain to destroy the air base supplying colonial troops. On 13 March 1954, the Vietnamese unleashed their artillery with deadly accuracy. They quickly knocked out a number of unprotected French artillery guns and destroyed the airstrip, which severed the camp’s lifeline to the outside within days. They also launched their first massive and costly attack on the same day

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    295 as troops moved under heavy French artillery and machine-​gun fire to submerge the advance posts. However, in response, French Union forces dug in—​quite literally. Indeed, the battle for Dien Bien Phu strangely resembled the trench warfare of the First World War. Some spoke of Verdun. This is hardly surprising, since each side possessed artillery, which forced men to go underground to hide when they weren’t ordered to go over the top and attack. What differentiated the DRV’s use of trenches in 1954 from those at Verdun in 1916 was that the Vietnamese ones were mobile, and expanded slowly to surround the enemy camp instead of forming a straight, static line. But like the trench warfare of the First World War, young Vietnamese boys ordered to attack suffered terrible casualties when they ran into intense machine-​gun and artillery fire, as did French Union forces who were counterattacking. This was not guerilla warfare. Although American pilots flew supply missions over Dien Bien Phu, Washington refused to try to intervene directly by landing troops or sending in the air force to strafe the valley perimeter. The French were on their own as the DRV’s army launched two more wave attacks until the camp on the valley floor of Dien Bien Phu finally fell on 7 May 1954. As negotiations formally began in Geneva to find a political solution to end the war, but not before the French Army had suffered its greatest colonial defeat since losing Quebec in 1759. The Vietnamese Communists had proved they could fight conventional battles—​and win. No other twentieth-​century war of decolonization ever produced a Dien Bien Phu.29 But as in China, fighting such big battles came at a cost, for this type of war required the enormous mobilization of people. Ho’s party had initiated the land reform program in late 1953 to encourage peasants to support the war and bring down the French for good at Dien Bien Phu. It also harshly overturned the landed and commercial classes as part of the communization of the state. The problem was that this dual military and social revolution exhausted the population. When the Chinese joined the French to reach a cease-​fire at Geneva, Ho agreed that he could push his people no further. The Communists had won a battle at Dien Bien Phu, but not the war. And behind the French, Ho knew, stood the Americans. On 21 July 1954, Ho’s party accepted a cease-​fire at Geneva that divided the country provisionally in half at the 17th parallel, with elections to follow in two years to unify it. When the ink dried on the Geneva documents a few months later, communist nationalists could only claim half of the Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh had declared independent on 2 September 1945.

Conclusion This would not stop the French from embarking on yet another colonial war, this time to keep Algeria. On 1 November 1954, hardly two months after the signing of the Geneva cease-​fire on Indochina, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) launched attacks across the country in support of full independence from France. The French refused to let go, just as they had in Vietnam a decade earlier. In many ways, for the French,

296   Christopher Goscha the Indochina and Algerian wars constituted a larger single ‘Indo-​North African War’ (1945–​1962). In Algeria, however, the Cold War and decolonization would intersect in ways very unfavourable to the French. The FLN mimicked the ‘diplomatic revolution’ the Indonesians had so successfully engineered in their victory over the Dutch in 1949 by enlisting the support of the United Nations, winning over public opinion and official support in the decolonizing states of the Afro-​Asian world (the FLN participated in the Afro-​Asian conference in Bandung in 1955). They also played the Americans against the French by threatening to lean towards the Chinese and the Soviets if the US didn’t support Algerian independence.30 And like the Indonesian Republicans, but in stark contrast to the Vietnamese, the FLN obtained their independence without ever having dominated the battlefield. As non-​communist nationalists, they could exploit the international system to their advantage in ways Vietnamese communists like Ho Chi Minh could not. Unlike the Geneva agreement on Vietnam in 1954, which denied Ho the southern half of the country he declared independent in 1945, the Evian Accords saw the FLN win their complete independence without the Americans stopping them. Here, the Cold War and decolonization intersected differently across the Afro-​Asian world.

Notes 1. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007). 2. While the First World War possessed a global dimension, it was nothing like the Second. See Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York, Penguin Books, 2013), Chapter 3. 3. Nowhere was this better evident than in the international intervention to stop the Chinese Boxer Rebellion (1899–​1901) from getting out of control. 4. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007), 7. 5. For an excellent synthesis of the Japanese expansion into Asia during the Second World War and its co-​prosperity sphere, see Franck Michelin, “La Sphère de coprospérité de la Grande Asie orientale: réflexion sur un régionalisme asiatique”, Relations internationales 168 (2016): 9–​28. 6. Of all the POWs in Asia, Chinese Republican troops had it worst under the Japanese. 7. See, among others, Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ronald Spector, In the Ruins of Empire (New York, Random House, 2005); Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1938–​1945 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–​1945, (London, Penguin Books, 2014); and Stephen MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra Vogel, eds., China at War (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007). 8. Hirofumi suggests that the true number remains unconfirmed. Hayashi Hirofumi, “The Battle of Singapore, the Massacre of Chinese and Understanding of the Issue in Postwar Japan”, The Asia-​Pacific Journal/​Japan Focus 28, no. 4. Accessed 21 April 2015, http://​ japanfocus.org/​-​Hayashi-​Hirofumi/​3187/​article.html. 9. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005), 253–​261.

Global Wars & Decolonization in East and South-East Asia    297 10. David Marr, Vietnam, 1945 (Berkeley, CA,  University of California Press, 1995) and Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution (Jakarta, Equinox Publishing, 2006). 11. Similar things had occurred in German-​occupied Europe, too, including among the French and the Dutch. 12. Christopher Goscha, “Pour une histoire transnationale du communisme asiatique:  les chevauchements sino-​vietnamiens dans les Mers du Sud”, Communismes, (2013): 21–​46; and his “Building Force: Asian Origins of Twentieth-​Century Military Science in Vietnam (1905–​54)”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2003): 535–​560. 13. Spector, In the Ruins of Empire, 26; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars,  5–​6. 14. ‘Instruments for the Surrender of Japan, General Order no. 1, Military and Naval’, Washington, 15 August 1945, in ‘Directive by President Truman to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Power in Japan (MacArthur)’, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States : Diplomatic Papers, 1945, The Far East, China, Volume VII, volume VII, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v07/d390. 15. John Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999). 16. See the excellent chapters on Republican China during the Second World War in Hans van de Ven, Diana Lary, and Stephen MacKinnon, eds., Negotiating China’s Destiny in World War II, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015). 17. Christopher Goscha, “This is the End? The French Settler Community in Saigon and the Fall of Indochina in 1945” (unpublished paper). On Dutch humiliation, see: Anne Foster, “Avoiding the ‘Rank of Denmark’: Dutch Fears about Loss of Empire in Southeast Asia”, in Christopher Goscha and Christian Ostermann, eds., Connecting Histories (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009), 68–​83. 18. Goscha, “This is the End?”. 19. Donald G. Gillin and Charles Etter, “Staying On: Japanese Soldiers and Civilians in China, 1945–​1949”, Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 3 (1983): 497–​518; Takao Fusayama, A Japanese Memoir of Sumatra 1945–​46:  Love and Hatred in the Liberation War (Ithaca, NY, Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1993), 102; and Christopher Goscha, “Belated Asian Allies: The Technical and Military Contributions of Japanese Deserters, (1945–​50)”, in Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Companion to the Vietnam War,  37–​64. 20. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars. 21. Stein Tonnesson, Vietnam 1946: How the War Began (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011). 22. Frédéric Turpin, De Gaulle, les Gaullistes et l’Indochine (Paris, Les Indes Savantes, 2005); and Tonnesson, Vietnam 1946. 23. Christopher Goscha, Un Etat né de la guerre (Paris, Armand Colin, 2011). 24. Christopher Goscha, “Le contexte asiatique de la guerre d’Indochine, 1945–​1954” (Paris, Ecole pratique des Hautes etudes, Sorbonne, 2000), Indochina section. 25. On Mao and Stalin’s attitudes towards Ho, see Christopher Goscha, “Courting Diplomatic Disaster? The Difficult Integration of Vietnam into the Internationalist Communist Movement (1945–​1950)”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1–​2 (2006):  59–​103. For the Indonesian case, see Richard Mason, “Containment and the Challenge of Non-​ Alignment:  The Cold War and US Policy toward Indonesia, 1950–​1952”, and Samuel Crowl, “Indonesia’s Diplomatic Revolution”, both in Goscha and Ostermann, Connecting Histories, 39–​67 and 238–​257, respectively.

298   Christopher Goscha 26. Mark Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2007). 27. On the role played by the Atlantic alliance in creating the Associated State of Vietnam under Bao Dai, see Lawrence, Assuming the Burden. 28. For the international context, see, among others, Laurent Césari, Le problème diplomatique de l’Indochine, 1945–​1957 (Paris,  Les Indes savantes, 2013); Pierre Grosser, “La France et l’Indochine (1953–​1956): Une ‘carte de visite’ en ‘peau de chagrin’ ” (PhD dissertation, Institut d’études politiques Paris, 2002); Mark Thompson, “Defending the Rhine in Asia:  France’s 1951 Reinforcement Debate and French International Ambitions”, French Historical Studies 38, no.  3 (2015):  473; Lawrence Kaplan, “The United States, NATO, and French Indochina”, in Lawrence Kaplan and Denise Artaud, eds., Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-​American Relations, 1954–​1955 (Wilmington, Scholarly Resources, 1990); and Jasmine Aimaq, For Europe or Empire? (PhD dissertation, Lund University, 1994). 29. Goscha, Un Etat né de la guerre. 30. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution (New  York, Oxford University Press, 2002).

Chapter 16

The End of E mpi re in the Mag h re b The Common Heritage and Distinct Destinies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia Sylvie Thénault (Translated by Christopher Mobley)

The Algerian war of independence was the seminal event of the end of the French Empire. This conflict was terribly bloody; its most extreme acts of violence concentrated within Algeria. It also had a profound impact on French society: the long-​term engagement of French troops was socially transformative, the war’s political repercussions were huge, and Metropolitan France became a theatre of the conflict.1 The war even reached the international stage, both coinciding with and contributing to the consolidation of the Non-​Aligned Movement, the widespread emergence of new nations out of the ruins of colonial empires, and the celebration of ‘Revolution’ as a solution for the Third World in search of its future.2 These dramatic impacts explain why Algeria has attracted the attention of researchers to the detriment of the other French North African territories. The bibliography of the Algerian war of independence is sizeable, international in scope, and built on a wide variety of approaches, among them military history, imperial history, the social history of the Arab and Muslim worlds, and international relations. There is a pronounced imbalance in the volume of research produced on Algeria on the one hand versus that generated on Tunisia and Morocco on the other. Hence there is a stark analytical challenge in writing the history of the Maghreb: such history must not be ‘chiefly determined [ . . . ] by Algeria’.3 The sequence of events at the end of empire in North Africa and the subsequent formation of sovereign states lend weight to an approach that pays due attention to the particular histories of the three territories, focusing chiefly on each one’s particularities.4 Hence this chapter compares the specific national features of independence in the Maghreb. However, we must also be careful to avoid the pitfalls of national histories that

300   Sylvie Thénault ignore connections across the Maghreb, as well as potential links across all of North Africa. Thus, this chapter argues that the Maghreb is a relevant scale of analysis, albeit not without some nuances. Granted, this scale is useful to offset the excesses of overly insular national histories, to rebalance a historiography that is overly focused on Algeria, and, in addition, to facilitate comprehension of societies that are interconnected and permeable. This Maghreb level of analysis should not, though, overshadow the national legacies of the former dependencies. Otherwise, we run the risk of confusing social realities that have a common basis but are nevertheless distinct and, even more so, of conflating separate historical trajectories. French North Africa built its territories on the foundations of nineteenth-​century polities: Morocco’s Sharifian Empire (which remained outside the Ottoman Empire), the Regency of Algiers (which did not), and the Tunisian Beylicate (a monarchical regime). We need sometimes to refer back to this pre-​ colonial history in order to understand the three countries’ paths to independence.5 Nationalist movements in all three countries gained decisive strength during the Interwar period. Each of the parties that took power after independence traced their origins to this period. Tunisia’s Neo Destour was founded in 1934 under the direction of Habib Bourguiba. He broke with the more established Destour party, which had drafted an influential nine-​point reform programme for the Tunisian protectorate in the wake of the First World War. In Algeria, the founders of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale—​FLN) emerged from the Algerian People’s Party (Parti du Peuple Algérien—​PPA), which was formed in 1937 following the dissolution of the Étoile Nord-​ Africaine (ENA). Founded a decade earlier in 1926, the ENA had been the first organization to demand full independence. In Morocco, the Istiqlal Party (created in 1944) and the Democratic and Independence Party (PDI, created in 1946) were each descended from the Moroccan Action Committee. In 1934, this Committee had presented a plan for reforms to Morocco’s protectorate, which served as a blueprint for future demands.6 The three societies witnessed the emergence of similar movements, all with inter-​ war origins. In each case the Arabic language and devotion to Islam served as forms of cultural immunization against French colonization. These traits were familiar elsewhere, the Maghreb being in step with the Near East, where the substitution of European domination for Ottoman domination was experienced as depersonalization and, in consequence, was bitterly resisted. A small circle of Maghrebi elites were also inspired by the ‘Young Turks’ movement, albeit at different points: ‘Young Tunisians’ and ‘Young Algerians’ consolidated before the First World War, ‘Young Moroccans’ after it. Lastly, the reformist hopes vested by some throughout the Maghreb in the French left were disappointed. The governments of the late 1930s failed to answer their demands and even paved the way for further repression. With the Second World War looming, nationalist organizations were dissolved, and their leaders arrested or forced into exile. These similarities notwithstanding, the history of each country raises different questions. Defining different phases of colonization in the Moroccan case is problematic, and it hardly makes sense to speak of the ‘end of Empire’. Indeed, in Morocco, the phases of subjugation and nationalist protest were intermingled. There was no decades-​long

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    301 ‘colonial period’ between the two. The Treaty of Fez, establishing the protectorate, was only signed in 1912, and ushered in military campaigns of sustained violence throughout the country—​this was ‘pacification’, at least according to the colonial taxonomy of the day. Framed in this light the Rif War of 1921–​1926 was ambiguous: it was both the peak of resistance to French conquest and a foundational moment for the future affirmation of a sovereign nation. The first nationalist circles coalesced in these years. They converged in 1930 to denounce the Berber dahir. This was a decree that the French Protectorate authorities sponsored aggressively, but which required the Sultan’s signature as a legal instrument, its aim being to officialize the existence of special justice in Berber regions. Denounced as an assault on the Sultan’s juridical prerogatives under Sharia law and thus as an attack on Moroccan cultural integrity, this dahir was annulled, but its effect in catalysing the nationalist movement was electric. In Tunisia, the growth of nationalism was profoundly affected by the dire economic situation of the 1930s. On the one hand, Muslim social movements privileged markers of cultural identity, for instance, protesting against the Eucharistic Congress at Carthage in 1930 and opposing the burial in Muslim cemeteries of naturalized Tunisians who had taken French citizenship in 1932. On the other hand, Tunisian industrial workers mobilized in response to the economic crisis. In 1937–​1938, strikes and demonstrations were put down with lethal force on several occasions. Given this context of embittered industrial relations, nationalist politicians had to address the relationship between their movement and trade union action. Tunisia was thus unique in having a strong tradition of trade unionism traceable to the 1930s and the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), founded in 1946 and headed by Farhat Hached, remained in the vanguard of organized opposition to French rule. Different again, in the Algerian case the issue of labour migration was especially prominent. Indeed, émigré workers played a role that had no equivalent elsewhere—​ notably because they were far more numerous in metropolitan France: around 200,000 Algerians resided in France in 1954, compared to a few thousand Tunisians and approximately ten thousand Moroccans.7 Many of these Algerian immigrant workers became caught up in the war of independence. Moreover, the first separatist organizations, the ENA and the PPA, were founded in France, which lends credence to the idea of a nation formed in exile.8 We need, though, to be cautious: focusing too much on the dynamics of emigration risks neglecting the multiple nationalist currents within Algeria: the ulama attached to Islam and the Arabic language; republicans such as Ferhat Abbas, who were more attentive to the fight for political rights; the Algerian Communist Party (PCA), which sought to broaden its (mostly French) membership by opening up to Algerians. A Algeria’s separatists never recruited in France alone. In the Maghreb, as elsewhere, the Second World War further stimulated aspirations for independence. The reasons are well known: the French defeat, the spread of international principles favourable to the self-​determination of peoples, the loss of imperial credibility as foreign troops (whether Axis or Allied) occupied colonial territory. After long being focused on these political factors, historical approaches have now embraced socio-​economic concerns as well, according greater attention to the suffering of the

302   Sylvie Thénault Maghrebi populations during this period.9 In these rural societies weakened by land dispossession, peasant smallholdings typically produced just enough to survive. With shortages and under-​employment endemic, the excess rural population of the Maghrebi countryside had begun migrating to slum dwellings in the burgeoning shantytowns of Casablanca, Algiers, and Tunis during the depression years. Wartime rationing, plus disruptions to production, supply, and distribution networks made chronic poverty even worse, leading to epidemics and famine. It was little wonder that an unbroken series of demands and struggles followed the war. High political interventions could still be decisive. Morocco’s Sultan Mohammed V played a central role in breaking away from France after endorsing the nationalists of the Istiqlal Party and the PDI in their quest for independence. In 1947, he made a speech in Tangiers calling for reform of the Protectorate as a prelude to independence. He backed up his demands by refusing to sign dahirs into law, effectively paralysing Protectorate governance. The French authorities resorted to a divisive strategy in response, attempting to bring a more compliant substitute, the Pasha of Marrakesh, to power, before deposing Mohammed V on 20 August 1953 and sending him into exile. The Sultan was only restored in November 1955 after the agreements were signed organizing the transition to independence. Moroccan society was a stakeholder in the process. After bloody riots in Casablanca in December 1952, civil unrest persisted alongside more episodic urban terrorism.10 Violence seemed set to escalate with guerrilla units formed in an atmosphere of heightened police and military repression. While there was no war per se, independence was only achieved with considerable bloodshed. The same held true for Tunisia, where mass demonstrations resumed after the Second World War. Led by the UGTT and Neo Destour, these protests were met with repression and loss of life. In 1950 Neo Destour agreed to join the Tunisian government, which presented a schedule of reforms to the French government. This programme was rejected, ushering in a period of extreme tension with armed groups of fellaghas—​literally, ‘bandits’—​mounting a series of attacks against French installations and personnel. The French army tightened its surveillance of the areas where the fellaghas operated, imposing harsh collective punishments against local populations. The murder of Farhat Hached in December 1952 suggested that state violence was spiralling out of control. A shadowy terrorist organisation, La Main Rouge (‘The Red Hand’), claimed responsibility for the union leader’s killing, implicating both the French secret services and other European counter-​terrorism organizations. French premier Pierre Mendès France, who also negotiated France’s final pull-​out from Indochina, eventually cut the Gordian knot in Tunisia. During a visit to Carthage in July 1954 he held talks with Bourguiba and conceded Tunisia’s internal autonomy as the prelude to independence. Morocco and Tunisia each achieved independence in March 1956. If this outcome was partly attributable to the popular pressure harnessed by the nationalist leaderships in both protectorates, the imperatives of French imperial policy were also critical. If the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the loss of French Indochina coaxed Mendès France’s coalition down the road to independence in 1954, the outbreak of rebellion in Algeria lent urgency to the process. This need was even more pressing as Maghrebi societies interacted

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    303 with one another. To cite one crucial example, the Casablanca riots in December 1952 were triggered by a protest against the assassination of Tunisian labour leader Farhat Hached. Likewise, as war took hold of Algeria, concerted attacks were mounted in the east of the country on 20 August 1955 in support of Moroccan demonstrations held to mark the second anniversary of Mohammed V’s deposition. In Algeria, protagonists of armed combat drew powerful lessons from the massacres in north Constantine in 1945.11 The most fervent partisans of insurgent violence broke from the PPA in 1954 to found the FLN and launch a war. Thus began a violent, eight-​year-​long conflict that exhausted Algerian society. Its death toll ran to hundreds of thousands, millions more were forcibly displaced from the countryside, and swathes of the Algerian interior were laid waste. On the ground, the French army almost eradicated the FLN’s maquis (named the Armée de Libération Nationale—​ALN); yet still the FLN triumphed. Much of this was due to the resilience of its OPA (Organisation Politico-​Administrative) networks, which were consistently rebuilt even after being targeted and dismantled by the French security forces. It was the OPA networks that mobilized Algerian society, fuelling he rebellion by rooting the FLN within local communities. The FLN also took its struggle to the international stage. Domestically and globally the movement sapped the determination of successive French governments to defeat it. In 1959, General de Gaulle, first president of France’s Fifth Republic, faced up to the prospect of independence by calling for a referendum on Algerian self-​determination. A protracted negotiation process began, eventually culminating in the Évian Accords signed on 18 March 1962. A final referendum formalizing Algeria’s independence was called for on 1 July. This marked not just the end of a colonial war but of a conflict fought in metropolitan France as well. Algerian immigrants participated in the fight for independence. In cities across France, as in Algeria, supporters of the FLN physically eliminated the Algerian National Movement (Mouvement National Algérien—​MNA), a rival organization that founded by Messali Hadj, formerly the leader of the PPA, who had never accepted the FLN. Factional violence was not, though, confined to intra-​Algerian conflict. Diehard partisans of French Algeria founded the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète), a terroristic paramilitary organization that drew strong support among the settler population in addition to far-​right sympathizers in France. The ends of empire for North Africa’s protectorates and the three Algerian départements were thus profoundly different in course and consequence—​but how much? French historian Charles-​André Julien’s works, which date back to the 1950s but are still frequently cited, assert that the permissible extent of reform was the essential dilemma of decolonization in the Maghreb. Julien had lived in Algeria, then served as an advisor to Léon Blum during the Popular Front before becoming an eminent member of the French Union under the Fourth Republic. He systematically argued in favour of extensive imperial reform. In 1952, he lamented ‘a policy of lost opportunities’—​by delaying internal autonomy for the protectorates and failing to reform the status of Algeria, successive French governments, in Julien’s view, failed either to remain true to their values or to safeguard their own interests.12 Moroccan and Tunisian

304   Sylvie Thénault independence then closed the debate in the protectorates, negotiations eventually triumphing over a policy of confrontation. In Algeria’s case, however, the debate raged on: unlike its two neighbours, was Algeria plunged into war because of the lack of substantial reforms? On this point, the core difference between the three colonies lay in their legal ties to France. French imperial administrations naturally sought to conserve their power but those in the Protectorates enjoyed greater latitude in responding to pressure for change. While the road to Moroccan and Tunisian independence was marked by violence and intense argumentation between local authorities and French governments, the nature of protectorate governance nevertheless lent itself to reform. From a domestic standpoint, a protectorate combined institutions that perpetuated indigenous authority while ensuring the pre-​eminence of French imperial power. Protectorate territories retained their local government structures; their peoples retained their nationality. For Tunisian nationalists, this was ‘co-​sovereignty’, i.e., two states sharing sovereignty, and this sharing could be redefined.13 Tunisian nationalist demands articulated this viewpoint clearly in the aftermath of the First World War:  Tunisians should have greater scope to participate more in managing their country’s affairs, the authority of the Bey and his administration should be extended, creating representative institutions and facilitating Tunisians’ access to positions in the civil service. Each of these claims illustrated the greater leeway made possible by the protectorate status. They were also consistent with the history of the Tunisian Beylicate. Acutely aware of European powers’ growing ambitions after Algiers fell to the French in 1830, Tunisian leaders, notably Ahmad I ibn Mustafa (Bey of Tunis, 1837–​ 1855) and Hayreddin Pasha (Grand Vizier, 1873–​1877), made efforts to modernize the state by means of key structural reforms—​for example, professionalizing the army and drafting a constitution. Although these initiatives did not spare Tunisia from falling under international domination, followed by the establishment of the French protectorate in 1881, they remind us that Tunisian demands in the interwar period were part of a longer historical trajectory, one that lent them greater legitimacy within the country. French rule was even criticized for interrupting a modernization process that militants during the interwar period wanted to resume. The connection between Moroccan nationalist demands in the late colonial period and the country’s earlier history was set apart by the circumstances that precipitated the Treaty of Fez: on the one hand disorder and revolts which threatened the Sultan’s power; on the other hand, the absence of a comparable modernization process to help secure the Sharifian Empire’s survival. Hence the French Protectorate’s stated mission was twofold: to reassert the Sultan’s authority and modernize the makhzen, the state apparatus that underpinned it. Both the Moroccan Action Committee’s 1934 plan for reforms and the Istiqlal Party’s decisive 1944 manifesto harked back to the declared aims of the Treaty of Fez, stressing that its promises of modernization had not been implemented. The nationalists also affirmed their belief in the personal authority of the Sultan, whom they acclaimed to cries of ‘Vive le roi’. They even adopted ‘Investiture Day’, a holiday created by the French authorities to celebrate Mohammed V’s enthronement on 18 November 1927. (Ironically, the young Sultan was originally preferred to his brothers, who were

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    305 supposedly less conciliatory towards the Protectorate administration.) The nationalists switched to calling the sovereign ‘king’ instead of ‘sultan’, a shift that symbolized their desire to transform the Sharifian Empire, a form of statehood that belonged to the past, into a twentieth-​century monarchy. State modernization in Morocco was thus bound up with the Protectorate, something that Daniel Rivet describes unequivocally as a ‘modern state transfusion’.14 Observing the situation from a more sociological perspective, Abdallah Laroui, while accepting the proposition that Moroccan nationalism could trace its origins to the nineteenth century, further concludes that only in the interwar years did Moroccan society develop the social movements capable of propelling a modernisation project forward.15 Regardless of these differences in the historical origins of reformist programmes in Tunisia and Morocco, both protectorates were quite unlike Algeria, which was made up of départements and integrated into the French Republic. Algeria’s administrative ties to France were not only powerfully symbolic, but they were also performative. Cited repeatedly by governments reluctant to countenance fundamental change, Algeria’s constitutional integration with France remained the stock justification of the partisans of French Algeria. The ties binding France to Algeria did not allow for any partial adjustment; they would either continue to exist or be ruptured outright. Any kind of federalism was unimaginable. This explains the firm rejection that greeted Ferhat Abbas’s Algerian Manifesto during the Second World War, the central plank of which was a call for Algeria to have its ‘own constitution’. This inability to rethink the status of Algeria left those like Abbas who were concerned about the denial of Algerians’ political rights with few options. Hence, much of the historical literature depicts Abbas’s personal journey from reformist parliamentarian in France to supporter of the FLN, as representative of an inevitable shift in the Algerian national movement towards its most radical demand—​independence, which, in turn, could only be achieved radically—​through violence.16 In terms of causation, the dominant trend in French historiography has long been to highlight the absence of reform as the cause of the Algerian war, thereby attributing prime responsibility to the settler population as the greatest obstacle to change. Charles-​ Robert Ageron, a student of Charles-​André Julien, who took up his mentor’s mantle to become another highly influential historian of colonial Algeria, exemplified this line of interpretation.17 The reforms considered or adopted (for instance, the 1919 Jonnart Law and the 1944 Ordinance) only conceived of individual access to political rights. They allowed some Algerians to become citizens, based on social criteria (property-​holding and language qualifications, for example) or proven merit (such as administrative service or war veteran status). The vast majority of Algerians remained excluded from such access to citizenship—​and thus to representation. Their voting rights were confined to a second electoral college with limited capacity to influence the direction of colonial government. The absence of broad Algerian representation in institutions, so the argument runs, prevented demands from being expressed peacefully by elected officials. The implication here is that peaceful demands might otherwise have been debated, making Algeria’s eventual decolonization less violent.

306   Sylvie Thénault Known as the theory of ‘lost opportunities’, this viewpoint has been criticized because of its ambiguity: doesn’t regretting the absence of extensive reforms basically amount to regretting the fact that French Algeria was not saved? The argument also suffers from its overemphasis on French policy, which occupies the central place in the unfolding of the story. Little account is taken of the aspirations and social pressures within Algerian society, the actual strength of which is evident in the vibrancy of political and associational activity during the inter-​war period.18 Seen in this light, the critical factor lay in the new ways in which Algerians expressed themselves as a national community. The social movements involved, regardless of their differences, were fundamentally consistent in articulating a distinct Algerian identity that distinguished them from the French. Recent work has tended to emphasize the underlying convergence between different organizations, religious and secular, as well as the networks of connection between their militants.19 We thus confront a very different viewpoint: wider reforms offering greater access to French citizenship were simply not what most Algerians wanted. One piece of evidence: the 1944 Ordinance allowed 65,000 Algerians to register for the first electoral college, but only half of those eligible did so.20 Thus, while we can imagine that reforms might have averted war, it is difficult to argue that they would have averted independence, as implied by the ‘lost opportunities’ thesis. Ambiguous and limited as it may be, the thesis remains useful insofar as it draws attention to Algeria’s French settlers. To recap, the argument holds them primarily responsible for the failure of reforms because of the persistent obstructionism of their chosen representatives. This accusatory stance, which originated among contemporary observers who regretted the turn of events, is no longer appropriate today. From a historical point of view, it treats settler attitudes as somehow remarkable rather than characteristic of broader imperial phenomena. After all, wasn’t the attitude of the French in Algeria similar to that of other colonial minorities attempting to safeguard their supremacy? Wasn’t it unexceptional? That being said, the nature of European settlement of the Algerian colony remains pivotal to understanding its eventual decolonization. Mass settlement made the ties between metropolitan France and Algeria even harder to rethink. Breaking the bonds between the two were complicated by the fact that, uniquely among France’s larger overseas territories, settlers in Algeria were both numerous and influential. A comparison with Tunisia and Morocco is instructive: in the early 1950s, Algerian settlers numbered close to a million, versus slightly more than 250,000 in Morocco and 180,000 in Tunisia.21 The prospect of independence obviously did not raise the same problems in all three cases. Nor did the political influence that Algeria’s settlers enjoyed have any North African equivalent. They had enjoyed representation in Paris since the nineteenth century, electing their own MPs, who often acted in unison on colonial questions. The French of Morocco and Tunisia had no such representation until 1945. Admittedly, the French of Morocco and Tunisia made their presence felt in local institutions, heading active organizations, notably the chambers of commerce. Still, their national influence was more circumscribed. Such was particularly the case in Morocco where colonial policy was strongly influenced by the ideas of General

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    307 Hubert Lyautey, the founder of the protectorate. Lyautey’s guiding principle was to preserve local society, which required the power of settlers to be scaled back. The situation was different in Tunisia, where the French representing the colonial party were dubbed the ‘Preponderants’, a term that reflected their relative weight.22 Even so, they exerted less influence than the settlers in Algeria, who mobilized on a massive scale on several occasions during the war of independence, protesting against those Paris governments they suspected of selling out. In addition to this important political role, Algeria’s colons hogged the leading positions of economic and social influence. Granted, in all three countries, the French (and other Europeans) were predominantly urban dwellers. A high proportion worked in the tertiary sector and belonged to the middle and upper socio-​economic categories. But social stratification was harsher in Algeria, where colonial domination was more total, leaving little place for the consolidation of a local bourgeoisie, whether comprised of merchants, landlords or civil servants. The Algerian middle class remained very small and was substantially confined to those towns and cities outside the coastal belt where settler dominance was greatest. In Morocco and Tunisia, by contrast, the colonial economy and local social structures left greater space for a local bourgeoisie to emerge, a phenomenon that reduced settler influence still further. To sum up, the difference between the decolonization processes in Tunisia and Morocco, on the one hand, and Algeria, on the other, is closely connected to the social and legal configurations of the three territories. For Algeria, a colonial society that included a large French minority and which was bound to Metropolitan France through its configuration into départements, potential changes confronted such enormous obstacles that the reformist approach was blocked. The nationalist movement was pushed to take up arms in consequence. Moreover, the Algerian colonial model always served as a foil in the Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates, where any move towards ‘Algerianization’ was feared, denounced, and rejected. While an analysis of the paths to independence in the Maghreb reveals a distinction between the protectorates and the Algerian colony, it also highlights the interactions between the three societies—​as we have seen, movements in one society could resonate in the others. This situation prompts us to wonder how far the connections went between the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian movements. In addition, how did Maghrebi independence play out on the international stage? The importance of transnational organizations is now well attested by scholars of empire. North Africa’s student diaspora was particularly well suited to building such connections. Given that there were no universities in the protectorates, and the University of Algiers was mainly European in composition, students from the Maghreb assembled in Paris. Their numbers were small, a few dozen Algerians and Tunisians, and only sixteen Moroccans in 1933–​1934.23 But they were united by a common Arab-​Muslim heritage. Reflecting this, the Association of North African Muslim Students (AEMNA), founded in 1927, had a strong cultural and religious focus. In 1930, it led a joint protest against the Berber Dahir in Morocco and the Eucharistic Congress at Carthage, Tunisia, condemning each event as a Christian assault on Muslim and Arab cultural space. Such

308   Sylvie Thénault unity was not to last, the Algerians leaving the AEMNA after a conflict over the issue of naturalization. Indeed, the AEMNA was from the outset dominated by its Moroccan members, led by secretary general Ahmed Balafrej, a future nationalist leader and co-​ founder of the Moroccan Action Committee and, later, the Istiqlal Party. The AEMNA became, de facto, a Moroccan organization after 1945, while the Tunisians and Algerians went on to establish parallel organizations: the General Union of Tunisian Students in 1953 and the General Union of Algerian Muslim Students in 1955. As these developments indicate, national approaches took priority and grew stronger as the struggles for independence gathered momentum. Cairo-​based Maghrebi organizations followed the same national trajectory after 1945, their rivalries tending to grow stronger rather than weaker over time. As the seat of the Arab League (founded in 1944), the Egyptian capital attracted nationalists fleeing colonial repression and drawn by ideas of pan-​Arab solidarity. Cairo became the hub of transnational activism in the Arab world. Its prominence also highlighted a structural division within the Arab world, whose Eastern territories predominated, convinced of their linguistic and religious authenticity, while the Maghrebi West was assumed to have more adulterated forms of Arabic and Islam. At a more practical level, Egyptian political milieux exerted a strong attraction on those Maghrebi militants most dedicated to Arabo-​Islamism, many of whom contributed to the various movements’ internal debates. While all such movements recognized Arabic and Islam as founding elements of the collective identities of their societies, they ascribed differing importance to Islam and Arabism within the future nations they imagined. Anyway, representatives of Morocco’s Istiqlal Party, Algeria’s PPA, and Tunisia’s Neo Destour in Cairo formed an Arab Bureau of the Maghreb in 1947, its purpose being to coordinate their actions. In the following year Abdelkrim, emblematic hero of Morocco’s Rif War, published a Manifesto founding a North African Liberation Committee. Still the differences mattered. Divergences of opinion and inter-​personal conflicts dampened the effectiveness of these organizations. Friction between Abdelkrim and Habib Bourguiba, who lived in Cairo for four years after the Second World War, was particularly acute.24 Perhaps, though, the Algerian war of independence best illustrates the tension between Maghrebi solidarity and national interests. After securing independence in 1956, Morocco and Tunisia offered the FLN vital refuge and support that helped sustain the Algerian nationalist struggle. The FLN executive based itself in Tunis when not in Cairo, unable to operate inside Algeria where the nationalist movement’s leaders and cadres were always priority targets for the French security forces. Military recruits to the ALN also trained in Morocco and Tunisia, where the future People’s National Army of Independent Algeria was formed, outside the country’s borders. Lastly, tens of thousands of civilian refugees fled to the two neighbouring countries. Just as the Moroccan and Tunisian governments lent support to the FLN, so their societies were effectively immersed in the Algerian war effort.25 For all that, sources of discord remained, not least border conflicts, which exposed the notion of Maghreb unity as wishful thinking. The insurrection launched by the FLN in November 1954 coincided with a North African

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    309 declaration of unity in the fight against France. The declaration proved febrile. Tunisia had just secured Mendès France’s promise of internal autonomy, but Morocco had not; Mohammed V was still in exile. This would change in the year ahead. As a result, the FLN regretted the two protectorates’ march towards independence, which left it alone in its fight against the French authorities. At the same time, anxiety persisted within Morocco and Tunisia over the repercussions of the Algerian war on their territories. Not only did the presence of large numbers of Algerians create major humanitarian and security problems, but the FLN’s bitter internal conflicts spilled over into plots and assassinations conducted within both countries. Prominent Algerians also lent their support to leading opposition figures. For instance, Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the FLN’s nine historical leaders, lent his backing to Habib Bourguiba’s radical adversary, Salah Ben Youssef. None of this was enough to dent the underlying Moroccan and Tunisian solidarity with the FLN. The depth of French annoyance provoked international incidents on at least two occasions. In October 1956, in a clear breach of Moroccan sovereign rights, French military aircraft intercepted and diverted an airplane carrying four senior FLN leaders. And in February 1958, the Tunisian border village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, a safe haven for ALN fighters crossing the nearby land frontier, was bombarded with heavy loss of civilian life. Despite these crisis, the leaders of the new regimes in Rabat and Tunis, Mohammed V and Habib Bourguiba, sought to build peaceful relations with the former colonial power in order to foster their countries’ development. The two heads of state therefore tried to dampen FLN militancy. This was precisely their objective at the 1958 Tangiers Conference, which brought together representatives of all three countries and reasserted Maghrebi unity. Their basic sympathy for the cause of Algerian independence notwithstanding, the Moroccan and Tunisian governments pressed the FLN leadership to take its partners’ interests into consideration. This plea fell on deaf ears, and the FLN executive refused to sacrifice the Algerian cause. Alongside the interconnections between Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, each country also occupied different socio-​cultural spaces shaped by a host of economic, historical, geo-​political, and ideological factors particular to each one. Tunisia had strong historical and cultural affiliations with Italy and Libya. Italy’s North African ambitions had embraced Tunisia from the nineteenth century to Mussolini’s 1930s expansionism. The relationship between Tunisian nationalists and France’s European rival were ambiguous. Italy was in a position to encourage the nationalists, but to serve its own ambitions rather than the cause of Tunisian emancipation. Moreover, the Tunisians were very attentive to events in Libya. After the First World War, Tunisia welcomed Libyan refugees, some of whom were organizing against the Italian conquest.26 Then, after the Second World War, these groups drew succour from the United Nations General Assembly resolution in favour of Libyan independence (in 1949), followed by actual independence in 1951. Alluding to Libya, regarded by many Tunisians as a less-​developed country, Bourguiba made a famous statement to the press: ‘Formerly colonised peoples, some of whom have not achieved our level of civilisation, have regained their sovereignty and independence’.27 However, this focus on changes in Libya, where the British supported the

310   Sylvie Thénault concept of trusteeship, came with no illusions that either London or Washington were about to lend support to the Neo Destour cause.28 Of the three countries, Algeria’s independence process garnered the most international attention. Libya played a prominent role here, too, acting as a support base and ‘brother country’. Nasser’s Egypt, as the champion of pan-​Arabism, was a more influential backer, providing the Algerians with crucial financial and military aid. More broadly, other Arab and Muslim states, members of the Non-​Aligned Movement, and some Eastern Bloc countries, as well as Communist China and Cuba, expressed support for the FLN whether for reasons of cultural affiliation or ideological solidarity. The magnitude of this internationalization was to some degree contingent on the war’s length and severity. Morocco and Tunisia had much more limited needs. Each brought their struggle to the United Nations, which in 1952 adopted resolutions that symbolically recognized the right of the Moroccan and Tunisian peoples to self-​government. By way of concluding this section, it is worth noting that the internationalization of Maghrebi independence did not involve the USSR (none of the separatist parties was communist), nor did it focus substantially on the West. While the Allies kindled Maghrebi nationalist hopes during the Second World War, these were soon disappointed afterwards. Contacts made in the US and the UK did not prove especially fruitful. Granted, during the Algerian war of independence, successive French governments complained of a lack of support from their Anglo-​Saxon partners, and rejected all mediation proposals (particularly those propounded by Eisenhower’s administration in 1958) as an unwarranted interference in French domestic affairs. These points notwithstanding, the Algerians did not receive any decisive aid from either Britain or the United States; nor did the Moroccans or Tunisians. Having examined the transnational and international dimensions of the independence processes in the three countries, let us now move beyond the Maghrebi scale of analysis to look at the specific features of each country. In the three newly independent countries, development policies sought to correct the most blatant inequities of colonization. All three suffered from deficits in educational provision and industrialization. Each had to modernize their agricultural sectors, partly in an effort to drive down rural unemployment. French managerial employees, most of whom left at independence, needed to be replaced, and problems of underinvestment were worsened by the flight of French capital that accompanied decolonization. Because official statistics were not recorded in the same way, we lack the data necessary to make a rigorous comparison between the three countries. Moreover, those researchers who have cited such statistics sometimes provide conflicting figures. However, the available indicators do converge on one point: Algeria was in many respects in the toughest position. It suffered from the sharpest deficit in education, its agricultural workers laboured on the smallest farms, and it was the most weakened by outflows of managerial staff and capital. Nevertheless, Algeria did enjoy other decisive assets for the future, thanks to its hydrocarbon deposits and level of industrialization. Algeria’s gas and oil would prove far more profitable than Morocco and Tunisia’s phosphate resources. Algeria’s late colonial wave of industrialization began with the Constantine Plan, launched in 1958 at the height of the war. By 1963, the first full year of independence,

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    311 the industrial sector represented 40% of Algerian GDP as against an aggregate 26% in Tunisia and Morocco, each of which had been independent for seven years. Measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, Morocco’s industrial sector remained flat in subsequent years. Following its decision to develop tourism, Tunisia’s service sector grew rapidly, representing nearly 50% of Tunisian GDP in 1963.29 From the standpoint of state-​building, the two protectorates benefited from the fact that local administration survived throughout the colonial period. Whether opting to perpetuate these administrative forms or to reform them, the independent states benefited from a legacy that Algeria, as a former settler colony, lacked. Algeria was desperately short of qualified civil servants because of the longstanding colonial discrimination against Algerians. Until 1944, most positions in the public sector had been reserved for French citizens. Subsequent ‘Muslim promotion’ policies failed to remedy matters. This situation left the country’s early FLN rulers with little choice. Although Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene denounced the ‘neo-​colonialism’ of the 1962 Evian Accords that ended the war and called for cooperation with the former colonial power, neither could govern entirely without French support. Each endeavoured to bring in volunteers from more diverse origins to assuage the looming threat of dependency. Volunteers were recruited in countries that supported the ‘Revolution’: the Arab world and favoured socialist client countries, Cuba and Yugoslavia prominent among them. In the protectorates, by contrast, the civil service was made up of equal numbers of French and locals even before independence: in Morocco, around 24,000 French and 24,000 Moroccans; in Tunisia, around 10,000 French and 10,000 Tunisians by the early 1950s. This broad equivalence resulted from a sharp increase in the indigenization of recruitment in answer to reformist pressure. It bears emphasis, though, that Moroccan civil servants were largely confined to subordinate roles: only 3% filled category A posts (the highest French civil service rank), as against 36% of Tunisian bureaucrats in category A posts on the eve of independence.30 Here, Morocco paid the price for its school system, which was much less advanced than that of Tunisia. The Moroccan school system developed later and to a more limited degree, notably because General Lyautey, as the Moroccan protectorate’s first governor, insisted that customary practices be respected. Ostensibly non-​interventionist, this approach led to a conservative policy, restricting funding for schools that might have offered young Moroccans greater access to advanced education. Tunisia also benefited from an institution that was unique in the Maghreb: Sadiki College. Created on the eve of colonization in 1875 during the reign of the reformist Grand Vizier Hayreddin Pasha, Sadiki College produced students throughout the colonial period who went on to hold managerial positions. This specific feature also impacted on Tunisia’s nationalist movement, which was driven by a highly educated elite who found themselves unable to secure advancement under the protectorate. Denied equal opportunities with their French counterparts, graduates of Sadiki College were major stakeholders in all the nationalist organizations in Tunisia.31 In more general terms, Tunisian nationalism had a strong professional bias, its leadership cadres including large numbers of graduates—​especially law graduates—​who faced

312   Sylvie Thénault pro-​European discrimination even stronger than within the administrative service.32 By comparison, the Moroccan elite that produced nationalist organizers and members of the post-​independence government was more marked by Quranic schools, from primary school to Al Quaraouiyine University.33 The white-​collar complexion of Tunisian nationalism was equally evident in a characteristic of post-​independence Tunisia: the ‘forced march towards the modern state’.34 The status of women illustrates the point, independence heralding the proscription of polygamy and the male right to marital repudiation. These reforms formed part of a broader revamp of law, administration, and state institutions. They not only grew out of the elite’s education under colonization, but were also inspired by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. While Habib Bourguiba’s regime followed the Turkish precedent in becoming a Republic rather than a constitutional monarchy, the Tunisian president also based his policy on a renewed islamic law. As Bourguiba’s break with the Beylicate indicates, Tunisia’s sovereigns, unlike Mohammed V in Morocco, had not embodied the nation as it moved towards independence. (The sole exception was Muhammad Al Munsif Bay during the Second World War.) In practice, the infant Tunisian Republic was authoritarian. Sentenced to death, Salah Ben Youssef, Bourguiba’s historical adversary, was forced into exile where he was later assassinated. Neo Destour, meanwhile, extended its grip over Tunisia’s administrative apparatus moving towards a one-​party  state. By contrast, the march to independence in Morocco bound the Sultan and the Istiqlal Party together. The PDI was quickly and violently cast aside. Mohammed V inherited the French Residency’s security services, which he turned over to his son, the future Hassan II. Thus, the Palace became the centre of power. After falling out of favour, the left wing of the Istiqlal Party was eventually eliminated, and disorders in the Sahara and the Rif were vigorously suppressed by the military. After Mohammed V’s death in 1961, his son privileged the security forces even more, attaching greatest priority to domestic stability, an alliance with the West, and economic and social conservatism.35 These trajectories have forged diverging representations of the two countries. Recent terrorist attacks notwithstanding, Tunisia evokes the image of an open, calm society—​ wrongly so, according to Jocelyne Dakhlia, who emphasizes the complexity and diversity of Tunisian society beyond the social base that Bourguiba consolidated after independence.36 Conversely, Morocco stands as the Maghreb’s ‘conservatory’. Not just because it took in the refugees of the legendary al-​Andalus, but also because it remained outside Ottoman domination. In this vein, French historical approaches to Morocco frequently propose analyses focused on the conflict between ‘archaic local traditions’ and ‘modernity’ imported from the West, despite all the interpretational problems raised by such a dichotomous view of history.37 The depiction of Algeria is entirely different, albeit similarly clichéd. After more than a century of colonization and a harsh war of independence, the civil war of the 1990s gave rise to a narrative emphasizing the country’s history as one of constant violence. This narrative, tinged with fatalism, obscures the alternative routes that Algeria could have taken. It understates the resources

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    313 of Algerian society—​a rich diversity that was visible during the interwar period in particular, when a wide variety of dynamic political organizations and civil society associations flourished. The disappearance of this pluralism was related to the political monopoly established by the FLN during the war of independence. Although their origins lay within the PPA, the FLN’s founders called on all other pro-​nationalist activists to join them. To some degree, this call resonated—​the FLN, after all, eventually attracted Abbas and his followers, and it was endorsed by the ulama, and even by Algerian communists on an individual basis. But the movement’s desire for exclusivity endured after winning independence. For the FLN leadership, it was axiomatic that the unanimity established during the war, when it was necessary to close ranks and unite, should continue to prevail. This rhetoric belied the factionalism and sectional interests within the Algerian nationalist movement, which became more evident after independence. Thus, the former ulama exerted a powerful influence over educational policy and Arabization, whereas industrial policy owed a good deal to those trained by the French workers’ movement, notably the CGT.38 Aside from this forced unanimity, the nature of the war had a profound impact in shaping post-​independence Algeria. From a sociological standpoint, repression had decimated the nationalists, favouring the rapid promotion of new recruits. Because colonial discrimination had been so marked, few among the FLN’s senior cadres, including the country’s future rulers, had attended secondary school; fewer still had attended university. Most heralded from the wealthiest segments of rural society, for example, civil servants or merchants.39 Even more significant was the war’s role in ensuring the primacy of the military. In July 1962, the FLN’s highly trained and well-​equipped recruits stationed in Morocco and Tunisia re-​entered Algeria. Led by Colonel Boumediene, an ally of Ben Bella, these troops seized control after a civil war that had lasted throughout the summer. Lacking a solid administrative apparatus, the army became the backbone of Algerian state power for decades to come.40 Finally, the greater length and depth of French domination in Algeria prompted an inward turn as Algeria refocused on the twin cultural markers of Arabic and Islam. The 1963 Constitution stipulated that these ‘have been the effective forces of resistance against the attempt by the colonial regime to depersonalise the Algerians’.41 The legal consequences were substantial. Apart from the fact that Algerian nationality is defined by Muslim personal status, family law is less favourable towards women because women’s liberation is disdained as a Western influence. In linguistic terms, the Berber minorities have been oppressed, and the fight for recognition of their cultural singularities has become bound up with the fight for democracy. The place reserved for Islam and the Arabic language in the new nations is instructive, at once emblematic of their common Maghrebi roots and their singularities. In the Moroccan constitution, the state is ‘Muslim’ and Arabic is the ‘official’ language. Given the sizeable community of Berber speakers (much larger than in the other two countries), Arabic cannot be declared the national language. Tunisia’s post-​independence constitution, meanwhile, followed a weaker formulation, stating simply that Arabic and Islam are the language and the religion of the country.

314   Sylvie Thénault Attempting to write a comparative history of the Maghrebi region calls forth three observations. Firstly, it attests to the strong national differences between the three territories examined here. At one level, these differences result from the forms of colonization experienced, whether as protectorates or départements. Algeria stands apart on every measure. At another level, these differences also reflect discrete colonial policies; to take but one example, General Lyautey’s defining approach to Moroccan governance had a significant impact on its development as a protectorate. Lastly, the nation-​specific history of each former dependency shaped the path it took. This is especially obvious when considering the past of the Tunisian Beylicate as an administrative regime facing both westwards to the Maghreb and to the Ottoman and Arab east. Paradoxically, while the Maghrebi scale of reference encourages us to adopt a transnational approach to the history of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, it also returns us to the national framework. We are forced to recognize the limited connections between the movements of the three colonies seeking to free themselves from French domination. Similarly, each country shaped its own area of reference and distinct ties of solidarity outside its borders. These differences logically come to the fore when we try to understand the independence processes from the political standpoint. Conversely—​and this positive note is quite important—​the Maghrebi scale of analysis comes into its own when reviewing the region’s economic and social history. It is, in fact, most relevant on this level, enabling us to highlight the three countries’ shared foundations and offering a sort of common denominator that we can use to analyse the obvious differences between them. To conclude, we must not forget that a comparison with other regions under European domination strengthens the idea that the Maghreb has shared a common destiny. Framing the ends of empire in this broader perspective, decolonization in this region of North West Africa emerges as quite distinct from the equivalent processes in other regions, notably the Middle East and sub-​Saharan Africa.

Notes 1. For a summary, see:  Martin Evans, Algeria:  France’s Undeclared War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013); Sylvie Thénault, Histoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (Paris:  Flammarion, 2012). On the war’s impact on French society:  Raphaëlle Branche and Sylvie Thénault, eds., La France en guerre 1954–​1962: Expériences métropolitaines de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2008). 2. Gilbert Meynier explores this in depth in his monumental Histoire intérieure du FLN (Paris: Fayard, 2002). See also Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution. Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. M’hamed Oualdi, “Des ‘enfants du pays par adoption’: les mamelouks des gouverneurs de la province ottomane de Tunis et le désenclavement des cadres historiographiques nationaux,” in Ecritures historiennes du Maghreb et du Machrek. Approches critiques, Nourreddine Amara, Candice Raymond, Jihane Sfeir, eds., (Naqd: Hors-​Série, 2014), 142. 4. For an investigation of the colonial/​national analytical frameworks: Hélène Blais, Claire Fredj and Sylvie Thénault, “Désenclaver l’histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 63, no. 2 (2016): 7–​13.

The End of Empire in the Maghreb    315 5. Alain Messaoudi and Martin Thomas were kind enough to read this chapter and to provide their expert advice. Jim House also contributed valuable help regarding Morocco, a country that he knows very well. I am very grateful to all three for their help. 6. See books that provide general views of the three countries. See Daniel Rivet, Le Maroc de Lyautey à Mohammed V.  Le double visage du protectorat (Paris:  Denoel, 1999). For Tunisia: Jean-​François Martin, Histoire de la Tunisie contemporaine, De Ferry à Bourguiba, 1881–​1956 (Paris:  Harmattan, 2003), or for a closer look at Tunisian research:  Ahmed Kassab and Ahmed Ounaïes, Histoire générale de la Tunisie, vol. IV (1881–​1956) (Tunis: Sud Éditions, 2010). On Algeria: Abderrahmane Bouchene, Jean-​Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari-​Tengour and Sylvie Thénault, eds., Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (Paris/​ Algiers: La Découverte/​Barzakh, 2012). 7. On emigration:  Emmanuel Blanchard, La Police parisienne et les Algériens (1944–​1962) (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2011); Anne-​Sophie Bruno, Les chemins de la mobilité. Migrants de Tunisie et marché du travail parisien depuis 1956 (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2010); Elkbir Atouf, Aux origines historiques de l’immigration marocaine en France 1910–​1963 (Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2009). 8. Rabah Aissaoui, Immigration and national identity. North African political movements in colonial and postcolonial France (London/​New York: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009). 9. See Martin Thomas, “Resource War, Civil War, Rights War: Factoring Empire into French North Africa’s Second World War,” War in History, 18, no. 2 (2011): 225–​248. 10. Jim House, “L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale?,” Genèses, no. 86, (January 2012): 78–​103, http://​www.cairn.info/​revue-​geneses-​2012-​1-​page-​78.htm. 11. For a summary: Jean-​Pierre Peyroulou, Setif and Guelma (May 1945), Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, [online], published on 26 March 2008, accessed 31 March 2015, http://​ www.massviolence.org/​Setif-​and-​Guelma-​May-​1945. 12. In the conclusion of his book L’Afrique du nord en marche (Paris, 1952). This book has been republished several times, most recently in 2002. 13. Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule. Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–​1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 14. Rivet, Le Maroc, 131. 15. Abdallah Laroui, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain, 1830–​1912 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1980). 16. For a fresh look at Abbas’s itinerary, see Malika Rahal’s thesis, L’Union démocratique du Manifeste algérien (1946–​1956). Histoire d’un parti politique. L’autre nationalisme algérien (Paris, 2007). 17. See Charles-​ Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. II:  1871–​ 1954 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979). Charles-​André Julien wrote the first volume of this work, published in 1964, covering the years 1830–​1871. 18. On associations, see Omar Carlier’s research, notably: ‘Médina et modernité: l’émergence d’une société civile “musulmane” à Alger à l’Entre-​deux-​guerres’, in Chantiers et défis de la recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain, ed. Pierre-​Robert Baduel (Paris/​Tunis: Karthala, 2009), 199–​227. 19. See Julien Fromage’s thesis:  Innovation politique et mobilisation de masse en ‘situation coloniale’: un ‘printemps algérien’ des années 1930?: l’expérience de la Fédération des Élus Musulmans du Département de Constantine (Paris, 2014); as well as that of Claire Marynower: Être socialiste dans l’Algérie coloniale, pratiques, cultures et identités d’un milieu partisan dans le département d’Oran, 1919–​1939 (Paris, 2013).

316   Sylvie Thénault 20. Ageron, Histoire, 602. 21. See Kamel Kateb, Européens, ‘indigènes’ et juifs en Algérie (1830–​1962), Représentations et réalités des populations (Paris: INED, 2001); Martin, Histoire de la Tunisie contemporaine; Ladislav Cerych, Européens et Marocains 1930–​ 1956. Sociologie d’une décolonisation (Bruges: De Tempel, 1964). 22. See David Lambert, Notables des colonies, une élite de circonstance en Tunisie et au Maroc (1881–​1939) (Rennes: PU Rennes, 2009). 23. Pierre Vermeren, La formation des élites marocaines et tunisiennes, Des nationalistes aux islamistes, 1920–​2000 (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2002), 83; Guy Pervillé, Les étudiants algériens de l’université française 1880–​1962 (Paris: CNRS, 1984), 21. 24. Samya el Mechat, Tunisie, les chemins vers l’indépendance (1945–​1956) (Paris: Harmattan, 1992). 25. Gilbert Meynier provides the most complete panorama of the relations between the three Maghrebi countries during the war of independence, as well as the internationalization of this conflict, in Histoire intérieure du FLN. This is the reference for this entire section. 26. On Libya and Tunisia, refer also to Juliette Bessis’s research, which is older and reflects a historiography that has not been renewed. See in particular: Maghreb, questions d’histoire (Paris: Harmattan, 2003) and La Libye contemporaine (Paris: Harmattan, 1986). 27. Martin, Histoire de la Tunisie contemporaine, 221. 28. During his long stay in Cairo, Bourguiba had been disappointed by the contacts he had made with British officials posted in Egypt, see:  El Mechat, Tunisie, les chemins vers l’indépendance. 29. This data is drawn from René Gallissot, L’économie de l’Afrique du nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978). 30. Vermeren, La formation des élites marocaines et tunisiennes, 190–​191. 31. Noureddine Sraïeb, Enseignement et nationalism:  Le collège Sadiki de Tunis, 1875–​1956 (Tunis: Alif, 1995). 32. The legal profession is a perfect example:  Éric Gobe, Les avocats en Tunisie de la colonisation à la révolution (1883–​ 2011). Sociohistoire d’une profession politique (Tunis/​ Paris: Karthala, 2013). 33. Vermeren, La formation des élites marocaines et tunisiennes. 34. To borrow the title of the first chapter of the second volume of Souhayr Belhassen and Sophie Bessis, Bourguiba (Paris: Jeune Afrique, 1989). 35. Pierre Vermeren, Histoire du Maroc depuis l’indépendance (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). 36. Jocelyne Dakhlia, Tunisie, le pays sans bruit (Paris: Actes Sud, 2011). 37. See in particular Daniel Rivet, Histoire du Maroc (Paris: Fayard, 2012). 38. René Gallissot, La République française et les indigènes, Algérie colonisée, Algérie algérienne (1870–​1962) (Paris: Editions de l'Atelier, 2006), 262–​263. 39. In addition to René Gallissot’s conclusion in La République française et les indigènes, see Gilbert Meynier’s sociology in Histoire intérieure du FLN. 40. On this topic see Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN. 41. Jean-​Philippe Bras, “La langue cause nationale au Maghreb,” in Trames de langues, usages et métissages linguistiques dans l’histoire du Maghreb, ed. Jocelyne Dakhlia (Paris: IRMC, 2004), 545–​561.

Chapter 17

Dec ol oniz at i on i n Tropical A fri c a Frederick Cooper

The end of empire in Africa was not a moment, a sharp separation of a post-​colonial era from a colonial period, but a process, a prolonged time of uncertainty, when African activists and a changing global context pressured colonial regimes to modify their strategies, giving rise to new rounds of claim-​making and mobilizing, and new forms of confrontation. The objectives of political activists in Africa were not limited to creating independent states, each the expression of a particular national sentiment. Some sought a pan-​African nation embracing oppressed people of colour wherever they lived; others thought they could transform colonial rule into a Euro-​African community stripped of inequality and exploitation. Instead of seeing a stolid colonialism leaving determinant ‘legacies’ to today’s Africa divided into nation-​states, we should recall the possibilities, the hopes, the struggles, and the disappointments that Africans experienced along the way. This chapter explores alternative routes out of empire.

The Transformation that Wasn’t: World War I and the Continuities of Empire World War I is sometimes seen as a blow against empire and the advent of a world of self-​determining nation-​states, but only if history is read backwards. The empires of the losers were dismantled, but pieces were distributed to the winners. Japan’s plea for a statement condemning racism in the post-​war settlement was turned down. A Pan-​ African Congress took place in the shadow of the Paris Peace Conference, and it articulated a compelling case for imperial reform, but the world powers ignored it. In Africa, the claims of soldiers to have paid the ‘blood tax’—​military service—​to France or Britain, which entitled them to the respect and rights of the citizen, were pushed back.

318   Frederick Cooper Indeed, both France and Britain articulated more explicitly than ever their ideas that Africans were immersed in their ‘tribal’ cultures and the wise colonial ruler would only slowly allow them to progress within the frameworks of their own cultures.1 The League of Nations provided a forum to, at times, examine the conduct of colonial powers, but it left judgement to those powers themselves. Rule over German colonies in Africa was mandated, under League supervision, to Britain, France, Belgium, and South Africa, which in effect added another element to a varied repertoire of imperial rule, alongside colonies, protectorates, dominions, and spheres of influence. The League, in the end, underscored the normality of colonial empire even while suggesting that there were international standards which colonial powers should meet.2 The depression of the 1930s deepened the involuted nature of colonial regimes: policies of ‘imperial preference’ kept, as far as possible, economic activities within the framework of empire. The social disruption of declining exports and declining employment could be sloughed off onto a countryside that could be deemed backward rather than impoverished, and in any case, was less visible than cities.3 Then, in the late 1930s, when recovering production created new social strains with­ out measures to relieve them, waves of strikes broke out in parts of the British empire, engulfing entire mine towns in the British Copperbelt, railroads in the Gold Coast and ports in Kenya, Tanganyika, and elsewhere. An even bigger wave struck the British West Indies. The confluence of strikes and riots in the former plantation colonies and in the parts of Africa most integrated into a wage economy led top officials in London to realize that by ‘tribalizing’ Africans they had deprived themselves of the means to think about and act on social problems in labour and in urban life that were emerging as empire-​ wide issues. The illusion that Africans lived in tribal cages and could be pushed back into them whenever authority was challenged began to fall apart as people migrated, entered new economic positions in cities and mines, and at times developed long-​distance connections to other people who in their own ways were confronting imperial authority elsewhere in the empires. The British at last accepted, in the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, the need to use metropolitan resources to restore social peace and provide minimally acceptable social services to vulnerable areas. In France, the Popular Front government flirted briefly with the possibility of extending some of the social legislation it had introduced at home to the colonies, but pulled back as administrators and business interests insisted that Africans were not ready for any such initiative. When the leftist government fell in 1938, even its tentative efforts to abolish or reduce the use of forced labour fell by the wayside.4

Empire Challenged World War II shook empire more profoundly than the previous conflagration. Africans contributed their bodies and their labour, for which they received little. British Africans served in Burma and elsewhere, while closer to home the social situation became tense.

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    319 Faced with new waves of strikes in colonial cities, railways, and mines, British officials lost the initiative as concessions led to further demands. Of France’s African possessions, French West Africa stood by the regime (Vichy) that was collaborating with the Nazis, while a small band loyal to France’s republican traditions and General Charles de Gaulle—including one of the few high-​ranking men of colour in the colonial service, Félix Eboué—took the other side and mobilized soldiers and labourers (including by compulsion) to fight for the Free French against Germany and Italy.5 The strike wave hit French Africa shortly after the war ended, beginning in Dakar in a form that seemed both like a mass urban movement—​with daily meetings at a sports field and boycotts of European stores—​and an industrial action led by relatively well-​ organized trade unions. France by 1946 followed the British lead by creating a fund for social and economic development, partly funded by the metropolitan taxpayer, hoping to regain the initiative. The international context had also changed. All the European powers, winners as well as losers in the war, were facing economic catastrophe; their economic and military capacity to hold onto their empires by force was doubtful. At the same time, they no longer needed to worry about an imperial rival gaining control of overseas resources. The former imperial giants had to sell commodities from their empires, and the United States was eagerly buying many of them. The tenuousness of empire’s grip was first evident in Southeast Asia. France’s loss of Indochina and the Netherlands’ of Indonesia to the Japanese during the war created a vacuum after the Japanese defeat, into which the revolutionary movements of Sukarno and Ho Chi Minh moved immediately. These rich territories had in effect to be recolonized, and neither power was able to do so in the face of developing movements for independence. India, meanwhile, achieved a negotiated decolonization in 1947.6 Such revolutions marked alternatives of which both colonial rulers and political leaders in Africa were aware. At the same time, colonial ideologies became less convincing in metropoles as well as in the colonies, as Nazism and the war discredited the smug self-​ confidence that many in Europe once had in the naturalness of white man’s rule. France and Britain initially reacted to threats and losses in Asia by looking more to Africa. As an official in Britain’s Colonial Office put it ‘Africa is now the core of our colonial position; the only continental space from which we can still hope to draw reserves of economic and military strength.’7 French thinking was similar: African colonies were vital to reconstituting the imperial economy. Reconciling Europe’s need for African resources—​greater than ever—​with the political necessity of putting a progressive face on imperial systems created an opening for African political and social movements to make demands. For France and Britain, the development idea seemed to offer an answer: an influx of capital and knowledge, improved infrastructure, European industrial and agricultural techniques, and better services would both increase output and raise Africans’ standard of living. Portugal and Belgium, in different ways, tried to join the development bandwagon without making political concessions.8 South Africa was buffeted by some of the same emancipatory winds as the rest of Africa—​and one can see parallels in the labour and

320   Frederick Cooper political movements there and in colonial Africa in the years after the war—​but especially after the 1948 elections its government took a different direction. Policies encouraging aggressive economic development were combined with draconian policing of African activities, tighter control over land, and careful control over movement between country and city. Although drawing on older systems of control—​pass laws, urban segregation—​the strategy had a new name, apartheid, and a new rigour.9 One of the effects of tightly controlling those Africans working in mines, cities, and industries was to add to the burden on the strictly limited land resources of the reserves—​later called Bantustans—​accelerating rural impoverishment and the growth of a population that had secure access to neither food nor jobs. Particularly in French and British colonies, it was becoming increasingly difficult in the 1940s and 1950s, for political as well as economic reasons, to treat colonized people as passive subjects. If they were to remain in the imperial polity, the basis of their belonging would have to be taken seriously: as active contributors to economic development, as people with legitimate interests in raising their standard of living and levels of education, and as participants in political institutions. The colonial powers would try to contain this dynamic in different ways. Belgium and Portugal went the furthest in repressing political activity. South Africa faced opposition movements with a considerable history—​the African National Congress (ANC) dates to 1912—​renewed by a militant Youth League after the war and a growing spirit of defiance. It would try to contain political movements while maintaining a facade of rule of law until 1960, when it banned opposition movements.10 France, meanwhile, sought to direct political action towards an imperial level by allowing a small number of representatives, elected on a limited franchise, to become members of the body writing a new constitution for the post-​war French republic, and then in the National Assembly. Britain, characteristically, did not allow colonial representatives to sit in its Parliament in London, but first tried to give educated Africans a bigger role in local government and then accepted that they would have to play a bigger role in legislative institutions within each colonial territory. Those openings would expand quickly via African political movements.11 But there was something schizophrenic about post-​war French colonialism—​at times integrative, capable of calm debate with African or Asian political activists, at times brutally violent against an entire category of people perceived to be a collective threat. Africans could sit in the French legislature, and African labour unions could organize, strike, and claim equal pay and benefits for equal work. At the same time, anything that fell in the category of ‘insurrection’ received the full colonial treatment. The repressive arm swung into action in the violent repression of a demonstration of returning soldiers at Thiaroye in Senegal in 1944, of a demonstration in Sétif, Algeria, in1945, and with particularly bloody effects in putting down a serious rebellion revolt in Madagascar in 1947. In the war in Vietnam of 1946–​1954 and the Algerian war of 1954–​1962, French forces used collective terror. The British would employ a similar excess of violence—​and would revert to a fiction of African savagery—​in putting down the revolt known as Mau Mau in Kenya beginning in 1952.12

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    321

Mobilization and African Society Africans were coming to the post-​war conjuncture from multiple directions. In the interwar period, some Africans had tried to make chiefdoms more influential; urban migrants strove to strengthen their communities of origin; and leaders in rural areas attempted to combat spiritual threats to the health of local communities.13 Christian or Muslim movements crossed cultural boundaries. Pan-​Africanists, from the Americas as well as Africa, came together from 1900 to 1945 in a series of conferences that brought out the injustices of colonial rule and demands for the global liberation of people of colour. Political parties before the war were largely elite affairs, notable for the connections they made, especially in the British case, among African capitals and between them and London. The circuits of elites sometimes included stops in Moscow. The biggest difficulty for such political leaders was making connections with popular classes in cities and the peoples of the countryside. The Garvey movement, led by the West Indian-​born Marcus Garvey, did more than any to capture the imagination of urban workers, especially seamen and dockers, but only in South Africa did it get much out of port cities.14 All this changed after the war. While formally organized political parties were not the only locus of political mobilization, they were crucial to this effort at bringing together different modes of protest, crossing the line between literate elites and peasants and workers. In Nigeria and the Gold Coast, older, elite organizations turned into mass parties, not simply enrolling individuals, but linking networks and organizations. In French Africa, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), organized in 1946, was notable for grouping political parties in individual territories into a party acting on the level of French Africa as a whole.15 The holding of elections fed attempts to mobilize whatever social ties politicians could draw upon. In Nigeria, the Gold Coast, or Senegal, teachers, civil servants, and wage workers already constituted a base upon which to build. In French Equatorial Africa, the weakness of colonial education efforts and the fragmented nature of colonial society meant that politics created its own social base: the first generation of politicians competing in the post-​war elections used patronage resources to build clienteles.16 Since such vertical ties tended to link politicians with people to whom they had a regional or ethnic tie, electoral politics in French Equatorial Africa fostered an ethnicizing logic. Two political dynamics were emblematic of the possibilities in the late 1940s. In the Gold Coast, the United Gold Coast Convention, led by the lawyer J. B. Danquah was demanding an increasing legislative role, via petitions and other protests. When Kwame Nkrumah, educated at a historically black college in the United States and working for pan-​Africanist organizations in London, rejoined his native Gold Coast, the party took an increasingly militant direction. But the key change occurred in 1948 when a series of protests against price gouging by European trading companies led to a boycott movement in Accra. Then, a march by ex-​soldiers angered at the lack of jobs and services on

322   Frederick Cooper their return from war was fired upon by colonial forces, resulting in fatalities and then riots. The UGCC tried to capture British fears of mass disorder by suggesting that only it could exercise control over the masses and that Africans in the police and civil service would not necessarily do the colonial regime’s dirty work. The offer was not appreciated, and Danquah, Nkrumah, and others were detained. But the government realized it had to co-​opt a moderate African leadership as well as address the social problems that lay behind the political unrest it was trying to contain. The moderate Africans it could get to cooperate all insisted upon moves towards representative government, presumably to be run by men like themselves. The British were not in a position to refuse, but Nkrumah used the opening he had to create a new and more militant party and appeal to workers, urban youth, and others whose attachments to ‘traditional’ authority had for some time been eroding. The British attempt to find the mythical moderate by electoral means ended up in Nkrumah’s party winning an election in 1951 (at a time when Nkrumah was again imprisoned). The government was trapped; the costs of blocking the Gold Coast’s road to self-​rule were more than the British government was willing to pay. It had to reimagine the militant Nkrumah as the moderate it had been seeking. Nkrumah became a kind of junior prime minister. Complicating the route towards full self-​government was the movement among Asante that drew on some of similar rhetoric of national identification as Nkrumah was using for the Gold Coast, but now focused on the Asante people.17 Nkrumah prevailed against this movement and led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957, upon which it renamed itself after an ancient African empire, Ghana. Nkrumah proved better able to contain dissident movements—from organized labour, cocoa farmers, Asante, and others—than the colonial government had been. In French Africa, political mobilization aimed more at Paris. Campaigning among the small number of ‘subjects’—who lacked the rights of the French citizen—allowed to vote in the 1945 elections for the legislature and constitution-​writing body, African candidates made the generalization of citizenship to all inhabitants of the empire their main platform. Elected in Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor reminded his fellow deputies of the time in 1793–​1794 when the new French Republic, out of a pragmatic need for unity in the face of reaction and foreign invasion of its Caribbean colonies as much as revolutionary principle, abolished slavery and made slaves into citizens, only to have Napoleon reestablish slavery in 1802. Slaves, for the second time, became citizens in 1848, but since then, Senghor asserted, progress in ‘ethnology’ gave recognition to Arab, Indian, Chinese, and African civilizations; France now had to accept that people could be citizens in different ways. After a brief walkout drove home the point that a new constitution would lack legitimacy without meeting the minimum demands of overseas politicians, the assembly agreed to abolish the status of subject, extend the ‘quality’ of the citizen to overseas inhabitants, and permit the overseas citizens to exercise such rights without coming under the French civil code in matters of marriage and inheritance.18 Citizenship is above all a claim-​making construct and French Africans in trade unions, veterans’ associations, and farmers’ organizations sought to obtain social and economic as well as political equality. They met much frustration especially in demands

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    323 for effective political institutions outside of a minority role in the National Assembly, for universal suffrage, for the end of reserved seats for white settlers, and for real power for assemblies in each territory. At first, the only significant political party in sub-​Saharan French Africa that favoured immediate independence was the Union des Populations du Cameroon, and while it was making strong efforts to find international allies, notably through its position as a trust territory that put French rule under a modicum of United Nations supervision, it had trouble moving beyond its regional base within Cameroon. France was able to marginalize the party, driving it underground and into an unwinnable guerilla insurrection.19 But in Côte d’Ivoire, where the French government had earlier tried to push out the leading political party, the RDA, it found its opponent too deeply rooted in too much of the country and had to reach a compromise in 1950, calling off the repression in exchange for the RDA’s breaking off its legislative alliance (largely a marriage of convenience) with the French Communist Party. From student and youth associations came more radical calls for independence and economic transformation, but it was only in 1957 that activists constituted a party making such demands, the Parti Africain de l’Indépendance, whose impact was more notable for articulating a radical alternative to the more reformist major parties than for electoral success.20 The spirit of claim making—​by workers for equal wages to those of workers from Europe, by war veterans for equal pensions, by students for equal access to educational opportunity, by farmers for a fair share of the world market price for their crops—​ trapped Britain and France in a spiral of demands. The demands were both for political rights and for economic and social progress, for which the ultimate reference point was the standard of living of the colonizing societies themselves.21 From the late 1940s, leaders in British Africa were pushing the envelope on territorial politics–​demanding internal self-​government and then independence. In French Africa, leaders like Senghor were turning the empire-​wide framework into a demand that was radical in a different way: for making the administrative unit of French West Africa into a federation of territories, with a federal parliament and a federal executive, while turning the French empire into a confederation, that is, a union of autonomous states choosing to stay together for mutual benefit. Only at the end of the 1950s did party leaders in French West Africa begin to talk seriously about joining Ghana and other newly independent countries in seeking recognition as sovereign entities. Even then, such aspirations were part of a spectrum of opinion about how to transform the unequal structures of empire into some form of layered sovereignty, in which Africans could both exercise power at home and retain a voice in a multinational francophone confederation. Even earlier, in the early 1950s, officials in France and Great Britain were complaining about the results of the development drive—​that heavy public expenditure was failing to produce private investment, that the inadequate infrastructure was choking on the new supplies coming in, that the lack of trained personnel and the strength of African trade unions in ports, mines, and railways was driving up labour costs, and that African societies were being stubbornly resistant to the new-​found colonial aspirations to change

324   Frederick Cooper the way they produced and lived. In fact, this was the great era of expansion of exports—​ copper, cocoa, coffee—​from Africa, the most impressive of the colonial era. But the dynamism of African economies was more chaotic and conflictual than the Eurocentric image of development, which is what officials had in mind. The development project did not do the political work expected of it: development efforts created more new points of conflict than it resolved. When white or black farmers used land more intensely, they cracked down on tenants—​a major cause of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Even the success stories of the era—​prosperous West African cocoa farmers or operators of transportation fleets—​used their gains to challenge European-​owned firms or to support political activity critical of colonial rule. It was the social demands, at least as much as the political ones, that forced the governments of France and Britain to rethink the implications of colonial empire. By 1956 or 1957, both governments and elements of the press were doing something they had not done before: coldly calculating the costs and benefits of empire. The two governments began to think about extricating themselves. But not immediately and not completely.22 In French Africa, the government tried to distance itself from social demands by conceding in 1956 power over most internal affairs to governments elected under universal suffrage, which would take responsibility for the budget, including the salaries of civil servants. African politicians welcomed the authority and the granting of their long demand for universal suffrage, but Senghor in particular realized the price—​what he called after an earlier imperial breakup the ‘balkanization’ of Africa. His hope for creating a federation of francophone African territories (and potentially of all African territories) now had to confront the fact that real power, with real resources and patronage possibilities, was being conferred on territorial governments that might be loathe to give it up to an African federation. Senghor, Sékou Touré of Guinea, and others persisted in their efforts at forging African unity within what they called a ‘Franco-​African Community,’ but others, notably Félix Houphouët-​Boigny of the Côte d’Ivoire favoured the Franco-​ African Community but opposed the African federation as an ‘onerous’ relay between the territories and France. As the dispute dragged on, the political parties—​the RDA in several instances, territorial parties in others—​entrenched themselves within the territorial power structures.23 Since 1951, British Africa had had the model of Nkrumah’s Gold Coast as a partially self-​governing entity, and since 1957 Ghana’s independence provided an even more impressive model. In the early 1950s, the British government conceded a degree of self-​ government to the three regions into which Nigeria had been divided, with the British keeping the central government to themselves. Especially in the southern regions, with substantial educated classes and experience in political activism at the local level, political parties organized themselves to compete for powers. In each region, elites from the majority ethnic group—​Igbo in the National Congress of Nigeria and the Cameroons, Yoruba in the Action Group, and Hausa-​Fulani in the Northern People’s Congress—​ were in a strong position, leaving minorities on the margins or seeking support from the lead party of another region. British officials were aware of the patronage politics and tensions in the regions, but by 1957, they had realized that there was no going back. As

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    325 the governor noted, ‘Inevitably the people are going to be disillusioned, but it is better than they should be disillusioned as a result of the failure of their own people than that they should be disillusioned as a result of our actions.’24 Nigeria became independent in 1960. British officials were even more pessimistic about the capacity of East African colonies for independence, but the dangers of resisting it loomed larger, and the best hope was for a positive post-​independence relationship with former British colonies; Tanganyika became independent in 1961, Uganda in 1962. In Kenya, the Mau Mau revolt had been brutally suppressed by the late 1950s, but officials in London realized that there was no future in hitching British interests to those of the white settlers who had sought at all costs to keep Africans out of power. The hope, as earlier in the Gold Coast, was that a ‘moderate’ wing of the Kenya African National Union would split from the ‘men of violence and of communist contact.’25 Britain realized it had to negotiate with the only African politicians who had the stature to enforce an independence bargain, principally Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya. Kenya became independent in 1963, and Kenyatta, newly released from detention, was transformed in the eyes of British officials from violent rebel to the great hope for peace and progress. Those hopes were not unfounded, for Kenyatta’s own efforts to solidify his position as an ‘elder’ deserving the respect of his fellow Kikuyu and to foster the interests of his closest followers made him a strong supporter of property rights and a positive business climate. The poor of Kenya, including those who had joined the Mau Mau rebellion, did not fare so well.26 In Central Africa, the British government had hoped to create its own version of federalism, bringing together Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland to create a larger unit to allow for economic planning and to fend off possible South African machinations with the white settlers. But the African political parties in all three colonies correctly assumed that such a plan would enhance the power of the white settlers of Southern Rhodesia over the entire region. Their fight against the federation was, at one level, successful, and led to the independence of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland as Zambia and Malawi. But in the remaining Rhodesia, Britain had already conceded a degree of self-​government to the white settlers who, finding themselves unable to defend white domination in the imperial terms with which they were familiar, began to defend it in national terms. A government elected by whites put forth the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, over the ineffectual objections of Britain. With African political movements driven out, there ensued an ugly civil war in which Rhodesia tried to defend itself as a bastion of civilization and economic dynamism, which proved unsustainable at home and abroad. Only in 1979 did majority rule prevail.27 African politicians had built their power bases within territories defined by the colonial powers. These boundaries and the institutions of state provided the basis for negotiated decolonization, marginalizing other kinds of affinities and aspirations. Pan-​ Africanism faded as a political focus as Africans found they could gain concrete benefits by a focus on the territory in the British case or on French or African federalism in the French case. When, after Ghana’s independence, Kwame Nkrumah proposed to give up some of eagerly sought sovereignty to create with other African territories a United

326   Frederick Cooper States of Africa, he did not get takers. Post-​colonial Pan-​Africanism would be a Pan-​ Africanism of states, not of a people, and when the Organization of African Unity eventually came into being it was more a mutual protection society of heads of state than a more radical expression of a common African destiny. Belgian, Portuguese, and Spanish Africa were going off in different directions. The Belgians did practically nothing until 1959 to prepare a route towards greater African voice in politics, let alone independence, with disastrous consequences when violent conflict broke out and Belgium, in a near-​panic, decided it had to follow a path towards independence that others had pioneered and prepared, but it had not. Portugal and Spain were at the time run by dictators at home, and the idea the denial of African political voice was not an anomaly. But in Africa, independence was contagious, and with Portugal stonewalling, guerrilla movements developed in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau over the course of the 1960s (as described in Norrie MacQueen’s chapter in this volume). The safe zones that newly independent neighbours provided was an asset that hard-​ pressed guerrilla movements needed but, despite the fears of the US and NATO of the leftist guerrilla movements, the international context was putting Portugal out on a limb. In 1974, the Portuguese army rebelled against its thankless and morally compromising task, throwing the fascist government in Portugal out of power and leading to a negotiated independence. The large majority of European Portuguese in Africa went to Portugal—​a place some of them had never seen. Africa had helped to liberate Portugal, which became more of an ordinary ‘European’ country, focused on its own national reformist projects and on its connections to other European states. But the experience of armed struggle did not unite former colonies in Lusophone Africa. Angola and Mozambique plunged into vicious civil wars, aided by the machinations of South Africa and the US, but reflecting as well the inability of leftist governments to develop policies that did not appear to many citizens to come from above and serve the interests of a narrow elite.28 In international circles, decolonization created new norms, with countries like India that had gained independence early on making use of the United Nations and other world fora to chip away at the normality of colonial empire.29 Part of the post-war thinking about development eased the imaginative transition: development (unlike civilization) was a universal possibility, so that European elites might expect that Africans would follow a path that would keep them in close relationship to Europe. But there was an element of cynicism too: a desire that African governments, not European ones, take the responsibility for complications. Political movements in mandated territories like Cameroon or Tanganyika got access to international fora even before independence, and as more countries left empires, those states added a collective voice to anti-​colonial politics, expressed at the Bandung conference of 1955.30 Meanwhile, the US and the USSR tried to capture the ‘development’ ideal for themselves, and sought allies among the newly independent to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist or communist models. For a time, such processes gave elites in anti-​colonial or post-​colonial polities room to maneuver: to assert a predominantly

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    327 national interest in the development process and seek to balance old colonial powers and new world actors against each other. It was a sign of a developing new international order that when, in 1956, Britain, France, and Israel attempted to invade Egypt in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the US pulled the rug out from under them. Fearing that such heavy-​handed actions would only drive Egypt and other independent countries into the Soviet Bloc, the US made clear that there would be adverse financial consequences if the invaders pursued their action. Humiliated, they withdrew. Similar consideration marked American attitudes towards French actions in Algeria. Although in Vietnam, the US in effect took over the French position as a bastion against Ho Chi Minh’s brand of communism, in Algeria the Americans decided that the revolution led by the Front de Libération Nationale was more nationalist than communist, and it did not want the defense of a dying colonialism to get in the way of its primary goal of containing communism. France’s defeat in Algeria in 1962 was more a political than a military one, but it was decisive nonetheless. Although France had considered Algeria to be an integral part of the French Republic, it now had to reimagine Algeria as a colonial situation in order that it could decolonize itself. French elites after 1962 sought to extricate themselves not only from empire but from the memory of empire, refocusing itself on a national imaginary projected backward in time.31 A world ended in April 1994 as black South Africans in great numbers lined up to vote for the first time in their lives. The final phases of a long and often violent struggle for liberation consisted of negotiations, elections, and an agreement that majority rule would not end the civil and political rights of a white minority or result in their loss of property. South Africa, with more resources and a bigger white population than settler colonies, ultimately succumbed to the difficulty of maintaining white domination in one country. Colonial empire had functioned, for a very long time, as an interempire endeavor, a nearly global phenomenon justified by the claims of otherwise rival European elites to authority and entitlement over diverse peoples and vast spaces.32 As that web of economic, social, and ideological connection unravelled, the last holdouts could not endure.

A World of Nations? The world was coming to consist of juridically equivalent nation-​states. But the spread of the national idea has not brought about an equal world. In some cases, just as Senghor warned, the territorial bounded nation-​state has become the site of a zero-​sum struggle of ruling elites to maintain the most important asset in a context where resources are limited: sovereignty. Senghor himself fell—or leapt—into the trap he warned against, for in 1962, feeling his political base threatened by the reforms his long-​time comrade and Prime Minister, Mamadou Dia, was pushing, dismissed Dia, put him in prison, and

328   Frederick Cooper dismantled the multi-​party electoral regime that he had helped develop in the period 1945–​1960. Would the layered sovereignty he had previously advocated have provided checks on this all-​or-​nothing politics? Perhaps. But we do know that similar tendencies towards treating power as something too valuable to let go has kept leaders in power and marginalized opposition politics in many instances. Omar Bongo ruled Gabon for 40 years before he was succeeded by his son. Félix Houphouet-​Boigny ruled Côte d’Ivoire for 33  years until his death; Senghor voluntarily ceded power, but not until 20 years after Senegal’s independence. New rulers feared the very multiplicity of social mobilizations that had challenged colonial rule and taken them to power. Ghana cracked down on the labour movement that had been so important to the militant politics of the Gold Coast in the late 1940s, and it so effectively went after the resources (and potential for political action) of the cocoa farmers who had been the source of the region’s prosperity that cocoa farmers ceased to renew their trees and the industry went into decline in the period before Nkrumah’s fall from power in 1966. Where resources were greater, the temptation for elites to maintain exclusive control of them was acute—​what some call the resource curse. This curse was particularly virulent in oil producers like Nigeria and Angola, for oil production, unlike export agriculture or mining, requires little labour, narrowing the distribution of wealth. African states followed their colonial predecessors as gatekeepers, with shallow control over most of society and economy, concentrated on the juncture between the national and world economies where export and import taxes and foreign aid could be collected, and where deals with multinational corporations could be made. But the incentives to take over the gate were high, too, and African states were brittle, tenacious in some sense, but vulnerable to challenges in another.33 Angola was a particularly vivid example:  a state controlling oil revenue combatting a guerrilla movement that controlled diamond smuggling; a conflict that went on for many years until the state side emerged victorious in 2002. African states feared as well most forms of regionalism, often referred to as ‘tribalism.’ Nkrumah’s crackdown on Asante, and Milton Obote’s on Buganda were cases in point; Robert Mugabe would later do the same to Ndebele. But the secession disputes in Nigeria-​Biafra, Congo-​Katanga, Ethiopia-​Eritrea, and Sudan-​South Sudan suggested that the dangers were real enough, and worsened by the very state policies intended to preserve the facade of a unified state. But states were rarely so unified, and the question was whether they had the will and the imagination to address the diversity that the concept of the territorial nation-​state obscured. One approach was to multiply the subunits, so that no one or no simple combination of two or three could aspire to a dominant position; this was the strategy of General Gowan at the end of the Biafran war. It was, however, at a considerable cost in the distribution of patronage resources, of which Nigeria had more than other African states, and at the expense of confronting the more general problems of transparent and equitable governance in the face of rampant inequalities at local, national, and global levels. Federalist structures remain difficult to achieve and unpredictable in their consequences; unitary states remain brittle.

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    329 South Africa had, over the years, developed a much more robust form of capitalism—​ with manufacturing and large-​scale agriculture as well as mining—​and it had and has the potential of moving in quite a different direction than other African states. To a significant extent, it transformed the racial composition of the top of society, and a black middle class emerged as well. But the poor remain almost entirely black and extremely numerous. South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. The division of South Africa into large-​scale capital and a class dependent on wage labour has been a source of its economic dynamism, but also of precariousness, for rural communities lack the capacity to provide a backup for people who cannot find wage labour.34 South Africa has now had a series of relatively fairly run elections since the monumental events of 1994, but it is not clear that its future is likely to be either egalitarian or democratic.

Conclusion The end of colonial empire, which developed out of local and global political struggles, redefined the meaning of sovereignty worldwide. Decolonization did not end social or political inequality or the uneven power to determine the categories in which politics is discussed. It would be a mistake either to see ‘colonialism’ as a phenomenon that could be turned off like a television set—​with all problems instantly turned into ‘African’ responsibilities—​or to define a colonial ‘legacy’ that determined Africa’s fate. It is important to keep in mind the political dynamics that ended up creating an Africa of brittle gatekeeper states. But one should remember as well the many futures that Africans since the 1940s imagined and the many forms in which mobilization took place. In less than two decades after World War II, colonial empires went from an ordinary fact of political life to the embodiment of illegitimate power, and the idea that Africans could rule themselves went from inconceivable to ordinary. This rapid reversal hopefully tells us as much about Africa’s future as about its past.

Notes 1. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment:  Self-​determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2007); Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize:  The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–​1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 2. For the new wave of scholarship on the League, see Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

330   Frederick Cooper 3. Moses Ochonu, Colonial meltdown Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). Jacques Marseille has argued that French businesses made the most of their privileged access to French-​ruled territories during downturns in the economy. Empire colonial et capitalisme français: histoire d’un divorce, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005). 4. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5. Eric Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6. See the chapters by Christopher Goscha and Bart Luttikhuis in this volume. 7. Frederick Pedler, Minute, 1 November 1946, CO 847/​35/​47234/​1/​1947, British National Archives, Kew. 8. Miguel Bandeira Jeronimo and Antonio Costa Pinto, eds., “International Dimensions of Portuguese Late Colonialism and Decolonization,” Portuguese Studies 29, 29 (Cambridge:  Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013); David van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garrett (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). 9. Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel, eds., Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–​1962 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993). How to compare patterns of change in South Africa and the rest of the continent remains a subject of divergent views. For two of them see Frederick Cooper, ‘A Parting of the Ways: Colonial Africa and South Africa, 1946–​48,’ African Studies 65 (2006):  27–​43, and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1996). 10. Pioneering texts on post-​war South African politics are Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London:  Longman, 1983); and Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa:  The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1979). For newer scholarship, see Robert Ross, Anne Mager, and Bill Nasson, eds. The Cambridge History of South Africa:  Volume 2, 1885–​1994 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011); Tom Lodge, Sharpeville:  an apartheid massacre and its consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–​1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). A narrative from an important point of view is Nelson Mandela, No Easy Walk to Freedom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990). 11. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–​1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); John Darwin, The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12. Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie 1954–​ 1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War and the End of Empire (New York: Norton, 2005). 13. Particularly interesting accounts of thinking about politics, religion, and society in Africa include Derek Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival:  a History of Dissent, c. 1935 to 1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 14. New scholarship on radical pan-​Africanism is emerging. See, for example, Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–​1939 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2011). On Garvey, see the momumental set of papers edited by Robert Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 12 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

Decolonization in Tropical Africa    331 15. This transition from elite to mass parties was widely recognized by the first generation of political scientists to do serious research in Africa. See, for example, Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1957); James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958); Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, 1946–​1960 (London:  Oxford University Press, 1964); Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French Speaking West Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). Aristide Zolberg added an important addendum: the parties were less mass organizations in the Leninist sense than machines that worked through brokers to aggregate different sorts of political collectivities, whose common point was grievances with colonial rule. But his emphasis, too, is on the connection, even if brokered, of leaders to an increasing portion of the rural and urban population. Creating Political Order: The Party States of West Africa (Chicago: Rand-​McNally, 1966). 16. Florence Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique Centrale:  Congo-​ Brazzaville, Gabon: 1940–​1965 (Paris: Karthala, 1996). 17. Jean Marie Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 18. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation. 19. Achille Mbembe, La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-​Cameroun: Histoires d’indisciplines (1920–​1960) (Paris:  Karthala, 1993); Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence:  Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Bujilding in Cameroon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). 20. The pioneering work of Morgenthau (Political Parties in French West Africa) is being complemented by new research including Elisabeth Fink’s study of elections in French West Africa, “Elections and the Politics of Mobilization: Voting in French West Africa, 1944–​ 1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2015. 21. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society. 22. Frederick Cooper, ‘Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,’ in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge, eds. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 64–​92. 23. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation. 24. Governor to Thomas Lloyd, Colonial Office, 6 August 1955, CO 554/​1181, British National Archives. 25. Memorandum for the Cabinet by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, ‘Kenya,’ C (62)22, 6 February 1962, CAB 129/​108, and 12th Cabinet Conclusions CC (62), 8 February 1962, CAB 128/​36, British National Archives. For more on Kenya, see Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale Unhappy Valley:  Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book Two:  Violence and Ethnicity (Athens:  Ohio University Press, 1992), and Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. 26. Daniel Branch, Kenya between Hope and Despair, 1963–​2012 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 27. Norma Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerilla War:  Peasant Voices (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1992); Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2015); Terence Ranger, “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30 (2004): 215–​234.

332   Frederick Cooper 28. For different views of independence struggles and their aftermath in Portuguese Africa, see Allen and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique:  from colonialism to revolution, 1900–​1982 (Boulder:  Westview, 1983); Michel Cahen, Mozambique, la révolution implosée (Paris: Harmattan, 2000); and Christiane Messiant and Michel Cahen, L’Angola postcolonial (Paris:  Karthala, 2008). See also Roger Southall, Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2013). 29. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010). 30. There is a lot of myth-​making surrounding Bandung, nicely punctured by Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-​ doong),” Humanity (Summer 2013): 261–​288. See also Christopher Lee, ed., Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Aftermaths (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 31. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization:  The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2006); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:  Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli:  la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1998). 32. Ryan Irwin, Gordian Knot:  Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 33. I have elaborated the notion of the gatekeeper state in my Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002). On post-​independence Africa, see also Jean-​François Bayart, The State in Africa:  The Politics of the Belly, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:  Polity Press, 2009), and Paul Nugent, Africa Since Independence (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 34. Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass, Class, race, and inequality in South Africa (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2005); Franco Barchiesi, Precarious liberation workers, the state, and contested social citizenship in postapartheid South Africa (Albany:  SUNY Press, 2011).

Chapter 18

T he Caribbea n i n a n Internationa l a nd Regional C ont e xt Revolution, Neo-Colonialism, and Diaspora Spencer Mawby

On 1 January 1804, Jean-​Jacques Dessalines inaugurated a new era in imperial history by declaring Saint-​Domingue independent of France. The obvious precedent for the creation of the new state of Haiti was the establishment of the United States during a successful rebellion against European control thirty years earlier but, unlike George Washington, Dessalines commanded an army of former black slaves. What Dessalines and his predecessor, Toussaint L’Ouverture, had proven was that African subjects of empire could liberate themselves. When, two centuries later, on 10 September 2004, the people of the Caribbean island of Bonaire were asked whether they wished to sever their political ties to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, only twenty-​seven of them voted in favour of independence. Bonaire has approximately 10,000 registered voters, but the paltry pro-​independence showing was later replicated when the other islands of the Dutch Caribbean empire, including Saba, Curacao, and Sint Eustatius, were consulted about their constitutional future. After the ballots were counted, the federal system of the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved and new constitutions were devised which enabled the Dutch state to exert greater control over its Caribbean patrimony.1 The different historical trajectories of Haiti and the Netherlands Antilles illustrate the singular place occupied by the Caribbean in the history of decolonization. The region is the historic location of the first independent black republic, which was established following a decade of revolutionary warfare, but it is also the place where some credits are still found in the colonial accounts of the purportedly bankrupt European imperial powers.

334   Spencer Mawby When the Trinidadian political theorist and literary critic C. L. R. James turned to the subject of Caribbean history, he chose the rebellion on Saint-​Domingue as a heroic example of the revolutionary potential of an oppressed class. The resulting book, The Black Jacobins, has cast a long shadow over Caribbean scholarship, to which we will return.2 Although James’s polemical tone and his emphasis on the importance of political leadership in mobilizing the purportedly inert slave class makes the book a product of its time, in other respects The Black Jacobins anticipates more recent historiographical trends. In particular, James’s emphasis on the transmission of revolutionary ideas across frontiers and continents and the operations of capital beyond the purview of the imperial state foreshadows contemporary themes in global history. Historical and geographical circumstances have been particularly significant in determining the dramatic impact which globalization has had in the Caribbean. On the one hand, the destruction of indigenous culture during the process of colonization made it impossible for local people, whose ancestors came from Africa and Europe, to draw on a tradition of pre-​modern Caribbean autarchy in resisting global processes. In terms of demography, ecology, culture, and politics, the modern Caribbean is rooted in a hybrid or creole past. This is significant because many theorists have identified the local as the antithesis of the global and parochial sentiment as a key motive for resistance to globalization.3 The destruction of the indigenous Caribbean society and the repopulation of the islands in the aftermath of the European conquests made the notion of a Black Atlantic diaspora a feature of Caribbean life in the colonial period, and Caribbean anticolonialism had a similarly globalist orientation. In geographical terms, the smallness of the islands has precluded economic autarchy. The move beyond subsistence production required engagement with the wider world, but the persistent feature of economic transactions beyond the region has been their unequal character. The precedent for the transfer of value out of the region was set during the era of the slave trade, but the general pattern of exogenous capital investment obtaining high yields on the basis of cheap endogenous labour continues into the present as is evident from the debate about neo-​colonialism in the modern service sector. Whereas James was a materialist, more recent transnational studies of Caribbean history, such as recent books by Putnam on music, Dillon Brown on literature, and Merrell on travel, have focused attention on cultural and ideological developments.4 This foregrounding of the role of non-​political agents from the Caribbean, including itinerant intellectuals, writers, and artists, has generated a much clearer sense of the pervasiveness of anticolonial sentiment at the end of empire; however, the focus on cultural vitality and intellectual engagement has also tended to push the productive activities of Caribbean workers to the historiographical margins. The moment may be ripe for some measure of consilience between a broadly conceived labour history, traditional political accounts, and revisionist cultural history. Plantation agriculture, tourism, and record distribution and publishing are areas of economic activity with particular resonance in the late imperial history of the Caribbean and they provide useful reference points for a project of historiographical synthesis. Before exploring arguments about the economic aspects of the end of empire in the context of debates about neo-​colonialism and analysing the anticolonial character of diasporic culture, it seems appropriate to begin with an account of revolution and constitutional change in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    335

Revolutions and Constitutional Change For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Caribbean territories formed an archipelago of political dependency situated a short distance from a vast American continent of independent states. The anticolonial revolutions against British rule in North America and Spanish rule in South America encompassed some, but not the majority, of island territories stretched in an arc from Florida to Venezuela. As Higman has emphasized, geography has determined much of the region’s history. Long coastlines and a relatively small landmass rendered the islands vulnerable to European military forces both at the moment of conquest and during subsequent periods of popular anticolonial dissent.5 There is a close correspondence between the size of an island and the time at which it became independent. The two largest islands, Hispaniola and Cuba, obtained political independence in the nineteenth century; the latter divided between two new states, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most of the smaller territories had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century for the completion of the decolonization process. The smallest territories of all retained their constitutional links with the European imperial powers into the twenty-​first century. The Caribbean is also a historical theatre in which is witnessed the decrepitude of the European empires and the emergence of the United States as a vigorous new regional power. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba were liberated from colonial control at moments of French and Spanish weakness, but the later superintending role of Washington ensured that their nominal independence was attenuated. From the Spanish-​American war over Cuba in 1898, through to the armed occupations by American marines in the early twentieth century, and on to the American invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Caribbean people appear prey to the rise and fall of the great world powers. But such geopolitical determinism risks replicating a longstanding historiographical tradition, which has robbed the Caribbean people of agency as historical actors who, first, played a decisive role in securing their own liberation and then went on to make a contribution to the global history of anticolonialism. This counter-​tradition of thinking about Caribbean decolonization was given its original and liveliest rendition in The Black Jacobins, in which James suggested that the revolution on Saint-​Domingue ought to occupy a special place in the history of the global struggle against imperialism. James saw the black slaves and, in particular, their leader Toussaint L’Ouverture as avatars of progress in a universal history. By demanding that the democratic and egalitarian principles of the American and French revolutions be extended to them, the Haitian slave class were responsible for a decisive break in the history of western political supremacy. It was their rebellion that set the precedent for a global challenge to European dominion by the former black subjects of empire. This global insurrection was still incomplete when James’s book was published in 1938.6 In 2004, the bicentenary of Haitian independence, Laurent Dubois published Avengers of the New World, which narrated the complex events of the revolution within the context

336   Spencer Mawby of an emerging Atlantic tradition of republican rebellion. What distinguished the revolutionaries of Saint-​Domingue from those in France and the US was that they were black slaves, rather than white slave-​owners, and it is this fact that enables Dubois to assign them a seminal role in the evolution of a universal system of human rights.7 Dubois’s book was not an isolated scholarly achievement but rather took place amidst what Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall has described as ‘an explosion of Anglophone scholarship on Haiti, sparked by the rise of Atlantic history and the new World history, as well as by interest in the history of race, colonialism and migration.’8 Reflecting on this flourishing of scholarship about revolutionary and post-​ revolutionary Haiti, two points are worth registering, although they pull in slightly different directions. One is that the liveliness of current academic debates about the Haitian revolution ought not obscure the significance of its earlier emasculation by North American and European historians. This was the argument forcefully made by Michel-​Rolph Trouillot two decades ago when he noted that contemporaneous attempts to silence or trivialize the significance of the rebellion on Saint-​Domingue had been replicated in modern scholarship and enabled the bicentenary of the French revolution to be stripped of its colonial baggage.9 Yet, identifying the Haitian revolution as a decisive moment in a global history of democracy and human rights risks occlusions of its own. There is an overt tendency towards teleological thinking in the Jamesian tradition of interpretation, which extends from scholars like Dubois, who are interested in the revolution’s global ramifications, to those more specifically concerned with the trajectories of Haitian history, such as Robert Fatton, Jr and Philippe Girard, who, while reaching different conclusions, both trace the problems of early twenty-​first-​century Haiti back to the violence of the revolutionary era.10 When history points towards the global future the parochial past may be overlooked. In Haiti’s case, it is necessary to acknowledge that, before the revolution, the insurrectionists had undertaken specific kinds of work on sugar plantations. Cultivating and harvesting sugar cane is notoriously punishing work. Owing to the propensity of the cane to rot, processing must begin in factories located near the fields of production. What emerged in Haiti and elsewhere was a plantation system in which European investors reordered Caribbean agrarian production away from food crops and towards sugar production by slaves for export. In Saint-​Domingue, the transformation was complete and the revolution is perhaps best interpreted as an attempt to reverse it. Caroline Frick’s analysis is particularly useful in emphasizing the determination of plantation workers to resist the demands of revolutionary leaders that they resume this kind of work after the abolition of slavery in August 1793. On this interpretation, the decisive moment occurred after Toussaint’s assumption of power in 1801, at which point he attempted to restore the plantation economy divested of slavery. James largely absolves Toussaint from blame on the grounds of economic necessity: ‘He was battling with the colossal task of transforming a slave population, after years of licence, into a community of free labourers, and he was doing it in the only way he could see.’11 By contrast, Frick directs attention to the way in which the freed plantation workers regarded matters after a decade of revolutionary upheaval: ‘Freedom for the mass of

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    337 insurgent slaves, if it was to be realised at all, was fundamentally intertwined with an independent claim to land. Work and labour for the profit of another or for the production of export crops on which the colony’s existence depended was profoundly antithetical to their own vision of things.’12 Eight years later, the President of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, acknowledged the implacable resistance of the agrarian population to plantation labour, and began to parcel out state land for private use, thus facilitating the emergence of a new peasant class which produced food to eat rather than crops for export. James wrote The Black Jacobins against a background of labour unrest in the British empire, but expectations that the Haitian model would be replicated in the Anglophone Caribbean were confounded. Most of the Anglophone Caribbean territories became independent between 1962 and 1983 and the process of incremental reform was in many respects a model of constitutional propriety. Although Trinidad became a republic in 1976 and the Prime Minister of Barbados broached the possibility of ending the island’s ties with the British monarchy during the celebration of fifty years of independence in 2016, the Queen remains head of state in the majority of the islands. As in many other instances of European decolonization, the final decision to grant independence took place suddenly in response to unexpected events. The collapse of the West Indies Federation just four years after its establishment in 1958 catalysed a new political geography that comprised numerous independent micro-​states. Any analysis of the road to independence of the individual islands requires a close examination of a long series of negotiations between metropolitan government and nationalist opposition, but the well-​worn negotiating tables of Lancaster House were not so distant from the plantations of the Caribbean as might be imagined. Some of the negotiators, including Robert Bradshaw of St. Kitts, were born into the labouring classes who worked on the sugar plantations. More pertinently still, the threat of labour unrest was a constant preoccupation for British negotiators. Strikes and stoppages were frequent in the Anglophone Caribbean during the postwar era. In the case of Grenada, for example, which had been the most quiescent of the islands in the 1930s, agrarian unrest in 1950 set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall and Westminster. A strike on the residual sugar plantations provided an opportunity for the island’s most prominent trade unionist, Eric Gairy, to establish his nationalist credentials. The Governor likened the Grenadian scene to ‘an active political volcano’.13 Following Gairy’s imprisonment by the colonial authorities and the dispatch of a warship to the island, three protestors were shot dead by Trinidadian police reinforcements. Sufficient order was restored during 1951 to allow the holding of elections, which ended in a victory for Gairy’s newly formed Grenada United Labour Party. His career has been interpreted by later analysts as a powerful, and to a large degree unfortunate, example of the salience of charismatic authority in Caribbean politics, but Gairy’s success rested firmly on the better economic deal he secured for local workers in the early 1950s.14 The tendency towards authoritarianism exhibited by many nationalist leaders, such as Gairy, alongside the economic and security problems encountered by small emerging states in the modern world, have disinclined the remaining colonial

338   Spencer Mawby territories to divest themselves of their links to Europe. However, while the 2004 referenda in the Dutch territories revealed a degree of realism about the prospects of independent micro-​states, they did not express satisfaction with the status quo. In particular, they revealed a familiar pattern of resentment among the smaller Batavophone islands at the dominance of the largest territory, Curacao. As a consequence, all the remaining islands followed the precedent set by Aruba in 1986 in exiting the Netherlands Antilles and reconfiguring their bilateral relationship with the Dutch state. Elsewhere among the dependent micro-​states there is evidence of the politics of ambivalence: on the one hand, there is the complacency induced by the comforting insurance which the European states still provide when natural disasters occur, as in the case of the 1995 volcanic eruption on Montserrat, or economic turbulence looms, as evidenced by the effects of the 2007 financial crash on Caribbean tourism. On the other, there is frustration that Caribbean voices will remain unheard in the metropolis and in international forums for as long as the European states superintend local politics. Events in Guadeloupe in 2009 suggest that the egalitarian impulses which underpinned the struggle for independence retain their vitality. During the course of a general strike on the island it is estimated that up to a quarter of the population participated in demonstrations. Although the escalating price of petrol originally motivated the protestors, a more all-​encompassing critique of economic exploitation soon emerged, which was so capacious that it required a new creole coinage to represent it: pwofitasyon. Low-​wage work in plantation agriculture and tourism forms a large part of the local economy and among the key achievements of the coordinating coalition of protestors, known as the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon, was an increase in the minimum wage.15 A final aspect of The Black Jacobins that resonates in the current historiography concerns James’s belief that West Indian precedents would have an impact in Africa. Even while the process of decolonization was incomplete within the region, Caribbean politicians sought a role in wider liberation struggles. They were particularly preoccupied with the promotion of democracy and anti-​racism in colonial Africa including Rhodesia, Kenya, and South Africa. In 1949, Vere Bird of the Antiguan Labour Party wrote to the Jamaican political activist Richard Hart about plans to unite Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland: ‘I hope you are taking note of what is happening in Africa. I hope we will speak out against any Central African Federation that is not built on the vast majority of the population who are Africans.’ Beyond the Anglophone sphere, Bird expressed opposition to the establishment of French overseas departments and the possibility of a revival of Italian colonializm in Africa.16 A decade later, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was met at Barbados airport by demonstrators from the local Labour Party waving banners reading ‘Release Kenyatta Now’.17 Once self-​government had been obtained as the final incremental step before independence, one of the first policies which Norman Manley’s Jamaican government explored was the possibility of severing relations with South Africa. With local politicians at last in a position of constitutional authority, Manley took the opportunity to chastise the Governor, Kenneth Blackburne. Conscious that the planned sanctions had provoked

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    339 dismay among Conservative politicians in the British Cabinet, Manley explained: ‘I am well aware of the fact that what we are doing is futile, but it is easy to argue that all protests against indecency by weak people are futile. Frankly, it disturbs me to think that you think we have done something wrong.’18 Anti-​apartheid sentiment was particularly strong in the Caribbean labour movement and in April 1960 dockworkers in Trinidad refused to unload a vessel whose cargo included peanuts from Nyasaland and fruit juice from South Africa following an appeal by the union’s leader to boycott exports from those territories.19 After independence, some Caribbean states propagated revolution beyond their frontiers. This tradition began in the early nineteenth century when Haiti’s leaders sought to spread the anticolonial revolution to the less populated eastern half of Hispaniola. In the twentieth century interventionist tendencies were given a transcontinental hue by the Cuban government’s ambitious policy of supporting African liberation movements. The revolutionary government in Havana identified parallels between their struggle and that of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria. At the end of 1961, during the dying days of French rule and despite the risks entailed in antagonizing de Gaulle, Castro authorized the despatch to the FLN of a cache of arms.20 From 1966 to 1974 Cuban military advisers and doctors assisted the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) in their war against the Portuguese colonial authorities in Portuguese Guinea.21 However, it was in Angola that the Cubans played their largest role. In January 1965, the leaders of the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA), who had launched their revolution against Portugal four years earlier, met Che Guevara in Brazzaville and requested military training and assistance. According to Edward George the subsequent Brazzaville mission ‘marked the start of the MPLA’s twenty-​six-​year alliance with Cuba, and forged a bond between the Cubans and Angolans which was to withstand the turbulent and traumatic years which followed.’22 Despite the nervousness of their allies in Moscow, the Cuban government dispatched 36,000 troops to Angola in late 1975 to assist the revolutionary government in its resistance to South Africa’s invasion of the country. Piero Gleijeses, who conducted the most detailed research into Cuban archives, concluded that during these years Cuba conducted an autonomous foreign policy in which ‘self-​preservation and revolutionary zeal’ were inextricably mixed. On his account, Cuban intervention in Angola was rooted in a sense that the fate of the island was tied to that of the wider world. Such an analysis recognizes a global revolutionary tradition which dates back to the era of José Marti and encompasses the history of Cuban volunteers who fought for the Spanish republic during the Civil War.23 While the fate of Lusophone Africa would almost certainly have been different had not Cuba sent military aid to their ideological counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, in its Caribbean backyard Cuba was unsuccessful in its ambitions for a more egalitarian form of politics and this was closely connected to the continuing dependence of the region on western capital and markets.

340   Spencer Mawby

Economics and Neo-​C olonialism One of the intractable debates about the end of empire is framed by the question of whether political independence actually constitutes a sort of ideological camouflage for other forms of dependence in the realms of economics, society and culture. Many of the most significant critics of neo-​colonialism came from the Caribbean, including Aimé Césaire, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon. Although the end of European rule generated significant domestic change, most obviously in extending the ambit of political participation to groups and classes who had previously been excluded, the vulnerability of the Caribbean states to the economic demands of external actors was conspicuous. One of the most dramatic examples was the Jamaican government’s decision to bow to IMF demands for economic retrenchment in 1977, which effectively ended Prime Minister Michael Manley’s programme of socialist reform. What this episode demonstrated was the difficulty, which was shared by Caribbean governments of differing ideological complexion, of accumulating capital. The newly independent states of the region remained dependent on overseas finance and as a consequence, as in the era of formal colonialism, economic value was siphoned from the region, although now it tended to be sucked northwards to the US and Canada, rather than eastwards to Europe. As in so many instances the Haitian revolution set the precedent. In 1825 the restored French monarchy, represented by Charles X, gained a measure of revenge against the republican revolutionaries of the Caribbean by forcibly inducing President Jean-​ Pierre Boyer to agree a large indemnity payment as recompense for the slave rebellion. Shilliam notes that the French decision to recognize ‘while easing the geopolitical threats to Haitian independence, intensified the competition between peasant, mulatto and black elites over domestic development. To pay the indemnity within five years as agreed, Boyer had no choice but to resurrect the militarized plantation system.’24 Boyer’s government also raised capital in France and when efforts to ensure timely repayment failed, Haiti endured a ‘double debt’ comprising indemnity payments and the interest on loans to meet the payments. By the beginning of the First World War, debt servicing accounted for over half of Haitian state expenditure. American intervention was purportedly intended to restore a degree of order to Haiti’s politics and finances. However, Washington’s regional proconsul, Smedley Darlington Butler, famously suggested that his role was a ‘high class muscle-​man for big business’ who had ‘made Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.’25 The small counter-​ balancing effect of overseas remittances, which reached the Caribbean from the pay-​ packets of migrant workers was not sustained as governments in Europe and North America reacted to the economic retraction of the 1930s by placing restrictions on immigration from the Caribbean. The double debt generated by the Haitian indemnity and interest payments was not replicated on the same scale anywhere else, but the politics of financial dependence remained pervasive during the last years of empire. In the Anglophone Caribbean,

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    341 the British agreed to continue with a small measure of financial aid after independence. Eric Williams of Trinidad argued that a more ambitious programme of assistance was required if the colonial vector by which economic value was transferred out of the region was ever to be reversed. His demand for investment rested on the claim that the funding of capital projects by Britain constituted recompense for a long history of colonial exploitation. A  financial manifesto for independence authored by Williams in 1960 entitled The Economics of Nationhood envisaged a British contribution of US$442m over a decade. Williams’s programme of investment was designed to provide the requisite economic infrastructure for an independent West Indian federation of ten states. British officials calculated that it amounted to an annual subsidy of GB£6.6 million, which they were not prepared to countenance.26 After the collapse of the federation the British government offered small packets of assistance to the newly independent territories but the conditions applied to these exiguous sums once again raised the spectre of neo-​colonialism. At a press conference in London on 15 November 1962, Williams complained that a proposed Commonwealth Development Loan for Trinidad was tied to the purchase of British goods and services: ‘. . . if aid fails to create employment in the country to which it is given then it is a trap . . . economic aid limited to the purchase of goods and services of other people is nothing more than the perpetuation of colonialism.’ Williams was even blunter at the London School of Economics (LSE) five days later: ‘The West Indies are in the position of an orange. The British have sucked it dry and their sole concern today is that they should not slip and get damaged on the orange peel.’27 When considering the impact of economic transactions on the people of the region, Frantz Fanon argued that the requirement for low-​paid workers in the travel industry to supply the needs of white western tourists marked a new form of economic subjugation. Citing the casinos of Havana as an example, Fanon suggested that the willingness of the archetypal Latin American nationalist to indulge their old colonial masters was self-​ evident: ‘the national middle class will have nothing better to do than take on the role of manager for western enterprise, and will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.’28 As labour-​intensive, high-​profit economic activities reliant on foreign capital and overseas markets, the Caribbean hotel industry resembled the plantation system of the colonial era. On visiting Martinique, V. S. Naipaul went as far as to suggest that that, in their eagerness to attract western vacationers, the islanders were ‘selling themselves into a new slavery’.29 Fanon’s emphasis on the structural inequalities of the tourist trade provides a necessary corrective to nationalist triumphalism but Naipaul’s analogy with the past is trite. Despite the continuing imbalance in economic and political power which modern tourism incarnates, the suffering and immiseration of slavery and indenture are unmatched in the service sector of the independent Caribbean. When George Gmelch put the question of neo-​colonialism to a Bajan hotel manager they responded on the basis of economic realities: ‘Ask them to look at the industry in other parts of the world and you’ll see not black people but white people serving. Here people need to feed their families, people need a home. So what other course is there?’ While most of

342   Spencer Mawby Gmelch’s interviewees emphasized the role of tourism in providing employment, there was also a recognition of the inequities which have exercised post-​colonial theorists. A chef interviewed by Gmelch resented the reliance on imported foodstuffs and the level of remuneration: ‘I think people who work in hotels are very underpaid. For an industry that brings in so much revenue they should pay their workers more. I mean you can read in the newspaper and see that this hotel made millions of dollars in profit, but their workers are not seeing it in their paychecks, and most of us are hardworking people.’30 The history of the Caribbean provides evidence of why hotels are regarded as conspicuous symbols of dependency and inequality. The rise of these structures shadowed the decline of European political influence. Although geographically at the periphery of the Caribbean, the colonial Bahamas were the first islands to switch from producing goods for western markets to providing services for western travellers. The American oil magnate, railway builder, and hotelier Henry Flagler extended his commercial empire to Nassau at the invitation of British governor Haynes Smith. In 1900 Flagler opened the Colonial hotel (now the Colonial Hilton) to cater for wealthy American tourists. A more startling case of economic occupation is provided by the history of what was once known as Hog Island, an offshore appendage located at the entrance to Nassau harbour. The territory was purchased by the Swedish industrialist and vacuum-​cleaner pioneer Axel Wenner-​Gren, who reordered its landscape and renamed it Paradise Island. Although nominally part of a British colony, control of the island passed from Wenner-​ Gren to the railway tycoon, Huntingdon Hartford, and then eventually to the multinational tourist giants, Resorts International, Holiday Inn, Club Med, Sheraton, and Loews, who, in the aftermath of independence in 1973, owned between them 90% of its 3,000 hotel rooms.31 It was not only colonial governors who proved amenable to western financiers. The casino culture of Cuba evolved in the aftermath of the late nineteenth-​century wars of independence in response to the demands of American investors. Much of the literature on Latin American tourism focuses on the cultural impact of travel, but Schwartz demonstrates the way in which President Gerardo Machado of Cuba sought to legitimize his regime by indulging the grandiose ambitions of the American Biltmore group. During the late 1920s they extended their activities beyond the promotion of gambling to the renovation of Havana’s racetrack and the construction of the Biltmore Yacht and Country Club. The aim of American investors on Schwartz’s account was ‘to transform Havana into the Riviera of the western hemisphere.’32 Nothing on quite this scale occurred in Haiti but a decade after the American military occupation Pan-​American airlines began promoting the country as a new destination for American travellers. Such efforts required not just a new infrastructure but a reimagining of the culture and traditions of the island to make them palatable to a North American audience. The experiment did not last long and the tourist-​unfriendly image of Haiti as a place of political and ethical darkness acquired new salience after Francois Duvalier’s assumption of power in 1957. The Haitian tourist trade’s declining fortunes were captured by the writer Graham Greene, whose novels and travel writing have exerted a strong hold on the post-​ colonial imagination. Greene’s dilapidated Hotel Trianon in The Comedians was once

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    343 sold to the West as a prime location from which to inspect the vibrancy of Caribbean culture: ‘A centre of Haitian intellectual life. A luxury-​hotel which caters equally for the connoisseur of good food and the lover of local customs. Try the special drinks made from the finest Haitian rum, bathe in the luxurious swimming-​pool, listen to the music of the Haitian drum and watch the Haitian dancers. Mingle with the elite of Haitian intellectual life, the musicians, the poets, the painters, who find at Hotel Trianon a social centre . . . .’ Although, on Greene’s account, this ‘had been nearly true once’, the hotel swimming pool, drained of water, is, in the era of Duvalier, the place to find the body of a murdered Haitian politician.33

Migration and Anticolonialism Focusing solely on the transformed role of Caribbean workers from suppliers of commodities to Europeans and North American in situ to providers of services to European and North American travellers suggests that the people of the region were passive recipients, or even victims, of western economic designs. Yet whether as permanent migrants or temporary sojourners, Caribbean people have engaged in both orthodox and unorthodox forms of political agitation directed against colonialism. If the primary goal of much of this activity was to expedite the end of the crumbling European empires, a secondary feature was that it pushed forward the process of globalization. The cumulative character of insurrections in the periphery and their role in thickening transcontinental connections has recently been given new emphasis, including by the editors of this volume.34 Much of the communication between anticolonial activists actually took place in the old metropolitan hub of empire and this final section explores the importance of Caribbean people as autonomous agents, working, organizing, making music, and writing against empire in Europe. The 1961 British census recorded that 172,877 persons born in the West Indies were resident in Britain. Migration from the Anglophone Caribbean during the last years of empire was facilitated by the 1948 British Nationality Act, which recognized imperial subjects as British nationals, but was then curtailed by the restrictionist character of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Labour shortages in the old imperial metropolis and the prevalence of unemployment and joblessness in the periphery generated the material pull and push factors for individual migrants. The Royal Mail, London Transport, and the NHS all became increasingly reliant on the willingness of Caribbean workers to work long hours for low wages. The prevalent racist assumption that Caribbean workers were unskilled led to an enforced deskilling of many migrants. Collins records the experience of one such worker: ‘When I was demobbed in 1949 . . . I was offered a labouring job. I was a qualified engineer. It did not matter what your qualification was, there was always the labouring job, reserved for you once they saw that you were coloured.’35 Although some of the grosser inequalities in employment practices were addressed by race relations legislation, Blackaby has suggested that the wage differentials

344   Spencer Mawby generated during the era of decolonization persisted when the children of the first generation entered the British labour market.36 Although only a minority of migrants became involved in formal political organizations, discontent with these British conditions politicized many and was responsible for forging a new West Indian identity in which earlier inter-​island rivalries were submerged.37 Furthermore the energy of those who did organize brought a new globalist anticolonial inflection to British politics. While the history of British migration policy has been carefully scrutinized, the politics of migrant organizations have attracted less academic interest. Some of the early small-​scale activity was sparked by plans to curtail Commonwealth immigration. Early in 1961 the newly formed Coordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CCARD) organized a demonstration in Birmingham to protest against the immigration policies of the Macmillan government. CCARD’s protests were not confined to domestic politics but encompassed anti-​imperial causes, including the murder of the Congolese African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, by Katangan secessionists with covert backing from Belgium and Britain (see Matthew Stanard’s chapter in this volume).38 Such activities confirm Schwarz’s suggestion that the ‘West Indians who crossed the seas and travelled to the mother country found themselves, against all expectations, living on the unofficial front line of this later struggle for decolonisation.’39 While the relatively small scale of some of the early demonstrations perhaps explains their absence from much of the historiography, it is notable that even larger events, such as the Black People’s Day of Action, which was organized in 1981 to protest against official disinterest in the causes and consequences of the New Cross fire, remain absent from the stream of recent publications about Britain in the 1980s.40 One subject, which is beginning to attract some academic interest, is the role of Caribbean women as political campaigners. The precedent for this work was set by Delia Jarrett-​Macauley, who interpreted the activities of West Indian women in the wartime Auxiliary Territorial Services (ATS) as evidence of incipient political activism.41 Later more radical groups such as the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) campaigned on issues that had particular relevance for black Britons, including anti-​racism, police harassment, education, sickle cell health matters, and immigration. Nydia Swaby has recently assessed the significance of campaigns organised by OWAAD and others in the history of British feminism.42 One group who were extremely self-​conscious about their role on this front-​line of imperial politics were the Caribbean intellectual class. The criss-​crossing of frontiers by Marxists such as C. L. R. James, Ferdinand Smith, and Claudia Jones gave a Cold War-​dimension to the history of Caribbean people on the move. All three settled in the US and endured harassment by the American authorities. The effective deportations of James, Smith, and Jones demonstrates that migration is often a story of displacement. Their movements perturbed the imperial state, which responded with policies of surveillance and control. Only two of the British Security Service files on James have been released but they reveal that they intercepted and read James’s letters. On his arrival in Britain in 1953, Special Branch declared him to be ‘very well spoken’ and of ‘very good appearance’. An informant told them what they already knew, which was that James was

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    345 influenced by Trotskyism, while a search of his baggage only demonstrated that he ‘read books of a pro-​left wing nature’.43 James did not resettle in the Caribbean but Smith did, and his arrival in Jamaica in 1951 caused considerable alarm. The colonial governments in the Caribbean were unsettled by his visits to eastern Europe to enlist the support of the World Federation of Trade Unions for a radical campaign of labour mobilization. They responded by banning many of the publications that Smith imported and restricting his movements and those of his supporters.44 Claudia Jones, who was deported from the United States in 1955, was denied entry to Trinidad by the colonial authorities. Schwarz notes that Jones’s displacement had a particular dramatic impact on post-​colonial culture in Britain because of her role in the organization of the first Notting Hill carnival and her contribution to the emergence of an independent black press. The broadcast of the carnival by the BBC can be interpreted as a key moment in British cultural history; a point at which the gradual creolization of the metropolis was recognized, or even endorsed, by one of the country’s elite institutions.45 The West Indian Gazette made less of an impact at the time but it was the progenitor of later publications aimed at a black British audience, including the commercially successful The Voice. The politics of the Gazette had sharper edges than many of its successors and for this Jones was primarily responsible. One of its journalists, Donald Hinds, has itemized the international issues which featured in the Gazette: the Cuban revolution, the war in Congo, the Katangan secession and the assassination of Lumumba, the Sharpeville massacre, and the Rivonia trial of the ANC leadership, as well as Commonwealth issues, including the fate of the West Indies federation. What Hinds also emphasizes is the perilous economic environment in which Jones operated. Despite the paper’s communist orientation and commitment to anticolonial causes, it was a commercial operation. Copies cost 6d. and featured as much advertising as could be obtained. The most consistent source of funds was a shipping firm: the Grimaldi Siosa Line, whose vessels travelled the North Atlantic route, often with Caribbean migrants abroad.46 Local commercial black outlets in London provided the Gazette with its distribution network, including Desmond’s Reliable Furniture in Denmark Hill, Theo’s Record Shop in Brixton, and Rainbow Travel on the Edgware Road.47 Transatlantic anticolonialism extended well beyond formal expressions of political solidarity delivered by nationalist leaders, such as Manley and Castro, and Marxist intellectuals, such as Jones and James. In defining the characteristics of what he described as the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has emphasized that music constituted a distinctive means of communication between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. As a form that both supplements and transcends textuality, Gilroy contends that black music has demanded that ‘bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhetoric.’48 In the case of the Caribbean, Calypso was a style that was often overtly political and widely influential. One Calypsonian, Growling Tiger, drew on the oratory of Abraham Lincoln, to urge his listeners ‘to defend the liberty of both rich and poor’. Abraham Lincoln Speech at Gettysburg was not recorded, but the songs of the prolific Lord Kitchener were and they illustrate the role of the diaspora in disseminating Black Atlantic culture as well as the commercial underpinnings of artistic influence. Famously, Kitchener arrived in Britain on the

346   Spencer Mawby Empire Windrush and his first recording in Britain was a rendition of ‘London is the Place for Me’ filmed by Pathé at the dockside in 1948. Inspired by his meetings with African expatriates in London, in 1956 he recorded ‘Birth of Ghana’, which offered a flattering portrait of Kwame Nkrumah’s success as both anticolonial firebrand and independence leader: ‘Dr. Nkrumah went out his way/​To make the Gold Coast what it is today/​He endeavoured continually/​To bring us freedom and liberty/​The doctor began as agitator/​He became popular leader/​He continued to go further/​And now is Ghana’s Prime Minister’. By some estimates ‘Birth of Ghana’ sold over 200,000 copies and the key to its success was a record distribution network extending from the Caribbean to West Africa.49 The commercial mastermind behind the success of Kitchener and other London-​based calypsonians was the almost-​forgotten figure of Emil Shallit. It fell to the music journalist Lloyd Bradley to give an account of Shallit’s significance in founding Melodisc records, whose catalogue was filled with expatriate African and Caribbean musicians playing Calypso, Modern Jazz, Ska, and Rocksteady in the old imperial metropolis.50 If London exerted a magnetic pull for Caribbean musicians after 1945, Paris was the focus of attention for Caribbean poets and writers in the interwar period, including Jacques Roumain. His life and legacy provide a final illuminating example of the transnational trajectory of Caribbean anticolonialism. In his case this extended beyond the Anglophone Black Atlantic. Although born into the mixed-​race, land-​owning elite of Port-​au-​Prince, Roumain identified himself with black rebels fighting the American occupation of Haiti during the inter-​war period. Most famously, he purportedly responded to an invitation to meet the American High Commissioner with the declaration ‘Le nègre Jacques Roumain ne daigne pas fréquenter les blancs’.51 Despite this, Roumain is not usually regarded as an influence on the development of thinking about négritude associated with other Francophone Caribbean intellectuals, most notably Aimé Césaire. The reasons for this are evident in the development of his ideas about nationalism, race, and class. After a cosmopolitan education in Europe, Roumain took up the anti-​colonial cause during the 1920s. Rather than adopting European or African models, Roumain initially suggested that Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns against the iniquities of British rule in India might form a model. In the following decade, he was increasingly influenced by his contacts with the American Communist Party who followed the orthodox Marxist aetiology that racism was a function of economic exploitation. The oppression of the Haitian peasant class is the theme of Roumain’s last and most famous novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée. As Kathie Richman has recently demonstrated, the legacy of that novel has been tied more closely than most to the cultural and economic infrastructure provided by the publishing industry. While it was adopted as a classic in the Francophone world almost immediately after its publication, and acquired resonance in the US because of its translation as Masters of the Dew by Langston Hughes, it only gained salience among a wider Haitian audience when it appeared as a serial comic strip in the Creole language journal, Bon Nouvèl in the early 1980s. The introduction to the book which collected together the strips that retold Roumain’s story under the title Mèt Larouzé noted: ‘Thus many people in other nations got to know it. But . . . the inhabitants of Haiti Chérie do not yet have a chance to know the novel which

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    347 is of great importance to them.’52 Gouverneurs de la Rosée in its various iterations, re-​ establishes the sugar worker as an agent of anti-​colonial revolution. On returning from the Cuban sugar plantations, Roumain’s protagonist, Manuel, attempts to rectify the social and economic degradation which colonialism, and those who collaborate in colonialism, have brought to his village.53 In this sense, Roumain prompts his readers in Haiti and elsewhere to recognize the spirit of the original Haitian revolution against colonialism and its continuities with later struggles.

Conclusion The two most ubiquitous figures in the historiography on Caribbean anticolonialism are the rural worker, represented in fictional form by Manuel in Gouverneurs de la Rosée, and the sophisticated urbanized, intellectual of whom Roumain is representative. The canon of great writers and artists is an extensive one which has acquired prominence in academic study because of the rise of a new imperial history with a particular interest in the cultural impact of dissident figures who refused to be confined by the borders of nation-​state or empires. Partly as a consequence of the significance accorded to the slave rebellion in Haiti and the labour uprisings in the Anglophone Caribbean during the 1930s, the region’s workers most often feature in the secondary literature as insurrectionists. Yet in between these two poles are a range of other actors, from the London retailers who distributed the West Indian Gazette during its short life, the migrant workers who staffed British buses, trains, and hospitals, the Caribbean residents who have taken up jobs in the expanding tourist industry, and the Cuban soldiers who were deployed to Lusophone Africa to sustain the liberationist cause on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. What is striking about the histories of these people is that their biographies were shaped by wider transnational processes in a way which anticipated many present-​day debates about the social, economic, and political impact of globalization. Although it important to write these individual histories back into the story of the end of empire in the Caribbean, it is also necessary to acknowledge that decolonization was tied to wider material developments, including the great power rivalry which raged on in various forms from the Napoleonic Wars to the Cold War and to a durable but inegalitarian system of trade in goods and services between the old imperial metropolis and periphery. It was the former which provided the context for Cuba’s intervention in Africa and to a large degree determined the fortunes of the expatriate Caribbean left. It was the latter which placed constraints on the Haitian revolutionaries of the nineteenth century and the West Indian nationalists of the twentieth century and which has provoked an ongoing debate about neo-​colonialism. Whether viewed from the perspective of demography, economics, or culture, the residue of empire in the contemporary Caribbean is unmistakable and is not confined to the political and legal privileges which western states still exercise in those small territories which remain in some form of politically dependent relationship with the old imperial powers.

348   Spencer Mawby

Notes 1. P. Clegg, “Independence Movements in the Caribbean:  Withering on the Vine,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 50, no. 4 (2012): 422–​438. 2. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin, 2001). 3. Y. H. Ferguson, “The History and Dynamics of Globalisation,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 25, no. 1 (2014): 137–​138. 4. L. Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013):  J. Dillon Brown, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013); D. Merrell, Negotiating Paradise:  US Tourism and Empire in Twentieth Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 5. B. W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3. 6. James, Jacobins. 7. L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London: Harvard University Press, 2004). 8. A. G. Sepinwall, “Introduction,” in Haitian Histories: New Perspectives, ed. A.G. Sepinwall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 3. 9. M. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), ch. 3. 10. P. Girard, Paradise Lost (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005); R. Fatton Jr, “Haiti: The Saturnalia of Emancipation and the Vicissitudes of Predatory Rule,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2006): 115–​133. 11. James, Jacobins, 196. 12. C. Fick, “Emancipation in Haiti: From Plantation Labour to Peasant Proprietorship” in After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, ed. H. Temperley (London: Routledge, 2000), 15. 13. TNA: CO/​1031/​348/​10, Arundell to Secretary of State, 17 March 1951. 14. A. W. Singham, The Hero and the Crowd in a Colonial Polity (London: Yale University Press, 1968); P. Noguera, “The Limits of Charisma:  Grenada’s Eric Gairy and Maurice Bishop,” in Caribbean Charisma: Reflections on Leadership Legitimacy and Popular Politics, ed. A. Allahar (Kingston: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 72–​91. 15. Y. Bonilla, “Guadeloupe is Ours,” Interventions:  International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 1 (2010): 125–​137. 16. Richard Hart Papers, CLC # 34 UWI Mona Campus, Bird to Hart, 9 April 1949. 17. FWI-​GG-​GA-​424, Stow to Hailes, 28 March 1961. 18. JNA 4/​60/​2B/​20, Manley to Blackburne, 13 May 1959. 19. Trinidad and Tobago National Archives, 2/​56/​1, Federation Files, Governor (Trinidad) to Governor-​General, West Indies, 22 October 1960. 20. P. Gleijeses, “Cuba’s First Venture in Africa: Algeria 1961–​1965,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1 (1996): 159–​195. 21. P. Gleijeses, “Havana’s Policy in Africa 1959–​1976,” Cold War International History Project 8–​9 (1996): 7. 22. E. George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola 1965–​1991:  From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 28.

The Caribbean in an International and Regional Context    349 23. P. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions:  Havana, Washington and Africa 1959–​1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 375–​376. 24. R. Shilliam, “What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us About Development, Security and the Politics of Race,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 3 (2008): 778–​808. 25. L. Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2012). 26. S. Mawby, Ordering Independence:  The End of Empire in the Anglophone Caribbean (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 146. 27. TNA: CO 1031/​3495, Brief for Secretary of State’s Visit #7: Trinidad Financial Settlement, Annex E: Selection of Public Statements by Eric Williams. 28. F. Fanon and C. Farrington (trans. Jean-​ Paul Sartre), The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; originally published 1961), 123. 29. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; originally published 1962), 210. 30. G. Gmelch, Behind the Smile:  The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 81. 31. P. Pattullo, Last Resorts:  The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (Kingston:  Ian Randle, 1996), 20. 32. R. Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 58. 33. G. Greene, The Comedians (London: Vintage, 2009; originally published 1966), 45. 34. M. Thomas and A. Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation: From ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation,” The International History Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 142–​170. 35. M. Collins, “Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Twentieth Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 3 (2001): 402. 36. D. H. Blackaby, “White/​Ethnic Minority Earnings and Employment Differentials in Britain,” Oxford Economic Papers 54, no. 2 (2002): 270–​297. 37. W. James, “The Black Experience in Twentieth Century Britain” in Black Experience and the Empire, eds. P.D. Morgan and S. Hawkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 347–​386. 38. A. Sivanandan, “From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and African-​Caribbean Struggles in Britain,” Race & Class 23, no. 2–​3 (1983): 111–​152. 39. B. Schwarz, “Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-​colonial Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 14, no. 3 (2003): 267. 40. Racial politics, if it features at all in this kind of literature, is confined to coverage of urban violence. See R. Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009); A. McSmith, No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Constable, 2011); A. W. Turner, Rejoice, Rejoice: Britain in the 1980s, (London: Aurum Press, 2010); G. Stewart, Bang: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013). 41. D. Jarrett-​Macauley, “Putting the Black Woman Back in the Frame: Una Marson and the West Indian Challenge to British National Identity,” in Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in World War Two Britain, eds. C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 119–​126. 42. N. A. Swaby, “ ‘Disparate in Voice, Sympathetic in Direction’: Gendered Political Blackness and the Politics of Solidarity,” Feminist Review 108 (2014): 11–​25. 43. TNA: KV 2/​1825, Special Branch Report on James, 14 July 1953. 44. S. Mawby, “Mr. Smith Goes to Vienna: Britain’s Cold War in the Caribbean,” Cold War History 13, no. 4 (2013): 541–​561.

350   Spencer Mawby 45. Schwarz, 273. 46. D. Hinds, “The West Indian Gazette: Claudia Jones and the Black Press in Britain,” Race and Class 50, no. 1 (2008): 88–​97. 47. Schwarz, 272. 48. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (London:  Harvard University Press, 1993), 37. 49. R. Funk, “In the Battle for Emergent Independence:  Calypsos of Decolonisation,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3, no. 2 (2005): Article 4. 50. L. Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), 41–​50. 51. C. Fowler, A Knot in the Thread:  The Life and Work of Jacques Roumain (Washington: Howard University Press, 1980), 133. 52. K. Richman, “Militant Cosmopolitanism in a Creole City:  The Paradoxes of Jacques Roumain,” Biography 35, no. 2 (2012): 303–​317. 53. L. Hughes and M. Cook, Masters of the Dew (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).

Chapter 19

E astern Europe i n t h e Gl obal History of Dec ol oniz at i on James Mark and Quinn Slobodian

Introduction This chapter places Eastern Europe into the larger history of decolonization by focusing on both the domestic end of empire after World War I and the relationship of communist Eastern European states to Africa and Asia during the dissolution of overseas European empires from 1945 to 1976. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms that enabled solidarities and facilitated material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-​alignment. After the demise of the so-​called ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop. Eastern Europe and the Global South tend to inhabit different storylines in world history. Eastern Europe’s twentieth century passes through Versailles, Auschwitz, Yalta, and, after a long interregnum, the Berlin of 1989. It is a story of nationalism realized, quashed, and redeemed. By contrast, the key dates for the Global South are the advent of postwar decolonization with Indian Partition in 1947, the Afro-​Asian Bandung Conference of 1955, and the wave of national independence from 1960 to 1976. Both are stories of nationalism but, with rare exceptions like the first meeting of the Non-​Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, they run parallel, rather than intersect. Coeval moments like the Suez Crisis and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, or the simultaneous crumbling of South African apartheid and the Soviet control of Eastern Europe, are seldom narrated as entangled events. This chapter proposes a different story. The expanded approach to the ‘ends of empire’ taken by this volume considers a range of contact points often obscured. The small

352    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian nations that emerged from the dismantled Habsburg and Russian Empires after the end of World War I had a plausible claim as the first site of decolonization in the twentieth century.1 Indeed, the very term “decolonization” was first used in English in the 1930s to connect the already-​achieved independence of states in Eastern Europe with an argument about the inevitability of the liberation of nations in Africa and Asia in the near future.2 When Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe after World War II and looked for partners overseas as the European empires crumbled, they saw a world both similar and radically different from their own. Communists hardly ever used the word “decolonization.” This was a western term that denied agency to the liberated, suggested that independence was the enlightened gift of the former imperial powers, and hence was associated with the attempt to keep former colonies within the sphere of influence of the West.3 Rather, Eastern European Communists employed the language of common struggle, suggesting the emergence of a new global anti-​imperialist space which stretched through Berlin, Moscow, Accra, Hanoi, and Havana and united the regions that contemporaries outside the bloc called the “Second” and the “Third Worlds”. According to this outlook, Eastern Europeans had waged progressive struggles against Empires that were now being replicated outside Europe: this developing sense of shared experience undergirded new political identifications, the transfer of economic knowledge, and domestic cultures of international solidarity. There were also telling silences in the public transcripts of “East-​South” interaction. Eastern European communists often seemed unsure if the same rules of development applied outside as well as inside Europe. The laws of history seemed perennially open to revision, and the spirit of proletarian internationalism did not efface differences of race and culture as promised. Other paradoxes persisted. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), a part of the former colonizing power of the Third Reich, disavowed its own imperial past in both Central Europe and sub-​Saharan Africa. Diplomacy often trumped doctrine to make non-​Marxist parties from the decolonizing world the partners of Eastern European communists. After the Sino-​Soviet Split in the early 1960s, Chinese communists made the charge that the Warsaw Pact’s overzealous identification with the Third World obscured the fault-​lines of race that still divided the earth.4 After the fall of the wall, activists and scholars asserted analogies between postsocialist and postcolonial experience that often distorted as much as they revealed. Relations between Eastern Europe and the decolonizing world did not always run smooth. This chapter shows that their trajectories through the century were closer to tangled knots than parallel lines.

Internationalism in Theory The peace treaties of 1919 initiated a process that would lead eventually to the end of empire in both Eastern Europe and what would later be termed the “Global South”. The timeline of this achievement was staggered. While the nation-​states of Latvia, Lithuania,

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    353 Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia (initially as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), and Poland emerged immediately from the dismembered Central European and Russian empires, or were reshaped in the case of Romania and Bulgaria, the Mandates system deferred independence for Asian and African colonies, which, it was thought, could only develop the economic and political capacities to stand alone with the long-​term oversight of international bodies and imperial powers.5 Nevertheless, given the fragile nature of new Eastern European states—​evidenced in particular by the instability resulting from postwar territorial disputes in Danzig, Silesia, and Fiume—​ some imperial figures, such as Jan Smuts, called for Mandates to be used there, too.6 In its full-​blooded form this idea was rejected. However, the idea of close equivalence between a brittle post-​colonial Eastern Europe and a colonial world that needed shepherding towards self-​sufficiency remained in the everyday assumptions of international politics in the interwar period. Even without the full supervision of the Mandates system, the League of Nations was granted the right to interfere in minority affairs throughout Eastern Europe7; and the League’s financial experts were given the capacity to intervene in the region’s reconstruction and financial stabilization in a manner that for contemporaries resembled the international administration of China or the debt-​ ridden Ottoman Empire.8 Racialized understandings of superiority forged in global Empire could be used to denigrate the struggles to build new states on the European continent: Lord Cecil referred to the Poles as “orientalized Irish”; for Smuts, they were “kaffir”.9 The positions of new Eastern European states and overseas colonies in the world order appeared interchangeable for some too. In the late 1930s, British officials considered offering Nazi elites control over territory in Central Africa in exchange for the restraint of their imperial ambitions over the nations of Eastern Europe.10 Yet in new eastern European states, there was initially little solidarity with those outside Europe whose independence was yet to be realized:  Czechoslovak intellectuals and politicians lobbied the Paris Conference to allocate them land in west Africa and Kamchatka, while leaders of the one million-​strong Polish Maritime and Colonial League argued that the attainment of colonies was an integral part of their country becoming a proper European nation.11 Nnamdi Azikiwe, who would later become a president of an independent Nigeria, was critical: ‘And so Poland, which until 1914 was a colonial territory of three different countries and which has been allowed to exercise the Wilsonian right of self-​determination, now needs colonies, and not in Europe but in Africa. . . . The former servant of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, the Russian empress Catherine II and the Prussian king Frederick the Great now wants to be a master in an African country’.12 Nevertheless, with the global rise of Fascism from the mid-​1930s, a growing number came to regard the fates of Eastern Europe and those of the extra-​European world as interconnected. One key turning point was the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935: widespread sympathy for anti-​colonial resistance was expressed across Eastern Europe, in part due to the historical memory of the suppression of their own nations at the hands of imperial forces.13 The German occupation of Czechoslovakia in summer 1938—​which the prominent Trinidadian anti-​colonial campaigner George Padmore called the ‘new

354    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian Abyssinia’—​further cemented the perception of such linkages. Understanding that the fates of the ‘other Europe’ and the colonized world beyond were related, Afro-​American radicals such as Cyril Briggs and anti-​colonial intellectuals such Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore questioned western powers’ commitment to Eastern European independence, and demanded respect for these new nations—​and their sovereignty.14 The economic predicament of Eastern European countries from the 1920s prefigured many of those in the African and Asian world after 1945.15 In both cases, regions that had previously provided raw materials and agriculture for the industrialized metropole sought to reinvent themselves as mixed economies. In Eastern Europe, new nations tried to move beyond primary production by protecting infant industries, seeking a level of economic growth to allow them to emerge from Europe’s economic hinterland.16 It is no coincidence that some of the pioneering economists of development economics, including Paul Rosenstein-​ Rodan, Nicholas Kaldor, Thomas Balogh, and Michał Kalecki, were from the primarily agrarian regions of East-​Central Europe re-​organized after the peace treaties.17 As Rosenstein-​Rodan put it in 1944: the ‘international development of Eastern and South-​Eastern Europe [ . . . ] provides a model presenting all the problems which are relevant to the reconstruction and development of backward areas [i.e. across the world]”.18 While some of these economists emigrated to the United States and the United Kingdom, others remained (or, like Oskar Lange, returned) and worked with Communist governments that took power in Eastern Europe after World War II. The central question of socialist economists was the path that nations in the Global South could take toward communism. Was the success of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe replicable on the periphery or would different tactics be necessary? Moscow, to whom all Eastern European nations turned, with the exception of Yugoslavia and later Albania, provided shifting answers. The Stalinist period was characterized by the Eurocentric and racially tinged assumption that advanced socialism was only possible in the more developed world, and that post-​colonial governments were still the puppets of Western imperialism. Yet these notions were rejected gradually from the mid-​to late-​1950s. The acceleration of decolonization in Africa, and the intensification of the ‘anti-​imperialist struggles’ in Latin America and Southeast Asia appeared briefly to confirm the idea that the world ‘was going their way’.19 According to this outlook, a progressive struggle that had already been waged successfully in Eastern Europe after World War II had now reached the long-​awaited, but inevitable, moment when it could extend across the world.20 This reading was the product of a universally applicable Marxist teleological approach to history, which was understood as proceeding through a series of stages divided up by revolutionary moments: political and economic transformations which Europe had undergone were now being replicated globally. Khrushchev declared that socialist revolutions, national liberation movements, and democratic revolution were merging into ‘a single revolutionary world process undermining and destroying capitalism.’21 Yet even as Soviet leaders created a master global narrative, they also allowed for a diversity of paths to the endpoint. After 1956, Khrushchev’s policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    355 allowed for a resurrection of Lenin’s ‘non-​capitalist’ roads to development.22 It also, notably, led to the acceptance of non-​socialist paths of postcolonial development.23 During the 1970s, East European economists followed Moscow’s lead in distinguishing between ‘national capitalist’ and ‘dependent capitalist’ states, offering a typology without strict prescription beyond the vision of a strong public sector.24 Strong distinctions blurred over time. By the 1980s, communist states were even advising postcolonial nations to turn to Western capitalist countries for aid.25 Relationships between Eastern Europe and the Global South were often expressions of communist weakness as much as strength. Links southward were frequently motivated by fear of diplomatic isolation or the protection of national sovereignty. The GDR, which presented itself as the first truly anti-​colonial German state, sought to escape the confines of the so-​called Hallstein Doctrine by striving for diplomatic recognition from decolonizing states, with some limited success. Syria, for instance, used the promise of recognition to ensure higher levels of aid.26 Poland sought postcolonial states’ support in the recognition of their western borders, which West Germany did not recognize until 1970. For those Eastern European states that asserted their independence from Moscow, these relationships would become especially vital. In the 1960s, Albania broke with Moscow altogether and found a new patron in Mao’s China.27 Tito’s Yugoslavia, which broke with the Soviet Union in 1948, cultivated an alternative engagement with the decolonizing world. It garnered considerable internal and international prestige as one of the principal architects of the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM).28 Yugoslavia developed some of the strongest cultural and economic ties with Africa and Asia of any country in the socialist east of Europe.29 In this case, it was the very absence of an analogous history between Yugoslavia and former colonial powers that allowed the NAM to appear as a grouping that transcended the earlier racialized order of imperial world society.30 Romania performed a similar act when it joined the G-​77 nations in 1976, declaring itself to be a Latin American country—​proving the flexible borders of political formations seemingly governed by a logic of race or shared history. These key exceptions make clear that there was no single ideological template for the Eastern European relationship to the Global South. It changed over time and, in substance, from nation to nation.

Creating Connections In the late 1950s, many Eastern European elites claimed that they had much to contribute to the development of newly independent states outside Europe. Their own experiences of decolonization and state building were within living memory, and their more recent experience of rapid industrialization, urban rebuilding, and economic growth after World War II meant that they had developed a wealth of knowledge about development and industrial production that could be readily exported. Expertise often had to suffice

356    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian given the absence of funding or access to raw materials, which the western powers could more easily provide. The proliferation of academic institutions focused on development was testament to this belief in the possibility of Eastern European leadership in a decolonizing world.31 Karl Marx University in Leipzig established an institute for African Studies in 1960, and similar institutions were created in the USSR in 1962 and Yugoslavia and Hungary in 1963.32 A Centre of Research on Underdeveloped Economies (CRUE) was founded in Poland in 1962. Elites of recently decolonized countries were trained, primarily in technical subjects, at newly founded institutions such as People’s Friendship University in Moscow (1960) or the University of the 17th of November, named after international students’ day, in Prague (1961).33 Professional expertise was provided, too. Architects from the communist bloc oversaw projects in postcolonial Africa from Zanzibar to Accra and in East Asia from Vietnam to North Korea.34 The ‘traveling architecture’ of the Soviet bloc helped to literally cement a shared imaginary globally.35 To provide one example of many: when a new socialist elite in Iraq wanted a massive expansion of housing for its poor after it overthrew its monarchy and seized the land of British Petroleum, it looked to a Polish firm that had built the workers’ city of Nowa Huta outside Krakow. Here was a company that embraced equality of housing, was accustomed to working for a strong state, and was from a country that had experience of massive urban rebuilding following World War II. The Polish foreign trade service learned how to market their anti-​colonialism to distinguish themselves from western European and North American experts. Not only had Poland never possessed colonies of its own, they emphasized—​she had also been the victim of partitions, wiped from the map of Europe between the late eighteenth century and World War I.36 It was not only a shared history of anti-​imperialism that was thought to bind these world regions together. Many of the states formed after World War I in Eastern Europe were recolonized under Nazi Empire from 1939 to 1945. Their experience of the abrogation of national independence after a short period of self-​determination demonstrated that decolonization was reversible.37 From the late 1950s, Communist regimes sought to make these links tangible. Despite formal independence in Asia and Africa, they warned, the world was witnessing the rise of heirs to Nazi imperialism in the form of the US and the fascist successor state of West Germany.38 The Eastern European experience was invoked to suggest that formal independence was not enough. Progressive nations needed to support each other against a return to the principles that had undergirded Nazi Empire. A Polish party leader explained in a 1966 speech why the citizens of Warsaw could directly empathize with the situation in south-​east  Asia: Twenty-​seven years ago, Nazi Germany began the creation of ‘the new order’. We remember and we’ll never forget what happened then  . . .  In distant and heroic Vietnam, under the bombs dropped from US planes, people are dying, people who love their country and independence. We know it well from our own history. We fully understand our Vietnamese brothers who fight for freedom and sovereignty.39

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    357 In the mid-​1960s, Vietnamese delegations were taken to sites that had been central to the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans. The Polish press reported that wartime commemorations could ‘spontaneously’ became demonstrations of solidarity for the Vietnamese struggle.40 Solidarity with the postcolonial world was important for the legitimacy of communist regimes. They employed the struggles in the decolonizing world in domestic propaganda to inspire a commitment to socialism, particularly directed at a younger generation. The turn to progressive politics provided global evidence that socialism was a growing and vibrant force—​even after the experiences of Stalinism at home. The Cuban revolution, in particular, inspired a wave of support within the Eastern bloc, as it did elsewhere in the world.41 Unlike ‘Third Worldist’ solidarity movements in the West, which were usually bottom-​up, extra-​parliamentary manifestations of a new form of postwar activist politics, their counterparts in the East of the continent were largely top-​down creations aimed at directing an official vision of protest and internationalism. Public demonstrations were expected to take place only in officially supported events, such as May Day parades or World Youth festivals.42 Beyond such public rituals, material solidarity was most encouraged in the workplace across Eastern Europe. There, the contribution to the anti-​imperial struggle occurred simply by labouring in a factory in Budapest, Belgrade, or Warsaw. This notion was made most explicit in so-​called solidarity shifts, where workers would work extra hours and ‘voluntarily’ donate their extra wages to the Cubans, Algerians, or Vietnamese. Obligatory gestures of support could be resented.43 Nevertheless, engagement with decolonization could, for a younger generation, imply that one was globally aware and modern. Anti-​imperialism often provided a language through which they could make sense of a world of interconnectedness in ways unanticipated by their states, and could lead to authentic outbursts of political fervour—​whether in support of a growing socialist world or, conversely, directed against Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe itself.44

Remaking the Global Economy? The end of European empires raised the hope for the Soviet bloc communist leadership that global systems of trade could be remade to their benefit. What would become later known as globalization was assumed in this period to have socialist content: colonial trade routes could be broken, new shipping lines and airport routes established, and new regional economic groupings could help to ensure that wealth would remain within regions that produced it.45 The Soviets also attempted to develop trade relationships outside a capitalist world system. One of their main weapons was so-​called petro-​barter; that is, exchanging Soviet oil for raw materials—​for sugar from Cuba, for instance. This allowed them to circumvent capitalist markets, and in fact, through offering oil at generous terms, draw countries with raw materials into a Soviet trading system.46

358    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian Yet the relative economic weakness of the Soviet bloc remained an unavoidable disadvantage in the competition for sympathies in the Global South. The Soviet economy was only the approximate size of France or the UK: the US was still responsible for half of world production in the 1950s.47 From 1945 to 1989, the entire value of Soviet aid was roughly equal to that offered by the US to Israel alone.48 Nevertheless, the importance of Eastern bloc financial support often lay in the power it provided elites in newly independent countries—​who could leverage such offers to obtain greater power in their interactions with international economic institutions.49 Yet it was clear from the outset that, if the competition for loyalty was to be fought only in material terms, the communist world would not be victorious. Anti-​imperialist rhetoric often had to substitute for credits. Soviet bloc countries also compensated for their relative weakness with a focus on supplying arms, military and intelligence training, and energy products to the Global South. As early as 1955, Czechoslovakia joined the Soviet Union in sending weapons to Nasser’s Egypt.50 By the end of the 1970s, the Soviet Union itself had dislodged the US as the largest supplier of such goods and services to the developing world.51 Military aid was sometimes coordinated within the Warsaw Pact, as in the provision of arms to Syria after the Yom Kippur War, but was not allocated according to a master plan from Moscow.52 Arms and training went to ideologically sympathetic countries like Mozambique and Ethiopia but, by the late Cold War, socialist countries could be as mercenary as their capitalist counterparts. Like the US, East Germany sold arms to both sides in the Iran–​Iraq War.53 The depth of reliance on east European weapons meant that, by 1989, Iraq was Poland’s biggest debtor.54 Eastern European countries themselves were questioning the policy of supporting economic development early on in this relationship. Most Eastern bloc states were only half-​heartedly committed to the initiatives of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which, from the early 1960s, fought western protectionism while also seeking preferential terms of trade, foreign aid, and commodity stabilization arrangements for what contemporaries called developing countries.55 UNCTAD’s first director, Raul Prebisch, frustrated by the lack of commitment from the socialist bloc to building a new world economy, frequently complained of ‘Second World bilateralism’. East European countries were happy to lend rhetorical support for ‘the democratic transformation of international economic relations’ but, as one East German legal expert put it, ‘decisively rejected unjustified demands for the adoption of the same obligations as those posed to former colonial powers.’56 Over time, ‘development’ in the socialist model came to resemble another variety of dependency. Some bloc countries increasingly abandoned any trade policy based on anti-​imperialist solidarity, and came to view the Global South as a reservoir of raw material and mobile labour with price differentials that could be exploited to the advantage of communist Europe.57 The Eastern European goal of instrumentalizing decolonization to their own advantage led to a gradual abandonment of ideologically charged language for a more pragmatic mode of collaboration that did not shy from crossing the Iron Curtain and co-​operating with the forces of the capitalist world.58 By

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    359 the mid-​1970s, détente enabled greater co-​operation between enterprises of the developed socialist and capitalist states in Europe in so-​called tripartite industrial projects in Africa and the Middle East.59 At UNCTAD IV in 1976, the states of the South decided to stop differentiating ideologically between the socialist and capitalist states of the northern hemisphere; rather, it appeared, the fundamental division in the world was now between an underdeveloped ‘Global South’ and an industrialized ‘Global North’ which held onto its structural advantages in the world economy.

An Anti-​Imperialist Empire? For East European states, the encounter with the decolonizing and postcolonial world held perils, too. The blind spots of race, the radicalism of its own youth, and the challenge of Chinese communism created environments in which the language of empire could be turned around to attack those in the bloc who claimed themselves to be the greatest ‘anti-​imperialists’. Issues of race, it was claimed, had been overcome in the socialist system. Racial science was a phenomenon of a now-​discredited Nazi era. Civilizational racism based on the idea of the superiority of civilizations over one another was to be rejected, too. Eastern European Communists, for the most part, did not reject the idea of race outright, however. Rather, they emphasized equality between different peoples still acknowledged as physiologically distinct.60 In alliance with newly independent Caribbean and African countries, Eastern bloc states pushed the issues of racism and rights on the agenda of international institutions as a means of discrediting their geopolitical rivals. The Soviet Union and its allies used the drafting process of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination to condemn Western states in the mid-​1960s; most supported the UN Convention on Racial Discrimination (1966); and the Soviet Union (with Guinea) were the initial sponsors of the convention to deal with the suppression and punishment of apartheid, which was passed in 1973.61 Although some postcolonial states in the UN welcomed the support from the Soviet bloc, others condemned it as cynicism and hypocrisy contrary to the rejection in the final communiqué of the Bandung Declaration of ‘colonialism in all its manifestations.’62 For many people of colour who visited the region, the Eastern bloc was not as racially enlightened as it claimed. Although acts of racialized violence directed at foreign students who attended Moscow’s People’s Friendship/​Lumumba University appear to have been infrequent, the authorities repeatedly failed to deal with the racist incidents that did occur. They viewed such outbursts as aberrant manifestations of un-​socialist behaviour or the legacies of older mentalities, rather than endemic social problems.63 Real racism, in their view, always existed outside the socialist world: in the treatment of African-​Americans in US cities, the violence meted out by French and British colonial forces, or in apartheid South Africa.64

360    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian By the 1980s, the language of ‘racism is elsewhere’ had become a rhetorical device that ordinary people could wield against the authorities: do something about the excessive numbers of students or labour migrants from the South, or their unfamiliar and threatening behaviour, some socialist citizens warned, lest western-​style racism enter the socialist world.65 Privileged access to consumer goods, both real and perceived, at a time of scarcity, helped fuel a sense of (sometimes racialized) resentment among local populations.66 As popular support for the Third World declined, acts of open discrimination and violence against students and labour migrants from the South increased markedly.67 Incomers experienced the limits of Eastern bloc support in others ways, too. Accustomed to the intensity of debate and sense of freedom that had accompanied political independence, many African students came to associate Soviet-​style socialism with the ossification of political expression. In 1963, for instance, between 350 and 500 African students fled Bulgaria. They experienced the East European communist rejection of pan-​Africanism and the strict oversight of national student organizations as politically suffocating.68 For others, the Soviet project was too similar to the western one: both sought to subjugate Africa and Asia. As one Nigerian student studying in Moscow put it: ‘Africans did not wish to replace western imperialism with eastern imperialism, no matter how well camouflaged it might be with seeming sympathy for African nationalism.’69 For some, the Soviet Union was not so much a communist state as another imperialist white country. At moments, East European youth themselves departed from the state-​directed script of internationalism. They adopted the anti-​imperialist language of the regime, but went beyond it, accusing the Eastern bloc support of being insufficiently radical, or regimes of betraying their internationalist revolutionary principles at home.70 Yugoslav youth protest was particularly striking for its preparedness to go beyond the state’s encouragement to peaceful solidarity in the workplace. There was a tradition of aggressive public anti-​imperialist protest which stretched back to February 1961, when an official rally of 150,000 people on Belgrade’s Marx-​Engels Square developed into an aggressive mob which threatened violence in front of the embassies and libraries of Western countries in response to the execution of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Eventually, they succeeded in breaking through the police line in front of the Belgian embassy, burning cars and wrecking the building.71 Violence directed against American institutions in Yugoslavia erupted following the Bay of Pigs incident and later the Cuban Missile Crisis and, in December 1966, in response to the intensification of bombing in Vietnam.72 A pointed challenge to the official transcript of Eastern European anti-​imperialism came from Mao’s China. Until the Sino-​Soviet split of 1960, the addition of China, the world’s most populous country, to the family of socialist nations was used to inspire Eastern European citizens to view themselves as part of an ambitious new postwar global project.73 After the split, however, identification with China was disruptive to East European governments. In the GDR, for instance, the growing numbers of young people visiting the Chinese embassy and publicly expressing allegiance to Mao’s model

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    361 of violent struggle led the regime to ban admission to the building and proceed aggressively against student groups.74 The Soviet language of anti-​imperialism always threatened to boomerang. From the Chinese perspective, Europe was a continent occupied and divided between the imperial powers of the US and the USSR. In 1969, the Chinese daily wrote that the relationship between the Soviet Union and its satellite nations was ‘nothing more than the relationship between the oppressive and enslaving ruling country and its colonies and states.’75 In Maoist rhetoric, the redefinition of empire was turned back on the Soviet Union. If the US exercise of powers beyond its borders without formal annexation could be considered ‘imperialism,’ then why couldn’t the Soviet Union be held to the same standard? China used the same charge against Yugoslavia, seeking (with little success) to question the legitimacy of a Non-​Aligned Movement that included a white European power in favour of a ‘second Bandung’ without Soviet bloc or Yugoslav participation.76 Despite their best efforts, with the notable exception of Albania, the Chinese largely failed in their attempts to persuade Eastern European elites of the superiority of their standpoint over that of Moscow.77 The benefits of selective cooperation with the Soviet bloc were simply too great to swear off in the name of an exclusionary ‘Afro-​Asian solidarity.’ Those seeking to throw off Soviet control from within Eastern Europe, however, adapted a new anti-​imperialist language to their own struggle. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising marked a crucial moment. For the re-​established Hungarian socialist regime who suppressed the revolt, their ‘victory’ had been waged against western imperialists, in league with domestic ‘counter-​revolutionaries’, who sought to spread a reactionary capitalism back into Eastern Europe. This placed them in natural solidarity with Algerians fighting the French state, or the Cubans struggling against American imperialism.78 Much of the western world drew the opposite conclusion. For western politicians, particularly those on the right, the real imperialism of the postwar period was to be found in Eastern Europe. As Britain came under fire during the Suez Crisis for maintaining its colonial ambitions, Prime Minister Anthony Eden noted defensively that such accusations would be better directed against the Soviet Union—​the fastest growing imperial power since World War II in terms of territory gained, he noted.79 Postcolonial observers were more judicious in their criticism, noting a melancholy symmetry in the two acts. Nehru called both invasions revivals of ‘old colonial methods, which we had thought, in our ignorance, belonged to a more unenlightened age.’80 African-​Americans and opponents of apartheid in South Africa argued that the western world’s enthusiastic support for the Hungarian Uprising relied on the whiteness of its protagonists—​their own struggles for racial justice, by contrast, were not in the 1950s yet capable of eliciting such a level of commitment.81 Around 1960, the Year of Africa, critics of Soviet rule from the region itself increasingly fashioned their anti-​Communist rhetoric in anti-​imperialist language: if African nations were now granted their independence, how long would Eastern Europe have to wait?82 By the 1970s, Eastern European states’ support for the rights to sovereignty and racial justice for Afro-​Asian countries at international institutions rebounded back into their own sphere: the UN-​supported Human Rights Year (1968) helped spark off some of the

362    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian first manifestations of Soviet dissidence; some of the rights to freedom of expression and religion they had supported in the 1960s were taken up by the drafters of the Helsinki Accords in the 1970s.83 Designed to decrease tensions in Europe, the 1975 agreement forced Eastern bloc countries over time to provide a greater room for political expression, and offered a vital legal framework for nurturing the dissident movements which heralded the end of state socialism in the region. East European communist regimes may have used links to the postcolonial world of the Global South to strengthen their own legitimacy, but alternative political imaginaries, whether around anti-​imperialism, rights or cultural revolution, always carried the potential of eroding the legitimacy of regimes from the inside.

Communism and Colonialism: Analogy or Entanglement? One of the most enduring descriptions of the Soviet Union came when US president Ronald Reagan labelled it an ‘evil empire’ in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida in 1983. In the Cold War years, the political—​often anti-​communist—​charge of labelling the Soviet Union an empire deterred many scholars from using the term analytically.84 As the political stigma faded after the end of the Cold War, however, a number of works have begun to understand the USSR in precisely this framework.85 Some scholars have examined the dissolution of the Soviet bloc as an ‘end of empire’ story, suggesting parallels to other land-​based Eastern European empires, including the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as contiguous, multinational empires with forms of universalist legitimation challenged, and eventually superseded, by nationalisms over time.86 Others place Moscow at the centre of three quasi-​imperial concentric formations: from the multinational territory of the Soviet Union to the adjacent East European ‘satellites’ and ‘client states’ in the Global South beyond.87 As the moniker of empire has become less charged, so too has the description of the populations of the former Soviet bloc as ‘postcolonial.’ In the years around the new millennium, some scholars, mostly from literary studies and cultural anthropology, boldly claimed an analogy between the postcolonial and postcommunist condition in both former East European satellite states and Soviet republics.88 The analogy captured the self-​ understanding (often described as ‘liminal’) of East European intellectuals after the fall of the Berlin Wall.89 At the same time, the analogy threatened to reduce postcolonialism to a mobile framework applicable to any and all Self/​Other relationships, disconnected from any specific histories of racialization or formal empire.90 Lost in this chain of re-​ appropriation was a sense of historical periodicity. In a master framework drafted to understand Eastern Europe as ‘colonized’ before the 1990s and ‘postcolonial’ afterward, where is the place for intellectuals from Angola and South Africa who spent time in Warsaw, East Berlin, and Sofia in the 1970s and 1980s? What about the Mozambican,

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    363 Cuban, or Vietnamese guest workers treated as racialized ‘Others’ both before and after the end of Soviet empire in East Europe?91 What about the well-​established academic discipline of ‘orientalism’ in Communist countries?92 Should this be understood as a relationship between colonial societies? On the global scale, Eastern Europe’s membership (however vexed at different times) in the camp of the ‘white West’ deserves to remain central in scholarly categories of analysis.93 Perhaps it is advisable to think more in terms of entanglement than analogy. Rather than postcolonial East European studies, we could study Cold War histoires croisées. Some scholars have already demonstrated how European Communist nations were points of reference, places of education, and ports of exile for people of colour coming from more conventional colonial and postcolonial contexts.94 Both the Iron Curtain and the borders of the Black Atlantic were more porous than often assumed, offering contact zones for interconnection between the Eastern Bloc and the Global South.95 We can demonstrate another example of such an entangled history in the close succession of the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc and of South African apartheid. Opposition groups in South Africa had long cultivated ties to the socialist East. The Soviet Bloc was hosting South African dissidents as early as 1951, when, for example, Ahmad Kathrada travelled to the World Youth Festival in Berlin at the expense of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.96 Some eastern bloc states brought the UN-​sponsored International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre (21 March) into their own domestic commemorative calendars in the 1960s.97 Between 1963 and 1991, the Soviets provided substantial humanitarian and military support to the ANC, and military training to over 2000 activists, and political and specialist education to many more, including future South African president Thabo Mbeki.98 In the 1970s and 1980s, the ANC was the most important overseas partner for training by the East German Stasi.99 Nevertheless, the Soviet financial contribution to the ANC remained limited; Scandinavian countries alone provided more in the 1970s.100 The official support for the anti-​apartheid struggle made it difficult for Eastern European dissidents to make it a cause of their own. Although some in Poland’s Solidarity movement had recognized similarities in the parallel struggle of trade union movements against illegitimate power, the support of Warsaw’s Communists for the ANC, and of some Polish exile organizations for the apartheid state, made such identifications difficult to develop.101 Nor could the ANC, which had not opposed ‘Soviet imperialism’ in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, find common cause with the Eastern European anti-​regime opposition. This was left to more moderate groups such as Federation of South African Trade Unions which looked to Solidarity in Poland, or to writers interested in Eastern European traditions of literary resistance against state power.102 The weakening of the Soviet Union allowed parallel processes of decolonization to occur from 1989. One was in eastern Europe, where democracy began to function with open elections in Poland in June of that year, reforms toward multi-​party democracy Hungary in October, and, eventually, the street demonstrations in Leipzig and Berlin that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. The second was in southern

364    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian Africa. Rapprochement between the West and the Soviets led to a treaty which withdrew Cuban troops from Angola, and the South African army from what would become the independent state of Namibia.103 The collapse of the Soviet Union slowly undermined the apartheid regime’s ‘red terror’ propaganda, weakened the hand of the radicals in the anti-​apartheid opposition, and softened fears that black suffrage would usher in a Moscow-​directed Communist dictatorship.104 Hence, it helped erode the Manichean opposition that had sustained both apartheid and anti-​apartheid in the late Cold War, opening up the possibility for compromise and an end to the last struggle of decolonization in Africa. The execution of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, who had been developing relationships with leaders across southern Africa, was received as an important warning against the excessive concentration of political power.105 It was only after the collapse of state socialism that oppositional movements recognized deeper affinities with each other.106 By the early 1990s, the ANC, who had abandoned the armed struggle in favour of negotiation, looked to the peaceful settlement in Eastern Europe for inspiration through what contemporaries termed the ‘Leipzig option’.107 In 1992, a South African communist periodical wrote that ‘comrades have been invoking the 1989 examples from Eastern Europe of massive and ongoing city centre demonstrations (in Leipzig, Prague, and elsewhere) which acted as the engine for the rapid demise of regimes.’108 The political turn in countries which had once provided refuge for ANC and SACP exiles now gave a boost to forces across southern Africa who argued for marketization and political pluralism, continuing processes that had already begun in countries such as Mozambique and Zambia before 1989. This discovery helped many radical movements—​from SWAPO to the SACP—​to appreciate that the world was turning towards multi-​party politics and market economy.109 As one scholar has noted, one might find an evocative date for both the end of apartheid and the Cold War—​not with the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, but rather with the assassination of the head of the SACP Chris Hani in 1993 by a far-​right anti-​Communist who had immigrated to South Africa from Poland in 1981.110 The definitive end of empire also meant the death of the communist alternative.

Conclusion It is easy to imagine Eastern Europe playing a starring role in a global account of modern decolonization. It was the first site of decolonization in the twentieth century. Its experience of Nazi and Soviet occupation in World War II and its aftermath demonstrated that the end of empire and national sovereignty was reversible—​a story echoed in the experiences of Latin America and Western Europe, and in that sense illustrative of a global dynamic more common than a simple shift from outright colony to postcolonial nation. The end of Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe could be understood as the finale to the century’s grand process of imperial disintegration.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    365 In the 1960s, a range of critical voices in Eastern Europe did note the parallels between the struggle to end Soviet Empire and decolonization across the world. Yet the consciousness of these connections had all but disappeared by the 1980s. Anti-​ imperialism had become too closely associated with regime rhetoric. Moreover, postcolonial movements’ attempts to shake off Eurocentrism had little purchase for oppositional movements in the Eastern bloc who sought to escape their region’s own subservient geopolitical status through a ‘return to Europe’. Dissident intellectuals from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, in an act of cultural decolonization, coined the term ‘Central Europe’ to describe a zone distinct from the imperial Soviet centre—​an act that forced Soviet intellectuals to admit to the fact that they represented an imperial power, a concept that was absent from their discourse.111 Critical movements under Soviet influence understood themselves, for the most part, as part of national or regional struggles for sovereignty. Mainstream voices in Polish Solidarity, for instance, presented the trade union movement as part of a national tradition of resistance against centuries-​old invaders, whether Prussian, Austrian, German, Russian, or Soviet. Moreover, the transformations in both Eastern Europe and Southern Africa were much more commonly narrated in the categories of economic transition and democratization—​rather than anti-​imperialism and the end of empire. The idea of a third wave of democratization—​made famous by political scientist Samuel Huntington—​has swamped a language of decolonization.112 One scholar has argued that the ‘Manichean perspective’ of the Cold War beclouded the diverse visions for the future that had circulated in the decolonizing world.113 The lauded ‘end of history’ may have been even more constricting as the shared horizon of free market capitalism became the sole form of political imagination in an era after empire.

Notes 1. For recent attempts to “draw the periodization of both decolonization and the Cold War backward” before the Second World War, see Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake, “Introduction”, in Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War:  Negotiating Independence (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), 8; Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial apocalypse: The Great War and the destruction of the Russian empire (Oxford: OUP, 2014),  3–​7. 2. Stuart Ward, “The European Provenance of Decolonization,” Past and Present 230 (2016): 237–​240. 3. James Mark and Péter Apor, “Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the making of a new culture of internationalism in socialist Hungary 1956–​1989,” Journal of Modern History 87 (2015): 853. 4. Jeffrey James Byrne, “Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-​Alignment,” The International History Review 37, no. 6 (2015): 923–​ 927; Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-​Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 56, 217–​218. 5. See Susan Pedersen’s contribution to this volume.

366    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian 6. Jan Christian Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), esp. 10–​13. For Smuts, Eastern Europe consisted of ‘embryo states and derelict territories’ and leaders who were ‘untrained . . . deficient in power’. 7. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–​1931 (New York: Allen Lane, 2015), 555–​556. 8. Jamie Martin, “The Colonial Origins of the Greek Bailout,” Exeter Imperial and Global History Blog (July 2015), accessed at:  http://​imperialglobalexeter.com/​2015/​07/​27/​the-​ colonial-​origins-​of-​the-​greek-​bailout​. 9. Tooze, The Deluge, 555. For a more sympathetic account of Smuts’ role in reconstruction in Eastern Europe and the Middle East after the First and Second World Wars, see Saul Dubow, “Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 1 (2008): 52–​53. 10. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians:  The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 343–​345. 11. Jan Havlasa, České kolonie zámořské (Prague, 1919); Rudolf Cicvárek, Asijské problémy a naše vystěhovalectví (Prague, 1927); Piotr Rypson, “Polish Public Opinion on the Italo—​ Abyssinian War” (forthcoming). 12. “National Mythology, Suitcase Trade, and Blank Spaces. Janek Simon Talks to Michał Woliński,” Piktogram 13 (2009), 50. 13. Piotr Rypson, “Polish Public Opinion. ‘Alo! Alo! . . . Ovde Abisinija!’ ”, Radio Beograd, 8 October 1935. 14. On African American radical Cyril Briggs, see Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–​1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 38. George Padmore, “Czechoslovakia: A New Abyssinia” in The People (Trinidad), 15 October 1938. Thanks to Leslie James for this point. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India:  Collected Writings 1937–​40 (London:  Lindsay Drummond, 1948), 273–​274. 15. Moritz Bonn, “The Age of Counter-​Colonisation,” International Affairs 13, no. 6 (1934): 846. 16. Joseph LeRoy Love, Crafting the Third World:  Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1996); Manuela Boatca, From Neoevolutionism to World-​ Systems Analysis:  The Romanian Theory of “Forms without Substance” in Light of Modern Debates on Social Change (Opladen:  Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2003). 17. J. F. J. Toye and Richard Toye, The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance, and Development (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 54–​56. 18. P. N. Rosenstein-​Rodan, “The International Development of Economically Backward Areas,” International Affairs, 20, no. 2 (April 1944): 164. 19. Christopher Andrew, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World—​Newly Revealed Secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 20. Vojtech Mastny, “The Soviet Union’s Partnership with India,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, no. 3 (2010): 53. 21. Quoted in Alfred B. Evans, Soviet Marxism-​Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 73. 22. David C. Engerman, “Learning from the East:  Soviet Experts and India in the Era of Competitive Coexistence,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 232.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    367 23. Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–​1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 475. 24. Gareth M. Winrow, The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1990), 210; Oscar Sanchez-​Sibony, Red Globalization:  The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), 128. 25. Winrow, Foreign Policy of the GDR, 208. 26. Massimiliano Trentin, “Modernization as State Building: The Two Germanies in Syria, 1963–​1972,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 502; William Glenn Gray, Germany’s Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–​1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003). 27. Elidor Mëhilli, “Defying De-​Stalinization: Albania’s 1956,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, no. 4 (2011): 4–​56. 28. See Robert Niebuhr, “Nonalignment as Yugoslavia’s Answer to Bloc Politics,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 13, no. 1 (2011): 146–​179; Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 29. Tvrtko Jakovina, Treća strana hladnog rata (Zagreb:  Fraktura, 2011); Hrvoje Klasić, Jugoslavija i svijet 1968 (Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2012). 30. Itty Abraham, “Prolegomena to Non-​Alignment: Race and the International System,” in Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-​Tiné, and Nada Boškovska Leimgruber, eds., The Non-​ Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi, Bandung, Belgrade (New York: Routledge, 2014), 77. 31. Jeremy Friedman, “Soviet Policy in the Developing World and the Chinese Challenge in the 1960s,” Cold War History 10, no. 2 (2010): 253–​254. 32. Young-​Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235. The Hungarian “Center for Afro-​Asian Research” was part of the national Academy of Sciences. The Zagreb-​based “Africa Research Institute” became “The Institute for Developing Countries” in 1971. 33. Daniela Hannova, “Arab Students inside the Soviet Bloc: A Case Study on Czechoslovakia During the 1950s and 60s,” European Scientific Journal 2 (2014): 373. Across the socialist East of Europe, students from newly decolonized countries came to receive technical training at local universities, institutes, and factories. 34. Hong, Cold War Germany, c­ hapters 2 and 9. Łukasz Stanek, “Accra, Warsaw, and Socialist Globalization,” in B. Albrecht, ed., Africa. Big Change, Big Chance (Bologna:  Editrice Compositori, 2014), 162–​164; Vladimir Kulić, “Building the Non-​Aligned Babel: Babylon Hotel in Baghdad and Mobile Design in the Global Cold War,” ABE Journal 6 (2014). 35. Christina Schwenkel, “Traveling Architecture:  East German Urban Designs Abroad,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 2, no. 2 (2014): 155–​174. 36. Łukasz Stanek, “Miastoprojekt goes abroad: the transfer of architectural labour from socialist Poland to Iraq (1958–​1989),” The Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012), 384. This position conveniently set aside the colonial aspects of the Polish presence in Belarus and Ukraine, and the interwar fantasies of overseas colonies of some business leaders. 37. See Andreas Eckert covering “Nazi empire” in this volume. 38. See, e.g., Afro-​Asian Solidarity Committee, The Neo-​Colonialism of the West German Federal Republic (n.p., 1965).

368    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian 39. Nigdywięcejwrześnia 1939 r.  [Never again September  1939], Trybuna Ludu (2 September 1966). 40. James Mark, Péter Apor, Radina Vučetić, and Piotr Osęka, “ ‘We are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015): 445–​446. 41. Anne Gorsuch, “ ‘Cuba, My Love’:  The Romance of Revolutionary Cuba in the Soviet Sixties,” American Historical Review 120 (2015):  462–​ 496; Tobias Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Encounters between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015), ­chapter  2; Mark and Apor, “Socialism Goes Global,” 857–​859; Jennifer Ruth Hosek, Sun, Sex and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), ­chapter 2. 42. See Nick Rutter, “Look Left, Drive Right:  Internationalisms at the 1968 World Youth Festival,” in Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane Koenker, eds., The Socialist Sixties:  Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Interpersonal relations frequently escaped these bounds. Hong, Cold War Germany, 52. 43. See Gerd Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus’ of the Early 1970s,” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (2013): 557–​578; Toni Weis, “The Politics Machine: On the Concept of ‘Solidarity’ in East German Support for Swapo,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 351–​367. 44. See Christina Schwenkel, “Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam,” in Quinn Slobodian, ed., Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 267–​292. 45. Johanna Bockman, “Socialist Globalization and Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the NIEO,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 109–​128. 46. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was the world’s largest oil producer. Douglas Rogers, “Petrobarter, Oil, Inequality, and the Political Imagination in and after the Cold War,” Current Anthropology 55, no. 2 (2014): 136. 47. Sanchez-​Sibony, Red Globalization, 134. 48. Sanchez-​Sibony,  138. 49. Jude Howell, “The End of an Era: The Rise and Fall of GDR Aid,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 32, no. 2 (1994): 328. 50. Klaus Storkmann, Geheime Solidarität: Militärbeziehungen und Militärhilfen der DDR in die “Dritte Welt” (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2012), 162. 51. Mark Kramer, “The Decline in Soviet Arms Transfers to the Third World, 1986–​1991,” in Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, eds., The End of the Cold War and The Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 56–​57. 52. Storkmann, Geheime Solidarität, 170. 53. Storkmann, 579. 54. Storkmann, 592. 55. Robert E. Hudec, Developing Countries in the GATT/​WTO Legal System (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 59. 56. Dietrich Schulz, “Aktuelle Fragen des Völkerrechts,” Neue Zeit, 14 March 1984. 57. Engerman, “Learning from the East,” 234. Lorenzini, “Comecon,” 187–​ 188. Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel, ‘Between Internationalism and International Relations: Labour Mobility in the Socialist World’, in James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky and Steffi Marung, ed., Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (forthcoming). Excepting Romania and Yugoslavia, Eastern European socialist states

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    369 did not commit themselves to supporting the “New International Economic Order” in the 1970s. 58. Sanchez-​Sibony, Red Globalization, 127. Jude Howell, “The End of an Era,” 308. 59. Sara Lorenzini, “Comecon and the South in the years of détente: a study on East–​South economic relations,” European Review of History 21, no. 2 (2014): 191–​193. 60. Quinn Slobodian, “Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany,” in Comrades of Color,  23–​39. 61. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 71; Steven L. B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights. The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially ­chapters 4 and 5. 62. Itty Abraham, “From Bandung to NAM:  Non-​Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–​1965,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 45 (2008): 206. 63. On African students, see Julie Hessler, “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, no. 1–​2 (2006): 33–​63. On Latin American students, see Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism, 284–​287. 64. Ian Law, Red Racisms: Racism in Communist and Post-​Communist Contexts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 39. 65. Alena G. Alamgir, “Race Is Elsewhere: State-​Socialist Ideology and the Racialization of Vietnamese Workers in Czechoslovakia,” Race & Class 54, no. 4 (2013), 73–​74. 66. Zatlin, “Scarcity and Resentment,” 697. 67. Maxim Matusevich, “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 27, no.  2 (2009):  28–​30; Maxim Matusevich, “Testing the Limits of Soviet Internationalism. African Students in the Soviet Union,” in Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Race, Ethnicity and the Cold War (Nashville, TN:  Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 155–​159; Weis, “The Politics Machine,” 366. On skinhead attacks on Cubans in Hungary, see James Mark and Bálint Tolmár, “Encountering Cuba in Socialist Hungary” (forthcoming). 68. Quinn Slobodian, “Bandung in Divided Germany:  Managing Non-​Aligned Politics in East and West, 1955–​63,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 4 (2013): 654. 69. Abigail Judge Kret, “ ‘We Unite with Knowledge’: The Peoples’ Friendship University and Soviet Education for the Third World,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 248. 70. Mark et al., “ ‘We are with You, Vietnam’ ”: 453–​461. 71. P. J. Marković, “Najava bure: studentski nemiri u svetu i Jugoslaviji od Drugog svetskog rata do početka šezdesetih godina,” Tokovi istorije 3–​4 (2000): 59. 72. Mark et al., “ ‘We are with You, Vietnam’ ”: 455–​456. 73. David G. Tompkins, “The East is Red? Images of China in East Germany and Poland through the Sino-​ Soviet Split,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-​ Forschung 62, no.  3 (2013): 393–​424. 74. Quinn Slobodian, “The Maoist Enemy: China’s Challenge in 1960s East Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no.3 (2015): 635–​659. 75. Institut für internationale Beziehungen. Abt. Sozialistische Staaten. Die Entwicklung der Beziehungen zwischen der VR China und der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik von 1949 bis 1971. N.d. DY 30-​IV A 2/​20/​1013.

370    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian 76. Jovan Cavoski, “Between Great Powers and Third World Neutralists: Yugoslavia and the Belgrade Conference of the Non-​Aligned Movement, 1961,” in The Non-​Aligned Movement and the Cold War, 197. See also Mark T. Berger, “After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2004): 14. 77. See Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-​ Soviet Split:  Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), ­chapter 5; Elidor Mëhilli, “Mao and the Albanians,” and Domnique Kirchner Reill, “Partisan Legacies and Anti-​ Imperialist Ambitions: The Little Red Book in Italy and Yugoslavia,” in Alexander C. Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 78. See this interpretation in the so-​called White Books, which were used to propagate the idea that the revolt of October 1956 was the expression of international counter-​ revolution in schools and in public life:  Nagy Imre és Bűntársai Ellenforradalmi Összeesküvése [The Counter-​Revolutionary Conspiracy of Imre Nagy and His Fellow Criminals] (Budapest:  A Magyar Népköztársaság Minisztertanácsa Tájékoztatási Hivatala, 1958), ­chapter 8. 79. Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in France and Britain 1882–​1956 (Oxford, forthcoming), ­chapter 6. 80. Quoted in Nataša Mišković, “Between Idealism and Pragmatism:  Tito, Nehru and the Hungarian Crisis, 1956,” in The Non-​Aligned Movement and the Cold War, 125. 81. Rachel A. Wonder, “From Cotton Curtain to Iron Curtain. Black Americans’ reaction to the Hungarian Crisis of 1956 and 1957” (University of Montana MA thesis, 1997), 102; “Hungary and South Africa,” Africa South 1, no. 3 (1957): 3–​5. 82. Mate Nikola Tokić, “The End of ‘Historical-​Ideological Bedazzlement’ Cold War Politics and Émigré Croatian Separatist Violence, 1950–​1980,” Social Science History 36, no.  3 (2012): 421–​445. 83. Jensen, International Human Rights, 217–​218, 219, 280. 84. Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends:  The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 3. 85. See, e.g., Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Terry Martin, “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-​Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). V. M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 86. Robert W. Strayer, “Decolonization, Democratization, and Communist Reform:  The Soviet Collapse in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World History 12, no.  2 (2001): 376–​77. 87. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts:  Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 16. 88. See, e.g., Sibelan E.  S. Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, “Introduction:  Mapping Postsocialist Cultural Studies,” in Sibelan E.  S. Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, eds., Over the Wall/​after the Fall:  Post-​ Communist Cultures through an East-​West Gaze (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 2004), 10; Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, “Configurations of Postcoloniality and National Identity: Inbetween

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization    371 Peripherality and Narratives of Change,” The Comparatist 23 (1999): 89. On the region as “doubly postcolonial”—​the object of both Soviet imperialism and Western “peripheralizing capitalism”—​see Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Şandru, “Introduction: On colonialism, communism and east-​ central Europe—​ some reflections,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 115. 89. Clare Cavanagh, “Postcolonial Poland,” Common Knowledge 10, no.  2 (2004):  84–​92; David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 118–​124. 90. See, e.g., Michał Buchowski, “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2006): 466. 91. On the racialization of Vietnamese labour migrants in Czechoslovakia, see Alamgir, “Race is elsewhere”. In 1983, over 7,000 Cubans were participating in training programs in the GDR, and an additional 4,000 in Czechoslovakia. The USSR also accepted workers from Cuba. See Perez-​Lopez and Diaz-​Briquets, Labor Migration, 283. On the sexualization and racialization of female labour migrants in Hungary, see Mark and Tolmár, Encountering Cuba (forthcoming). 92. See Michael Kemper and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds. Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies During the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2015). 93. For influential challenges to this notion, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 94. See, e.g., Matusevich, “Probing the Limits of Internationalism,” 19–​39; Monica Popescu, “On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Eastern Bloc, and the Cold War,” Research in African Literatures 45, no. 3 (2014): 91–​109; Simon Stevens, “Bloke Modisane in East Germany,” in Comrades of Color, 121–​130. 95. Cedric Tolliver, “Alternative Solidarities,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no.  4 (2014): 380; Michael David-​Fox, “The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex,” in Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-​1960s (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014): 18. 96. Nick Rutter, “The Western Wall: The Iron Curtain Recast in Midsummer 1951,” in Cold War Crossings, 91. 97. Report of the UN Secretary-​General, “Implementation of the UN Declaration on the elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination,” 30 August 1967, 34. 98. Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson, The Hidden Thread: Russia and South Africa in the Soviet Era (New York: Jonathan Ball, 2013), 308, 323. For a rather uncritical analysis from an insider, see Vladimir Shubin and Marina Traikova, “There is no threat from the eastern Bloc,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Vol. 3. International Solidarity (Los Angeles: Unisa Press, 2008), 1059–​1060. 99. Storkmann, Geheime Solidarität, 568. 100. Filatova and Davidson, Hidden Thread, 343–​344; Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Volume II:  Solidarity and Assistance 1970–​ 1994 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2002), 36. 101. Christiaens and Goddeeris, “Entangled Solidarities?” 102. Monica Popescu, South African Literature Beyond the Cold War (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 12.

372    James Mark and Quinn Slobodian 103. Fabian Klose, “Decolonization and Revolution,” European History Online. http://​ ieg-​ego.eu/​en/​threads/​europe-​and-​the-​world/​european-​overseas-​rule/​fabian-​klose-​ decolonization-​and-​revolution#InsertNoteID_​89_​marker90. 104. Chris Saunders, “The Ending of the Cold War and Southern Africa,” in The End of the Cold War and the Third World, 270; Rob Nixon, “The Collapse of the Communist-​ Anticommunist Condominium: The Repercussions for South Africa,” Social Text 31, no. 32 (1992): 235–​251. Even the reaction to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February 1991 was muted in the Soviet Union. 105. Douglas G. Anglin, “Southern African Responses to Eastern European Developments,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 28, no. 3 (1990): 434. 106. See also Solidarity’s embrace of anti-​apartheid only after the fall of Communism. On 13 December 1989, on the first anniversary in democratic Poland of the proclamation of martial law, a reggae concert against Apartheid was held in the Gdańsk shipyard: Christiaens and Goddeeris, “Entangled Solidarity.” 107. Chris Saunders, “1989 and Southern Africa,” in Ulf Engel, Frank Hadler and Matthias Middell, eds., 1989 in Global Perspective (Leipzig: Leipzig University Press, 2015), 358–​359. Adrian Guelke and Tom Junes, “ ‘Copycat Tactics’ in Processes of Regime Change:  The Demise of Communism in Poland and Apartheid in South Africa,” Critique and Humanism Journal 40 (2012): 172. Links were also invoked by Jamaican-​born black British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. He had sought to connect the struggles of the British working class under Thatcherism and Polish Solidarity in 1982’s “Wat about di working claas,” had performed in Gdańsk at Solidarity’s 1990 anti-​apartheid concert, and suggested an entanglement between the fall of state socialism in the Eastern bloc and the fight to end apartheid on the 1991 track, “Mi Revalueshanary Fren”. 108. Jeremy Cronin, “The Boat, the Tap and the Leipzig Way,” African Communist 130 (1992). www.nelsonmandela.org [Accessed April 19, 2015]. 109. Guelke and Junes, “Copycat Tactics”, 186–​187. 110. On his death as the turning point, see Christopher J. Lee, “Decoloniality of a Special Type: Solidarity and Its Potential Meanings in South African Literature, During and after the Cold War,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no.  4 (2014):  466. Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Rhetoric, Dialogue, and Performance in Nelson Mandela’s ‘Televised Address on the Assassination of Chris Hani’,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (2003): 709–​735. 111. See Jessie Labov, “A Russian Encounter with the Myth of Central Europe,” The Contours of Legitimacy in Central Europe:  New Approaches in Graduate Studies. European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford: Lisbon conference, 1988. 112. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 113. Bradley, “Decolonization”, 465.

Chapter 20

De c ol oniz ation a nd t h e Arid Worl d Robert S. G. Fletcher

Empires come and empires go, Shelley’s Ozymandias reminds us, but ‘the lone and level sands’ endure. From the Sahara in the west to the Gobi in the east, a vast belt of desert and semi-​desert environments spans the length of the Afro-​Eurasian landmass. This great Arid Zone—​larger than all other dry areas of the world combined—​passes through more than 35 nation-states, most of which became independent of the European and Soviet empires in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, aridity is a climatic fact, with low annual rainfall affecting the density and growth rates of diverse flora and fauna. We might also consider it a historical fact, presenting distinct opportunities and exerting particular pressures on the human societies that have sought to live within and operate through its boundaries. Imperialism and decolonization transformed political geographies; in many ways, they made the world in which we live. Whether the constraints and possibilities of physical geography could be as readily disregarded is another question altogether. This chapter explores the comparable and connected histories of the world’s desert environments in the era of decolonization. It seeks to offer some initial reflections on how our histories of the ends of empire might change when desert ‘margins’ take centre stage. This is hardly a perspective that many decolonization specialists have chosen to stress. In the 1980s, the historical geographer Joe Powell undertook a lively ‘Cook’s tour’ of the world’s semiarid lands, noting how new nationalisms, imperial networks, and scientific expertise were intersecting to change systems of land use between the world wars.1 Across a longer chronology, Diana K. Davis has made a particular study of changing cultural perceptions of drylands, from the authors of antiquity to development programmes today.2 A  wider literature has also emerged on the history of scientific and managerial internationalist approaches to deserts in the later twentieth century; Richard Grove’s work on discourses of desiccation remains another important point of reference.3 But it is perhaps scholars of the ancient and the medieval past who have done the most to demonstrate the potential of the Arid Zone as a unit of historical analysis.

374   Robert S. G. Fletcher Thinking in terms of an Arid Zone or ‘Saharasia’ has stimulated comparative approaches to locations within this ‘wider, frequently broken, ecological continuum’, suggesting a host of forces and dynamics which have influenced its past.4 Nomadic pastoralism, in particular, has emerged as evidence of human adaptation to dryland environments, with many now arguing for the disproportionate role of nomads and their empires in the histories of wider regions. Students of the modern period, in contrast, seldom address the Arid Zone as such, certainly relative to the amount of writing focused on the nation state. Nomadic pastoralism may be a great example of human responses to desert conditions, but it would be a mistake to assume that it was also the last. In recent years, however, a number of historians have examined the attempts of particular empires and states to solve the ‘problems’ of their arid borderlands. Often directed at explaining contemporary tensions between a national ‘core’ and its ‘periphery’, or on the economic and political fortunes of a particular frontier zone or minority community, their work suggests an exciting set of tensions and responses for further comparative analysis, from frontier delimitation and detribalization to irrigation and development. This chapter explores this growing body of work (some of the best of which is little known outside single national historiographies) and draws out the wider historical framework in which these encounters took place. As a survey, it is unfortunately selective; much valuable work has had to be left out. But in many ways, the modern history of the Arid Zone has heretofore been splintered, frustrating an appreciation of the whole: this chapter presents an opportunity to think more broadly about patterns of state engagement with deserts and their populations across the twentieth-​century. Doing so is not only a chance to unite somewhat disaggregated stories. Thinking in terms of the Arid Zone’s modern history brings a fresh approach to outstanding issues in the history of the ends of empire, prompting us to question the units and chronologies we employ. It supports the wider objective of recovering the pasts of so-​called ‘empty’ spaces, areas often ‘marginal’ to more nationally focused histories. It contributes to a new literature on decolonization and the natural world, an area of growing interest given the significance of interventions in the environment to the growth of the capacities of the state in world history.5 It suggests that deserts have been the setting for events and the home of resources integral to the wider histories of decolonization and the Cold War, both contributing to and helping to reveal significant patterns of political, economic, and social change. Above all, it considers how far decolonization and the Cold War took a distinct path in the arid world, asks whether we’ve given enough weight to the place of arid regions in these wider histories, and reflects on the ways in which these regions still resist being folded into the national stories of imperialism’s successor states. *** At the turn of the twentieth century many statesmen, commentators, and colonial officials expressed anxiety about a world with no more empty spaces to settle, no more frontiers to close. From Frederick Jackson Turner’s concern that ‘the free lands are gone’ to Halford Mackinder’s proscriptions for the conduct of imperial politics since ‘the round world has become a closed and locked system’, closed-​space ideas were, as James Malin observed, very much ‘in the air’.6 By the 1920s, with new lines drawn up across

Decolonization and the Arid World    375 the former Ottoman lands, much of the great Arid Zone had also been partitioned. Yet here, at least, talk of the ‘closing’ of the world was soon shown up as premature. With their low population densities, poor productivity, and mobile and powerful inhabitants, vast desert territories defied straightforward control by national and imperial governments alike for decades. In the era of the two world wars, many states embraced new techniques and technologies in renewed attempts to monopolize authority over desert regions, from the state-​building projects of Saudi Arabia and Iran to the empires of Italy, France, and Great Britain. Decolonization in the arid world, when it came, did so on the back of a period of heightened state engagement with desert environments. The Middle East, for example, witnessed a succession of interwar attempts to project power into arid hinterlands and to curb the autonomy of nomadic groups. In Iran, Reza Shah’s campaign to address the country’s ‘tribal problem’ lay at the heart of a sustained drive to transform the state itself. As Stephanie Cronin has shown, from 1921 the regime committed unprecedented resources to controlling rural society, as it set about sedentarizing tribes, courting khans, and targeting the power of the Bakhtiyari.7 Across the Persian Gulf, in Arabia, the work of recruiting, settling, and ultimately suppressing the Ajman, Harb, and Mutair played a similarly pivotal role in the consolidation of Saudi power.8 In Syria, the French mandatory regime set up a separate Contrôle Bédouin organization to police its desert zones, drawing freely upon leçons reçues in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.9 In Egypt, Palestine, Trans-​Jordan, and Iraq, Britain’s interwar ‘moment’ in the Middle East also coincided with fresh attempts to know and control the region’s arid borderlands. Between the new generation of ‘desert administrators’ active on the ground, and the new strategy of ‘air policing’ from above, British influence appeared to tighten in the region’s desert areas even as it retreated from its cities and towns: a reflection of the importance the British attached to developing the new overland routes of their empire.10 In North Africa, the French Empire had a longer history of attempting to ‘pacify’ the Sahara, but the interwar years still had a tenor of their own. The dream of a transsaharien connection by rail never came to pass, but now, through aircraft and the automobile, it achieved a form of reality, with new implications for French military control and tribal policy.11 In Libya, the Italian Empire launched new and ambitious schemes of military occupation and agricultural settlement in the 1920s and ’30s.12 The Tsarist Russian state had supported peasant emigration into Central Asia since the 1880s, but wholesale revolt from 1916 would prompt a renewed effort to suppress tribal power and extend state authority.13 Together with their counterparts in China, Soviet authorities spent much of the interwar years struggling for control of the Kazakh-​Xinjiang borderland, a shadow war that would see thousands of nomads and refugees flee one jurisdiction for another.14 The circumstances varied, of course, but governments faced common and pressing problems as they attempted to penetrate remote environments, develop natural resources, control nomadic societies, and manage desiccation. This would have important repercussions in the era of decolonization, revising our impressions of when it was that those processes were set in motion. Because many desert areas remained difficult to govern in the early twentieth century, they were already sites of contestation, innovation, and experiment—​places intricately bound up with wider questions of authority

376   Robert S. G. Fletcher and power—​by the time that anti-​colonial movements were presenting new claims to the legitimacy of rule. Because it was often inside the great Arid Zone that discrete imperial systems came into contact, governments acted here in an incendiary setting of intensified international rivalry and conflict (tensions made even worse by the existence of a range of competing imperial projects in the Arid Zone to build new communications routes by rail, road, and air). In each case, the challenges of managing nomads or transforming environments shifted into a new gear at this time, catalysing legal, institutional, and structural changes to the imperial territories and national states in question, often giving rise to a scale of state intervention and to apparatuses of government quite distinct from those at work in more settled, ‘orderly’ jurisdictions. And while interwar technologies such as aircraft, the motorcar, and wireless telegraphy allowed states to expand into hinterlands where their authority had long been attenuated, they could not yet act with impunity towards the peoples who called them home.15 Well into the 1920s and 1930s, the desert areas of many a state remained ones in which political identities were highly mutable, and loyalty to central authorities shallow-​rooted. Economic, social, and political relations may have begun to be realigned by newly international boundaries, but older networks of trade, grazing, and migration—​so integral to the survival of desert communities—​still persisted.16 For many interwar regimes, deserts held out a seductive vision of new resources and greater territory that remained tantalizingly out of reach. Even after the Second World War, it is striking how often the growth of anti-​colonial nationalism appears to have occurred alongside the forward expansion of imperial power into desert territories. Was there more to this than coincidence? In some instances, the rise of organized nationalist movements and the predominantly urban nature of the phenomenon may have prompted colonial regimes to double-​down on their assets in the desert, out of sight of potential critics, if seldom out of mind. The British experience in the Middle East and North Africa is suggestive in this regard. In 1945, Lord Altringham, British Resident Minister in the Middle East, stood at the foot of the statue of Saad Zaghlul—​Egypt’s great nationalist hero—​in Cairo, and looked out across the Nile. What he saw troubled him deeply. ‘Cairo’, he wrote, is an occupied city . . . A host of auxiliary organizations . . . inhabit many of the city’s chief buildings . . . on [the] right is one of Cairo’s most charming parks, still a military camp. On [the] left is the Alamein Club . . . the scene . . . of formidable parades. Across the Nile the statue faces the Kasr-​el-​Nil barracks and the Semiramis Hotel, [ . . . ] still a military headquarters . . . This investment of a nationalist monument is symbolic.17

The solution, it seemed to Altringham, was to reduce the visibility of Britain’s forces in the region by getting them beyond the gaze of populous urban centres.18 The subsequent development and store set by the Suez Canal base is merely one example of this (even if it ultimately proved too distant from Alexandria and Cairo for some on the British staff, and not distant enough for many Egyptians). Richard Worrall has described the repeated attempts made between 1945 and 1949 to station a British military reserve in the deserts of Cyrenaica—​less provocative than in Egypt, more stable than in Palestine.19

Decolonization and the Arid World    377 Sir John Glubb, since 1939 the commander of Jordan’s armed forces, also believed in meeting the twin threats of nationalism and the Soviet Union by creating ‘a chain of Gibraltars’—​a new network of British bases—​in locations across the Libyan, Syrian, and Arabian deserts, away from ‘the vicinity of cities and politicians’ (and wherever possible acquired as Crown Colonies).20 In Southwest Arabia in the 1950s, local British officials responded to the growth of Nasserite influence and Yemeni irredentism by deepening their involvement along the Aden Protectorates’ frontiers, hoping to bind their tribal allies into a tighter system of British control. Later, the ill-​fated attempt to incorporate Aden Colony into a wider Federation also sought to offset Britain’s collaborative relationships in the desert against rising urban nationalism.21 In Iran in the 1940s, the British reactivated their connections among the Bakhtiyari and other southern khans, this time as a bulwark against a weakened central government, Soviet infiltration, and the rise of the Tudeh Party.22 Proposals for the retention of a British Negev appeared before the Cabinet in 1943, 1946, and 1948; more than once in the 1950s, Parliament discussed the possibility of annexing the Sinai peninsula outright on the grounds of its strategic potential and apparent isolation from anticolonial protest. Many of these schemes proved a disappointment. Collectively, however, they show just how large deserts loomed in the imperial imagination, as local and metropolitan officers alike explored possibilities for the more discrete exercise of influence, and even rule. The British story reminds us of the unevenness of decolonization: imperial influence could expand into new territories even as it retreated from others. It was the French, however, who took this logic to its boldest conclusion. Between 1957 and 1963, the French government sought to create a new institution—​the Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes (OCRS)—​out of the combined desert regions of Algeria, Mauritania, the French Sudan, Niger, and Chad. The aim was to try and isolate these relatively pro-​French areas from the fallout of the Algerian War (and, later, the impending break-​up of the French communauté), to hold on to their oil and natural gas (discovered at Hassi Messaoud and Hassi R’Mel in 1956), and to conduct nuclear tests in their vast hinterland. The scheme was audacious, certainly, but it was also of a type. The distinctly military character of Saharan administration had persisted since the conquest, and in that respect the OCRS was the last in a line of a political schemes for tighter French control of the Sahara.23 While initial proposals to build an autonomous Saharan Région or Département failed, the OCRS still effected a partition of sorts, with authority over many areas of economic and social life in nominally distinct jurisdictions being centralized under a new Ministry of the Sahara in Paris.24 It was welcomed by many among the Tuareg elite, whose worlds spanned the administrative boundaries of France’s colonies, and who saw in it a means of preserving cultural identity and a degree of political autonomy. But to politicians in Bamako, Niamey, and Algiers, it was an affront to sovereignty, and did not outlast French defeat in the Algerian war. That it had ever been thinkable owed much to the growing antipathy between many desert populations and their emerging national elites, a theme to which we shall return. Historians of the British Empire often refer to a ‘second colonial occupation’ to describe the renewed, enthusiastic, ‘intrusive and often haphazard’ involvement of British officials in their colonies after the Second World War, driven by the new imperatives of

378   Robert S. G. Fletcher economic reconstruction and upholding Britain’s position on the international stage.25 In the twin contexts of late colonialism and the Cold War, might we talk of a ‘second colonial occupation’ of the arid world, too? For across the Arid Zone, postwar visions of ‘desert development’ played an important part in the claims to legitimacy of colonial regimes and the Cold War competition for hearts and minds. In the Middle East, the American Point Four programme built new laboratories and imported agricultural technologies to ‘make the desert bloom’; so, too, on a more humble scale, did the forestry training courses, irrigation pilot projects, and well-​drilling programmes advanced by the British Middle East Office.26 French politicians lost no opportunity in promoting the OCRS as a sign of their commitment to improving the lives of the peoples of the Sahara.27 Soviet scientists in Central Asia pointed to the creation of protective forest belts and the fixing of sand dunes to trumpet their achievements in desertification control—another victory for ‘the Soviet system of nature management’ and the planned economy.28 Today, the Karakum Canal project is best remembered for its role in causing the Aral Sea disaster, but for decades (construction lasted from 1954 to 1988) it served as a showcase of Soviet engineering: the largest and longest irrigation canal in the Soviet Union.29 By the 1950s, Soviet and Western science had even weaponized rainfall, experimenting in weather modification to irrigate the drylands of their allies and desertify those of their enemies. Much of this was fantastical, but that did not stop deserts real and imagined playing a part in Cold War geopolitics, from Cuban and Mexican accusations of American-​induced droughts, to President Lyndon Johnson’s support for Project GROMET, the 1967 attempt at ‘seeding’ clouds to break the drought in Bihar Province and ‘pull non-​aligned India . . . into the western sphere’.30 Ambitious engineers on both sides of the Iron Curtain now pledged to harness the power of the atom and transform the desert areas of the former colonized world into gigantic irrigation projects and inland seas.31 These were new variations on an older theme: dreams of flooding the Sahara had existed since the nineteenth century. But it was over dams that science fiction and fact came closest together. After the Second World War, the Arid Zone witnessed an explosion in new dam projects, as the engineers of competing powers scrambled to win over national elites to their visions of the future. These projects were by no means confined to the arid world, but it was here that some of the most ambitious took root—​ where the seductive image of abolishing the desert matched the confidence of the times; where existing economies were often more limited in scale; and where civilian objections might be more easily brushed aside. In Khuzistan in 1956, for example, American engineers began a new high dam for the Deza River—​one of the boldest projects in the world to date—​as part of a drive to cement their ties with states bordering the Soviet Union. As R. P. Tucker has shown, the siting of many such dams reflects the geographies of decolonization and the Cold War, so that fiscal and industrial resources were funnelled to many a remote location.32 In turn, national elites looked to dams to expand both economic and political power, advancing the cause of more meaningful independence. The resulting tensions meant that dams and irrigation projects in the Arid Zone would provide flash-​points for some of the most remarkable events in the history of

Decolonization and the Arid World    379 decolonization, not least the politics of funding the Aswan Dam and the road to the Suez Crisis. For Iran’s last shah, irrigating the Khuzistan lowlands was not only a means to power economic development: it would deprive the Bakhitiyari and Qashqai of grazing grounds, thereby renewing his father’s campaign to control the tribes. Taken together, the scale of state activity in the world’s deserts in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s is striking. Behind many new schemes and projects lay the feeling that effective control of a desert’s people or resources was vital to the strength of a wider polity and the exercise of broader influence and power. In China in the 1940s, for example, a renewed drive to control the arid far west accompanied the rolling back of colonialism from the coast. In this, the Communist Party proved just as committed to nationalizing the diverse territories bequeathed by the Qing Empire as the Guomindang had been before them.33 The efforts to hold Xinjiang within the orbit of the state were perhaps the most desperate: here, the ‘crisis of Han colonial legitimacy’ (the creation of the breakaway East Turkestan Republic in 1943 marked a particular low point) offered political opportunities for Kazakh nomad autonomy and Soviet intervention alike.34 For Xioyuan Liu, the determination of successive governments to project the centre’s authority helps to define twentieth-​century China as ‘a frontier state’, where ‘ “peripheral” matters were central to the very vitality of the newly forged Chinese Nation’ and remained so across the disjunctures of 1911 and 1949.35 The drylands of the American West were not subject to the same separatist pressures, but still received conspicuous injections of federal capital and military personnel during the twentieth century, so that many extensive desert areas (and their economic prospects) remain in federal—​ often military—​hands.36 By the 1950s, the development of the atomic bomb, the escalation of the Korean War, and a new emphasis on air power and missile development had fuelled a boom in bases, test facilities, and research stations across the arid West, cementing a broader relationship between regional history, national defence, and the international projection of American power. Nuclear testing, overseas bases, irrigation schemes, and mega-​engineering projects reinforced the place of desert areas within wider structures of power. With the renewed emphasis on secrecy of the early Cold War, deserts became home to some of the largest military installations on earth: the environment of choice, perhaps, for the military-​ industrial complex. ‘Emptiness’ and ‘remoteness’ were valued assets now. Where uncomfortable evidence of productive desert communities was found, discourses dismissing ‘barren wastelands’ and insisting on their ‘sterility’ helped to brush aside objections to military occupation and environmental destruction. The first American nuclear tests were conducted, as is well known, in the deserts of New Mexico. Shut out from participation in the American programme after 1946, the British conducted their own tests in the deserts of South Australia—​a vital series of trials, not only to British prestige, but also to convincing the US to resume joint tests in Nevada. France conducted nuclear tests at Reggane in the Sahara; China at Lop Nor on the edge of the Taklamakan; the USSR at Semipalatinsk on the Kazakh steppe; India in the Thar desert; Pakistan in the Ras Koh Hills. At its most brilliant, the connection between deserts, decolonization, and the Cold War was fused at temperatures ten thousand times hotter than the surface

380   Robert S. G. Fletcher of the sun; it was the ‘trinitite’ left smouldering in the Jornada del Muerto. In the coming age, you needed a desert to be a world power. *** For the European empires after 1945, close engagement with the peoples and places of the great arid zone was not without its costs. The expense incurred by some desert schemes was simply prohibitive: it was the British Treasury that baulked at the staggering costs of ‘transforming barren deserts into fledgling military bases’ in Cyrenaica, putting to rest military enthusiasm for a Libyan strategic reserve.37 But the political costs were no less significant. There were always statesmen who warned of the risks of being seen to pay too much attention to deserts, nomads, and their leaders, not enough to the cities and the literate classes; that imperial influence depended on backing the right sort of people; and that the future belonged—​the watchword of Britain’s postwar foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin—​to ‘peasants, not pashas’. That accusation—​that empires had leaned too much on the support of desert populations and tribal elites—​would feature prominently in anticolonial movements in many states around the great Arid Zone. Nationalist opinion in Iran, for example, considered the Bakhtiyari khans to have been fatally compromised by their association with Britain and the Anglo-​Persian Oil Company. The archival record points to a more nuanced relationship, but Reza Shah nonetheless derived considerable popularity from the forcefulness with which he was seen to tackle both tribal power and colonialism in settling the tribes.38 In the Sahel, similar perceptions of the Tuareg as French puppets made them a target of the new national regimes; they also help explain why the proposed OCRS had met with such protest. In Modibo Keïta’s Mali, where the idea of a Malian nation took time to take root, casting the Kel Adagh as ‘neo-​colonial’ and ‘feudal’ helped in rallying a new sense of national identity and in ‘decolonizing the mind’. A concerted effort to break the Tuareg’s French privileges—​new taxes on their livestock, new demands on their labour, and the rhetoric (if not yet the reality) of forced settlement—​ provoked rebellion in 1963. The frustration of that movement, and of another in 1990, left many Tuareg feeling that, by comparison, French rule had been a ‘golden age’.39 That view may well have been rose-​tinted, but it reminds us that for all the similarities between how imperial states and national states have approached their desert territories, there were also important differences. Because it was often in desert environments that colonial power had been most attenuated, because colonial treasuries were seldom overflowing, and because colonial officers could be less invested in nation-​ building than their successors, many regimes had come to a working arrangement with key nomadic groups: exempting them from tax or conscription, making allowance for forms of ‘customary law’, even governing indirectly through their ‘headmen’ and ‘chiefs’. After the Second World War, it wasn’t simply a question of a new capacity to project state power into the arid world: there were new imperatives at work, too. At an ideological level, the national modernism of many decolonizing projects injected a fresh urgency into governments’ resolve to contain tribal autonomy and to remake their rural hinterlands. Doing so became an anti-​colonial act, a cause around which popular nationalism could coalesce, or a way for new regimes to distinguish themselves from their

Decolonization and the Arid World    381 predecessors: the Syrian Constitution of 1950, for example, pointedly renounced all the privileges heretofore enjoyed by the Bedouin. Across the Middle East, a succession of governments instituted new programmes of sedentarization and detribalization to bind desert populations to the fate of the nation. Success owed much to factors common to many areas of the postwar arid world, including periods of drought and the growing pull of wage labour. But these programmes also tended to outstrip those attempted by the colonial powers in comprehensiveness, ambition, and speed. In the late 1950s, for example, the enhanced capacity of the Saudi state to purchase the latest technical equipment led to the development of two prominent sedentarization projects: the Wadi Sirhan Settlement Scheme (from 1959), and the Pasture Improvement Project (from 1961). Both stumbled in the face of ecological constraints and a lack of prior consultation with nomadic groups, but ultimately worked to limit the choices of desert populations who wished to remain migratory. Often it was national oil wealth which fuelled the sustained effort that sedentarization seemed to demand: again, in the Saudi case, sedentarization was advanced considerably more by the credit supplied through the Saudi Agricultural Bank from 1964, the animal subsidy programme (which shifted herd composition away from camels towards sheep and goats), and the Real Estate Development Fund from 1975, than by the earlier, more eye-​catching engineering projects.40 Comparable tensions played out in campaigns to abolish the exceptional legal orders which colonialism had established for many desert territories, and to fully incorporate them into the national polity: we might call this the struggle over ‘desert law’. Around the Syrian and North Arabian deserts, colonial regimes had bolstered so-​called ‘customary law’ to strengthen the hand of likely collaborators and to secure a degree of popular consent. For nationalists, in contrast, these provisions belied claims to national unity and presented a target of opportunity for wider critiques of colonialism. Yet they could often only be removed in the face of opposition from desert populations themselves. In Egypt and Trans-​Jordan in the 1930s, attempts to apply regular legal codes to designated ‘desert areas’ were successfully seen off.41 It was not until 1976 that many forms of ‘tribal’ law were abrogated in Jordan, ending the legal separateness of the Bedouin. Even here, however, as in many other parts of the Arab world, customary law continues to hold an attraction for Bedouin communities, with plentiful evidence of its ongoing adaptation and use.42 Bids to engineer desert places and peoples, and the new certainties that drove them on, played out in a kaleidoscope of contexts. In Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party responded to the various challengers to its rule by inundating them. It sent thousands of state-​sponsored Han settlers into the province each year, drastically altering its demography, transforming its environment, restructuring its economy around the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and overpowering the many acts of resistance this provoked.43 This was, as Justin Jacobs has noted, a ‘fundamentally different’ approach to the pressures of decolonization to promoting ethnic ‘self-​determination’ (as in Soviet Central Asia) or ending formal political rule (as in many European possessions), but reflected ‘the political capital that the metropole attributed to the retention

382   Robert S. G. Fletcher of its colony’.44 In the Sahel, the collapse of the OCRS and the end of formal French rule left independent regimes facing comparable ‘tribal problems’ in their northern territories. After putting down the Tuareg rebellion of 1963, the Malian government accelerated its sedentarization schemes. Many Tuareg responded with trans-​border flight to Niger, where the land purchases and environmental damage caused by mining uranium became another source of conflict.45 In some ways, these national ‘tribal problems’ are best understood from the perspective of a frustrated—​Tuareg—​nationalism operating between multiple states.46 As in other parts of the arid world (such as the Sinai peninsula, or the Sino-​Kazakh borderland), it was only really when the end of colonial rule substituted national boundaries for administrative frontiers that border regimes began to bite, disrupting wider zones of migration and exchange. But from our vantage point at the start of the twenty-​first century, when deserts provide corridors for the movements of hundreds of thousands of people, it would be as well not to exaggerate the capacity of even the most determined regime to hermetically seal a desert border.47 Swirling behind these official interventions were multiple visions of the desert itself. ‘Desert’ is an evocative word, and in the twentieth century it was often deployed instrumentally to render a variety of complex landscapes simple, and to facilitate otherwise unthinkable forms of intervention. Two broad environmental imaginaries of the desert stand out, both with deep roots. On the one hand was the image of the desert as wasteland: static, unproductive, and empty. Some made a point of insisting upon this: only a true ‘wasteland’ could be legitimately irradiated, scorched, and bombed. Another response was to deny it altogether: well into the twentieth century, ‘boosters’ in Australia and the US talked up the habitability of their semi-​arid lands while hounding anyone who dared bring up the ‘d’-​word.48 A third response was to view the desert as a place in need of total transformation. Deserts could help the former decolonized world ‘catch up’; they could fix the problems colonialism had left behind; they could even assist in the task of building the new citizen, but only if they were made into something else. This was the desert as showcase of national modernity, and its enduring attraction is well illustrated in the history of Egypt. Here, where 96% of the people live on 4% of the land, every administration since the 1952 Revolution has announced its intention to radically transform the country’s desert expanses, whether reclaiming desert land for agriculture or constructing all-​new desert cities. In more than sixty years, few such projects have even come close to meeting their targets. Their achievements lie instead in the realm of politics, with successive regimes unable to resist the propaganda potential of announcing new projects, and where the allocation of desert land has helped lubricate the patronage networks on which political authority relies.49 An alternate image recast the desert as a national resource, making vital contributions to the economic life and energy needs of the country. Desert resources from guano to diamonds have long been prized, of course, and empires have played a considerable part in their exploitation and circulation. But decolonization in the arid world also coincided with the take-​off in oil exports and the hunt for uranium, so that deserts would play an integral role in that distinctly twentieth-​century story: the abundance of ‘cheap energy’.50 With this came the hope among many national elites that desert resources

Decolonization and the Arid World    383 might underwrite a more meaningful independence. The ‘oil shock’ of 1973, for example, represented the desire of a number of states, including some long within the orbit of Britain’s informal empire, to assert their independence as sovereign states. Where deserts offered the means to wealth and power, they were now worth defending (and their boundaries worth defining), even at the risk of international tension.51 Yet the road from desert riches to national autonomy has seldom run true. Whether as the ‘mediators’ in desert border disputes (as at Buraimi in 1952), or as the originators of political intrigue or armed intervention to protect desert assets (as in Iran in 1953), outside powers have remained deeply involved in the exploitation of these resources. Visions of redeeming the desert were buoyed by the international currency that the language of desert development had acquired by the 1950s and ’60s. The Arab League, for example, convened a series of conferences on the development of the Bedouin in the late 1940s and ’50s; similar pronouncements on ‘the problem’ of nomadism were made by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Labour Organization and the World Health Organization.52 Above all, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) placed the investigation and transformation of the Arid Zone at the heart of some of its earliest efforts at international scientific collaboration. This pioneering international research program began as the ‘Advisory Committee on Arid Zone Research’ in 1951, raised to the status of UNESCO’s very first ‘Major Project’ from 1957–​1964. Throughout, it acted as a hub for scientific examinations of desert geology and hydrology, but it also adopted a holistic view of what it called ‘the challenge of the desert’, supporting interventions in sedentarization and desert agriculture in the belief that desert transformations offered solutions to broader problems of food insecurity, political instability, and ‘the process of decolonization’ itself.53 With hindsight, too many of its projects prioritized the state’s interests ahead of those of desert populations to achieve lasting success. They privileged the physical sciences and the pursuit of productivity, and could lose sight of the human dimension.54 But the programme did promote the idea of the Arid Zone as a problem in itself, and a global one at that, for which lessons learned in one desert could well apply elsewhere. New definitions of aridity, as well as Peveril Meigs’ iconic map of the Arid Zone’s extent, contiguity, and apparent similarity, were both produced under the auspices of the programme. In the process, international organizations helped to nourish a network of institutions that would influence how many desert places and peoples were managed, such as the Central Arid Zone Research Institute in Jodphur and the Sahara research station at Beni Abbès, Algeria. As sources of authority located within the Arid Zone itself, these centres sometimes built on colonial foundations, but they also presented opportunities to demonstrate new forms of leadership in a decolonized arid world. When the Egyptian Desert Institute opened in Cairo in 1951, for example, it struck at least one former British officer and guest as ‘an international public relations exercise’, while Modibo Keïta’s visions for the deserts of Mali were at least partly inspired by a 1958 tour of agricultural experiments in Israel. As such, deserts were being bound together through transnational flows of science and expertise, so that modern desert histories were not merely comparable,

384   Robert S. G. Fletcher but connected. Protest movements from below, meanwhile—​over rights to access land, concerns for environmental pollution, and hostility to the legal regimes surrounding military bases—​formed transnational connections of their own, linking, for example, activists around the Nevada Test Site with those in southern Algeria, Semipalatinsk, and Maralinga in Australia.55 Given the secretive nature of much that went on here, and the steady drip feed of revelations, the political fallout emanating from some desert test sites is set to continue for years. Across the twentieth century, national governments, colonial powers, international organizations, and desert inhabitants all put forward visions for the future of the arid lands. But many of these actions occurred against a common backdrop of growing alarm over the nature, seriousness, and speed of the outward ‘march’ of the world’s deserts, a phenomenon that came to be referred to as ‘desertification’. The idea had origins that long predated decolonization (scientific discourses connecting deforestation and desiccation were well established by the eighteenth century), but was revived in the interwar period amidst international fascination with the Dust Bowl disaster and the transnational circulation of dryland management ‘experts’.56 The sense of crisis reached ever greater heights after 1945, as colonial foresters, development ‘experts’, and UN agencies helped to recast the problem as truly global in extent, amplified by the upsurge global population growth. As David Thomas and Nick Middleton have shown, desertification fed off these uncertainties to become a major issue of political as much as environmental import, axiomatically linked to the stability of ‘fragile’ independent states, issues of global inequality, development, humanitarianism, and the legacy of colonial stewardship of the natural world. With billions of dollars of aid at stake, thousands of publications repeating the term, and an apparent link to drought, poverty, and famine, desertification became ‘a big business’. By the 1970s and ’80s, regimes across the Arid Zone had become adept at invoking the concept to channel development aid into national development projects, and even to pursue long-​standing policies towards ‘marginal’ desert populations:  routinely blaming desertification on feckless nomads, for example, who seemed incapable of heeding the lessons of ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Herein lies a paradox, for ‘desertification’ was descried far more than it was understood; exactly what it involves remains uncertain even today. The popular notion of the physical expansion of a desert—​of a contiguous band of Saharan sands seeping ever south—​is particularly misleading:  insofar as generalizations allow, desertification ‘is more like a sporadic rash than an advancing tide’.57 The persistence of these desert images reflects the success with which they were mobilized in the twentieth century; their enduring place in our imaginations is an echo of those national, imperial, and international struggles to shape the futures of the arid world. Ultimately, they remind us of the benefits of bringing the ideal and the material into dialogue in any environmentally informed work of history. The histories of these fictive deserts, these ‘deserts of the imagination’, are just as much a part of our subject. *** Whatever decolonization has meant for the states bordering the great Arid Zone, their governments have seldom had their own way in the desert. Time and again, the activities

Decolonization and the Arid World    385 of a host of sub-​state and supra-​national actors have worked to frustrate their intentions. Ultimately, events at the beginning of our present century further illustrate the incompleteness of many desert regions’ incorporation into the nation-​state. Since 2011, Egyptian military control of the Sinai has atrophied, despite the thousands of troops despatched to bolster the state’s authority. In southern and eastern Syria, Bashar al-​Assad’s mismanagement of steppe resources during a time of drought fuelled Bedouin involvement in the Syrian uprising; in turn, the Bedouin’s trans-​border kinship ties helped to give the conflict a regional dimension.58 Paris and Washington were quick to frame the 2012 Tuareg uprising in Mali within the struggle against international jihad, but it can also be understood, as least in part, as a further manifestation of the long-​standing tensions between Bamako and its desert frontiers. From Waziristan and Shabwa to the Syrian Desert and the Sahel, many desert areas have afforded and continue to afford terrains into which forces independent of and antagonistic to the state could retreat and re-​form. Where deserts have been transit zones for hundreds of thousands of people, as between West Africa and the Mediterranean, the operations of transnational clandestine networks (and of the European border regimes being projected overseas to stop them) have both eroded national sovereignty further.59 Even the exceptional legal measures to which many states have resorted—​the recourse to martial law or customary law to which mid-​twentieth-century nationalists objected so vocally—​is proof that the challenges deserts present are not easily overcome. For some, it has been a shock to learn that such ‘friction of terrain’ survives in the age of the satellite and the drone.60 Writing in the middle of the United Nations ‘Decade for Deserts and the Fight Against Desertification’ (2010–​2020), the interest of international and non-​governmental organizations in the world’s desert environments shows no sign of abating. Nor are these the only forms of transnational intervention to which today’s deserts are subjected. Deserts remain favoured locations for overseas bases, where they can project power and influence while relying on their ‘remoteness’ to be ‘less blatantly violative of nationalist sensibilities’.61 France’s military presence in Chad has offered its forces extensive desert training which it has not been shy in putting to use. American drone bases have proliferated in the arid world since 2001, where their distance from civilian centres (but proximity to potential targets) has helped to mask the growth of a ‘secret empire’.62 Through the auspices of the Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership (and the Pan-​Sahel Initiative before it), the US has found a means to rotate military hardware and personnel around the Sahel and Maghreb. Discourses of ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘safe havens’ help to justify all this, but governing regimes from Algiers to Beijing have also played their part, echoing the vocabulary of the ‘war on terror’ to draw external resources into their long-​standing efforts to control their desert possessions. Looking back across the modern history of the Arid Zone, many broad continuities stand out. There is a fundamental similarity to how empires and their successor states have approached their desert territories which can diminish the significance of the formal end of empire. Many post-​independence campaigns to sedentarise nomads, transplant settlers, advance communications, spread irrigation, and transform desert environments built on colonial—​often interwar—​foundations. And yet, similarity is not

386   Robert S. G. Fletcher sameness, and there are important discontinuities to be drawn out further, not least in the scale, ambition, and haste with which independent governments first resolved to meet ‘the challenge of the desert’. Differences in extent could become differences in kind, as when the sheer weight of new settlers altered the demographic balance of a territory, or where irrigation schemes and military tests had a catastrophic impact on the land. These specifics matter, and warrant further investigation. But adopting this broader perspective does more than offer a basis for comparison across time. It prompts us to seek out the policies and patterns which have most deeply affected the relationship between state structures and their desert territories, questioning the relevance of specific changes of regime—​and even the most eye-​catching initiatives—​to the desert histories that have unfolded. Ultimately, are historians of decolonization justified, like our colleagues working on earlier periods, in taking the Arid Zone as a unit of analysis? After all, the breath-​taking diversity of ecologies, land forms, and biota in the world’s deserts gives reason to pause before treating the arid world as one. But there are real opportunities to be gained from recognizing the commonalities between the modern histories of states around the great Arid Zone. The diversity of arid and semi-​arid environments may defy easy generalization, but the broad similarities of human responses to them are striking, so that the very act of imagining a common ‘arid world’ was considerably advanced by the twentieth-​century histories of colonialism, internationalism, decolonization, and the Cold War. Because deserts have long harboured forces which cross boundaries, they have much to add to our understanding of the development of nationalism and its limits. The movements of pastoralists and refugees, the circulations of colonial dryland ‘experts’, the rotations of military and scientific personnel, and the reach of international aid and development programmes have all helped to ensure that the modern histories of many disparate desert sites are not merely comparable, but connected. This ought to unsettle our units of decolonization just as it does our chronologies. For thinking in terms of an arid world may be a more helpful way of understanding continuity and change than privileging the nation, or the continents, or former imperial blocs. Deserts have played a significant part in some of the big stories of the twentieth century; we stand to lose much by neglecting their pasts.

Notes 1. J. M. Powell, ‘Abideth Forever? Global Use of Semiarid Lands in the Interwar Years’, Great Plains Quarterly 6 (1986): 151–​170. 2. D. K. Davis, The Arid Lands:  History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2016). 3. For example, N. Middleton and D. S.  G. Thomas, Desertification:  Exploding the Myth (Chichester:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 1994); E. E. Whitehead, ed., Arid Lands Today and Tomorrow (Boulder, CO:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 1988); V. K. Saberwal, ‘Science and the Desiccationist Discourse of the 20th Century’, Environment and History 3 (1997): 309–​343; R. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–​1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Decolonization and the Arid World    387 4. See, for example, J. Gommans, ‘The Eurasian Frontier after the First Millennium AD: Reflections along the Fringe of Time and Space’, The Medieval History Journal 1 (1998): 125–​143. 5. A  central thread running through the essays in E. Burke and K. Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). For our period, see also J. R. McNeill and C. R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010); R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 6. J. C. Malin, ‘Space and History:  Reflections on the Closed-​Space Doctrines of Turner and Mackinder and the Challenge of those Ideas by the Air Age’, Agricultural History 18 (1944): 65–​74; G. Kearns, ‘Closed Space and Political Practice: Frederick Jason Turner and Halford Mackinder’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2 (1984): 23–​34. 7. S. Cronin, Tribal Politics in Iran:  Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–​ 1941 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 8. J. Kostiner, The Making of Saudi Arabia:  From Chieftaincy to Monarchical State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 9. E. Burke, ‘A Comparative View of French Native Policy in Morocco and Syria, 1912–​1925’, Middle Eastern Studies 9 (1973): 179–​186; J. Mizrahi, Genèse de l’Etat Mandataire: Service des Renseignements et bandes armées en Syrie et au Liban dans les années 1920 (Paris:  Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003); D. Neep, ‘Policing the Desert:  Coercion, Consent and Colonial Order in Syria’, in L. Khalili and J. Schwedler, eds., Policing and Prisons in the Middle East:  formations of coercion (New  York:  C Hurst & Co., 2010); M. Thomas, Empires of Intelligence:  Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). 10. R. S. G. Fletcher, British Imperialism and ‘The Tribal Question’: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–​1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 11. B. C. Brower, A Desert Named Peace: the Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); B. E. Thomas, ‘Modern Trans-​ Saharan Routes’, Geographical Review 42 (1952): 267–​282. 12. A. A. Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: state formation, colonization and resistance, 1830–​1932 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); C.G. Segrè, Fourth Shore: the Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 13. D. R. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 14. S. Cameron, ‘Violence, Flight, and Hunger:  the Sino-​Kazakh Border and the Kazakh Famine’, in T. Snyder and R. Brandon, eds., Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–​1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44–​66; J. Jacobs, ‘The Many Deaths of a Kazakh Unaligned: Osman Batur, Chinese Decolonization, and the Nationalization of a Nomad’, American Historical Review 115 (2010): 1291–​1314. 15. D. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control:  The Royal Air Force, 1919–​ 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 16. Scholars in the field of border studies might term these ‘adolescent borderlands’. See the discussion in:  M. Baud and W. van Schendel, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History 8 (1997): 211–​242. 17. The National Archives (UK) [TNA], CO 732/​88, no. 5a, E. Grigg, ‘British policy and organization in the Middle East’ (2 September 1945). 18. TNA, CAB 66/​67, CP (45) 55, E. Grigg, ‘Imperial Security in the Middle East’ (2 July 1945). 19. R. Worrall, ‘Britain and Libya: a Study of Military Bases and State Creation, 1945–​1956’ (D.Phil dissertation: University of Oxford, 2008).

388   Robert S. G. Fletcher 20. TNA, FO 371/​91223, no. 29, J.B. Glubb, memorandum (23 May 1951). 21. S. Mawby, ‘Britain’s Last Imperial Frontier: the Aden protectorates, 1952–​59’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29 (2001): 75–​100; S. C. Smith, ‘British Relations with the Aden Protectorate, 1937–​59’, Middle Eastern Studies 31 (1995): 509–​523. 22. Cronin, Tribal Politics, 194–​197. 23. A. Bourgeot, ‘Sahara:  espace géostratégique et enjeux politiques (Niger)’, Autrepart 16 (2000): 21–​48; B. Sèbe, ‘In the Shadow of the Algerian War: the United States and the Common Organisation of Saharan Regions (OCRS), 1957–​2’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38 (2010): 303–​322. For the military interventions that ran parallel to this organizational innovation, see J. Guillemin, ‘Les campagnes militaires françaises de la décolonisation en Afrique subsaharienne’, Le Mois en Afrique 198–​199 (1982): 124–​141. 24. Bourgeot, ‘Sahara’, 38–​39. 25. The term is from D. Low and J. Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, in D. Low and A. Smith eds., History of East Africa, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1–​64. 26. P. Kingston, Britain and the Politics of Modernization in the Middle East, 1945–​1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 27. Sèbe, ‘Shadow’. 28. A. G. Babaev, ‘Complex Desert Development and Desertification Control in the USSR’, in Whitehead, Arid Lands, 825–​839. 29. P. Micklin, ‘Desiccation of the Aral Sea: a water management disaster in the Soviet Union’, Science 241 (1988): 1170–​1176. 30. R. E. Doel and K. C. Harper, ‘Prometheus Unleashed: science as a diplomatic weapon in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration’, Osiris 21 (2004); J. R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: the Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 31. See, for example, N. P. Rusin and L. A. Flit, Man Versus Climate (Moscow:  Central Books, 1966). 32. R. P. Tucker, ‘Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American strategic interests and the global spread of high dams in the early Cold War’, in McNeill and Unger, Environmental Histories, 139–​166. 33. X. Liu, ‘Rediscovery of the Frontier in Recent Chinese History’, in W. Kirby, ed., The People’s Republic of China at 60: An International Assessment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 306–​327. 34. Jacobs, ‘Kazakh Unaligned’. 35. Liu, ‘Rediscovery’, 310. 36. G. Nash, The American West in the Twentieth-​Century: a Short History of an Urban Oasis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977). The connections between the aridity of the West and its subordination were one of the themes of the New Western History; see especially D. Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992). For reflections on the ‘New Western History’, see M. Walsh, The American West: Visions and Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 37. Worrall, ‘Britain and Libya’, 2. 38. Cronin, Tribal Politics. 39. J. E. Lecocq, ‘”That Desert Is Our Country”: Tuareg rebellions and competing nationalisms in contemporary Mali (1946–​1996)’ (Ph.D. dissertation: Universiteit Gent, 2002). 40. K. Al-​Radihan, ‘Adaptation of Bedouin in Saudi Arabia to the 21st Century:  Mobility and Stasis among the Shararat’, in D. Chatty, ed., Nomadic Societies in the Middle East

Decolonization and the Arid World    389 and North Africa:  entering the 21st century (Leiden:  Brill, 2006), 840–​864; U. Fabietti, ‘Facing Change in Arabia: the Bedouin Community and the Notion of Development’, in Chatty, Nomadic Societies, 573–​598; A. Al-​Gain, ‘Integrated Resource Survey in Support of Nomads in Saudi Arabia’, in Whitehead, Arid Lands, 1213–​1221. For rich studies of natural resources and state development in Saudi Arabia, see S. Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); T. C. Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). It is worth remembering that, contrary to popular opinion, sedentarization is one of many strategies of adaptation pursued ordinarily by nomadic groups worldwide. Nomads do not need governments to ‘teach’ them how to settle. 41. Fletcher, British Imperialism. 42. F. H. Stewart, ‘Customary Law Among the Bedouin of the Middle East and North Africa’, in Chatty, Nomadic Societies, 239–​279; J. A. Massad, Colonial Effects: the Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); C. Bailey, Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev—​Justice Without Government (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2009). 43. J. A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (London: Columbia University Press, 2007). 44. Jacobs, ‘Kazakh Unaligned’. 45. Lecocq, ‘That Desert’, 83–​84; J. Keenan, ‘Resisting Imperialism:  Tuareg threaten US, Chinese and Other Foreign Interests’, in A. Fischer and I. Kohl, eds., Tuareg Society within a Globalized World: Saharan Life in Transition (London: I B Tauris & Co., 2010), 209–​230. 46. B. Sèbe, ‘A fragmented and forgotten decolonization: the end of European empires in the Sahara and their legacy’, in Chafer and Keese, Francophone Africa, 204–​218. Calls for a united Tuareg territory grew in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and revived again following the Arab Spring, but there remains widespread disagreement over the nature and even desirability of a sovereign Tuareg state. 47. R. Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 48. W. P. Webb, ‘The West and the Desert’, Montana:  the Magazine of Western History 8 (1958): 2–​12; J. M. Powell, ‘Taylor, Stefansson and the Arid Centre: A Historic Encounter of ‘Environmentalism’ and ‘Possibilism’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 66 (1980): 163–​183. 49. D. E. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster? (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014); E. Deputy, ‘Let’s do it for the Kids: Toshka, children’s literature and political propaganda’ (APSA Annual Meeting, 2011: available at: https://​papers.ssrn.com/​ sol3/​papers2.cfm?abstract_​id=1901986). 50. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-​ Century World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). 51. A. Melamid, ‘Political Boundaries and Nomadic Grazing’, Geographical Review 55 (1965): 282–​293. 52. R. Bocco, ‘The Settlement of Pastoral Nomads in the Arab Middle East:  International Organizations and Trends in Development Policies, 1950–​1990’, in Chatty, Nomadic Societies, 302–​330. 53. M. Batisse, ‘Progress and Perspectives: a look back at UNESCO Arid Zone activities’, in Whitehead, Arid Lands,  21–​30.

390   Robert S. G. Fletcher 54. For example, see G. F. White, The Future of Arid Lands: papers and recommendations from the International Arid Lands Meetings (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1956). For critical perspectives on the programme, see C. F. Hutchinson and S. M. Herrmann, The Future of Arid Lands—​Revisited: A Review of 50 Years of Drylands Research (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). 55. R. Solnit, Savage Dreams:  A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 56. Grove, Green Imperialism. For the Dust Bowl, see D. Anderson, ‘Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography and Drought:  The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa During the 1930s’, African Affairs 83 (1984): 321–​343; Saberwal, ‘Science’. The tone of some of the most passionate writing on desiccation at the time can be unnervingly familiar: see British colonial forester E. P. Stebbing, ‘The Encroaching Sahara: The Threat to the West African Colonies’, The Geographical Journal 85 (1935):  506–​519; P. Sears, Deserts on the March (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935); G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte, The Rape of the Earth: A Survey of World Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). 57. Middleton and Thomas, Desertification, 6. 58. H. Dukhan, ‘Tribes and Tribalism in the Syrian Uprising’, Syria Studies 6 (2014): 1–​28. 59. Andersson, Illegality, Inc. 60. P. Porter, The Global Village Myth: Distance, War, and the Limits of Power (London: C Hurst & Co., 2015). 61. R. E. Harvaky, Great Power Competition for Overseas Bases:  The Geopolitics of Access Diplomacy (New York: Pergamon, 1982), 33. 62. D. Styan, ‘Chad’s Political Violence at 50: Bullets, Ballots and Bases’, in T. Chafer and A. Keese, eds., Francophone Africa at Fifty (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013), 233–​248; N. Turse and T. Engelhardt, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001–​2050 (Lexington, KY: Dispatch Books, 2012).

Chapter 21

T he Open Ends of t h e Du tch Em pire a nd t h e I nd onesian  Past Sites, Scholarly Networks, and Moral Geographies of Greater India across Decolonization Marieke Bloembergen

Sites or the material remains of Asia’s ancient history provided strong reference points during the decolonizing process in Asia, albeit to many parties.1 In the 1950s, ancient sites like Borobudur, Indonesia’s eighth-​century Buddhist shrine, or Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, a twelfth-​century Hindu-​Buddhist temple complex, both re-​discovered, explored, and restored under colonial regimes and then left behind by receding empires, became powerful symbols in the language and politics of nation building of the newly independent states. Yet these sites are the centre of multiple histories, geographies, and moral spaces that do not necessarily overlap with the political boundaries in which these sites became re-​appreciated. Alongside their re-​discovery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became nodal points of new transnational networks of scholars, religious revivalists, and spiritual seekers who moved between the various sites, and related them to other chronologies, world views, or communal ways of thinking.2 This chapter shows that, for Indonesia, decolonization—​its chronologies, its processes, and its supposed finality—​looks very different when such sites are used as primary reference points, and we view political developments through a transnational and cultural lens. Present-​day Indonesia covers a region that more or less overlaps with the domain of the late colonial state of the Dutch East Indies, and that, since at least the sixteenth century, has the largest Muslim population of the world. However, it also hosts pre-​Islamic Hindu-​Buddhist sites, as well as a so-​called ‘Indic’ past, that point to

392   Marieke Bloembergen earlier connections to what is now India. These connections are pivotal to academic and popular views on Indonesia as being part of—​what I  refer to as—​moral geographies of Greater India.3 I use this to refer to a transnational form of moral thinking in terms of place and civilization, or geographical imaginations, projected on today’s South and Southeast Asia as a single, spiritual, Hindu-​Buddhist ‘civilization’ with Indian origins. This civilizational idea of ‘Greater Indian’ is moral, as it is often perceived as superior to other (Christian-​Western materialist, or Islamic) imaginary constructs of civilizations, and, like the nation or the state, entails mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.4 Long-​running scholarly debates over Indonesia’s Indic cultural heritage and the way it connected to ‘foreign’ (Indian) civilizational influences, were, indeed, affected by decolonization and the consequent rise of a more assertive Indonesian readings of the country’s cultural past as national. Yet, at the same time, these debates—​and the scholarly networks at their heart—​transcended decolonization and helped maintain moral geographies of Greater (Hindu-​Buddhist) India, which included (predominantly Islamic) Indonesia. Additionally, in some ways certain individual scholars and their cultural production thrived in an independent Indonesia. In other ways, both the networks and their scholarship responded to quite different currents of cultural interchange that did not all together overlap with nationalist aims in the independence struggle and the historiography that covered these. By focusing on sites in the Netherlands Indies/​Indonesia, and transnational networks of academic culture across decolonization, this chapter engages with transnational approaches to imperial and Asian history thriving in the past two decades, often with a focus on the ‘connecting’ Indian Ocean. These new approaches grew out of a double discomfort: about a dominant state-​and nation-​centred approached to imperial history, and about the artificial boundaries between South Asian and Southeast Asian studies. The recent focus on transnational mobilities and identities has yielded fresh insights into why and how people identify with worlds of ideas, beliefs, and related histories that differ from or compete with official, state-​centred histories.5 However, the chapter also warns against pitfalls of the new transnational approaches that focus on cultural flows, as these may exaggerate the region’s cultural unity, reifying the very moral geographies of Greater India it interrogates.6 Interestingly, within the historiography on Dutch empire and Indonesian (post-​) colonial history, transnational and so-​called New Imperial approaches towards cultural political history are being embraced in the past decades as well.7 However, this research has hardly covered the period of decolonization.8 The recently revived interest in violence and atrocities during the recolonization war of 1945–​1949, and the discussions they have raised, are framed by the interests of state and society in the Netherlands and Indonesia.9 Noteworthy, however, is the 1990s trend in the field to study decolonization from a longer-​term perspective.10 That researched has yielded important insight in the ways economic enterprises and social institutions developed across decolonization. Additionally, it has generated a new interest in the 1950s as a transformative period.11 But

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    393 overall, for the history of Dutch-​Indonesian decolonization, the field of political culture and cultural institutions still deserves systematic scrutiny.12 This chapter examines how the sites and networks of heritage and academic culture provide a tool to explore how ‘open’ the ends of empire were for academic knowledge production and heritage formation across decolonization. This method allows us to see how transnational connections did—​or did not—​work, and thus helps to explore, in the case of Dutch-​Indonesian decolonization, the main questions in this volume. The chapter thereby provides methodological tools for an alternative transnational approach to study the impact of decolonization on various, larger, competing imaginations of the region that developed in local, inter-​Asian and global contexts, or competing moral geographies:  the moral geographies of the decolonizing empire, of the Indonesian nation, of the post-​colonial state, and of a Greater India. At various levels of understanding, each of these took shape in people’s minds in this period. If we start from ‘sites of heritage and knowledge exchange’, this chapter shows how we can study the experience of decolonization of transnational ‘Indic’ scholarly knowledge production and heritage formation. At the same time, such a sites-​centred approach helps to understand, in Frederick Cooper’s formulation, the various, multiple hierarchies that made connections work or not.13 These ancient sites, whether representing the region’s heritage or hosting knowledge production, connect to many histories and loyalties. They have discreet political, cultural-​economic, and religious geographies that have other boundaries than those of the state. The chapter starts from Indonesia-​based sites of heritage and research, and the site-​related ‘Indic’ scholarly knowledge networks which connected these sites to powerful sites of learning in the Indies/​Indonesia, the Netherlands, France, and India. Then it explores the development of these networks over time and attempts to explain their role in shaping moral geographies, whether the nation, the postcolonial state, or Greater India, to discover how these were related to each other. It asks what the impact was of regime change on knowledge production, exchange, and identification with various moral geographies, as well as when, where and how local, state, and institutional power problematized global and transnational connections in cultural reform, knowledge production, and heritage politics. These queries will lead us to multiple sites and various key players who built upon the knowledge networks on Indonesia’s ancient past. To understand limits and identify changing hierarchies within the networks, the chapter follows multiple perspectives. It does so, by loosely following the perspective of French epigrapher Louis Charles Damais (1911–​1966), who, before the war, worked for the Dutch colonial Archaeological Service. After the war, meanwhile married to an Indonesian, he continued his scholarly career in Indonesia on behalf of the Ecole française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO). As an outsider inside, he connected the various histories of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production about Indonesia’s ancient past.

394   Marieke Bloembergen

Dutch-​Indonesian Decolonization and the Open Ends of Heritage A four-​year period of colonial military attacks, civil war, and intensive international diplomacy in the Dutch Indies unfolded after Japan’s 1945 surrender and the subsequent declaration of Indonesian Independence on 17 August by Soekarno and Mohammed Hatta. This recolonization conflict formally ended with the Dutch recognition of the Indonesian Republic in December 1949. These four years of violence wrought profound changes in the relationship between the Netherlands and the Indonesian Republic, within Indonesian state and society, and in the manning of government, administration, security tools, and education. However, post-​independence reform and cultural politics also built on multiple older structures of power and interdependency, of institutions, institutional knowledge, and networks with local, inter-​Asian and global reach, and on individual people’s expertise, which the new independent state inherited from the past. These older connections were particularly apparent in the fields of culture, heritage politics, and scholarship. In December 1953, Louis-​Charles Damais, an acknowledged epigrapher with strong connections to independent Indonesia’s influential elites, attended the festive inauguration of the reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan in Central Java. He was the only non-​Dutch foreign scholar and special invitee of the young Indonesian Republic’s Archaeological Service (founded in 1946). The Siva temple is the largest of the ninth-​ century Hindu temple complex Prambanan, which stands today, together with the nearby eighth-​century giant Buddhist shrine Borobudur, as one of Indonesia’s most important national monuments. Both temples gained UNESCO-​world heritage status in 1991. In forms of scholarly learning, heritage politics, religious pilgrimages, and mass tourism, they connect local and global interests of elite and popular character. Damais personified colonial and postcolonial academic connections to the temple. Before and after the War, he was briefly affiliated with the Dutch Colonial Archaeological Service. Later, he represented France and the EFEO (founded in Saigon in 1898), and, with his later-​acquired title of ‘Conseiller Culturel’, the French embassy in Jakarta. But most importantly, he recorded a moment of postcolonial nation-​building. At Prambanan, Damais observed how Indonesia’s president Soekarno’s inaugural speech (to a predominantly Muslim audience, and ‘as a Muslim’ himself) managed to give ‘an official character’ to the Hindu temple’s restoration: it was not meant to ‘adore Siva’, but it served as a proof of the capacities of the Indonesian people of the past, and offered a great promise for independent Indonesia’s future.14 Damais thus witnessed how Soekarno, three years after the Dutch formally recognized Indonesian independence, transformed a ninth-​century Hindu temple ruin into the first national monument of a young state that had the largest Muslim population of the world.15 Ironically, while the temple served as a tool to stress the power of Indonesia’s ‘local genius’—​a scholarly term of that time—​in the same period, during the 1950s and

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    395 1960s, Prambanan-​based objects and other Indonesian Hindu or Buddhist art objects appeared in temporary and permanent Asia-​exhibits as ‘Arts of Greater India’ all over the world. These exhibitions offered views of older traditions as well as inter-​Asian, inter-​colonial, and global networks of research and collecting that built on alternative views of the region, the ‘Greater India’ of which Indonesia was considered a part. This region covered today’s South and Southeast Asia, and was imagined as united by one superior Hindu-​Buddhist ‘civilization’ with its origin in India, and in which Indonesia is being portrayed as the passive receiver of a benign, foreign civilizer and its superior religious art.16 This was not Soekarno’s message at Prambanan in 1953. The presence of Damais at the inauguration of the Siva temple, and at the Greater India exhibitions worldwide, illustrates how not only Indonesia’s past, but also ‘empire’—​in this case a (former) Dutch empire—​and the politics of scholarly knowledge production and heritage within empire had open ends. While the inauguration of the Siva temple was a quintessential ceremony of decolonization designed to serve the aim of nation building, Damais’ presence also pointed to abiding continuities in local and international collaboration and power, some of which went beyond state-​centred interests. Largest among the temples of the Prambanan complex dedicated to Hindu deities, the Siva temple was a professional archaeological reconstruction dating from the colonial period.17 It had previously been a ruin which, although partly uncovered and cleaned, had been further damaged by nineteenth-​century colonial interventions. By the early 1920s, however, the Siva temple became the object of a prestigious reconstruction project initiated by the Colonial Archaeological Service of the Netherlands Indies. During Japan’s occupation (1942–​1945), the Japanese military regime took over the running of heritage politics and continued the reconstruction of the Siva temple, even temporarily transforming it into a memorial dedicated to the souls of Japanese victims in the Pacific War. Following the Japanese surrender and the 1946 establishment of an Indonesian Archaeological Service, the Indonesian Republic took over the temple’s reconstruction amidst a recolonization-​cum-​civil war. After Dutch recognition of Indonesia’s independence in 1949, the Indonesian Archaeological Service completed the monument working alongside the Dutch under the direction of the Dutch engineer Vincent van Romondt (1903–​1974), who had supervised the earlier reconstruction in the 1930s.18 While the reconstruction of the Siva temple may thus have been the product of a colonial mindset, when the Siva temple was presented on 20 December 1953 in all its splendour, it was celebrated as the first official national monument of Indonesia. Damais, and the (former) staff of the Dutch and Indonesian Archaeological Services attested to this. Heavy with nationalistic symbolism, with hundreds of Indonesian children waving their red-​white flags, the inauguration of the Siva temple was enacted exactly five years after Dutch troops occupied Yogya, the then-​centre of the Indonesian Republic. In his speech tracing the nation back to ancient times, the newly appointed minister of Culture and Education, Muhammad Yamin (1903–​1962), recognized the red and white colours of the Indonesian flag in the Ramayana reliefs of the temple, and applauded the reconstruction

396   Marieke Bloembergen as the most significant national achievement since the declaration of independence in 1945.19 Attesting to all of this, and present from the Netherlands, were several senior personnel from the former Colonial Archaeological Service: A. J. Bernet Kempers (1906–​ 1992), the last head of the Dutch East Indies Archaeological Service after the Japanese occupation, architect Van Romondt, and the Dutch philologist J.  G.  de Casparis (1916–​2002). Physically absent, but remembered with respect, was the Dutch archaeologist Willem F.  Stutterheim (1892–​1942), the last head of the Netherlands Indies’ Archaeological Service before the Japanese occupation, who, attacked by a brain tumour, had died in September 1942. From the new Indonesian scholarly world, a prominent figure who also spoke at the inauguration was the Dutch-​trained archaeologist Soekmono (1922–​1974), a recent archaeology graduate of Bernet Kempers at the newly founded University of Indonesia in Jakarta. Prior to his archaeology training, he worked for the Japanese propaganda service during the occupation, and had already recognized the cultural significance and immense political value of the Great Hindu and Buddhist monuments in Central Java. In 1946, in the nationalist cultural journal Pantja Raja, he declared Borobudur ‘heirloom of Indonesia, heirloom of our fatherland’.20 Now, in 1953, having successfully finished his studies, he had succeeded his teacher as head of the Indonesian Archaeological Service, and was proudly in charge of Indonesia’s ancient Hindu-​Buddhist temples, formerly jewels of the Dutch empire. Ostensibly, while the inauguration of the Siva temple thus served the aims of nation building, the presence of various other parties—​a foreign scholar, former colonial personnel, and Indonesian subjects—​reveals the continuity of alternative, multiple engagements with the monument. These neither necessarily overlapped with the interests of the new independent nation state, nor with Dutch attempts at harmonious postcolonial collaboration. When night fell, for example, priests from the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, together with Balinese students from the recently established University Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, gathered to pay tribute to the temple according to Balinese-​ Hindu rituals. To them, it was a sacred site.21 Next to these local religious engagements with the Siva-​temple, Damais personified the external, archaeological-​cum-​diplomatic interests of foreign parties that built on pre-​war international and inter-​Asian intellectual and cultural knowledge networks.

Greater Indian Horizons, Local Colonial Restrictions Since the early twentieth century, an international group of scholars, collectors, pilgrims, and Asian elites representing various local and international institutions, associations, and concerns would engage with Indonesia-​based sites like the Siva temple or

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    397 Borobudur by following non-​Indonesia centred, ‘Indic’ scholarly preoccupations. What bound them was the question of the external, Indian, Hindu-​Buddhist civilizational origin and its influences within Indonesia’s cultural history and prehistory. Whether they were nationalist by principle, a scholar, or a Hindu or a Buddhist revivalist, their framework of thought, research, or pilgrimage was, by definition, transnational. This kind of ‘Greater India’ thinking had multiple expressions, and it developed inside and outside ‘Indic’ scholarly and religious knowledge networks, in academia as well as in popular culture. Its legacies remain evident today.22 One influential example of Greater Indian thinking concerns the group of scholars and nationalists who, in 1924 Calcutta in British India, founded the Greater India Society. As Susan Bayly has shown, this society of Bengal-​born intellectuals, inspired by the works of the French sanskritist Sylvain Lévi (1863–​1936) and other French Indologists, heralded the vision of a benign, spiritual Indian civilization that had once spread across Asia.23 Scholars like Kalidas Nag (1892–​1966), Sunit Kumar Chatterjee (1890–​1977), Ordhendra Coomar Gangoly (1881–​1974), Himansu Bhusan Sarkar (1905–​ 1990) and R. C. Majumdar (1888–​1980) propagated the contemporary revival of this civilization through their research, exhibition activities, seminars, and journal publications. Their work also attracted international scholars well into the 1960s. From the start, they not only maintained good relations with French scholars, but also actively sought contact with scholars of the Archaeological Service and the Batavian Society in the Indies, visited Java’s ancient Hindu-​Buddhist sites and modern Hindu Bali, and exchanged ideas and publications. In this same framework, the internationally recognized, Calcutta-​born Nobel Prize winner and poet Rabindranath Tagore visited the Dutch East Indies in 1927, who called it part of an eastward-​bound ‘pilgrimage to India beyond its modern political boundaries’. When confronted with the sight of Borobudur he ‘recognized India’.24 Looking back, he wrote to a friend that his visit to Java and Bali filled him with the wish that Indian scholars would be sent there to study and to help recover these ‘neglected and forgotten outposts of Indian civilization [ . . . ] for our own enrichment and for the benefit of the inhabitants.’25 In comparison to these Indian scholars and spiritual superstars, the situation for Indonesian intellectual elites in the Dutch East Indies was somewhat different. In British India, Greater Indian Scholars like the more senior Majumdar or his student Sarkar (both then at Dacca University) held official positions at universities, or at the Archaeological Survey of British-​India, and actively networked in the international academic world of Indologists. From 1918, they organized international ‘All-​India’ Orientalist conferences in India to which they invited foreign colonial scholars. In the Dutch East Indies, on the other hand, there were no universities. Two high schools, both in Batavia, provided the needed doctors and lawyers: the School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen (School for the education of native physicians, STOVIA) was founded in 1899, and the Rechtshoogeschool (Law School) was founded in 1924. Only in 1940, were two academic institutes founded: a Faculty of Law, and a Faculty of Arts, both also in Batavia. Moreover, only a tiny, privileged minority of Indonesian elites had official positions at the colonial scholarly institutions and contributed to scholarly debates

398   Marieke Bloembergen that were, moreover, restricted to Javanese (and subsequently Balinese) culture, history, or language. At the Colonial Archaeological Service, modern educated lower elites filled intermediate ranks like draughtsmen, or secured work at the library of the Batavian Society. One such was Raden Roro Soejatoen Poespokoesoemo (191326–​2005), Damais’s future wife. While intrinsically important, these more junior positions were hardly visible in the colonial and international academic world. The pre-​eminent Indonesian professional scholars in the field of Indology are the Javanese Hoesein Djajadiningrat (1886–​1960; a pupil of the famous Islamic scholar and colonial Advisor of Native affairs Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje) and Ngabehi Poerbatjaraka (1886–​1966; mentored by archaeologist and Indologist N. J. Krom—​head of the Indies Archaeological Service—​and who did his doctorate under the guidance of Javanologist G. A. J. Hazeu). Djajadiningrat and Poerbatjaraka were the first Indonesians trained as Indologists who also defended a PhD thesis at Leiden University during the colonial period. They would pursue rather exceptional successful careers in the relevant scholarly institutions in the Indies—​and, subsequently, in post-​Independence Indonesia. As Director of the Department of Education and Religion, Djajadiningrat reached the highest position ever held by an Indonesian during the Dutch colonial period, via the Archaeological Service (1913), a professorship at the Law School (1924), a membership of the Raad van Indie (Indian Council, 1934), a directorship of the prestigious Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (1938).27 Poerbatjaraka became curator of the Javanese manuscripts at the Museum of the Batavian Society, and published in relevant Dutch academic journals.28 It is noteworthy that neither of the two moved within the international ‘Indic’ networks of scholars interested in Indianized Asia, or Greater India, a privilege reserved for the senior Dutch colonial scholars working at the higher echelons of the Archaeological Service. In the 1930s, a younger generation of Indonesians—​but again only a few—​would follow a comparable trajectory in the field of Indology writing PhD-​theses in Leiden—​ e.g., the Surakarta-​born Chinese Javanologist and Islam expert Tjan Tjoe Siem (1909–​ 1978), and the Yogya-​born Javanologist R.  Prijono (1905–​1969). Like Damais, who befriended them, they would start what seemed the beginning of a serious—​Java-​ based—​scholarly colonial career in the late 1930s, but who instead became well known and esteemed for their role in academic life in early independent, nation-​building Indonesia, both holding a professorship at Universitas Indonesia. Prijono, the first Dean of the Faculty of Letters, was even appointed Minister of Education and Culture (in 1957), in which year Tjan Tjoe Siem succeeded him as Dean. Because of their (presumed) leftist inclinations, their careers were enfeebled, and in Prijono’s case, ended violently after the pre-​empted communist coup of 1965 and the subsequent anti-​ communist purges under the new regime of general Suharto.29 Outside the official scholarly institutions there were more Indonesian, often nationalist, elites who, in the 1920s and 1930s, played an active role in knowledge production about Javanese or Indonesian culture, both past and present; e.g., Muhammad Yamin, the Minister of Education and Culture and speaker at the inauguration of the Siva temple. They set up journals, and founded cultural-​nationalist and political

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    399 associations.30 Some of them, together with Dutch and the few Indonesian ‘official’ scholars, co-​organized the congress for the Javanese cultural development (held in Surakarta 1918), which hosted Dutch scholars and Indonesian intellectual elites. On the momentum of the Surakarta congress, in 1919 they founded, along with the same colonial scholarly elites, the Java Institute in Surakarta, whose journal Djawa was dedicated to the study of Javanese culture, and soon included Bali and Sumatra. Some of the more privileged Indonesian elites also moved within inter-​Asian and international knowledge networks.31 For instance, Prince Mangkunagara VII in Solo, honorary chair of the Java Institute and honorary member of the India Society in London (founded in 1911), corresponded with and hosted visitors from India. The Sumatran-​born writer Sanusi Pane, co-​founder of Timboel (another cultural political journal), travelled to India in 1929. Some Javanese nationalists, notably the poet Noto Soeroto (1880–​1951) who was born in the Pakualaman palace of Yogyakarta, supported the visit of Tagore to Java in 1927. Javanese cultural nationalist journals, like Timboel, extensively reported on Tagore’s visit, and on Visva Bharati, the site of learning that Tagore had founded in Santiniketan—​a location that attracted famous Indologists seekers of spiritual learning from Europe as well.32 After Tagore’s visit to the Indies, the art school at Santiniketan would host the Sumatran artists Soetan Harahap and Roesli. It was Harahap who provided the drawings for the 1933 Malay translation by Muhammad Yamin of Tagore’s The Home and the World Yamin, on his turn, as early as 1928, took great interest in Tagore’s work.33 Other Indonesian students also visited Santiniketan in the context of longer travels in India. These included the Javanese medical doctor and nationalist Soetomo (1888–​1938).34 In the early independence years, famous Balinese intellectuals like Ida Bagus Mantra (1928–​1995), the later governor of Bali, and Javanese artists like Afandi (1907–​1990), followed. They arrived with scholarships provided by the newly founded Indian Council for Cultural relations (ICCR) in Delhi (1950), with a branch Office in Jakarta from 1955 onwards, through which the Indian government aimed to foster closer relations between Independent India and Indonesia.35 During and shortly after decolonization, India’s connections to ancient Hindu-​ Buddhist sites in Indonesia were emphasized in meaningful diplomatic ways at the initiative of both Indonesian and Indian parties. In 1948, during the hot years of decolonization war and revolution, the Indonesian Archaeological Service, based in Yogyakarta, and competing with the Dutch colonial Archaeological Service in Batavia, invited Indian archaeologists to Java.36 This Indian mission consisted of the Greater India Society’s member C. Sivaramamurti (superintendent of the Indian Museum of Calcutta) and K. R. Srinivasan (superintendent at the Indian Archaeological Service’s Central Circle). Sivaramamurti later on published a book (translated into French with the support of the Musée Guimet in Paris) in which, with a peculiar India-​centric interest in connections, he compared the details of the Borobudur reliefs to old Indian art.37 This perfectly fitted the way that the Musée Guimet in Paris displayed Hindu and Buddhist sculptures from South and Southeast Asia, including a Buddha head from Borobudur, as Indianized high art.38

400   Marieke Bloembergen India’s prime minister Nehru solidified India’s cultural political connections to the site via his 1950 visit to the young Indonesian Republic. He referred to the two nations’ shared cultural past while visiting these civilizations’ beautiful collaborations, Borobudur and Prambanan, in Tagore’s footsteps. Among Nehru’s retinue were the archaeologist Neogy and the director of the Indian Archaeological Service, N.  P. Chakravarti.39 In this way, Indonesia-​based sites, like the Siva-​temple and Borobudur, continued to be pivotal sites of knowledge exchange between various parties that sometimes represented (new) states, but that were also part of the knowledge networks which bound scholars, collectors, and pilgrims to other moral geographies than those of the nation state. The chapter now explores the relevant sites of learning in the Netherlands in the 1920s–​1930s to gauge continuities and discontinuities in international and empires’ institutions, alliances, and ideas. It was there that most of the scholars present at the Siva temple in 1953 met, and where Greater Indian scholars like Majumdar gathered, as well as some of the few Leiden-​trained Indonesian scholars, during what we may call an ‘Indic summer’ in Dutch academia. It was there, also, that different worlds of Greater India thinking developed in parallel, in exchange and misunderstanding.

Leiden in the 1920s–​1930s: the Indic Summer and Re-​Indianizing Indonesia In 1935, the talented, twenty-​four-​year-​old Damais, with diplomas from L’Ecole nationale des langues Orientales vivantes and the Faculty of Languages and Literature of the University of Paris, arrived in Leiden on a fellowship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His objective was to deepen his knowledge of the languages and culture of the Indonesian archipelago—​for which he also planned to learn Dutch.40 His choice was not surprising, but his timing seemed fortunate. As the centre for the training of colonial administrators, as host of important Orientalist collections, and of an internationally esteemed National Ethnographic Museum, Leiden had since long been a magnet for scholars interested in Asiatic languages, cultures, and histories. Orientalism in Leiden has been studied as such, although mainly from a Dutch national perspective.41 But in the late 1920s, this provincial town with its prestigious academic centre seemed to experience an international ‘Indic Summer’ that attracted a self proclaimed beau monde of influential indologists in the making from across Europe, and from British India itself . This was their finest hour, for the importance of their mission, nor its colonial dimension, was not questioned—​not by themselves, not by a growing number of Indian art aficionados outside academia. After his experience of a three-​month research visit to Leiden in 1928, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar (1888–​1980), the Greater Indian historian, said, ‘I can say from my personal experience that anyone who wants to study the Dutch sources of the history

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    401 of Greater India cannot select a better place than the Kern Institute, Leyden.’42 When he visited the Institute, named after the famous Dutch multi-​linguist and Sanskritist J. H. C. Kern, it was just three years old. It was a creation of the Sanskritist Jean-​Philippe Vogel who, in 1913, had returned from a successful career at the Indian Archaeological Survey to become professor of Sanskrit and Indian archaeology at the University of Leiden. He would become the teacher of Stutterheim, Damais, Bernet Kempers, and De Casparis. The Kern Institute won the strong support of Vogel’s first PhD student, Frederik D. K. Bosch, who was, by then, director of the Archaeological Service in the Dutch East Indies. It would become an important, internationalizing centre for the study of Indian archaeology in its broadest sense. Not accidentally, Majumdar remarked that the object of research at the Institute included ‘not only India proper, but also what we call to-​day Further India and the Dutch East Indies. In short Burma and the vast territory to the east together with the islands like Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo etc., where ancient Indian Culture and civilization was spread in ancient times is included in the subject of the study . . . the Kern Institute is in a way pursuing the same ideals as the Greater India Society in Calcutta’.43

Vogel, the mastermind behind the Kern Institute, personified important Leiden-​ Indian-​Indies’ and French Indochina connections through his international network. It included the French indologists Lévi and Alfred Foucher, as well as, thanks to his own ‘Indian’ career, both English and Indian colleagues and friends. After finishing his studies with Sanskritist Jan Speyer (1849–​1913), Vogel, like his predecessor Kern, worked extensively in British India, and in 1901, Vogel became Archaeological Surveyor of the Circle of the Punjab—​a region of the size of France and Germany together—​to which soon the northern ‘United Provinces’ Circle would be added.44 Vogel’s nomination occurred just one year after Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, in his famous speech made the safeguard of ‘Indian’ antiquities a top priority.45 In the wake of what Benedict Anderson has famously referred to as an Asia-​based, imperial ‘Archaeological push’, this more or less coincided with the installation of the EFEO in French Indo China (1898), and of the Archaeological Commission in the Netherlands Indies (1901). These institutions shared comparable aims and took the organization of archaeology in each other’s and in neighbouring empires in the region as a model.46 Uniquely at the time, the Kern Institute, due to converging Dutch colonial Indies’ and classic Indian interests developing at Leiden University, would support both a chair for Sanskrit, literary sources and archaeology in British India (Vogel, from 1914), and one for archaeology in the Dutch East Indies, created in 1919, and occupied by N. J. Krom (1883–​1945). Krom was the first director of the Dutch East Indies’ Archaeological Service from 1913 to 1916, and was the supervisor of Stutterheim’s PhD thesis. The Institute collected research and teaching material for these fields (books, photographs, lantern slides, plaster casts), and hosted teaching staff working on the Dutch East Indies or on the ‘Greater Indian region’, one of whom was the Javanese philologist Poerbatjaraka.47

402   Marieke Bloembergen The Greater Indian historian Majumdar visited the Kern Institute in 1928, as part of a touring through Europe and preparing a subsequent visit to ‘Further India’ in the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. In Oxford, he had represented the Greater India Society at the Orientalists’ Conference, in Paris he had visited the Societé Asiatique, and he ended his European tour with a three-​month research visit to the Kern Institute. Vogel revered Majumdar as a great expert in Hindu-​Javanese archaeology, so it was unsurprising that Majumdar felt ‘well received’ by Vogel and Krom, calling them ‘leading authorities on Indian cultural relations with Indonesia’.48 From Europe, and carrying introductions from Vogel and Krom, Majumdar travelled to Java to visit ‘the remarkable monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan, etc.’, crossed over to Bali to study ‘the living relics of Hinduism’, and then continued via Indochina (where French archaeologists hosted him at the ‘splendid’ temple ruins of Angkor) to Bangkok to study ‘the relics of Hindu culture’ in the Royal Palace’s museum collection and the Vajrayana library. Reporting on his trip to the members of the Greater India Society, Majumdar found ‘that scholars everywhere were eager to help the Greater India movement started in India, and expressed the desire that Indian scholars would visit these centres systematically, with a view to reconstructing the forgotten chapter of our glorious past history’.49 All this served the ambitious project Majumdar pursued—​to write what he considered the first scholarly history of ‘the Indian Colonisation in the Far East’. In the second volume of this grand series dedicated to the Indonesian archipelago, and published in 1937, he thanked the Dutch scholars for their support: To the Dutch savants whose labours have unfolded a new and glorious chapter of the History of Ancient Culture and Civilization of India this volume is dedicated in token of the respect, admiration, and gratitude of the author.50

Majumdar’s brief report of his grand tour to Europe and Further India, as well as his impressions of the Kern Institute, were published in the Calcutta-​based Modern Review, which was run by Ramananda Chatterjee, a strong supporter of the Greater India Society.51 In another issue of the Modern Review that year, Majumdar’s colleague and Greater Indian scholar Bijan Raj Chatterjee, a student from Lévi in Paris, published an overview entitled ‘Greater India—​Some Landmarks in its History’, in which he traced the textual and material sources of information proving ‘the spread of Indian culture in Indo-​China and the Malay Archipelago (Java, Sumatra, Bali, Borneo)’. He concluded—​ ‘justly’ according to the journal’s editor—​that ‘India [ . . . ] should be taking her share in the matter of reconstructing the history of Greater India’.52

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    403 Following decolonization, Majumdar and his like-​minded colleagues were criticized by a new generation of international scholars (who identified themselves as Indonesianists) for the India-​centred bias in their work. This bias, they insisted, amounted to a form of Indian cultural ‘colonization’. However, Greater Indian scholars’ interests did not all together overlap either with those of the scholars working in Leiden and the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s. For all these divergences, their preoccupations came together on occasion. It is in that context that the Leiden-​ trained scholars like Bernet Kempers and W. F. Stutterheim, while endeavouring to understand local agency, during colonial times, behind Javanese Hindu-​Buddhist civilizational history, nonetheless travelled to India for comparative research.53 After decolonization, Damais and De Casparis further distanced themselves from both Dutch and Indian colonial perspectives,54 but their more senior colleagues, Bernet Kempers and the older Bosch and Stutterheim, would sometime criticize the Greater Indian mindset, too.55 This generation, although still formed by the Leiden Sanskrit tradition, were also fundamentally shaped by the long-​term practice of site-​centred research in the Dutch East Indies, and, in Stutterheim’s case, by an anthropological approach conducted there, in situ, seeking traces of the past via the historical landscape and cultural practices of the present.56 On the other hand, the queries of Leiden’s new, ‘Indonesia’-​oriented colonial scholars were ambiguous. This ambiguity was, for example, evident in the title of Bernet Kempers’ inaugural speech for his lectureship in Leiden:  Indische cultuurstroom (Indian Cultural flow, Italics MB)—​which still implied an Indian-​centred framework of thinking.

The Outsider Inside: Made by Empires? As French, Indian, and Dutch East Indies’ scholarly alliances were coming together in Leiden, it was not surprising that the talented Damais also turned up there as one of the young students of—​among others—​Vogel. In Leiden he became acquainted with the Dutch Indologists, as well as with Prijono and Tjan, who would both defend their PhD theses in Indology in 1938.57 In addition to his new Dutch and Indonesian connections, Damais, when leaving Leiden for Java in 1937, also could exploit older French-​Dutch orientalist connections that went back to the first official French EFEO missions to the Dutch East Indies around 1900. These included Louis Finot and others in 1899, Henri Parmentier (1871–​1949) in 1904, Foucher in 1907, the 1920s, and 1930s, Paul Mus Lévi (1902–​1969) and Suzanne Karpelès (1890–​1969) in 1928, and Henri Marchall (1876–​ 1970) in 1930. These scholars all investigated Hindu-​Buddhist civilizational influences through the study of ancient history, inscriptions and texts, archaeology, and/​or conservation politics. What distinguished Damais’ experience from those of his predecessors was that he came to the Indies not via Indochina, but through Leiden. Subsequently,

404   Marieke Bloembergen thanks in part to his Javanese wife, and in part through their network of local cultural elites, he could incorporate perspectives from the inside. In comparison to most of his older French colleagues, Damais’ approach to the study of the Archipelago’s pasts became much more Indonesia-​than India-​or Indochina-​centred. At the same time, Damais’ career, like those of his colleagues, was to a large extent facilitated by empire—​ indeed multiple empires. Partly through his institutional affiliations, he thus became a mediator in so many of the local and international knowledge networks that facilitated the movement and moulding of ideas on Indonesian culture and Greater India. Like the Siva temple, Damais personified the formative aspects and continuities of empires and decolonization.58 Once referred to by a colonial administrator in Indochina as a ‘French Lawrence of Arabia in Asia’,59 in 1953 at the Siva temple Damais was half on the Indonesian and half on the French side. Despite his explicit expression of anti-​colonial sentiments,60 to a certain extent both the French and Dutch empires in Asia made him.61 As a linguist studying in Paris, as a military servant in Syria (1932–​1933), and as secretary of a UN commission for the demarcation of the border between Syria and Iraq, the polyglot Damais had mastered Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, Sanskrit, Russian, and a bit of Kurdish. To these he added, during his studies in Leiden (1935–​1937), old and new Javanese under C. C. Berg, and Dutch, while improving his knowledge of Malay under Philippus Samuel van Ronkel (1870–​1954), Arabic under Islamologist and Semiticist A. J. Wensinck 1882–​1930, Sanskrit under Vogel, and Russian (under Slavist Nicolas van Wijk 1880–​1941). He also took lessons at the home of the famous Arabist and Islamologist Snouck Hurgronje. Thus, when he secured a research-​fellowship to Java in 1937, heading towards the self-​proclaimed centre of Javanese culture, Surakarta, he was well connected, and well equipped, reading and speaking Dutch, Javanese, Malay, and Arabic. However, due to financial circumstances, he soon had to swap his research post in Surakarta for a diplomatic one as vice-​consul at the French Consulate in Batavia. Thanks to Stutterheim, with whom he became well acquainted during some of Stutterheim’s official archaeological inspection trips to sites in Java and Bali, he resumed his research in 1941. In March of that year, Stutterheim assigned him as epigrapher of the Dutch colonial Archaeological Service. In June 1942, in the wake of the Japanese occupation, Damais married R.A. Soejatoen Poespokoesoemo, a Javanese intellectual, who was the assistant-​ librarian at the Batavian Society and a pupil from Stutterheim at the ‘Eastern section’ of the Algemeene Middelbare School (general High School, AMS) in Surakarta.62 Damais and Soejatoen had three children and he converted to Islam in a ceremony guided by the prominent intellectual and Islamic scholar Agus Salim.63 The Pacific War and the Japanese occupation of the Indies (1942–​1945) placed Damais in an ambiguous position: as a national of Vichy France, he did not face internment, and he did not explicitly support the French resistance movement.64 However, Damais did try to avoid working for the Japanese regime, and during the war Damais’ scholarly activity remained restricted to the study of the Indonesian language, which under a Japanese regime that prohibited the use of Dutch, quickly ‘progressed’ as a new nationalist, formalized language based on local Malay.65 In 1943, when Damais, again as a result of Japanese archaeological politics, was asked to translate Dutch publications

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    405 into English, he refused. This forced him to earn a living as an informal school teacher to Indonesian youths and in January 1945, he, his wife, and some of their Indonesian friends were arrested and interrogated by the police, for listening to clandestine news broadcasts about the movement of the allied forces. These were at least feats of arms on his curricu­ lum vitae of 1959, when Damais was made the new chair of Indonesian civilization and languages at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris, a post created specifically for him.66 After the war, Damais, while strongly on the side of the Indonesian Republicans, half-​heartedly resumed his work on a corpus of Javanese inscriptions for the Dutch colonial Archaeological Service. In 1947, he left for Europe, partly driven out by the military clashes and chronic insecurity in Batavia. From 1951 to 1953 he was affiliated to the EFEO in Saigon, after which he returned permanently to Indonesia.67 In the early 1950s, with his strong foothold within Indonesian intellectual elite and scholarly circles, Damais played an ambiguous role as mediator between French cultural diplomatic, Indonesian nationalist, and Greater Indian scholarly interests, and provided an entrance into Indonesian high society to the new French ambassador. Damais’ alliances with Indonesian scholars were confirmed at the end of 1953, partly by his nomination to the ethnographic and linguistic section of the Lembaga Kebudyaan (Cultural Institute, the successor of the Batavian Society), and partly as a member of that Institute’s advisory council.68 One of his advisory council assignments was to produce ‘a popular but sufficiently academic’ overview of the historical problems regarding Indonesia and her relationships with India.69 Damais’ nomination thus seems to invoke the poignant dilemmas facing the Lembaga Kebudyaan: how to reconcile longstanding Greater Indian views that were now competing with nationalist scholarly views on Indonesia and its history. Damais also received an invitation to become a member of the ‘India-​Indonesia Cultural Society’, which supported the line of Greater Indian versus nationalist thinking, but with an Islam based twist. The society was founded in December 1953 under the auspices of Damais’ friend Prijono and Poerbatjaraka, the idea materializing during the one-​year visit of Syed Mohamed Hoessain Nainar, the Indian linguist and Islamic civilization specialist from the University of Madras.70 Above all, by representing, and, ultimately, helping to found an EFEO office in Jakarta, Damais secured the continuities of French scholarly interests in Indonesia’s ancient ‘Indic’ civilizations dating back to the first of several missions archaéologiques by EFEO-​members to Java in 1899.

The Indonesian Moment: Closed Doors and Open Ends of Colonial Heritage Networks That the Greater Indian mindset conflicted with postwar Indonesian nation building—​and scholarship—​can be inferred from one of the educational tools

406   Marieke Bloembergen published by Soekmono, shortly after he had become head of the Indonesian Archaeological Service. In his Pengantar Sedjarah Kebudajaan Indonesia (Guide to the Cultural History of Indonesia), a textbook for use in Indonesian high schools, he broke with the tradition of generations of foreign scholars who started the history of Indonesia in India: ‘the history of the Indonesian people does not begin with the arrival of the people and influences of India . . . . Whether it has Hindu, Islamic or Western influences, from the beginning until the end, Indonesian cultural history is Indonesian cultural history.’71 On the other hand, the old transnational Indic scholarly networks would continue to challenge such Indonesia-​centred views on ancient Asian history with alternative views, enhanced by interdependent relationships of scholarly knowledge exchange. Thus, in late 1955, Damais ran across the young archaeologist Satyawati Suleiman, whom he knew from before the war when she was still at high school in Batavia, now a staff member under Soekmono at the Archaeological Service. Damais presented Suleiman with a copy of George Coedès’s (French Sanskritist and former director of the EFEO) latest monograph, Les États hindouisés d’Indochine et Indonesie (1948). This work, later translated into The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, is a classic in the tradition of Greater Indian views on the region. To Suleiman, the book, and the connection, was a treasure, as she would develop over the next decades into an internationally esteemed specialist of the Sumatran remains of the Srivijaya Kingdom. Perhaps in exchange, she rather excitedly told Damais about the vice president Muhammed Hatta’s plans for an Indonesian archaeological mission to sites in India in 1956, and invited Damais to come along. Such an invitation to a foreigner was quite exceptional at the time; due to deteriorating relationships between Indonesia and the Netherlands, Suleiman had notably snubbed the epigrapher De Casparis, who was fiercely anti-​colonial, but Dutch. Damais explained the situation to his boss, as well as his excitement of finally viewing the archaeological remains of India’s ancient past. Sadly, the Indonesian archaeological mission never materialized. Instead, and probably as an outcome of these preparatory plans, in 1958 Suleiman was sent to India as an ideal knowledgeable cultural attaché to the Indonesian Embassy.

Conclusion Like Nehru’s visit to Borobudur with his archaeological missionaries, the meeting between Suleiman and Damais was one of a number of exchanges taking place in the years of early Indonesian independence, which showed that, in spite of post-​independence politics of nation building, the long-​term scholarly networks of Greater India still influenced a mindset that prioritized a transnational view on the region that excluded Indonesian (Islamic) realities of past and present. Indonesian, Dutch, French, and Indian scholars studying the ancient world in Asia, often in affective and interdependent relationships, could be stimulated and enhanced in their position precisely through enduring Greater Indian interests in connections between Indonesia and India.

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    407 However, others were restricted by negative experiences and politics of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial nation building. Before, during, and after the war, as well as across the decolonization divide, the idea of ‘local genius’ and related plans for heritage safeguarding were, despite the urgency of Indonesian nation building, subordinated to the interests of international and inter-​Asian collaborations. For all these actors who were privileged by birth and education, empire (or several empires) provided a formative experience. Empire enabled some of them, Dutch, French, but also Indian, to enjoy successful careers that developed further within and beyond the borders of empire. They played active roles and exercised influence within Indian-​, Southeast Asian-​, and European-​based scholarly networks of Greater India. Empire, on the other hand, also restricted others, in particular, the Indonesian scholar-​intellectuals during the colonial period. These moved strictly within the Dutch imperial space, whereas their Indian colleagues travelled the world and played visible roles in international academic forums. But regardless of whether these scholars wrote against the Greater Indian mindset or not, each helped to shape the moral geographies of Greater India that still exercise influence on the way many people, including academics, in Asia, Europe and the US look at the world and consider her in spatially and morally defined hierarchies of civilization. In that sense, the scholars central in this chapter helped, whether purposefully or not, empowering forms of cultural imperialism that alternated, but also partly overlapped, with those of empire. Ideas of Greater India as the superior solution to problems of the ‘self ’ or the world at large not only linger on in museums, studies, and coffee table books of Asian art and archaeology, but also in the worldwide embracing of Yoga as the pertinent good, or the Hollywood Blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love (2010) which triggered a new generation in the West to go on pilgrimage to ashrams in India and gurus in Bali. These academic and popular practices dwell on ideas of Greater India and related mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, that we, whether as scholars, pilgrims, or both, need to recognize as well, if we want to open up to the world.

Notes 1. This chapter is a pilot of my research project, ‘Indonesia and Greater India. Scholarly and spiritual knowledge networks and moral geographies’, supported by KITLV, 2016–​2020. It builds on my previous joint research-​project, 2009–​2014, with Martijn Eickhoff, on see Marieke Bloem-bergen and Martijn Eickhoff, The politics of heritage in Indonesia. A cultural history. (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming 2019) archaeology and heritage politics in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, within the Sites, Bodies, Stories Programme supported by the Dutch Scientific Council (NWO). 2. Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Exchange and the protection of Java’s antiquities; A transnational approach to the problem of heritage in colonial Java”, Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 4 (2013): 1–​24. Compare on sites in India: Alan Trevithick, The revival of Buddhist pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–​1949). Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi temple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006); Upinder Singh, “Exile and return. The reinvention of Buddhism and Buddhist sites in Modern India”, Journal of South Asian

408   Marieke Bloembergen Studies (2010) 26, no. 2: 193–​217; David Geary, “Rebuilding the Navel of the Earth 35–36. Buddhist pilgrimage and transnational religious networks”, MAS 48, no. 3 (2014): 645–​692. 3. Tim Creswell, “Moral Geographies”, in D. Atkinson, et al., eds., Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005), 128–​134. For a transnational elaboration of this concept, see M. Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia: Scholars, Pilgrims and Knowledge Networks of Greater India, ca. 1900–​1970”, in Michael Laffan, ed., Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 35–56. 4. Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”’. Compare on India-​centred forms of Greater India thinking and Asianism Susan Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’; French and Indian visions of colonialism in the Indic mode”, MAS 38, no.  3 (2004):  703–​744; Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-​Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India:  Nationalism and Internationionalism (ca. 1905–​1940)”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 65–​92; C.M. Stolte, Orienting India: Interwar Internationalism in an Asian Inflection, 1917–​1937, PhD-​thesis, Leiden University, 2013. 5. Of the many possible examples two influential ones, with impact on research on Asia in the late colonial period: Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons. The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). See also: Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith, “Sites of Asian interaction: An introduction”, MAS, 46, no. 2 (2012): 249–​257; Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 6. For a recent discussion on transnational history, see Matthew Pratt Guterl, “Comment: The Futures of Transnational History”, American Historical Review, 118, no. 1, (2013), 130–​139. 7. For the New Imperial History in the context of Dutch colonial history, see Remco Raben, “A new Dutch imperial history? Perambulations in a prospective field”, Low Countries Historical Review/​BMGN, 128, no. 1 (2013): 5–​30, and other essays in this special issue at http://​www.bmgn-​lchr.nl/​492/​volume/​128/​issue/​1/​. 8. For some important recent or ongoing exceptions: Ethan Mark, “Asia’s Transwar Lineage; Nationalism, Marxism, and ‘Greater Asia’ in an Indonesian Inflection”, Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 3 (2006): 461–​493; Yulianti, “Producing Buddhism in modern Indonesia (ca. 1930s–​1950s): South and Southeast Asian networks and local agencies”, forthcoming PhD dissertation at Leiden University and Universitas Gajah Mada. 9. Bart Luttikhus and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence. The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon:  Taylor and Francis, 2014); Rémy Limpach, De brandende kampongs van generaal Spoor (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016); Gert Oostindie, Soldaat in Indonesië 1945–​1950. Getuigenissen van een oorlog aan de verkeerde kant van de geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016). In 2017 a new large research programme started conducted by Netherlands-​and Indonesian-​based institutions and scholars, funded by the Dutch government: ‘Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945–​1950’, see: http://​www.ind45-​50.org/​en/​home. 10. In the Netherlands and Indonesia, this started at a grand scale with the NWO-​funded program “Indonesia across Orders. Rearrangements of Indonesian Society”, running 2002–​2008; it was initiated by Remco Raben, coördinated by NIOD (Amsterdam), and entailed collaboration with various universities and historians in Indonesia; for the resulting publications, see http://​www.niod.nl/​en/​projects/​indonesia-​across-​orders. For

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    409 recent studies by Indonesian historians on institutional histories across regime changes, see Agus Suwignyo, “The Breach in the Dyke: Regime Change and the Standardization of Public Primary School Training in Indonesia, 1893–​1969”, PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2012; Farabi Fakih, “The Rise of the Managerial State of Indonesia: Institutional Transition During the Early Independence Period, 1950–​1965”, PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2014. 11. On Indonesia in the 1950s, see the special issue of BKI, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 167, no. 4 (December 2011); see also Jennifer Lindsay and Maya Liem, eds., Heirs of World Culture:  Being Indonesian 1950–​1965 (Leiden:  KITLV Press, 2012), who study this period as a ‘beginning’ to counter the historiography on Indonesian history that either lays a watershed in 1940–​1945, or in 1965. 12. See, however, Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur: Moral engagements and the fear of loss. The Netherlands, Japan and (post-​) colonial heritage politics in Indonesia”, in S. Legêne, B. Purwanto, and H. Schulte Nordholt, eds., Sites, Bodies and Stories. Imagining Indonesian History. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2015), 33–​66; Mathew Cohen, Inventing the Performative Tradition in Colonial Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016) includes the Japanese occupation and independent Indonesia. 13. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question:  Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). 14. “Rapport sur une mission effectuée à Jogyakarta (ou Djokja) par L.C. Damais, pour representer l’[Efeo] à la Céremonie marquant la fin des travaux de restauration du Temple principal de Complexe de PRAMBANAN (souvent appelé Lara Djonggrang) dédié à Siwa Mahadewa, le 20 Decembre 1954” [hereafter Report Prambanan, Damais, 20-​12-​1954]. EFEO Paris, Archives EFEO, (hereafter EFEO), Dossiers de Personnels (hereafter DP), IV-​ D-​P P/​33, Louis Charles Damais, 1953_​0003-​0006. 15. For an extensive analysis of the inauguration of the Siva temple in the context of Indonesian nation building in the 1950s, see Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Conserving the past, mobilizing the future. Archaeological sites, regime change and heritage politics in Indonesia in the 1950s”, BKI/​Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 167, no. 4 (2011): 405–​426. See also Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur”. 16. Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”. 17. This paragraph builds on Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past”. 18. Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past”, 405–​418. 19. Muhammad Yamin, “Tjandi Loro Djonggrang”, Budaya, 12 (1953):  5–​ 10; see also Muhammad Yamin, 6000 Tahun Sang Merah-​Putih (Jakarta 1953). 20. Edi Sedyawati, “Sekapur Sirih”, in Edi Sedyawati, Ingrid E.  H. Pojoh, and Supratikno Rahardo, eds., Monumen. Karya persambuhan untuk prof. dr. R. Soekmono (Depok, 1990), vii–​ix, here vii–​viii; Soekmono, ‘Kepentingan leloehoer nenek moyang kita’, in Pantja Raja 1, no. 6 (1946): 149–​150. 21. Report Prambanan, Damais, 20-​12-​1954, EFEO, DP, IV-​D-​P P/​33, Louis Charles Damais, 1953_​0003-​0006. 22. Compare, for India-​centred forms: Susan Bayly, “Imagining ‘Greater India’ ”; Stolte and Fischer-​Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India”; Mark Ravinder Frost, “ ‘That Great Ocean of Idealism’: Calcutta, the Tagore Circle, and the Idea of Asia, 1900–​1920”, in S. Moorthy and A. Jamal, eds., Indian Ocean Studies:  Cultural Social and Political Perspectives

410   Marieke Bloembergen (London:  Routledge, 2010, 2018), 251–​279; on their impact regarding (post)-​colonial Indonesia, see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”; Marieke Bloembergen, “Sites of Learning, New Spiritual Movements and Scholarly Seekers in Indonesia and ‘Greater India’, 1920s–​ 1970s:  Local and Global Connections to Modernity”, in Susi Protschky and Tom van den Berge, eds., Modern Times in Southeast Asia, 1920s-​1970s (Leiden: Brill forthcoming). 23. Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’ ”; Stolte, Orienting India, Chapter 3; Kwa Chong-​Guan, “Introduction: Visions of early Southeast Asia as Greater India”, in Early Southeast Asia Viewed from India: An Anthology of Articles from the Journal of the Greater India Society (Singapore: ISEAS, 2013), xv–​xlvii. 24. See for the visit of Kalidas Nag to the Dutch East Indies in 1924, Bloembergen, “Borobudur”; on the visit of Tagore to Java in 1927, see Arun Das Gupta, “Rabindranath Tagore in Indonesia: An Experience in Bridge-​Building”, BKI/​Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania, 158, no.  3 (2002):  451–​477; Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 245–​260; Martin Ramstedt, “Colonial Encounters between India and Indonesia”, South Asian History and Culture, 2, no. 4 (2011): 522–​539; Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur! The Moral Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Indonesia across Orders and Borders, 1930s–​1980s”, in Michael Falser, ed., Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission (London: Springer, 2015), 96–​97. 25. R. Tagore, 16-​9-​1928, [probably to T. K. Birla]. Santiniketan, Rabindra Bhavan, Corres­ pondence Tagore, ‘Java-​tour’, 179, 1. 26. In 1913, according to a 1952-​CV of Damais (see footnote 40); In 1912 according to the website http://​www.geni.com/​people/​Rr-​Soejatoen-​Poespokoesoemo/​6000000012966920530, consulted 7-​4-​2015, which learns that she was born in East Java, Situbundo, and the daughter of a priyayi, R. Abdoelharif Poespokoesoemo, and Samini Binti Poespowardojo. 27. For Dutch and Indonesian biographical sketches of Djajadiningrat, see, among others, Soetanto Soetopo, Prof. Dr.  Hoesein Djajadiningrat. Karya dan pengabdianya (Jakarta:  Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1982); G. Pijper, “Professor. dr. pangeran Ario Hoesein Djajadiningrat, 8 december 1886–​12 november 1960”, BKI/​ Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 117, no. 4 (1961): 401–​409. 28. For an obituary of Poerbatjaraka, see Th. Pigeaud, ‘In memoriam professor Poerbatjaraka’, BKI 122, 4 (1966), 405–​412. Damais reviewed Poerbatjaraka’s Riwajat Indonesia (History of Indonesia) (Djakarta: Yayasan Pembangunan, 1952), in BEFEO, 48, no. 2 (1957): 607. For a personal memory on Poerbatjaraka, see Benedict Anderson, “Sembah-​sempuh: The politics of Language and Javanese culture”, in Language and Politics: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 194–​239, at 214. 29. On Prijono, see Lee Kam Hing, Education and Politics in Indonesia (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1995) 182–​185; Harry Poeze, Verguisd en vergeten. Tan Malaka en de linkse beweging in Indonesië, 1945–​1949. Part 3 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 1716. On Tjan Tjoe Siem, see Leo Suryadinata, Southeast Asian Personalities of Chinese Descent, Vol I (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012), 1184. 30. Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion. Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–​1926 (Ithaca NY: Columbia University Press, 1990); Hans van Miert, Een koel hoofd en een warm hart. Nationalisme, javanisme en jeugdbeweging in Nederlands-​Indië, 1918–​1930. (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995). 31. For analyses of Indonesian colonial elites interactions with India, see Ramstedt, “Colonial Encounters”; for postcolonial times, see Martin Ramstedt, “Hindu bonds at work,

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    411 Spiritual and commercial ties between India and Bali”, Journal of Asian Studies, 67, no. 4 (2008): 1227–​1250; see also Yadav Somvir, “Cultural and religious interaction between modern India and Indonesia”, in Martin Ramstedt, ed., Hinduism in Modern Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2003), 255–​263. 32. On Santiniketan and visiting European-​ born Indologists, in particular, the Italian Sanskritist Tucci (1894–​1984), see Stolte, Orienting India, 83–​102. 33. Republished in the 1950s, Muhammad Yamin, Di Dalam lingkungan rumah tangga (Jakarta, Perpustakaan Perguruan Kementerian P.P.  dan K, 1955); From the same author, another translation of Tagore’s works: Muhammad Jamin, Menantikan soerat dari raja (Batavia, 1928). Soetan Harahap made frescoes for the buildings of the art school at Santiniketan, and also contributed drawings to the work of the Bengal writer Buddhadeva Bose, The Land Where I  Found It All, translated by Nandini Gupta, see http://​www. parabaas.com/​BB/​articles/​pNandini_​SPDCh10.html, accessed 12-​2-​2017. 34. Soetomo, Towards a Glorious Indonesia:  Reminiscences and Observations (Athen, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1987), edited, annotated and introduced by Paul W. van der Veur, at 162–​170. 35. Somvir, “Cultural and religious interaction”, 257. Martin Ramstedt, “Hindu bonds at work”, 1230. 36. See Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur”, 101. 37. S. Sivaramamurti, Le stupa du Barabadur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961). 38. Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”. 39. Laporan Tahunan. Dinas Purbakala Republik Indonesia (Jakarta, 1952), 13. 40. CV Charles Louis Damais, 1951, EFEO, DP, IV-​D-​P P/​33, Louis Charles Damais, Activités 1950-​1951-​0060-​CVDAMAIS. 41. Willem Otterspeer, ed., Leiden Oriental Connections, 1850–​1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1989); Cees Fasseur, De Indologen. Ambtenaren voor de Oost 1825–​1950 (Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 1993).; Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, Tussen oriëntalisme en wetenschap (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2001). 42. R. C. Majumdar, ‘The Kern Institute of Leyden’, Modern Review XLV (1929):  601–​603, at 602. 43. ibid. 44. F. D. K. Bosch. ‘In memoriam Jean Philippe Vogel, 1871–​1951’, De Gids, 122 (1959): 1–​12, at 2, 5. 45. Upinder Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginning of Archaeology (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 349; Bosch, “In memoriam”, 2. 46. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:  Verso, 1983); on the history of archaeology and politics in India, see Upinder Singh, The Discovery; Tapati Guha-​Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories:  Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2004). On international competition in archaeology in Southeast Asia, involving king Chulalongkorn of Siam, see Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things. The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s modern Image. (Honolulo:  University of Hawaii Press, 2002); From a Dutch East-​indies’ perspective, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Exchange”. 47. Jean-​Philippe Vogel, De arbeid van het Instituut Kern, 1925–​1935. (Leiden: Brill, 1935), 7, 12. 48. Vogel, Instituut Kern, 12; “Dr R. C. Majumdar in Europe and Indonesia’, Modern Review XLV (1929): 131. 49. “Dr R. C. Majumdar”, 131.

412   Marieke Bloembergen 50. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Suvarnadvipa. Describing Hindu Culture and Political History in Malaya and Indonesia (Dacca, 1937), frontispiece. Compare Ramstedt, “Colonial Encounters”, 8. 51. “Dr R. C. Majumdar”, 131. 52. B. R. Chatterjee, ‘Greater India—​Some Landmarks in its History’, Modern Review XLV (1929): 337–​338, at 338. See also, from the same author: “Fall of the last kingdom in Java”, Modern Review XLV (1929): 536–​539. 53. For more details on this generation, see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”. 54. For De Casparis, see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”; For Damais, see L. Ch. Damais, “Pre-​Seventeenth-​Century Indonesian History: Sources and Directions”, in M. A. Soedjatmoko, G. J. Resink and G. McT. Kahin, eds., An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 24–​35, at 31. 55. On Stutterheim and Bosch, ambiguously in action against Greater Indian thinking, see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the light of Asia”. 56. Characteristic for Indology students from the Dutch Philologist W. H. Rassers (1877–​1973) at Leiden University. See C. C. Berg, ‘Javaansche geschiedschrijving’, in F. W. Stapel, ed., Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-​Indië (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1938), 9. 57. Interview with Damais’s son, Adji Damais, Jakarta, 10 March, 2017. With thanks to Hélène Njoto for mediating. 58. Compare to Damais: Harry J. Benda, “Louis Charles Damais”, Indonesia, 3 (1967): 217–​221; G. J. Resink, “Six rencontre mémorables avec Charles-​Louis Damais”, Archipel, 41 (1991): 19–​ 21; Jean-​Pascal Elbaz, “Louis-​Charles Damais, un humaniste en Indonésie. Détails d’une vie à Java à travers sa correspondence”, Archipel, 54 (1997): 243–​252. 59. “Haut Commissariat de France pour l’Indochine in Saigon, Conseiller Diplomatique to Minister of Foreign Affairs (Sous-​direction Asie-​Océanie), 29-​5-​1946”, in Centre des Archives d’ Outre-​Mer (CAOM), Aix-​en-​Provence, Archives du Haut-​Commissariat de France à Saigon (HC) (1946–​1954), Conseiller diplomatique (CD) (1945–​1952), Indo 4. 60. Jean-​Pascal Elbaz, “Damais”, 245, quoting a letter of Damais dating 20 February 1946. 61. Compare Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Penguin, 2004). 62. She passed her exams 13 May 1934. ANRI, KBG, inv. DIR 1098 (1941–​1941), overview of personnel at the Museum of the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. 63. Interview with Adji Damais, Jakarta, 10 March 2017. The Haute Commissaire in Saigon, reporting about Damais’ pro-​republican activities, tried to spread the gossip that Damais had converted to Islam when he was in Syria. Haut Commissariat de France pour l’Indochine, Conseiller Diplomatique to Minister of Foreign Affairs (Sous-​direction Asie-​ Océanie), 29-​5-​1946, in: CAOM, HC (1946–​1954), CD (1945–​1952), Indo 4. 64. Benda, “Louis Charles Damais”, 220. 65. Damais to Claire Holt, 17 December 1945, EFEO Jakarta, Letters of L. C. Damais. With thanks to Jean Pascal Elbaz and Henri Chambert-​Loir for the access to study this collection. 66. CV Louis Charles Damais, 1951, EFEO DP, IV D P-​P-​33, Louis Charles Damais, Activités 1950-​1951-​0060-​CVDAMAIS. 67. Catherine Clémentine-​Ojha and Pierre-​Yves Manguin, A Century in Asia: The History of the École française d’Extrême Orient, 1896–​1996 (Singapore: Didier-​Millet, 2007), 130. 68. Damais to director EFEO, 26 December 1953, in: EFEO, DP, IV D-​P/​P-​33, Louis Charles Damais, LO-​SD-​12-​Poste de Djakarta-​1953-​0011.

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past    413 69. “Une revue de vulgarisation, mais de bonne tenue scientifique, sur les problèmes historiques de l’Indonésie et de ses rapports avec l’Inde”, Damais to director EFEO, 26 December 1953, in EFEO DP, IV D-​P/​P-​33, Louis Charles Damais, LO-​SD-​12-​Poste de Djakarta-​1953-​0011. 70. See Nainar’s lecture “Islam, civilization and culture”, held at the Jajasan Wakaf Perguruan Tinggi Islam in Jakarta in 1953 (Leiden University Library, Collection KITLV, Collection R.  Roolvinck), and his Java as Noticed by Arab Geographers (Madras:  University of Madras, 1953). 71. R. Soekmono, Pengantar Sedjarah Kebudajaan Indonesia; Djilid 1. (Djakarta:  Penerbit Nasional Trikarya, 1955), 5 (translation MB).

Pa rt   I I I

T H E M AT IC P E R SP E C T I V E S

Chapter 22

Se lf-​d etermi nat i on and Dec ol oni z at i on Brad Simpson

Introduction Speaking on the eve of Ghana’s independence in November 1956, Gold Coast Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed to his future countrymen that ‘if we can make a success of our independence, we shall have made an incalculable contribution towards freedom and progress throughout Africa. We must show that it is possible for Africans to rule themselves, to establish a progressive and independent state and to preserve their national unity. The struggle for self-​determination which was started by our forebears is in our time coming to a successful end.’1 Nkrumah’s vision of self-​determination through a unitary government, however, was not the only one on offer. Members of the National Liberation Movement (NLM), a mass political organization founded in 1954 and claiming to represent the force of Asante nationalism, denounced the ‘black imperialism’ of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) and advanced a competing demand for national self-​determination, either through secession or the creation of an Asante autonomous region, before being taken over by more moderate nationalist forces who transformed it into a conventional political party.2 The struggle over the shape that a future Ghana (or some other political formation) might take highlights the simple fact that there was no common understanding of the idea of ‘self-​determination,’ the demand voiced by countless anticolonial movements and activists from the end of the First World War until well into the 1970s, when the era of formal European colonialism shuddered to a close. Like human rights more broadly, the meaning of self-​determination as a human right in the 1960s and 1970s was fractured and contested along lines that transcended neat East–​West or North–​South divides. It emerged from political, ideological, and sometimes even military conflict, with a multiplicity of actors seeking to enlarge or constrain it to suit their own purposes.

418   Brad Simpson Historians of human rights have thus far made two erroneous arguments concerning self-​determination. First, they have argued that anticolonial movements used the discourse of self-​determination primarily for instrumental goals (and primarily in instrumental fora), and as merely one arrow in a quiver of tactics for achieving broader goals, including economic development and racial equality. ‘Outside the United Nations,’ Jan Eckel has argued, ‘it was never applied more than tentatively . . . part of a more general “subaltern” logic with which political and social groups in the colonies used metropolitan discourses in order to employ them against the colonial powers and demand that the latter practice what they preach.’ Second, they have insisted that self-​determination’s fiercest advocates in the Global South by the 1960s had reduced the principle cum-​right ‘to the receipt of statehood and perpetual non-​intervention thereafter,’ thereby irrevocably diluting its liberal, democratic implications.3 Both arguments, this chapter argues, oversimplify the myriad ways in which a variety of state and non-​state actors deployed self-​determination claims to envision sovereignty and human rights in the era of decolonization. Self-​determination, in other words, was a form of claim making about the nature and scope of post-​colonial rights and sovereignty, an open-​ended contest rather than a fixed concept. To illustrate these claims, this chapter focuses on UN debates over the status of self-​determination as a human right, debates among colonial powers and anti-​colonial activists concerning the proper ‘form’ of self-​determination could and should take—​including possible federation, secession or non-​self-​government—​and debates over the nature and scope of ‘economic self-​determination.’

Origins and Institutionalization Historians have traced the origins of ideas about self-​determination to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the American Declaration of Independence, nineteenth-​century German philosophy, and late nineteenth-​century Marxism. Early twentieth-​century radicals and nationalists were among the first to frame self-​ determination in anticolonial terms as the right to independence from imperial rule. US President Woodrow Wilson helped to popularize self-​determination as a way of voicing sovereignty claims when he suggested at the end of the First World War that people subjected to imperial governance had the right to self-​rule. His words helped to galvanize many activists, who appropriated it to lend legitimacy to the anticolonial protests and revolts which erupted amidst wartime political and economic dislocation.4 Anticolonial radicals, however, often couched their demands in the context of a broader critique of capitalism and imperialism and the economic exploitation they entailed. Wilson, on the other hand, viewed self-​determination in liberal terms, as first and foremost a political act that would create independent nation-​states, but only for those considered fit for self-​rule in racial or civilizational terms. Wilson’s vision also

Self-determination and Decolonization    419 posed a challenge for anticolonial leaders who sought transnational solidarities and framed their claims, as some Muslim activists did, in religious, rather than ethnic or nationalist terms. European and US leaders at the Paris Peace Conference rejected the expansive self-​ determination claims of anticolonial activists while colonial officials and armies put down their revolts, but this hardly settled the matter. During the interwar period a wide range of groups and movements continued to frame their aspirations and demands in these terms, though some adopted the language of Marxism rather than anticolonial liberalism. Self-​determination lacked legal standing in international law and remained ill-​defined, and was thus open to appropriation and redefinition to suit diverse needs. Anticolonial activists in League of Nations Mandate Territories, Pan-​African and Pan-​ Asian thinkers, and African-​American Communists in the southern United States kept the idea alive and in circulation.5

Charter and Covenants As had been the case two decades before, the outbreak of war in Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and the temporary collapse of European empires galvanized anticolonial activists everywhere, many of whom again loudly demanded self-​rule. Hoping to motivate British and US citizens, and perhaps dampen these anticolonial calls, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt in August 1941 jointly proclaimed the Atlantic Charter (the ‘Charter’), which pledged the Allied powers to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’ and ‘see sovereign rights and self-​government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’.6 Anticolonial activists seized upon the Charter’s promises to describe and lend legitimacy to their ongoing struggles, but also recognized its limits. The African National Congress in 1943 concluded that the Charter reaffirmed the principle of self-​ determination, and applied both to colonies and to peoples subjected to minority rule. The Charter’s call for postwar economic cooperation and equal access to raw materials for all nations, however, seemed ‘likely to bring about a continuation of the exploitation of African resources to the detriment of her indigenous inhabitants and the enrichment of foreigners’.7 Two years later, as he declared Vietnam’s independence, Ho Chi Minh declared, ‘We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-​determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam’.8 The United States sought after 1941 to embrace self-​determination as a basic principle of global order, while simultaneously narrowing its scope and meaning. In doing so, US officials, scholars, and others advanced a limited vision self-​determination as popular self-​rule, rather than as a right held by all colonized peoples. Britain, like most colonial powers, insisted that ‘rights’ inhered in individuals and not in collectively identified

420   Brad Simpson ‘peoples,’ that self-​determination was a principle, not a right, and that this principle imposed no legal obligation on states. Both powers, therefore, worked to delete references to self-​determination in the United Nations Charter, before bowing under strong pressure from Latin American and non-​western states. Anticolonial movements, many postcolonial states, and their socialist allies offered a more radical vision of self-​determination encompassing economic as well as political sovereignty, embracing national liberation as a means to achieve it, and predicated on full and rapid decolonization of European empires. For example, most anti-​colonial movements and their post-​colonial brethren recognized that the achievement of political self-​determination did not guarantee economic sovereignty. The issue was of course central to the hopes of states emerging from colonialism or dominated by foreign firms for autonomous development that would lead to their integration with the world economy on fairer terms. This meant, first and foremost, challenging the continued control of their economies by former colonial powers, foreign firms, multilateral institutions that shaped the framework for the disbursement of development assistance, and a global trading and legal system that favoured the needs of advanced industrial economies and the companies residing in them over those countries dependent on producing primary products. Over the course of the next four decades a wide range of actors, from anticolonial leaders in Asia and Africa to Latin American diplomats to African American and Native American activists, would deploy claims to economic self-​determination as a political principle, a human right, and as a way of envisioning sovereignty in an increasingly integrated world economy. Debates over the scope and meaning of self-​determination raised a series of thorny questions, especially for anticolonial activists:  Was self-​determination a principle or a right, and if so, for whom: individuals, ethnic or national groups, all peoples living within the boundaries of a former colonial territory, or something else entirely? Was it primarily an act (as of decolonization) or a process (of democratic self-​rule), and was it confined to politics or did it also encompass economic and cultural life? Furthermore, did it encompass the right to secede from establish states?9 These questions were of existential importance for anticolonial movements, many of which claimed to represent ethnically and culturally heterogeneous territories with restive minorities that themselves sought self-​determination. The 1948 UNDHR did not resolve these debates because it excluded self-​determination as a human right, an important reason why anti-​colonial movements seized on the latter and not the former as the ideological framework for national liberation struggles. Beginning in the early 1950s, however, non-​western states sought to institutionalize its status in the UN human rights machinery, working through the Human Rights Commission and the General Assembly’s Third (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) and Fourth (Special Political and Decolonization) Committees.10 Mounting support within the UN General Assembly for self-​determination was reflected in a string of landmark resolutions. In 1950, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan sponsored a UN resolution requesting the Human Rights Commission to ‘study ways and means which would ensure the right of peoples and nations to self-​determination’,

Self-determination and Decolonization    421 and the next year these same countries, joined by Burma, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the Philippines, Syria, and Yemen, voted in favour of adding to the proposed human rights covenants a provision stating that ‘all peoples have the right to self-​ determination’.11 It soon became clear that, despite the opposition of the US and other Western nations a majority of non-​Western and newly independent countries supported inclusion of a right to self-​determination in the human rights covenants, and that they envisioned extending far beyond mere politics to include economic and cultural sovereignty. In 1960, a coalition of African and Asian states in the General Assembly secured passage of the landmark Resolution on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The Declaration formally established self-​determination as ‘the legal foundation for the establishment of the sovereign state from the colonial territory’ while rejecting arguments about primitivism and backwardness as a basis for continued colonial rule, though countries of all ideological stripes continued to make them.12 Five years later the UN adopted the legally binding International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, linking Apartheid with decolonization and self-​determination and breaching an opening in the wall of state sovereignty though which a generation of human rights NGOs would later enter. The following year, culminating a decade of negotiations, the General Assembly adopted the Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article I of which began with the famous phrase:  ‘All peoples have the right of self-​determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’.13 The institutionalization of self-​determination in the UN machinery was the product, not the cause, of the dramatic wave of decolonization and the transformation of the UN made possible by an expanded membership. While the General Assembly and its newly independent members voted overwhelmingly in favour of both human rights covenants, many Western and European states did not. Britain, like most colonial powers, insisted that ‘rights’ inhered in individuals and not collectively identified ‘peoples,’ that self-​determination was a principle, not a right, and that this principle imposed no legal obligation on states.14 The dramatic shift in the membership of the General Assembly, however, forced a reconsideration of imperial powers’ views, or at least the optics surrounding them, as debates about self-​determination began ‘affecting the legitimacy of empire,’ thus contributing ‘to making colonial rule untenable’.15 Shortly after approving the human rights covenants (the overwhelming votes for which gave them the whiff, if not the substance, of international law), the General Assembly began considering what eventually became the 1970  ‘Declaration of the Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-​operation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations’.16 Surveying the political landscape among the nations of the Nonaligned Movement, the British Foreign Office now concluded ‘that we have more to gain than lose from conceding the existence of some form of right to self-​determination’. Perhaps more important, London sensed that recognition of a ‘right’ to self-​determination would not impose substantive

422   Brad Simpson new burdens on it or other ‘perplexed proprietors of tiny territories,’ almost all of which would likely retain close trade, political, and security ties to colonial metropoles even if they became independent.17 The 1970 ‘Declaration of the Principles of International Law’ marked a turning point in the evolution of self-​determination claims, simultaneously expanding and telescoping them. It extended the definition of self-​determination from an act of colonial emancipation to a process linked to representative government, one that could be equally applied to South Africa under Apartheid and the states of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination. More relevant for the US and Britain—​those ‘indefatigable collector[s]‌of bits and pieces of empire’—​the Declaration also stated that self-​determination could take forms other than independence, including ‘the free association or integration with an independent State or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people’, widening the scope of possible outcomes beyond those envisioned by anti-​colonial movements. ‘It is our long-​standing position’, US Secretary of State William Rogers later argued, ‘that independence is only one of several possible outcomes of [a] process of self-​determination’, a position that the US and Britain used to endorse the variety of arrangements that they envisioned for non-​self-​governing and trust territories such as Micronesia, Guam, the British Virgin Islands, and other small or island states.18

The Forms of Self-​Determination As historians such as Fred Cooper remind us, the nation-​state was not the inevitable result of the decolonization process. ‘What our gaze backward from the era of independence fails to appreciate—​or belittles’, he argues, ‘is another form of politics in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s: an effort not to escape empire, but to transform it’ through federation or other political configurations.19 Colonial and anticolonial leaders as well as metropolitan officials envisioned self-​determination taking many possible forms according to perceived ethnic, religious, racial, geographic, administrative, or linguistic realities. In the immediate postwar period, anticolonial leaders in India, Indonesia, and Philippines, as well as other large colonies with heterogeneous populations, often demanded that self-​determination result in the creation of unitary nation-​states conforming to previous colonial boundaries. Restive ethnic, racial, or linguistic minorities, predictably, resisted the siren song of strong, centralized states and in Aceh, West New Guinea, Mindanao, Pakistan, and elsewhere sought federation, outright independence, or significant autonomy. The creation of the United Nations Trusteeship System, and the forging of a multi-​ layered system of semi-​sovereignty by the United States and other imperial powers after 1945 vividly illustrates the open-​endedness of the project of self-​determination. As the war drew to a close, US planners sought to balance the need to support European allies, acknowledge anticolonial nationalism, and sort out the geopolitical implications of

Self-determination and Decolonization    423 Washington’s now-​dominant international position. A primary concern was the fate of thousands of bases acquired during the war, now central to postwar planning and to the War Department’s emerging vision of ‘defense in depth’.20 The San Francisco conference established a Trusteeship Council to oversee the disposition of former Japanese and German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, as well as territories falling under the authority of the League of Nations Mandates Commission, such as Southwest Africa. The mandate of the Trusteeship Council was to administer Trust territories and ‘promote the political, economic and social advancement of the Territories and their development towards self-​government and self-​determination’.21 Although most anticolonial movements thought this meant independence, the Western powers, with the US in the lead, envisioned a layered conception of sovereignty, with eventual independence envisioned for most formal colonies, but only ‘progressive development toward self-​ government’ for ‘dependencies’ such as Guam and the Pacific Island Trust Territories.22 The US, which dominated the UN until the early 1960s, offered highly qualified support for self-​determination, exempting the British, French, and Dutch from trusteeship arrangements regarding India, Indochina, and Indonesia, and embracing civilizational discourses that stressed the tutelary function of colonial powers towards their backward subjects.23 The Trusteeship Council nevertheless became the focus of efforts by NGOs such as the International League for the Rights of Man, the American Committee on Africa, and the British-​based Movement for Colonial Freedom, all of which pressed the Council to accelerate progress towards self-​government in the trust territories. In addition, ‘hundreds of African nationalists from the UN Trust Territories’ bombarded the Trusteeship council with tens of thousands of petitions in the 1950s, suggesting the degree to which they viewed the UN as a crucial site for deploying self-​determination claims.24 During the long period of postwar decolonization many anticolonial leaders and their former colonial masters internalized what one commentator called the ‘bigness bias,’ believing that small countries were ‘militarily vulnerable, politically weak, [and] economically unviable’.25 This fear helps to explain the support for schemes of federation, which proliferated among small decolonizing states, as well as among great powers such as the US and the UK, which viewed small states as sources of instability and potential geopolitical conflict. They were joined, though for different reasons, by anticolonial leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, who ‘condemned any expression of the right to self-​ determination which was on a small scale, and blamed it on neo-​colonial influences’.26 Academic economists and political scientists, moreover, were ‘obsessed with the need for large internal markets to promote economic development in the third world,’ and believed that small states, especially those dependent upon resource exports, could never create balanced, independent economies.27 A decade later, explosive economic growth among tiny East Asian states such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan put some of these concerns to rest. But federation remained an appealing alternative vision of self-​ determination for smaller territories in the West Indies, Indian Ocean, island Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and the South and Central Pacific (as well as the imperial powers that controlled them).28

424   Brad Simpson

Secession While the US and its European allies, China, the Soviet bloc, and the nations of the postcolonial world often violently disagreed on the nature and scope of self-​ determination after 1945, there was something approaching genuine international consensus on the danger of secession. Much of the burgeoning social science literature on self-​determination in the 1960s and 1970s focused on this question, which lay at the heart of the post-​colonial settlements and the emergence of independent states from the remnants of former colonial territories.29 Prior to 1945, scholars such as Alfred Cobban evinced a cautious optimism about the prospects for self-​determination as a principle that might ease the path from colonialism to self-​government, though many western observers framed their understanding of self-​determination in liberal, individual terms as little more than representative self-​ government. Even the worrying signs of early partition crises in Palestine and India did not significantly dampen such enthusiasm.30 As UN member states moved to condemn colonialism and enshrine self-​determination as a human right in the early 1960s, however, so too did worries that cascading self-​determination claims within anticolonial movements might lead to increased pressure for secession.31 The UN, with African members in the lead, repeatedly condemned attempts by secessionist movements to redraw the borders of often fragile multi-​ethnic states, and explicitly or tacitly authorized the Congo, Nigeria, and other countries threatened by such movements to take whatever actions necessary to preserve their territorial integrity.32 The rapid decolonization of much of Africa in the early 1960s forced many of the most pressing questions concerning the nature and limits of self-​determination to the surface. At the founding conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, anticolonial leaders heatedly debated whether the Pan-​African ideals of unity, anti-​ colonialism, and self-​determination required the maintenance of colonial borders or their dissolution in favour of a Pan-​African federation or some other formation. The OAU eventually took a strong and unequivocal stance in favour of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of member states and the preservation of existing borders, partly out of fear of state fragmentation, and partly at the insistence of smaller states fearful of border disputes with and territorial claims by their larger neighbours. While insisting on the ‘inalienable right of all people to control their own destiny’, the OAU Charter placed respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity among its founding principles.33 This was a reasonable stance given the ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of many postcolonial states and the often arbitrary definition of colonial borders, both of which raised the spectre that acknowledging a right of secession might lead to the unraveling of the postcolonial African system. One Kenyan official told an OAU Summit Conference in 1963 that ‘the principle of self-​determination has relevance where foreign domination is the issue. It has no relevance where the issue is territorial disintegration by dissident citizens’.34

Self-determination and Decolonization    425 The OAU’s stance reflected the deep unease spawned by the Congolese civil war (1961–​1963) and the attempted secession of Katanga province, justified by Moise Tshombe ‘on the basis of the universally recognized right to self-​determination’.35 The secessionist State of Katanga, indirectly backed by numerous Western governments and mining firms, was defeated in January 1963, just a few months before the OAU’s formation. Many African leaders saw the Katanga secession as an attempt by former colonial powers to foster the emergence of weak post-​colonial states, and postcolonial self-​ determination (at least as described by them) as a mask for the promotion of imperial and commercial interests.36 The Nigerian civil war (1967–​1970) and the attempted secession of Biafra raised similar questions about whether a self-​identified minority could secede from a recognized state, and when—​if ever—​state-​sponsored violence might legitimize state dissolution.37

The Limits of Self-​determination By the 1960s, international law broadly recognized a right to self-​determination for most non-​self-​governing territories, including colonies and trust territories. A  wide range of states, however, continued to insist that some places were too small, too backward, or too primitive to merit self-​determination leading to independence, though the 1960 decolonization declaration specifically renounced such assertions as justifications for continued colonial rule. The US, the UK, and France all rejected independence for Pacific islands they claimed as ‘strategic trust territories,’ military bases, or sites of nuclear testing, stressing their obligations towards ‘primitive’ peoples and favouring association and other forms of semi-​sovereignty. Where possible, Western officials would hold consultations or other measures designed to provide the appearance of self-​rule. Elsewhere, as in Diego Garcia, the US government negotiated with the British to build an air base and simply expelled the native population, in order to ‘remove the possibility that use of the islands could be hampered by external pressures for self-​determination’.38 The belief that some places were too small or backward to merit self-​determination in some cases helped to legitimize postcolonial aggression. In 1961 India invaded the tiny Portuguese colony of Goa, quickly conquering and annexing the territory to general agreement from its postcolonial brethren and the Socialist bloc. Western governments such as the US, which denounced the Indian takeover, reversed position a year later when Indonesia threatened war with the Netherlands in order to ‘recover’ the former Dutch territory of West New Guinea (later known as West Irian or West Papua). President John F. Kennedy helped broker a 1962 agreement turning the territory over to Jakarta pending a UN-​sponsored act of self-​determination. Indonesia organized the so-​called Act of Free Choice under UN auspices in 1969, leaving nothing to chance in what is now widely regarded as a fraudulent process. Indonesian, US, and Australian officials, however, almost uniformly agreed that Papuans were too tribal and too primitive to merit self-​government, rendering integration with Indonesia the only conceivable

426   Brad Simpson outcome. One US official wrote that ‘the stone age Papuans cannot be prepared for meaningful self-​determination during any feasible UN trusteeship period; the problem will not sit that long’.39 The tropes of size, primitivism, and backwardness also underlay Western support for Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and occupation of the Portuguese territory of East Timor. Western diplomats, while affirming East Timor’s rights in principle, repeatedly rejected them in practice, effectively ruling out independence and framing self-​determination squarely in the context of integration with Indonesia. Developmental discourses, moreover, provided a shorthand for dismissing Timor as too small and primitive to merit self-​government. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs argued in 1974 that, though it had the right to self-​determination, ‘Portuguese Timor is not at present a viable economic entity and . . . would have no capability in the short term to handle a self-​governing or independent status’.40 New Zealand’s Ambassador mused that ‘considered as human stock they are not at all impressive’—​despite the efforts of anthropologists and activists to argue that East Timor was a viable independent state.41 Indonesian President Suharto agreed, telling US President Gerald Ford in a few months later that the Portuguese colony ‘would hardly be viable’ and that ‘the only way’ to decolonize ‘is to integrate into Indonesia’.42 After Indonesia’s invasion, Western governments voted consistently against UN General Assembly resolutions rejecting Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor and reaffirming its right to self-​determination, and worked to remove East Timor from the agenda of the UN decolonization committee. The Western position was at odds with that of a divided non-​aligned movement, which twice voted in favour of resolutions reaffirming East Timor’s right to self-​determination and calling for speedy independence for the territory.43 The European powers’ stance on Timor proved strikingly similar to that regarding the Moroccan and Mauritanian takeover of Spanish Sahara in December 1975, two months after the International Court of Justice ruled that partition and annexation of the territory violated the ‘freely expressed will of peoples’ there for independence. While repeatedly affirming Western Sahara’s right to self-​determination, the US, France, the UK, and other European powers expressed their de-​facto support for Moroccan and Mauritanian partition of the territory, viewing it as too sparsely populated and primitive to become anything but the object of regional and, potentially, global rivalry.44 ‘Self-​ determination for 40,000 nomads?’ asked Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba. ‘Let’s not exaggerate’.45 Though the US and Soviet Union backed Morocco and Algeria, respectively, with weapons and assistance, the chief goal of each was to prevent Western Sahara from escalating into a Cold War conflict. Others, such as the UK (which imported 75% of its phosphate from Morocco), Spain, and France, had longer-standing economic and colonial stakes in backing the Moroccan and Mauritanian position.46 The OAU and Nonaligned Movement were deeply divided on Western Sahara, as on Timor, unable to come to a resolution of the conflict which could reconcile their support for self-​determination with broader regional rivalries and ambitions, as well as personal and ideological disputes.47

Self-determination and Decolonization    427

Economic Self-​Determination Debates about the viability of territories such as Western Sahara, West Papua, and East Timor were closely related to questions of economic sovereignty and the control over natural resources, investment, and macroeconomic policy more generally. Anticolonial movements, post-​colonial states, and their anxious brethren in many parts of the world recognized that the achievement of political self-​determination did not guarantee economic sovereignty. The issue was of course central to the hopes of states emerging from colonialism or dominated by foreign firms for autonomous development that would lead to their integration with the world economy on fairer terms. This meant, first and foremost, challenging the continued control of their economies by former colonial powers, foreign firms, multilateral institutions that shaped the framework for the disbursement of development assistance, and a global trading and legal system that favoured the needs of advanced industrial economies and the companies residing in them over those countries dependent on producing primary products. The issues at stake were apparent as early as 1947, when the Philippines held a ‘parity rights plebiscite’ which granted US citizens and corporations equal rights to invest in and exploit the resources of the newly independent country. The vote capped an extraordinarily contentious debate about the conditions and meaning of Philippine decolonization, and a months-​long campaign by President Manuel Roxas to persuade the nation that the need for trade with the US trumped the imperatives of colonial nationalism, after decades of dominance by US investors. Many of his countrymen thought they had little choice. US colonial authorities imposed the Parity provisions on the Philippines as a condition of independence, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1946 tied postwar relief payments to passage of a constitutional amendment giving equal rights to US corporations. The Parity provisions barely passed the Philippine senate, and only after the legislature blocked leftists from taking up their seats.48 But US-​based multinational corporations invested in the Philippines exulted in a decision that ‘marks the first departure from the readiness of certain underdeveloped nations since the depression to stand on their political sovereignty and invoke the principle of economic self-​determination as warrant for ostracizing or confiscating foreign capital or limiting it in the future to a subordinate status’.49 Over the next four decades a wide range of actors, from anticolonial leaders in Asia and Africa to Latin American diplomats to African American and Native American activists, would deploy claims to economic self-​determination as a political principle, a human right, and as a way of envisioning sovereignty in an increasingly integrated world economy. The ‘virtually obsessive repetition’ of such claims in both national politics and multilateral forums underpinned many of the most important economic initiatives of the nations of the ‘global south’ after 1945, from the assertion by many states of ‘permanent sovereignty over natural resources’ to calls for a ‘New International Economic Order’ or a ‘right to development’.50

428   Brad Simpson As early as 1950, representatives from newly independent and Latin American states began pressing for inclusion of a right to economic self-​determination in UN debates over the human rights covenants. Western diplomats, businessmen, and international legal scholars were quick to see the implications of the rising tide of UN resolutions endorsing the right to self-​determination.51 One US official, Dean Acheson, wrote that French officials ‘are very much worried about the inclusion of any kind of article on self-​determination, no matter how carefully drafted the language might be. They fear that this will lead to economic self-​determination of peoples and not be limited to political self-​determination alone’, and that ‘inclusion of the right to self-​determination in a treaty might mean the abrogation of treaties and contracts in the economic field’.52 Western officials did not have to look far for confirmation of these fears. In March 1951, Iran’s parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-​Iranian Oil Company after months of bitter negotiations, a move which Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh later explained would not only fund national development but ‘ensure respect for our independence and for our right of self-​determination’ over Iran’s resources.53 In 1952 alone, the UN General Assembly, ECOSOC Committee, and Human Rights Commission passed half a dozen resolutions explicitly linking economic self-​ determination, resource sovereignty, human rights, and the needs of developing counties, with a majority of Latin American states joining a vanguard led by Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. On 5 November 1952, Uruguay submitted a draft resolution, later passed largely along North–​South lines, which called on member states to respect ‘the right of each country to nationalize and freely exploit its natural wealth, as an essential factor of economic independence’.54 Debates about the scope and meaning of political and economic self-​determination occupied a prominent, but largely ignored role in the work of the UN Human Rights Commission, the ECOSOC Committee and the Decolonization Committee for the remainder of the decade.55 In September 1954 the UNHRC recommended establishment of a commission (formed in 1958) to survey the right of peoples and nations to ‘permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources,’ noting that this right formed a ‘basic constituent of the right to self-​determination.’56 In December 1962, after years of often bitter debate, the General Assembly adopted resolution 1803 (XVII), which declared the ‘right of peoples and nations to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources’ in the name of national development, further noting that ‘creation and strengthening of the inalienable sovereignty of states over their natural wealth and resources reinforces their economic independence.’57 While Western nations managed to secure reference to the benefits of economic cooperation and the need to honour contractual obligations freely entered into, they viewed the United Nations’ actions as a disaster, capping an extraordinary burst of energy in which the General Assembly and various committees passed or published more than three dozen resolutions and reports rooting permanent sovereignty over national resources in the right to economic self-​determination. Christopher Dietrich writes that the UN endorsement of the right of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources ‘marked an important transfer of legal power’ that

Self-determination and Decolonization    429 was swiftly capitalized upon by a wide range of states in the late 1960s and early 1970s, all of which cited Resolution 1803 and others concerning the right to economic self-​ determination to justify the nationalization or expropriation of foreign firms and extractive resources; eg, as Iraq did when it began nationalizing its petroleum in 1967 and other OPEC nations did in years to come. Moreover, ‘the shift in legitimacy challenged a fundamental tenet of the international political economy’.58 Over the course of the next decade a growing number of governments in developing and postcolonial countries launched a bold challenge to the position of Western capital, nationalizing or expropriating natural resources from scores of Western firms.59 Postcolonial African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, who, at the start of the decade, told their fellow anti-​colonialists to ‘seek ye first the political kingdom’, by the end of it were declaring that ‘if we are to remain free, if we are to enjoy the benefits of Africa’s enormous wealth, we must unite to plan the exploitation of our human and material resources in the interest of all of our people’, as a necessary prerequisite for economic self-​determination.60 Even as they grudgingly moved towards accepting some notion of self-​determination as a human right, colonial powers sought to limit its application to the narrowest possible sphere and insure that doing so would not impinge on their economic prerogatives. In other words, self-​determination did not imply economic sovereignty.61 Following passage of the Human Rights Covenants, for example, Australia began considering self-​ determination and independence for the tiny island territory of Nauru, one of Canberra’s few non-​self-​governing territories. In discussions with the British Colonial Office, Australian officials noted that the only barrier to immediate independence for Nauru was concern about control of the island’s rich phosphate deposits. They concluded ‘that balance of advantage would be to give Nauruans “independence” in 1968 as part of package deal in which Nauruans would sign a phosphate agreement guaranteeing continuing supply of phosphate’ at fixed prices; ‘otherwise title to phosphate rights and nominal control of the industry would pass into the hands of Nauruans’ (emphasis added). Similar concerns informed official Australian discussions in 1975 about the transfer of independence to Papua New Guinea, with its extraordinarily rich copper and gold deposits.62 A year later, in March 1974, the UN held its famous sixth special session on economic issues. In his speech at the session, Algerian President Houari Boumedienne highlighted the differences between Wilsonian self-​determination and the far more capacious vision of the Third World. Western nations, he charged, ‘accepted the principle of self-​ determination only after having grasped the reins of the world economy’ and ensuring that formal independence would be meaningless.63 It was here that the Group of 77, led by Iran, issued a declaration of principles for the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) to accelerate the development of poor countries and close the widening gap between them and the industrialized world.64 These efforts continued well into 1970s and 1980s with demands for a New International Economic Order, a UN Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States (CERDS), the African Banjul Charter on Human and People’s Rights, and insistence on a ‘right to development.’ They were a far cry from the Wilsonian vision of

430   Brad Simpson self-​determination of early twentieth-century liberals or radicals, and spoke to a profound sense of unease among a wide range of states and movements that political self-​ determination of peoples might be a chimera in the face of the sovereignty eroding dynamics of global capitalism.65 Nationalist leaders, decolonizing movements, and minority and indigenous communities deploying claims to self-​determination after 1945 were not advocating a particular development strategy (socialist vs. capitalist, autarchic vs. free trade, etc.) or a particular political formation. Rather, they were insisting that the process of decolonization necessitated not only political but also economic and other forms of sovereignty in order to be meaningful. The persistence and proliferation of self-​determination claims after 1945 speaks to the ongoing tensions between the pressures of the world market and the demands of states and communities for meaningful political and economic control, unfolding at different speeds and in different ways in different parts of the world. Demands for self-​determination, in other words, became a vernacular for understanding and deploying sovereignty claims in an increasingly integrated world, not merely a process of liquidating empire and achieving formal decolonization.

Notes 1. Speech delivered by the Prime Minister, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, 12 November 1956. Supplement:  The Gold Coast Today, 24:1 (December 1956), International League for the Rights of Man, Box 2, General Correspondence, Ghana, 1956–​1959, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. 2. Jean Marie Allman, “The Youngmen and the Porcupine: Class, Nationalism and Asante’s Struggle for Self-​ Determination, 1954–​ 57”, The Journal of African History 31, no.  2 (1990): 263–​279. 3. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 35–​59; Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization:  New Perspectives and Open Questions”, Humanity 1, no.  1 (Fall 2010): 111–​135; “Another response to Jan Eckel”, by Roland Burke, 01/​28/​11, http://​www. humanityjournal.org/​blog/​2011/​01/​another-​response-​jan-​eckel. 4. Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5. Susan Pederson, The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 6. “The Atlantic Charter”, 1941–​1945. Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 44, NARA. 7. “‘Africans’ claims in South Africa”, 16 December 1943, http://​www.anc.org.za/​show. php?id=4474&t=The, viewed August 19, 2014. 8. Ho Chi Minh, “Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam”, in Ho Chi Minh, ed., Selected Writings: 1920–​1969 (Hanoi, 1973), 53–​56. 9. Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi. Human Rights at the UN:  The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 212–​220; Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 35–​59.

Self-determination and Decolonization    431 10. Sam Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84–​119; Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 72. 11. Department of State Instruction to the US Delegate to the United Nations, April 1951, FRUS 1951 The United Nations; the Western Hemisphere, 772–​774. 12. Sam Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84–​119; Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 72. 13. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, G.A. Res. 2200, 21 U.N. GAOR Supp. 16, at 49, 53, U.N. Doc. A/​6316 (1966); Vernon Van Dyke, “Self-​Determination and Minority Rights”, International Studies Quarterly 13, no. 3 (September 1969): 223–​253. 14. Telegram 415 from UK Foreign Office to UK Mission to the UN, New York, February 22, 1966, CO 936–​951, UK National Archives (hereafter UKNA); Note by the Foreign Office, February 25, 1967, FCO 60/​46, UN Human Rights Covenants, 1968, UKNA; Note by Foreign Office, Steering Committee on International Organizations, UN Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, February 22, 1967, FCO 60/​44–​60/​49,  UKNA. 15. Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization”, 127. 16. “The United Nations, Self-​Determination and The Namibia Opinions”, The Yale Law Journal 82, no. 3 (January 1973): 533, 541; Airgram A-​229 from Belgrade to State, September 20, 1963, RG 59 Central Foreign Policy File 1963, Box 4234, NARA; Borislav Blagojevic, “Codification of the Laws of Active and Peaceful Coexistence”, Yugoslav Review of International Affairs (September 5, 1963): 9–​13. 17. Dispatch 17319 from Foreign Office to New York, 22 April 1966, CO 936–​977 Discussion in UN of Principle of Self-​Determination, 1966–​1968, UKNA; Memo, “UK Strategy regarding General Assembly Item No. 88”, June 28, 1966, ibid.; Summary of UK Dispatch 19, 24 June 1966, CO 936–​951, UKNA; Rupert Emerson, “Self-​Determination”, The American Journal of International Law 65, no. 3 (July 1971): 469. 18. Emerson, “Self-​ Determination”, ibid.; Telegram 050616 from State to Paris, “Draft Resolution on Colonialism”, March 20, 1976, http://​foia.state.gov/​SearchColls/​Search.asp; Telegram 331 from US Mission UN to State, 3 February 1971, “Future Political Status of Micronesia”, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Box 300, Agency Files, USUN, Vol. VI, NARA; see also Deanne C. Siemer and Howard P. Willens, National Security and Self-​ Determination: United States Policy in Micronesia (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). 19. Cooper, Frederick. “Possibility and Constraint:  African Independence in Historical Perspective”, The Journal of African History 49, no. 02 (July 2008): 167–​196, 175; See also Imlay, Talbot C. “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order”, The American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (October 1, 2013): 1105–​1132,  112. 20. Discussion on Trusteeship, May 29, 1945, FRUS, 1945, General:  the United Nations:  UNCIO, April 25-​June 26, 1945, 959; International Organization Minutes 37, March 23, 1944, Informal Political Agenda Group, RG 59, Records of Harvey Notter, 1939–​ 1944, Records Relating to the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations, 1944, Box 170, NARA; Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 56–​59, 226–​227. 21. http://​www.un.org/​en/​decolonization/​its.shtml. 22. See Minutes of the 45th Meeting of the US Delegation, May 18, 1845, FRUS, 1945, General: UNCIO, April 25-​June 26, 1945, 790–​793.

432   Brad Simpson 23. Michael Hunt, The American Ascendancy:  How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 196–​199; Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–​1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 107, 122. 24. Terretta, Meredith. “ ‘We Had Been Fooled into Thinking That the UN Watches over the Entire World’: Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonization”, Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2012): 329–​360. 25. Painter-​Brick, Samuel Keith, “The right to self-​determination: its application to Nigeria”, International Affairs 44, no. 2 (1968): 257. 26. Painter-​Brick, “The right to self-​determination: its application to Nigeria”, 257. 27. Nathaniel H. Leff, “Bengal, Biafra & the bigness Bias”, Foreign Policy 3 (July 1971): 129–​139; Essack, “Biafra holds out”: 8–​10. 28. Wesley-​ Smith, Terence. “The Limits of Self-​ determination in Oceana”, Social and Economic Studies 56, no. 1/​2 (March 1, 2007):  182–​208; Size, Self-​Determination, and International Relations:  The Caribbean. Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1976; Jesse Harris Proctor, Jr, “The Framing of the West Indian Federal Constitution: An Adventure in National Self-​Determination”, Revista de Historia de América, no. 57/​58 (January 1, 1964): 51–​119. 29. On the UN debates concerning human rights and self-​determination see Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 35–​59; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2010), 84–​ 119; Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions”, Humanity 1, no. 1 (2010): 124–​148; Brad Simpson, “The United States and the Curious History of Self-​Determination”, Diplomatic History 36, no.  4 (2012):  675–​694; Brad Simpson, “Self-​Determination, Human Rights, and the End of Empire in the1970s”, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 2 (2013): 239–​260; Stephen Jensen, “Negotiating Universality: The Making of International Human Rights, 1945–​1993” (PhD Thesis, University of Copenhagen 2013); Normand and Zaidi. Human Rights at the UN, 156–​216. 30. Vernon Van Dyke, “Self-​determination and minority rights”, International Studies Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1969): 223–​253; Rupert Emerson, “Self-​determination”, American Journal of International Law 65, no.  3 (1971):  459–​475; Samuel Keith Painter-​Brick, “The right to self-​determination: its application to Nigeria”, International Affairs 44, no. 2 (1968): 254–​266; Ved Nanda, “Self-​determination in international law: The tragic tale of two cities-​Islamabad (West Pakistan) and Dacca (East Pakistan)”, American Journal of International Law 66, no. 2 (1972): 321–​336; Lee Buchheit, Secession: the legitimacy of self-​determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Azadon Tiewul, “Relations between the United Nations organization and the Organization of African Unity in the settlement of secessionist conflicts”, Harvard International Law Journal 16 (1975): 259. 31. Frederic L. Kirgis, “The degrees of self-​determination in the United Nations era”, American Journal of International Law 88, no. 2 (1994): 304–​308. 32. Rupert Emerson, “The problem of identity, selfhood, and image in the new nations: the situation in Africa”, Comparative Politics 1, no. 3 (1969): 303. 33. Saadia Touval, “The Organization of African Unity and African borders”, International Organization 21, no.1 (1967): 104–​106; U.O. Umozurike, “The domestic jurisdiction clause in the OAU charter”, African Affairs 78, no. 311 (1979): 197–​209.

Self-determination and Decolonization    433 34. Hollis Barber, “Decolonization: the committee of twenty-​four”, World Affairs 138, no. 2 (1975): 146; see also Suzanne Cronjé, The World and Nigeria: the diplomatic history of the Biafran war, 1967–​1970 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972), 281–​320. 35. Note 2, telegram from the Department of State to the consulate in Elisabethville, 23 September 1961, Accessed 5 December 2013, http://​history.state.gov/​historicaldocuments/​ frus1961-​63v20/​d123; Onyeonoro S. Kamanu, “Secession and the right of self-​ determination:  an O.A.U.  dilemma”, The Journal of Modern African Studies 12, no.  3 (1974):  355–​376; Rene Lemarchand, “The limits of self-​determination:  the case of the Katanga secession”, American Political Science Review 56, no. 2 (1962): 404–​416. 36. Azadon Tiewul, “Relations between the United Nations Organization and the Organization of African Unity in the settlement of secessionist conflicts”, Harvard International Law Journal 16, no. 1 (1975): 259; Aleksandar Pavkovic and Peter Radan, The Ashgate research companion to secession (Farnham, UK:  Ashgate, 2011), 120–​ 122; Alexis Heraclides, The self-​determination of minorities in international politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 58–​80. 37. Julius Nyerere, among others, rejected the Katanga comparison on the grounds that Tshombe’s regime lacked the popular support of the Biafran movement, and was supported in the main by Belgium. See Julius K. Nyerere, “The Nigeria-​Biafra Crisis”, Biafra review 1, no.1 (1970): 20–​24; Stanley Meisler, “Africans back Nigeria but pity Biafra”, The Washington post, September 24, 1968, k4; Airgram A-​019 from Lagos to State, July 9, 1967, RG 59, SNF 1970–​1973, Pol-​Def, POL 30 Nigeria, box 2511, NARA; More generally see Brad Simpson, “The Biafran secession and the limits of self-​determination”, Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 2–​3 (2014): 337–​354. 38. Telegram 331 from US Mission UN to State, 3 February 1971, “Future Political Status of Micronesia”, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Box 300, Agency Files, USUN, NARA; David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2009), 78–​79; Memo from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-​Military Affairs to Secretary of State Rusk, March 3, 1964, FRUS, 1964–​1968: XXI—​Document  34. 39. Memo, Robert Johnson to McGeorge Bundy, December 18, 1961, FRUS, 1961–​1963, Vol. XXIII, 440; Telegram from Jakarta to State, August 20, 1968, “Subject: The Stakes in West Irian’s “Act of Free Choice”, http://​www.gwu.edu/​~nsarchiv/​NSAEBB/​NSAEBB128/​index. htm; See also John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962–​1969: The Anatomy of a Betrayal (New York: Routledge, 2002). 40. Policy Planning Paper, 3 May 1974, Canberra, NAA: A 1838, 696/​5, ii, cited in Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 1974–​1976 (Melbourne, 2000), 50–​52. 41. “Testimony of Shephard Forman before Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, US House of Representatives, Washington DC, June 18, 1977; Arnold Kohen and Stephen R. Heder, “East Timor and the Issue of Self-​ Determination”, ibid., Washington DC, June 28, 1977; Memo from Roger Peren to New Zealand Secretary of Foreign Affairs, “East Timor: Ambassador’s Visit”, 13 January 1978, released under Official Information Act request; Foreign and Commonwealth Office Diplomatic Report no.  182/​76, “Timor:  Indonesia’s reluctant takeover”, 15 March 1976, FCO 15/​1709, UKNA. 42. “Note on Meeting With [excised]”, Note from New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta to Wellington, 5 July 1975, declassified document in author’s possession; Memorandum of

434   Brad Simpson Conversation, 5 July 1975, NSC Country Files, EAP, Indonesia, Box 6, Gerald Ford Library; Telegram 170357 from State to Jakarta, 18 July 1975, ibid. 43. Telegram 5688 from USUN to State, 6 December 1978, declassified as a result of FOIA request by author; Telegram 4899 from USUN to State, 3 November 1979, ibid.; Telegram 04413 from USUN to State, 21 October 1980, ibid.; Foreign and Commonwealth Office Diplomatic Report no. 182/​76, “Timor: Indonesia’s reluctant takeover”, 15 March 1976, FCO 15/​1709, UKNA. 44. Telegram 273978 from State to Algiers, “INR Assessment of Western Sahara Issue”, November 6, 1976, State Department FOIA Electronic Reading Room; for background see Erik Jenson, Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate? (New York: Lynne Rienner, 2004). 45. Telegram 28443 from US Embassy Paris to State Department, October 31, 1975. State Department FOIA Electronic Reading Room, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973–​1976, http://​aad.archives.gov/​aad/​series-​description.jsp?s=4073&cat=all&bc=sl; more generally, see Jacob Mundy and Stephen Zunes, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010). 46. Brief no.  4 visit of Mr. Sauvagnargues to London, March 4, 1976, FCO 093–​899, The Western Sahara 1976, UKNA; note from Christian Mallaby to Nigel Williams at the Foreign Office, March 2, 1976, ibid.; Note from the British Embassy in Paris, February 2, 1976, French Policy in the Maghreb, ibid.; See also the folder FCO 65–​1953, Problems Arising from the Decolonization of the Western Sahara, 1977, UKNA. 47. Telegram 050459 from State to all African Posts, March 2, 1976, State Department FOIA Electronic Reading Room; Telegram 0925 from Niamey to State, March 4, 1976, ibid.; Telegram 3200 from Colombo to State, August 24, 1976, ibid. 48. “Laurel Challenges Parity in Philippines”, New York Times, October 10, 1946, p. 12; George Phillips, What Price Philippine Independence? (New  York:  New Century Publishers, 1946); Donald Starr, “Roxas Defends Parity for US Business in Philippines”, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 25, 1946, p. 18. 49. Paul Heffernan, “New Era Opening in the Philippines: Guarantee of Rights Alters Standing of Americans With $90,000,000 Invested”, New York Times. March 16, 1947, F1. 50. Anthony Carty, “From the Right to Economic Self-​Determination to the Rights to Development:  A Crisis in Legal Theory”, Third World Legal Studies 3, no.  1 (January 1984): 73. 51. Hornsey, G. “Foreign Investment and International Law”, The International Law Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1950): 552–​561. 52. Letter from Acting Chairman of the US Delegation to the General Assembly (Roosevelt) to the Secretary of State, February 7, 1952, FRUS 1951 The United Nations; the Western Hemisphere, 785. 53. “Acheson Asks Iran to Reconsider Stand; Hopes Teheran’s Rejection of British Offer Has Not Shut Door to Oil Negotiations”, New York Times, June 21, 1951, E5; “Excerpts from Mossadegh Address in U.N.”, New York Times, October 16, 1951, A6; more generally, see Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–​1954 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1997); Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse:  Syracuse University Press, 2004). 54. UN Doc. A/​AC.97/​1, 19 May 1959; UN Doc. A/​C.2/​L.165/​Rev.1, December 8, 1952; EH Kellogg, UN Resolutions on Nationalization the 7th General Assembly ‘Nationalization’ Resolution New York: Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1954.

Self-determination and Decolonization    435 55. James Hyde notes that the GA’s Third Committee “devoted virtually its entire time in 1955 to the discussion . . . of how economic self-​determination should be dealt with”. 56. Memorandum by the Senior Adviser to the United States Delegation to the United Nations (King), September 9, 1954, FRUS, 1952–​1954. General:  Economic and Political Matters: Volume I, Part 1—​Document 25. 57. General Assembly resolution 1803 (XVII) of 14 December 1962, “Permanent sovereignty over natural resources”, http://​www2.ohchr.org/​english/​law/​resources.htm. 58. Christopher R. W. Dietrich, “ ‘Arab Oil Belongs to the Arabs’: Raw Material Sovereignty, Cold War Boundaries, and the Nationalisation of the Iraq Petroleum Company, 1967–​ 1973”, Diplomacy & Statecraft 22, no. 3 (2011): 450–​479. 59. Hal Brands, “Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: The Problem of Expropriations, 1969–​1974”, Diplomacy & Statecraft 18 (2007): 215–​235; Vanessa Ogle, “State Rights against Private Capital: The ‘New International Economic Order (NIEO)’ and the Struggle Over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–​1981”, Humanity 5, no. 2 (2014): 211–​234. 60. James Thuo Gathii, African Regional Trade Agreements as Legal Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 28; Kwame Nkurumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Panaf Books, 1963), 101, 163. 61. J. Oloka Onyango, “Heretical Reflections on the Right to Self-​Determination: Prospects and Problems for a Democratic Global Future in the New Millennium”, American University International Law Review 15, no. 1 (1999): 156. 62. Confidential Memo 1283 from Canberra to Commonwealth Office, 5 September 1966, CO 936–​977, Discussion in UN of Principle of Self-​determination, 1966–​1968, UKNA; Airgram A-​271 from Canberra to State, “Preparations for Nauruan Independence”, March 3, 1967, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–​1969, Political and Defense, Box 2575, NARA. 63. Giuliano Garavini and Richard R. Nybakken, After Empires:  European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South 1957–​1986 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 177. 64. The Group of 77 was formed in June 1964 as a caucus of nations, many newly independ­ ent, working to develop a common programme around development issues at the UN; on the NIEO see the recent special issue of Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015). 65. Anthony Carty, “From the Right to Economic Self-​Determination to the Rights to Development: A Crisis in Legal Theory”, Third World Legal Studies 3, no. 1 (1984): Article 5; P. J. I. M. De Waart, “Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources as a Corner-​Stone for International Economic Rights and Duties”, Netherlands International Law Review 24, no. 1–​2 (1977): 304–​322; African [Banjul] Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, adopted June 27, 1981, OAU Doc. CAB/​LEG/​67/​3 rev. 5, 21 I.L.M. 58 (1982), entered into force Oct. 21, 1986; Conway Henders, “Multinational Corporations and Human Rights in Developing States”, World Affairs 142, no. 1 (1979): 17–​30; Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN, 291, 298.

Chapter 23

An t i -​C ol onialism Origins, Practices, and Historical Legacies Christopher J. Lee

Anti-​colonialism as a historical phenomenon defies easy categorization. Despite wide usage as an expression across a range of academic disciplines, anti-​colonialism resists simple definitions of practical form, political scope, and empirical content. This situation is undoubtedly due to the ubiquity of anti-​colonial thought and activism across time and geography. Indeed, in a basic sense of opposing foreign domination, it is arguably one of the oldest forms of political conduct. Yet, more often than not, it has primarily served as a generic rhetorical device to describe that which is against colonialism. Drawing upon its longstanding political use, the anthropologist David Scott provides one provisional approach for thinking about anti-​colonialism as a specific concept, writing, ‘Anticolonialism has been a classic instance of the modern longing for total revolution.’1 In this sense, anti-​colonialism belongs to a European Enlightenment tradition of radical thought and activism articulated by such figures as Karl Marx—​an intellectual genealogy that, while valid in a number of instances, nevertheless positions anti-​colonialism as derivative of Western political thought to the neglect of non-​ Western sources.2 Furthermore, anti-​colonialism in this usage is positioned against an equally broad notion of colonialism, construed, in Scott’s words, as ‘a totalizing structure of brutality, violence, objectification, racism, and exclusion.’3 Scott views this monolithic account of colonialism as ultimately problematic, since it prompts uniform notions of what anti-​colonialism has been, or should be, as a result. Such discrete, oppositional understandings of colonialism and anti-​colonialism have often generated teleological narratives of political history in former colonial territories, characterized by linear accounts of cultural resistance, societal overcoming, and triumphal nationalism that, combined, display a kind of political romanticism involving elements of tragedy, heroism, and catharsis.4 Dialectical understandings of the colonizer versus the colonized have consequently posed analytic limitations at times and thus restricted a deeper comprehension of political life, in all its complex dimensions, under colonial rule.5 This chapter uses this critique as a point of departure. Its reservations about essentialized approaches to colonialism and anti-​ colonialism reflect a common

Anti-Colonialism   437 appraisal formulated by a number of scholars over the past several decades.6 Anti-​ colonialism must be recognized and understood as a significant phenomenon in defining the political history of the modern world, but it also must be considered in many cases as indiscrete from the colonialism it confronted. Anti-​colonialism has often been multilayered and syncretic, consisting of adopted foreign features in addition to local indigenous elements—​to the point that the prefix anti-​must be qualified. Indeed, current scholarship has demonstrated that political resistance in colonial territories often appropriated the ideas and techniques of ruling countries to make claims for political reform and, later, self-​determination.7 Criticism, accommodation, and even collaboration were constituent elements of political behaviour among the colonized, rather than the outright overthrow of foreign rule alone.8 This argument for creative appropriation and the complexity of political intentions, in turn, indicates a need to envisage anti-​colonialism as a process over time. Though states and communities frequently resisted imperial advances from the outset, anti-​colonialism should not be defined as strictly reactionary, but rather as motivated by evolving principles of accommodation and self-​rule. Situating anti-​colonialism as a historical formation underscores this gestation and scale of response. As with other social processes and phenomena, anti-​ colonialism was not static, either as a practice or a concept, but subject to changing historical conditions across time and place. With these parameters in mind, this chapter outlines three approaches for addressing this topic: anti-​colonialism and everyday life, anti-​colonialism as intellectual history, and anti-​colonialism as statecraft. These three thematic headings work at successive, interrelated levels of the social, the philosophical, and the political. Furthermore, they progress chronologically from times of colonial rule, to decolonization, to the legacies of anti-​colonialism in shaping postcolonial sovereignty. While it is impossible for this chapter to claim complete historical coverage or omniscience over this subject’s secondary literature, these rubrics enable a provisional means for organizing and thinking through anti-​colonialism from the local to the global, as well as integrating social, cultural, and political realms. This holistic approach aims to circumvent the problem of narrative cliché and analytic essentialism as identified by Scott and others by envisioning anti-​colonialism as a contingent, evolving, and manifold process, rather than as a predestined, monolithic, or temporally fixed experience. Indeed, this chapter underscores how anti-​colonialism, rather than being an overdone subject, continues to maintain under-​examined empirical domains and connections that deserve renewed attention.

Anti-​C olonialism and Everyday Life Since the advent of Western imperialism during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, colonial ventures from Europe commonly encountered forms of resistance. In fact, given the near ubiquity of empire as a political form across time and place, as argued by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, anti-​colonialism must be recognized as one of the earliest varieties of political behaviour, reaching back to classical periods

438   Christopher J. Lee in the Mediterranean, Asia, and elsewhere.9 In this sense, colonialism as a practice should not be construed as uniquely Western in origin, even if this chapter dwells on this particular history.10 Furthermore, though imperialism and colonialism are at times used interchangeably, it is important to note a basic difference in scale, with colonialism characteristically being a local manifestation of a broader imperial endeavour. This observation underscores a second fundamental point—​the often-​limited nature of anti-​colonialism as a political action, confined primarily to regions and provincial communities. Geography posed a constant challenge. Put simply, from the standpoint of analysis, understanding anti-​colonialism has typically meant engaging with the social, political, and ethical life of local states and indigenous societies. Nevertheless, geographic scale remains an important question and challenge for scholars, as it did for the colonized—​particularly the distance between the politics of the local village or community and broader projects of self-​determination, national and otherwise. Moreover, if we embrace a view by V. Y. Mudimbe that colonialism derives from the Latin root word colĕre, meaning to design or cultivate, the range and magnitude of anti-​colonialism becomes even greater, extending well beyond formal politics to resistance in realms of language, religious faith, gender, class, and culture more generally.11 Local responses to foreign intrusion and colonial rule were immediate, frequent, and ongoing. The fact of active armed resistance generated an instant predicament and constant anxiety for colonial states and settlers in locales across Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Such acts of indigenous opposition are too numerous to name, but can include such varied examples as the Tepehuán Revolt (1616–​1620) in Mexico, the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II (1780–​1782) in Peru, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the Igbo Women’s War of 1929 in Nigeria, to offer four case studies from four centuries on four different continents.12 These episodes of anti-​colonial revolt possess specific individual circumstances, yet these events share a common agenda of colonized people defying state power that was deemed unjust. The political legitimacy of foreign rule remained in constant question—​at once protected by self-​validating ideologies of racial and cultural superiority, but just as easily contested by local political and cultural values, especially if deteriorating social, political, or economic conditions merited criticism. In 1967, Terence Ranger captured the importance of this subject in his first book, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–​97, a study of the First Chimurenga (also known as the Second Matabele War) between the Shona and Ndebele against encroaching British settlers in what would become colonial Rhodesia and, later, independent Zimbabwe. Ranger’s text blended historical analysis with a political sensibility that acknowledged the uncertainties of a continent then experiencing political struggle and decolonization during the 1960s.13 Though Ranger was not the first to address anti-​colonialism as a topic, he understood and promoted its implications for developing a postcolonial historiography in Africa and elsewhere that refuted existing historiographical biases that condemned communities of the colonized as passive recipients of foreign rule. Emerging concurrently with the rise of the new social history with its emphasis on peasants and working classes, marginalized popular politics, and everyday mentalités, this new analytic that stressed a dialectic of foreign colonial domination and African resistance proved widely

Anti-Colonialism   439 influential, spurring scholars to foreground and stress the agency of the colonized in making their own history, if not necessarily conditions of their choosing.14 This emphasis has gradually expanded the contours of the political under colonial rule, beyond examples of overt armed revolt cited previously. Intersecting with the cultural turn in historical scholarship during the 1980s, this approach eventually defined anti-​colonialism as shaping ways of life in both domestic and public spheres, with everyday forms of resistance—​ranging from casual theft and work slowdowns to popular songs and cultural practices, among many topics—​signaling the ability and ambition of the colonized to thwart the economic and political directives of colonial states and carve a livelihood beyond such power.15 Through his work in Southeast Asia, James Scott in particular has argued that rural peasants typically maintained notions of moral economy, a concept drawn from E.  P. Thompson, whereby communities are able to withstand political demands and economic pressures, but only up to a certain threshold when rebellion of some kind occurs.16 Scott expanded this argument on the ethics of subsistence and revolt to consider alternative ‘weapons of the weak’ and the existence of ‘hidden transcripts’ among the peasantry that maintained positions of autonomy, if on a small scale.17 Indeed, such everyday practices of resilience and action not only informed critical views towards state power, but also constituted the limits of state power itself.18 Overall, this evolving set of ideas pioneered during the 1970s and 1980s fruitfully enabled a further diversification of how the political and social life of colonial societies could be understood. It must be stressed that Scott’s own scholarship on resistance did not pertain exclusively to anti-​colonialism as such. However, it influenced and paralleled the work of others addressing this topic. Allen Isaacman and William Roseberry applied similar techniques to understand the complexity of peasant consciousness in sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America, respectively.19 In urban areas, Frederick Cooper has detailed how imperial development projects introduced a set of growing contradictions between colonial economic policies and emerging working classes in the colonies, resulting in unionization, labour strikes, and eventually moves towards decolonization.20 But arguably the most prominent historiography that emerged from this confluence of social history and political theories of resistance has been from the Subaltern Studies collective that published a series of anthologies on local colonial histories in South Asia. Drawing initially from the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, from whom the term subaltern (a subordinate) derives, this group of historians not only sought to articulate the perceptions and agency of common people against the British Raj, but also positioned these experiences as a critique against a postcolonial historiography that neglected these populist stories in favour of elitist national narratives. These subaltern histories demonstrated how workers, peasants, women, and religious minorities challenged the hegemony of British colonial rule. In doing so, they equally confronted postcolonial conditions that continued to ignore the political aspirations and needs of such communities. Indeed, this group of historians initially led by Ranajit Guha, and involving such scholars as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyanendra Pandey, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eventually interrogated the colonial archive itself as a site for the preservation and production of

440   Christopher J. Lee historical knowledge. The anti-​colonial narratives this group sought to write raised deeper questions of epistemology—​how the possibilities of restoring and politically mobilizing the past were structured and limited by the archive. The critical ethos of anti-​ colonialism thus extended beyond the colonial period itself, informing techniques of research analysis and writing to speak to the political present.21 This remobilization of the spirit of anti-​colonialism in scholarship drew upon interdisciplinary insights, perhaps most notably from the field of postcolonial studies that emerged during the 1980s after the publication of such works as Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said—​a point to which I  shall return.22 But before moving on to anti-​ colonialism as intellectual history, it is important to underscore that the historiography on colonialism and anti-​colonialism had reached a level of maturation by the 1990s such that a new set of criticisms emerged, touched upon at the start. Histories of colonial rule and resistance had become too Manichean, too dialectical, which streamlined the intentions of states and subjects alike. Subaltern Studies in particular was accused of privileging a local authenticity that was elusive and difficult to retrieve. Equally significant, foregrounding such a perspective could result in restricting the political imaginations of provincial communities. Being a peasant did not necessarily translate into having a local worldview. This criticism of authenticity and the concurrent argument for exploring cultural and political entanglements at local and imperial levels informed a turn towards a new imperial history that has accented the circulation of ideas and practices across oceans and continents. The upshot is that scholars have become more attentive to the diversity of political imaginations and cultural life under colonial rule. Local practices shaped colonialism as much as colonialism changed patterns of livelihood. As a result, scholars have become more cautious in applying the term anti-​colonial to behaviour that may have been critical of colonial policies, but did not seek complete decolonization per se. Critical attitudes often surfaced as a feature of everyday life. Such opinions, however, did not always overwhelm the decision-​making and life course of the colonized, even if they shaped the worldviews of many.23

Anti-​C olonialism as Intellectual History If anti-​colonialism is understood as a political stance and perspective, it is essential to grasp the critical philosophies and moral rationales behind it. Indeed, anti-​colonialism and anti-​colonial thought have often been treated in synonymous ways. Figures such as Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–​1948), Ho Chi Minh (1890–​1969), Patrice Lumumba (1925–​ 1961), Frantz Fanon (1925–​1961), and Nelson Mandela (1918–​2013) have not only been seen as political leaders, but as intellectuals. Before becoming emblematic symbols, they served as speakers for the political struggles they represented. Anti-​colonialism must consequently be examined for its philosophical content—​the articulation of

Anti-Colonialism   441 oppositional views and their basis in social grievances, as well as the complex interplay of local traditions and foreign ideas introduced by colonialism. Anti-​colonial resistance did not only take militant form through social protest or cultural expression. Its militancy also took textual form through the writing of manifestos, the establishment of newspapers, and the publication of subversive fiction, among other literary genres. By extension, it is important to distinguish such intellectual production and knowledge into thematic categories to avoid a tendency towards monolithic definitions, as cited earlier. Anti-​colonial thought encompassed a range of topics, at times concerned with the individual and his or her psychic health and other conditions of well-​being, as discussed by Gandhi and Fanon, while on other occasions it was focused on larger communities and group strategies in order to expel foreign rule. Indeed, it is necessary to emphasize the diversity and complexity of intellectual life among the colonized, which was at times accommodating and reform minded in relation to colonialism. It was not always directed towards political overthrow and decolonization per se—​an anachronistic interpretation from the vantage point of the present that must be avoided, despite the political sympathies we might hold. As with political resistance, the intellectual history of anti-​colonialism originates with conquest, with many local communities drawing upon indigenous traditions, often religious or spiritual in scope, to interpret the causes and meanings of colonialism and its violence. Millenarianism—​the belief that a major social transformation is about to occur—​was a common aspect of the colonial encounter in such places as southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and the American West.24 Such beliefs fomented rebellion with the desire to reinstate control to indigenous authorities and communities, if not exactly restoring conditions to the way they were prior to colonial intrusion. Other religions, such as Islam, also played a significant role in rationalizing and coalescing anti-​colonial resistance in such varied locales as Senegal, Algeria, and Afghanistan.25 The idea of jihad (holy war) was invoked and often pursued with the view that European colonialism was part of a broader strategy of Western Christian conquest and conversion. Indeed, this idea of a clash of civilizations, as captured more recently by Samuel P. Huntington, has a long genealogy concurrent with European imperialism, extending at least as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–​1859) and his writing on Algeria during the mid-​ nineteenth century.26 But it is important to emphasize that Christian thought was also mobilized against colonial rule, with its principles used as an ethical basis for criticism of existing social inequalities and economic exploitation. John Chilembwe (1871–​1915), the pastor of an independent church in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) who received his religious education in Virginia, famously led a short-​lived revolt against British rule in central Africa. Despite its brevity, the 1915 Chilembwe Uprising attained legendary status, demonstrating the capacity of Christian converts among the colonized to turn literacy and Western ideas into anti-​colonial expression—​a pattern repeated elsewhere in Africa.27 Still, secular Enlightenment notions of individual rights, suffrage, economic just­ ice, and national self-​determination proved to have greater influence on anti-​colonial thought than either religious ideals or pre-​existing local traditions. Though the latter

442   Christopher J. Lee two persisted and continued to inform political life, the postcolonial world that came into being after the Second World War—​in addition to those parts of the world that had already achieved independence earlier, as in the Americas—​signalled this broad, secular effect by embracing a republican nation-​state model of constitutional governance based on citizenship rights, at least in principle. But such ideas had gained traction over time, gestating and circulating concurrently with imperial expansion itself. The Haitian Revolution (1791–​1804) is a case in point—​a seismic world event led by Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–​1803) along with other former and rebel slaves, who embraced the rights of liberty, equality, and fraternity as established by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) during the French Revolution (1789–​1799). As Laurent Dubois and other scholars have emphasized, the meaning of the Haitian Revolution should not be underestimated. Not only did it indicate the global reach of the French Revolution, but, more importantly, it underscored the capacity of African slaves to resist their bondage and establish a new political order with such political ideas, to the fear of slave owners throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian Revolution is the only slave revolt in history to result in the founding of a new sovereign state. Indeed, the meaning of Haiti extended to the twentieth century, becoming an early symbol of anti-​ colonial revolution as argued by the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James (1901–​1989) in his classic 1938 study of the event, The Black Jacobins.28 The Haitian Revolution was not the only political revolution to inspire anti-​colonial thought. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 also demonstrated the power of ideas, specifically Marxism, to generate political change. Though not anti-​colonial per se, it provided a twentieth-​century paradigm of political insurrection led by intellectuals and supported by peasant and working classes—​an example emulated in different form in such places as China, Cuba, Algeria, and South Africa. The Bolshevik Revolution also established a state that was sympathetic to anti-​colonial movements across the world, primarily during the Cold War, but also during this earlier period. The Communist International (1919–​1943), or Comintern for short, promoted anti-​imperial sentiments during the interwar period, most famously with the World Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism held in Brussels in 1927—​better known as the League Against Imperialism meeting. Vijay Prashad has written that this league was founded as a direct counterpoint to the League of Nations (1920–​1946), whose membership included imperial powers.29 Anti-​colonial nationalist leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–​1964) of India and Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj (1898–​1974) of Algeria were among those in attendance. Yet the League of Nations—​established in 1920 in the wake of World War I, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles—​also proved to have influence in the colonies, with its expressed concern for the ‘just treatment’ of colonial peoples as listed in Article 23 of the Covenant of the League. More significant was the right to self-​determination initiated in US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech of 1918. Though the term self-​determination did not appear in his address, Point Five stressed that the interests of colonial subject populations be given ‘equal weight’ in matters of determining sovereignty. As detailed by Erez Manela, the ideas of Wilson proved immediately influential across the imperial world.30

Anti-Colonialism   443 Needless to say, while these events, states, and institutions proved crucial in circulating certain ideologies and opening new political possibilities, the intellectual work of anti-​colonialism depended on individual thinkers, many of whom blended different strands of thought filtered through their own life experience to rationalize different strategies of resistance. As a consequence, it is important once more to distinguish these thinkers from one another, to avoid the homogeneity that the category anti-​colonial can impart. Comparing Frantz Fanon with Aimé Césaire (1913–​2008) is a useful illustration. Césaire and Fanon were both from the island of Martinique in the French Antilles, and in fact Fanon studied under Césaire, who taught at his secondary school in Fort-​ de-​France. Yet both carved distinct political paths. Césaire is famous for being one of the founders of Négritude, along with Léopold Senghor (1906–​2001) and Léon-​Gontran Damas (1912–​1978), during the interwar period—​a popular literary movement that was critical of French racism. Yet Négritude was not entirely critical of French rule as such. Indeed, Césaire and Senghor both served in the French National Assembly after the Second World War and sought, for a time, a federal model of decolonization that would keep their respective countries of Martinique and Senegal within a broader French community.31 As demonstrated in 1952 in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon was also keenly critical of French racism and the impossibility of equal citizenship, despite French claims to the contrary. However, in contrast to Césaire, he ultimately pursued total decolonization as the only possible option for a complete political and social revolution as outlined in 1961 in his final book, The Wretched of the Earth.32 Fanon’s radicalism as compared to Césaire’s is not to say that the latter was entirely compliant to French rule—​he did publish the fierce 1955 polemic Discourse on Colonialism—​but it is essential to differentiate between critical views and calls for complete decolonization.33 Using the term anti-​colonial gratuitously can smooth over such nuances, complexities, and even open arguments between intellectuals, such as those that existed between Césaire and Fanon. Indeed, such intricacies raise fundamental questions about how broadly (any critical position) or narrowly (a position specifically calling for complete decolonization) the term anti-​colonial should be defined and applied. Such critical differences were often informed by personal experience. Césaire was a poet, teacher, and, ultimately, a lifelong politician who was mayor of Fort-​de-​France for a remarkable period from 1945 until 2001. He also served in the French National Assembly for an equally extraordinary tenure from 1946 to 1993.34 Fanon, on the other hand, worked as a staff psychiatrist at a French hospital in Blida, Algeria, where he witnessed firsthand the trauma of the Algerian War (1954–​1962). Though he never fought on the battlefield as such, his immediate experiences with the revolutionary context of Algeria—​continued further with his medical work while in exile in Tunisia and his diplomatic efforts for the anti-​colonial National Liberation Front (FLN) in Ghana, Mali, and other countries—​undoubtedly shaped his belief that complete decolonization was the only option to end the dehumanization of Western colonialism. Intellectual differences of this kind can be found elsewhere. Mohandas Gandhi deliberately pursued a philosophical agenda, anti-​colonial in scope, which proved far different from the diplomatic pragmatism of his compatriot Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Indian

444   Christopher J. Lee Home Rule (1909) offers a critique of British rule in India from the individual to the civilizational level, framing the problem of colonialism and the question of decolonization as not simply political issues, but matters of personal conduct. Satyagraha in South Africa (1928) and An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927 and 1929) similarly accent individual ethics as the starting point for broader struggle through non-​violent, anti-​colonial resistance.35 In contrast, Nehru’s The Discovery of India takes a civilizational point of view like Gandhi—​as did Césaire and Senghor with Négritude—​but Nehru positions this backdrop as providing a historical rationale, rather than a purely cultural or philosophical one, to make a specific political claim for India’s right to sovereignty. India was a historical nation, similar to European nations. These different arguments amid this range of thinkers underscore once more the need to resist any generic understanding of anti-​colonialism. The long history of insurgent thought is one defined by internal tensions between different thinkers along generational and experiential lines, whether by race, class, gender, or geography, among many identities. Furthermore, it is a history of entanglement, with the frequent appropriation and integration of Western and non-​Western ideas together, as seen in the work of such varied thinkers as Muhammad Iqbal (1877–​1938) of Pakistan, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu (1924–​1996) of Zanzibar, M. N. Roy (1887–​1954) of India, and B. R. Ambedkar (1891–​1956) also of India, to cite a few additional examples. Each explored Islam, Maoism, Marxism, and Buddhism, respectively, as providing different political alternatives. But, to conclude, it is also important to emphasize how, through such methods of borrowing and bricolage, these thinkers themselves consciously challenged binary visions of their political present. Despite his popular reputation, Fanon was exemplary in this regard. Along with the Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi (1920–​present), he is typically seen as promoting a Manichean worldview—​the classic dialectical topos of the colonizer versus the colonized. However, a close reading of Fanon’s work reveals that he identified this binary structure as colonial in origin and thus sought to undermine it. In Black Skin, White Masks, he cites its potential instability through patterns of colonial assimilation. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates for its complete destruction through decolonization—​and to unleash a new humanity in its wake. It is therefore essential to grasp the complexity and precision of anti-​colonial arguments not only to pay proper credit to certain thinkers and their ideas, but also to understand the colonial sources of stereotypic views and their persistence today.

Anti-​C olonialism as Statecraft From 18 to 24 April 1955, twenty-​nine countries from Africa and Asia convened in the city of Bandung, Indonesia, to address pressing issues their continents faced during the early Cold War period. Formally called the Asian-​African Conference, the Bandung conference, as it is more commonly known, was the largest diplomatic meeting of its kind up to that point, ostensibly representing 1.5 billion people, or almost two-​thirds

Anti-Colonialism   445 of the world’s population by some popular estimates. Only the United Nations (UN), which had seventy-​six members in 1955, was larger in numeric representation and in terms of geographic and political magnitude. The Indonesian conference offered a stage for the rise of such statesmen as Sukarno (1901–​1970) of Indonesia, Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–​1970) of Egypt, and Zhou Enlai (1898–​1976) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all of whom promoted personal, national, and international interests. Sponsored by Indonesia, Burma (present-day Myanmar), Ceylon (presentday Sri Lanka), India, and Pakistan, official delegations in attendance came from the PRC, Egypt, Turkey, Japan, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, North and South Vietnam, the Philippines, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), Sudan, and Liberia. Though regional conflict in Southeast Asia between North and South Vietnam provided the catalyst for holding the conference, the programme ultimately included broader issues regarding American and Soviet influence in Asia and Africa, the consequent importance of postcolonial sovereignty, and remaining questions over the surge of decolonization then occurring, particularly in Africa. The origins and purposes of the meeting were ultimately multifaceted, geographically and politically, reflective of the expansive continental representation at hand and the political changes then occurring across the world.36 The Bandung meeting also reflected the transformation of anti-​colonialism from a type of insurgent politics to a method of statecraft. Indeed, the continuation of anti-​ colonial politics after political independence is important to grasp, particularly for the first generation of postcolonial leaders, many of whom actively led liberation struggles. Anti-​colonialism as a political sentiment and worldview did not quickly subside, but instead took new shape to inform the international politics of the postcolonial period. The reasons are self-​evident. Diplomatic occasions like that at Bandung took place during a critical period of transition between colonial and postcolonial periods, amid a passing era of modern European imperialism and a new era of Cold War rivalry and intervention—​the latter a type of informal imperialism, if often denied as such. Furthermore, global decolonization was an uneven process, with many liberation movements, like those in southern Africa, continuing for decades. Postcolonial diplomacy and statecraft as political practices consequently emerged during a time of uncertainty and opportunity both. These conditions perpetuated the continuation of an anti-​colonial discourse as part of a need for Asian and African countries to secure sovereignty, resist foreign intervention, and participate in the global politics then taking shape. In his opening address at Bandung, Sukarno celebrated the start of a new era in world history guided by Asian and African countries, while also warning of the new dangers presented by the US and the USSR. The threat of neo-​colonialism through trade agreements, security arrangements, and other political alignments with Western powers encouraged the persistence of anti-​colonial rhetoric to protect the meaning of political independence. Diplomacy was equally vital. International meetings like that at Bandung and membership in broader institutions like the UN presented public occasions for reiterating

446   Christopher J. Lee self-​determination and the right to sovereignty. They also substantiated these claims by enabling interstate networks of trust and community, drawing from and aggregating forms of political and economic capital. Indeed, the rapid emergence of the conference format among newly independent countries after the Second World War can be understood through these incentives, given the relative weaknesses they individually maintained as new nation-​states and the immediate possibility of collective strength through group alignments. While international diplomacy played a role in negotiating an end to colonialism in many cases, postcolonial diplomatic meetings provided new alternative venues for affirming political recognition and strengthening relationships among peers, beyond the immediate purview of former colonial powers.37 Summitry—​defined as the institutionalized practice of heads of state meeting on a routine basis—​legitimized postcolonial autonomy, reinforced the principle of non-​interference by external powers, and, in a number of ways, continued the ethos of anti-​colonialism by asserting self-​ determination as not simply a right justifying pre-​independence struggles, but as an abiding rule and technique of governance against present and future territorial threats. In this regard, despite its importance, the 1955 Asian-​African Conference was far from isolated. To list a few examples, preceding meetings like the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in Delhi and the 1953 Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon, as well as the 1956 Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) and the 1958, 1960, and 1961 All-​African People’s Conferences in Accra, Tunis, and Cairo, respectively, enabled new patterns of political networking among states and remaining liberation movements during the early postcolonial period.38 The location of these conferences in cities in Asia and Africa indicated a new political geography that had emerged from the shadows of Western colonial rule. Yet, these post-​war meetings also continued a chronology of conferences that started during the early twentieth century, including such precursors as the Pan-​African Congresses and the 1927 League Against Imperialism meeting. While these preceding efforts ultimately failed, their historical significance persisted due to their facilitation of geographically dispersed people to meet, converse, and produce political solidarity. Though attended by persons without official capacity, they engaged with self-​determination and acquired symbolic value through broadly-​ conceived political imaginations anchored in shared experiences of racial discrimination, cultural prejudice, and political repression. Postwar diplomacy highlighted a fundamental shift from these earlier events, given that their attendees increasingly represented sovereign nation-​ states rather than solely liberation movements and like-​minded intellectuals. Still, struggles for self-​ determination remained in parts of Africa and Asia circa 1960, a reason why anti-​ colonialism continued. But the growing involvement of autonomous states facilitated a set of different possibilities to come into view that reflected political independence and the resources that went with it, in contrast to previous conferences where those gathered had little actual political power. Indeed, postwar conferences proved to be generative in scope. If the geographic balance of the 1955 Bandung meeting tilted towards Asia, the future of Asia-​Africa relations soon shifted to the African continent. Nasser positioned himself as a leader of the Third World, a status enhanced by the support Egypt garnered

Anti-Colonialism   447 during the 1956 Suez Crisis. In December 1957, the Afro-​Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) was established in Cairo, marking a new inter-​continental endeavour in the wake of Bandung. AAPSO had wider involvement, including a range of organizations from Asian and African countries, rather than solely official state delegations. The conferences it organized during the late 1950s and 1960s continued the so-​ called ‘Bandung spirit’ through professional exchange, cultural promotion, women’s coalitions, and youth participation. Furthermore, its meetings were held within an expanding range of geographic locales, including Ghana, Guinea, and Tanzania. The most significant outcome, however, was the birth of the Non-​ Aligned Movement—​the name itself tacitly indicating an anti-​colonial stance redefined for the Cold War era. The Belgrade conference of nonaligned states that convened in Yugoslavia in September 1961 formalized this political coalition. Key figures included former Bandung participants such as Nehru, Nasser, and Sukarno, along with new figures such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. Zhou and the PRC were notably absent—​an indication that political solidarities did not necessarily persist. In this case, tensions and eventually war—​specifically, the 1962 Sino-​Indian War—​put an end to good relations between India and the PRC. A second Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM) conference was held in Cairo in October 1964 with delegations from forty-​seven states in attendance, a numeric growth assigned to the wave of decolonization in sub-​ Saharan Africa. The NAM ultimately superseded the 1955 Asian-​African Conference—​ drawing upon it symbolically, but marking a different configuration of nation-​states that would meet routinely in the decades ahead.39 The idea of non-​alignment also signalled a broader convergence of anti-​colonialism’s intellectual and statecraft dimensions. In addition to Afro-​Asianism, ideologies of Pan-​ Africanism, promoted by Nkrumah, and Pan-​Arabism, promoted by Nasser, marked efforts to unite different states under the banner of broadly-​construed identities, geographic and cultural in scope, positioned against the Euro-​American West. The 1963 founding of the Organisation of African Unity and the establishment of the United Arab Republic (1958–​1961), which briefly unified Egypt and Syria, manifested these ideas institutionally and territorially. Leaders such as Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Léopold Senghor, then president of Senegal, also articulated forms of African socialism that blended local ideas with introduced ideologies like Marxism and Maoism, as in the case of ujamaa (‘family-​hood’) in Tanzania, which aimed to make their respective countries economically independent from former colonial powers. Non-​alignment itself had circulated earlier as an idea before it became a state practice, specifically through the efforts of Nehru and India’s UN ambassador V. K. Krishna Menon, who advocated the term. It also partly originated from Nehru’s experience with the anti-​colonial strategy of non-​cooperation before India’s independence. Yet these developments that indicate the continuation of anti-​colonialism as a political ethos must be understood as more complex and limited than public rhetoric might suggest. Despite claims of neutrality, a number of NAM members had formal relations with the US and the USSR. In fact, such alignments had developed prior to the Bandung meeting with the Manila Pact (1954) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), underscoring once

448   Christopher J. Lee more the need to avoid oversimplified views and definitions of anti-​colonialism that would have its proponents share uniform policies or even political consistency. Indeed, though it would continue to be applied to politically fraught situations in South Africa and Israel during the 1970s and 1980s, the term anti-​colonialism became increasingly rhetorical, rather than substantive, in scope during the postcolonial period—​a tool for marking a critical position, citing a patriotic history, and creating political solidarity, rather than identifying an immediate threat, galvanizing a revolutionary movement, or achieving and maintaining nation-​state sovereignty as such.

Conclusion This chapter has provided a brief overview as to how to think about anti-​colonialism—​ from its evolution as a complex historical phenomenon to its current status as a critical stance and analytic method. Indeed, the academic field of postcolonial studies founded by such figures as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlights the ways in which anti-​colonialism has transformed from being a subversive political discourse found in many parts of the world to a form of academic knowledge accepted across disciplines and at many universities, not least those of former imperial powers. In this sense, anti-​colonialism is still active as an evolving set of ideas that continues to shape politics, understandings of the past, and even visions of the future. Anti-​colonialism has defied the initial historical chronology in which it was born—​that is, the colonial period. But this condition is also due to the ongoing presence of imperial-​like formations in our world and the concomitant need to face these occurrences intellectually and politically, whether they are based on past legacies or the result of new situations. Indeed, the world we live in remains profoundly structured by histories of imperialism as well as histories of anti-​colonialism that resisted such arrangements, whether political, cultural, or epistemological in orientation. Such conditions demand critical vigilance. As Edward Said wrote, ‘Are there ways we can reconceive the imperial experience in other than compartmentalized terms, so as to transform our understanding of both the past and the present and our attitude toward the future?’40 This chapter is written in this spirit of continuing reassessment and redefinition, in order to better understand anti-​colonialism and its diverse potential meanings in the past, present, and future.

Notes 1. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:  The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6. 2. For an examination of these entanglements, see Timothy Brennan, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2014); Robert J.  C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2001). 3. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 6.

Anti-Colonialism   449 4. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 7, 8. 5. A  classic example of this approach is Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]). 6. For one overview, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question:  Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 7. For examples of work in this vein, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–​1804 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture:  Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). 8. For examples, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2000), part two; John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume Two: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon:  Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1999); David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation:  Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–​1920 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000); Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 9. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 10. For recent work on non-​European empires, see, for example, Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2008); Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–​1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 11. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1. 12. On these events, see, for example, M. Matera, M. L. Bastian, and S. K. Kent, The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Biswamoy Pati, ed., The 1857 Rebellion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nicholas A. Robins, Genocide and Millennialism in Upper Peru: The Great Rebellion of 1780–​1782 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Nicholas A. Robins, Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Susan Schroeder, ed., Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain (Lincoln, NE:  University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 13. Terence O. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–​97: A Study in African Resistance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967). 14. On the new social history, see, for example, Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1959); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963).

450   Christopher J. Lee 15. For past and more recent examples of these cultural themes and others, see, among many, Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996); Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives:  Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–​ 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–​1914 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-​Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–​1945 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–​1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem:  Southern African Voices in History (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 1991). On the cultural turn more generally, see, for example, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 16. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–​136. 17. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance:  Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1985). See also Eric R.  Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1999 [1969]). 18. For examples, see Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 19. Allen F. Isaacman, ‘Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa’, in F. Cooper, F. E. Mallon, S. J. Stern, A. F. Isaacman, and W. Roseberry, eds., Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 205–​317; William Roseberry, ‘Beyond the Agrarian Question in Latin America’, in Confronting Historical Paradigms, 318–​370. See also Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals:  Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Steve J. Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 20. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21. On subaltern studies, see, for example, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 22. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 23. On debating subaltern studies, see Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection:  Rethinking Colonial African History’, American Historical Review 99, no.  5 (1994):  1516–​1545; Florencia E. Mallon, ‘The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History’, American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1491–​1515; Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1475–​1490.

Anti-Colonialism   451 24. See, for example, Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion:  Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 2011 [1979]); James Mooney, The Ghost-​ Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (New York: Dover Publications, 2011 [1896]); J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-​Killing Movement of 1856–​7 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 25. For example, Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad:  Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–​1913 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007); Benjamin C. Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2009); William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–​42 (New York: Vintage, 2013); Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow:  France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011). 26. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 1996); Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 27. On Chilembwe, see George A. Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising, 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958). On Christian movements, see Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); David M.  Gordon, Invisible Agents:  Spirits in a Central African History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012); Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–​1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 28. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World:  The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2005); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens:  Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–​ 1804 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); C. L.  R. James, The Black Jacobins:  Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1938]); Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 29. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2008), 21. 30. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 31. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–​1960 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2014); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time:  Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2015). 32. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]); Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 33. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]).

452   Christopher J. Lee 34. There were breaks in Césaire’s political career as mayor between 1983 and 1984. See Wilder, Freedom Time, 109, 110, 130. 35. M. K. Gandhi, Autobiography:  The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1983 [1927 and 1929]); M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1909]); M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publishing, 2008 [1928]). 36. On the Bandung meeting, see, for example, Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010). See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya, eds., Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-​African Conference for International Order (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008). 37. For a study of such negotiations, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002). 38. On these conferences, see J. A. McCallum, ‘The Asian Relations Conference’, The Australian Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1947): 13–​17; J. A. McCallum, ‘Personalities at the Asian Relations Conference’, The Australian Quarterly 19, no.  3 (1947):  39–​44; Homer A. Jack, ‘Ideological Conflicts’, Africa Today 6, no. 1 (1959): 11–​17; George M. Houser, ‘At Cairo: The Third All-​African People’s Conference’, Africa Today 8, no. 4 (1961): 11–​13; ‘All-​African People’s Conferences’, International Organization 16, no.  2 (1962):  429–​ 434; G. H. Jansen, Nonalignment and the Afro-​Asian States (New York: Praeger, 1966), 265, 266. 39. Lorenz M.  Lüthi, ‘Non-​Alignment, 1946–​1965:  Its Establishment and Struggle against Afro-​Asianism’, Humanity 7, no. 2 (2016): 201–​223. 40. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 17.

Chapter 24

U nravelli ng t h e Re l ationships bet we e n Hum anitaria ni sm, Hum an Righ ts , a nd Dec ol oniz at i on Time for a Radical Rethink? Andrew S. Thompson

Humanitarianism, human rights, and decolonization: each, in their own right, have generated a substantial corpus of scholarship. As fields of historical enquiry, humanitarianism and human rights have lately emerged. Decolonization has an older historiography, which although for some time stuck in a state of stasis, is now being revitalized. Decolonization and humanitarianism have spun largely in their own orbits: one can read entire histories of decolonization without coming across any reference to humanitarianism and vice-​versa. The relationship between decolonization and human rights has attracted more attention, albeit with sharply contrasting views of the extent and consequences of their connection. This chapter demonstrates how humanitarianism, human rights, and decolonization were so closely entangled that their histories not only illuminate each other, but also should serve to do so, as they are barely comprehensible when studied in isolation.1 The central argument is that it was amidst the complexities of decolonization, humanitarianism, and human rights that the post-​colonial world was forged, even if not always in ways of aid workers and rights activists active choosing. This argument takes us back to the very nature of decolonization, the rethinking of which—​as this volume explains—​is long overdue.2 Decolonization arrived in the post-​ war world as three things:  (geo)political fact, an on-​going process of (often violent) contestation, and its intended outcome of a newly emerging normative world order

454   Andrew S. Thompson of nation-​states. Each of these three dimensions was capable of evoking different responses; collectively, they amounted to a huge challenge to existing notions of humanitarian endeavour and understandings of human rights. More than anything else, decolonization radically shifted the balance of armed conflict away from inter-​state and towards intra-​state warfare.3 As a result, the status of irregular or insurgent combatants belonging to non-​state armed groups, the protection of civilian populations from forced displacement, collective punishments, and reprisal attacks, and the rights of an ever-​growing number of political detainees were all given a prominence they had not enjoyed before. Hence, at the very heart of decolonization, there lay a critical dialectic. On the one hand, how were humanitarianism and human rights shaped by the geopolitical regime that was in place at the end of empire, and that served the interests of Europe’s colonial powers? On the other, what were the effects of humanitarianism and human rights upon that geopolitical regime? This chapter shows how, at the intersection of decolonization, the Cold War, and post-​ war globalization, a new generation of humanitarians and human rights activists found themselves assuming a much larger, and in many ways unforeseen, role in world affairs. The international and non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) they created played a vital role in reshaping the post-​war international order and were a powerful manifestation of the rise of a new form of moral politics after 1945. These humanitarians and human rights activists hoped to change face of a decolonizing world, but that that world, in turn, profoundly affected what they were able to do and what they eventually became. Humanitarianism and human rights have the capacity therefore to enable us to see decolonization in a much more dynamic way than the usual state-​centric version. But in order to enlarge our conception of this complex geo-​political phenomenon we need to think across three related but distinct phases: the de-​legitimization of colonialism, the actual contestation internationally and on the ground, and its imperfect and incomplete implementation. By extending the chronological boundaries of the end of empire in this way, beyond the wars waged by nationalist movements and into the forging of newly independent post-​colonial states, we can begin to tell a very different story. In particular, we can distinguish between ‘formal’ and ‘effective’ decolonization—​between the struggles for power that led to the collapse of territorial empires and the struggles for power that ensued. A generation of post-​colonial leaders invoked the language of humanitarianism and human rights to justify their actions and shore up their authority by securing larger sums of material and technical aid. They bristled, however, against the ways in which their assertion of sovereignty was compromised and constrained by international organizations and NGOs that they regarded as Western in their origins and orientation. It is precisely by looking more carefully and critically at these organizations—​and the responses they provoked—​that the whole process of decolonization is revealed for what it actually was: untidy, indefinite, and possibly even unfinishable. For decolonization was never a singular thing, but a combination of things, the dynamics and duration of which demand a radical rethink of the subject’s conceptual architecture—​to which we return at the end of this chapter.

Unravelling the Relationships    455

Integrating a Disparate and Disconnected Historiography The relationship between humanitarianism and decolonization is perhaps the most unresolved of them all. There was a persistence of an imperial mind-​set in the choice of targets of leading aid agencies and the cultural assumptions that key actors preserved. In order to capture this mind-​set, terms like ‘humanitarian imperialism’4 and ‘imperial humanitarianism’5 have entered the literature. The main premise of ‘humanitarian imperialism’ is state centric. Imperial interests and ideologies are said to have been closely tied with humanitarian aid, either as a cynical cloak for exploitation, or as a highly paternalistic—​and circumscribed—​concern for the welfare of colonial subjects. ‘Imperial humanitarianism’—​ as a term—recognizes humanitarian action often occurred outside of formal government channels, yet claims that such action frequently mimicked colonialism, even when calling its precepts into question. Both of these terms suffer from significant limitations, however. They gloss over the sheer variety of humanitarian organizations (including those radically opposed to colonialism) and sharply contrasting cultures of aid (within the West as well as between Western and non-​Western powers). They over-​emphasize aid as essentially a Western export, thereby overlooking the ways in which humanitarianism was appropriated resisted, rejected, and subverted by its ‘beneficiary’ or ‘recipient’ communities. And they seriously underestimate the impact of changes within the international community upon the character of humanitarian action. Meanwhile, the place of decolonization in human rights history is widely debated. Some scholars see decolonization itself as a major achievement of a post-​war human rights regime—​a riposte to the idea that the Cold War blocked that regime’s development until later in the twentieth century. However, this view is contested vigorously by those who argue the change ushered in by the Universal Declaration of 1948 to have been more rhetorical than real. Samuel Moyn has led the charge.6 Determined to decouple decolonization from human rights, he insists there was no self-​styled human rights movement until a ‘breakthrough decade’ of the 1970s. Before then human rights were largely restricted to supranational forums, and the NGOs that worked in their name did so ‘invisibly’ within these precincts.7 The chief characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s was the ‘agonising fruitlessness’ of human rights projects, not their prominence or popularity.8 For a widespread human rights paradigm to emerge, Moyn insists, the world had to wait for a new era of citizen activism, exemplified by Amnesty International. A post-​ war human rights movement was ‘not so much outraged by imperial crime as depressed and angry about post-​colonial failure’.9 Finally, there is the elusive relationship between humanitarianism and human rights, the distinctions between which are easily blurred by constant utterance in the same breath. Making sense of humanitarianism and human rights as conceptual categories across different contexts has proved decidedly tricky.10 The promotion of the one is often

456   Andrew S. Thompson perceived to be at the expense of the other. Humanitarianism was—​and still is—​based on a discourse of charity and suffering. Many aid agencies are cautious about speaking out against rights abuses for fear of jeopardizing their access to people in need. Human rights, by contrast, has long been based on a platform of justice and solidarity; providing emergency relief is seen as a distraction from gathering evidence about atrocities and denouncing the perpetrators. That said, humanitarianism and human rights have long been vulnerable to similar critiques, in particular with regard to their selective gaze, their quest to be seen as apolitical, and their tendency to deflect attention away from the causes of violence towards its consequences. There is, moreover, a sense in which decolonization served to destabilize what they fundamentally held in common—​viz., the idea of a shared humanity—​either by bestowing rights on some while withholding them from others, or by providing assistance to some while denying it to others. As one commentator shrewdly observes, the ‘human’ part of ‘human rights’—​and we might add, humanitarianism too—​‘has always been unstable, and variable in scope and inclusiveness’.11 In order to unravel their connections with decolonization and with each other, it is first necessary to understand what happened to humanitarianism and human rights after 1945.

Humanitarian and Human Rights Trajectories after 1945 The decades of decolonization were a watershed for a rapidly emerging international humanitarian system and a nascent, much more fragile, international human rights regime. After 1945, power shifted to a global stage, exercised by multinational companies, the international media, and an array of supranational, inter-​, and non-​governmental organizations. Amidst this globalization of power, humanitarian action and human rights activism expanded as a form of international relations precisely at the point when what had previously seemed unassailable Western colonial empires started to fall. A post-​war generation of international organizations grew in number and carved out a space of their own distinct from, yet sometimes sharing, government agendas.12 These organizations extended their global grip in the midst of a new constellation of geopolitical interests in ways that provoked far-​reaching questions about the limits and legitimacy of non-​governmental action. The post-​war ratcheting up of the scope and scale of relief operations saw a rapid growth of the number of people humanitarians reached each year and the number of countries in which they operated. The very term ‘humanitarianism’ was used by Western aid agencies in a more inflationary way in order to bring new categories of victim—​ particularly those created by ‘non-​international armed conflict’—​into their ambit. The key components of the international humanitarian system with which we are familiar

Unravelling the Relationships    457 with today—​the International Red Cross, the United Nations’ (UN) specialized agencies (UNICEF and the World Health Organization, or WHO, for example), secular NGOs (such as Save the Children and Oxfam), and many faith-​based agencies (Christian and Muslim)—​were all assembled during decolonization. The belated recognition that non-​Western expressions of humanitarianism—​in particular, a new generation of post-​ colonial NGOs (BRAC in Bangladesh, AMEL in the Lebanon, ACCORD in Africa)—​ would have to be taken much more seriously can also be traced back to the latter part of this period.13 In the expansion of humanitarianism beyond a war-​torn Europe and into Europe’s decaying empires, older geographies of imperial integration became entangled with new geographies of international integration. That said, the ‘imperial’ and the ‘international’ in humanitarianism were never simply sequential; rather, the former paved the way for, overlapped with, and, for a while, considerably complicated the latter. Scores of NGOs planted roots in nearly and newly independent colonies in which they had hardly—​ sometimes never—​worked before. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this geographical spread of humanitarian action, via territorial pathways forged by colonialism, was fuelled as much by the end of empire as it was by new discourses of humanity and international community. A  post-​war generation of international organizations capitalized on the connections forged by Europe’s empires, while at the same time taking those connections to a new level of intensity and importance. The overall result was that movement was, for quarter of a century or so, noticeably differentiated: North and West Africa received assistance from France, Britain prioritized the Commonwealth, and the United States (US) focused on Latin America. Oxfam nicely illustrates the way in which spheres of state interest coincided with flows of overseas aid.14 On the eve of the Nigeria–​Biafra War, the charity was still debating whether to work in French-​speaking West Africa at all. It was recognized that agricultural development in Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, and Togo lagged far behind that of Nigeria and Ghana, yet the absence of voluntary agencies in the region (especially Protestant missions) was keenly felt. The heavy presence of official or quasi-​ official French relief agencies was also regarded as problematic.15 Equally, the experience of Oxfam shows how refugee work blurred the boundaries between empires. The organization’s ‘greatest need’ principle led to Oxfam prioritizing relief for refugees. In the late-​1950s its first major programme outside Europe was not addressed to British territories but to the plight of Algerians fleeing to Tunisia and Morocco. Their suffering was highlighted by a visit by Oxfam’s Secretary, Leslie Kirkley, describing what he saw as ‘one of the acutest problems of displacement anywhere in the world’.16 Today, the United Nations is known around the world for its specialized relief agencies and its pivotal role in co-​ordinating many relief operations. In this period, however, the UN was reluctant to involve itself in humanitarian emergencies; the post of UN Disaster Relief Co-​ordinator was established as late as 1972 and with limited powers.17 By contrast, ideas of human rights became intertwined with the development of the UN from its very inception. A new global order was to be based on the recognition of universal human rights, and it was, above all, to the UN that people looked for answers to

458   Andrew S. Thompson the basic, yet fundamental, questions of who controlled the human rights agenda, who were the legitimate guardians of human rights, and what specific rights were encompassed by the concept. Under the aegis of the UN’s Charter, a new portfolio of human rights provisions emerged, by which, in theory, colonial powers were to be held to account. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, had focused on codifying minority rights, whereas the UN appeared much more tender to the rights of nation states—​its primary concern was with abuses of individual rights in the new environment of decolonization and the Cold War. Although (within barely two decades) membership increased dramatically from 58 to 122 states (including many newly independent African and Asian countries), and although it acquired a reputation as an aggressive champion of anti-​colonialism, the way in which human rights were institutionalized in the UN’s machinery led not to the fulfilment of these hopes, but rather to much frustration and bitter disappointment. What has been aptly termed the ‘structured anarchy’ 18 of the UN system meant that there were multiple points of entry, which made the organization a highly complicated and frequently unsatisfactory forum for human rights claim-​making. The UN’s Charter did not define human rights; rather, it only stipulated that they should be enjoyed ‘by all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’. The UN’s Commission for Human Rights (CHR), formed in 1946 in the wake of the mass atrocities of the Second World War to promote the rights of all the world’s peoples, was immediately faced with the task of filling an implementation gap. The CHR was itself hamstrung however by disagreements over the scope of the right to self-​determination, by the protracted twelve-​year process (riven by Cold War antagonisms) required to produce the two draft human rights Covenants, and, even more so, by a self-​denying ordinance not to investigate complaints or enforce the principles it had promulgated.19 Indeed, within less than a decade, Secretary-​General Dag Hammarskjöld had instructed the Commission’s first Director, John Humphrey, to limit the programme to ‘minimum flying speed’, a policy of ‘deflation’ which ensured that ‘what was not done had greater consequences than what was done’.20 The much publicized proposal from a new generation of human rights NGOs to create a UN High Commissioner as the ‘voice or embodiment of international public conscience’ was meant to nudge the CHR further towards ‘dealing with racial and other human rights problems’. But, with insufficient state support, this proposal came to naught.21 As far as decolonization is concerned, there was a marked contrast between the CHR and the UN’s other human rights instruments. Whereas the former decided not to hear petitions from anti-​colonial groups, the Trusteeship Council enshrined the right of petition—​received in their thousands—​and undertook visiting missions to Trust Territories, as (more controversially) did the Special Committee on Decolonization to colonial dependencies.22 (A right to individual petition was eventually included in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1965.) Targeted by nationalists in the eleven trust territories formerly under Japanese, Italian, and German rule, the Trusteeship Council opened the door to human rights campaigning

Unravelling the Relationships    459 as part of a wider liberation strategy and provided a bridge between Western and Afro-​ Asian rights activists. Moreover, whereas the Third Committee of the General Assembly, to which the CHR reported, was if anything a more cautious body, firmly resisting pressures from non-​administering powers to address rights violations, the Fourth Committee, which considered—​and was often critical of—​reports from the Trusteeship Council, was decidedly more ambitious. The Fourth Committee asserted its right to hear and question petitioners from both trust and non-​self-​governing territories, with the aim of internationalizing the struggles of dependent peoples and accelerating the process of decolonization. Western powers’ fears of human rights becoming an instrument of anti-​ colonialism thus intensified. The fragmented nature of the UN system was mirrored in the multiple strands of human rights activity that developed beyond its precincts. Here the judicial activism of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), focused on country reports and the observation of political trials, can be contrasted with Amnesty’s campaigning on behalf of ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, and with the civil libertarianism of the New York-​based International League for Human Rights, which helped leaders of independence movements to present their case in their homelands and internationally, and which was in turn closely involved with the renegade Anglican priest, Rev Michael Scott, the first NGO representative to speak at the UN on behalf of the Herero people of Namibia. Scott was Director of the Africa Bureau whose strategy of Christian witness sought to keep the actions of colonial powers in the public spotlight.23 The fact that these different organizations had very different mandates and working modalities meant that the human rights ‘movement’ of the 1950s and 1960s was nothing if not loosely knit, although it may also have served to mobilize a wider spectrum of supporters. If the new wave of human rights NGOs that emerged after 1945 were shaped by their experiences of the end of empire, there was also a critical Cold War dimension. The overt and covert means employed to prosecute the Cold War greatly increased violations of human rights. Moreover, just as leftist liberation movements, open to Soviet influence, received little western—​especially American—​bilateral aid, so African self-​ determination became enmeshed in wider ideological struggles over the meaning of human rights. The openly anti-​communist orientation of Western rights groups is reflected in how, initially, they were often more concerned with challenging Soviet repression in Eastern Europe than colonialism in Africa and Asia. More damagingly, it is seen in the covert support provided by the CIA and British security services to the ICJ, Africa Bureau, and Amnesty.24 Scratch beneath the surface of newly opened archives and the tantalizing involvement of intelligence and security agencies in a post-​war human rights regime is revealed, even if the precise extent of that involvement and its actual effects are difficult to gauge. Damaging press revelations of secret funding, emerging in 1967, produced a great deal of internal feuding within human rights groups. In the case of Peter Benenson25 and Michael Scott, they also likely contributed to their tragic personal breakdowns, a salutary reminder of how in the post-​war era a widespread and insidious fear of Communism framed people’s lives as much as the end of empire.

460   Andrew S. Thompson

National Liberation Movements and Non-​State Armed Groups: Kaleidoscopic Responses Decolonization required actors in the international arena to grapple with large issues regarding the purpose of late-​colonial rule, the transition of colonies towards independence, and struggles for domestic supremacy in post-​colonial states. Nowhere were the complex moral questions and political judgements facing international aid agencies more evident than with respect to the question of whether, and how, to engage with guerrilla, insurgent, and irregular combatants. While some organizations were content to provide short-​term fixes to temporary crises, others saw themselves as agents of wider transformations, or as spearheading a resurgent internationalism unleashed by the Second World War. The range of positions adopted by international organizations towards liberation movements thus spanned a spectrum from distant sympathy and paternalistic charity, to pragmatic accommodation and professional mediation, to critical solidarity and committed support. The balance of opinion in donor societies was a further complicating factor. Throughout the 1950s the violent opposition of non-​state armed groups was invariably labelled terrorism by Europe’s colonial powers in a determined effort to place such groups in the eyes of the electorate beyond the humanitarian pale. When Oxfam’s attention was first directed towards East Africa in 1954, largely as a result of the Kenyan emergency, a considerable proportion of the charity’s modest budget went to support relief and rehabilitation work, but among loyalist Kikuyu only.26 A ‘discrete appeal’ for food and clothing for the ‘most needy’ was agreed by Oxfam’s executive, with the clear stipulation that recipients should not be Mau Mau. Similarly, although Christian Aid’s Director, Janet Lacey, would later vividly recall the harrowing sight of the ‘Lowry-​like’ African figures huddled together in Kenya’s detention camps, the £40,000 raised by the organization in 1955 was targeted at state-​sanctioned ‘rehabilitation work’ in detention camps and at Kikuyu Christians seeking refuge as a result of refusing to take Mau Mau’s ‘primitive oaths’.27 Oxfam and Christian Aid both calculated—​probably correctly—​that the British public would not have tolerated welfare programmes on behalf of a movement like Mau Mau. Nor was this unique to Britain—​the French Red Cross in Algeria, averse to be seen to be helping insurgents, did no work among the FLN. Human rights activists were subject to similar pressures. In 1956 the young lawyer and future Amnesty leader Peter Benenson visited Cyprus to take up the cause of John Clerides QC, who had resigned his position as Attorney-​General to chair the Nicosia Lawyers’ Human Rights Committee.28 The British government accused Clerides and his colleagues of combing the island for complaints and requesting interrogators’ names simply in order to pass them to the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA). Benenson returned fire, protesting against the obstruction of lawyers’ access to their

Unravelling the Relationships    461 Greek-​Cypriot clients, and demanding minimum safeguards during interrogation. He refused, however, to be drawn into allegations of misconduct by the British Security Forces. In his introduction to Gangrene (a full-​scale attack on British policy in Kenya and French policy in Algeria), Benenson even felt it necessary to state that many EOKA allegations were probably ‘large exaggerations’. He went on to add that it was ‘truly remarkable’ that British troops had operated with such restraint while under intense provocation. Gangrene was published by the maverick left-​wing John Calder who had to circumvent a ‘D’ notice issued by the Home Secretary for the book to see the light of day.29 A different type of pressure was that exerted upon international humanitarian and human rights organizations by their national branches. Two of Europe’s major colonial powers were among the leading national participants: Britain and France. The worldwide jurists and human rights network, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), faced strong opposition from its British and French sections when attempting to enquire into repressive British and French policies in Kenya and Algeria. The ICJ expressed concern at the ‘deteriorating situation’ during both of these emergencies, yet left open the question of how systematic or widespread the infringement of civil liberties and human rights had been. Indeed, in the case of Kenya, the ICJ seems to have willingly turned a blind eye to more coercive aspects of rehabilitation which the organization accepted as necessary when directed towards ‘the inner core of the hard core’ of Mau Mau detainees.30 It is a moot point how far the recycling of ex-​colonial officials from the UK, France, and the Netherlands into international aid agencies jeopardized their relations with liberation movements. Certainly, there is a need to go further than simply exposing the neo-​colonial impulses behind humanitarian action. For example, the presence of such officials in two of the UN’s agencies, the Fund for Population Activity and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was problematic.31 The fact that these officials had experienced the end of empire partly as a function of population growth (and their inability to stop it) strengthened support for a global strategy of birth control. That, in turn, created tensions with local staff who saw these ‘neo-​colonialist expatriates’ as preoccupied with reducing fertility. However, this is by no means the whole story. At least one leading figure in the world of development positioned himself in the vanguard of anti-​colonialism. Oxfam’s first Africa Field Director, the colourful T. F (Jimmy) Betts, formerly a Nigerian forestry officer, and the brother of Barbara Castle, was friend to a generation of African nationalist leaders, most notably Julius Nyerere.32 Betts had earlier penned several reports on behalf of the Labour Party on the political and constitutional situation in British East and Central Africa, expressing horror at the disregard for human life in Kenya and Nyasaland in particular, and opposition to the suppression of African nationalism more generally. He later became an expert in the field of refugee resettlement and a key advocate of the influential doctrine of integrated rural development. If Betts brandished strong anti-​colonial credentials, motives across the humanitarian sector as whole for engaging with liberation movements were decidedly mixed. For

462   Andrew S. Thompson some, like Betts, they sprang from a belief in humanitarianism’s emancipatory effects, coupled with the view that poverty and disease were not simply the result of natural disasters but rather a reflection of the way colonial societies structured themselves and allocated resources. The technocratic argument that colonial rule was necessary to solve African poverty was flatly rejected, and the enjoyment of economic rights understood to be predicated on the enjoyment of political rights. Others were more pragmatic however. For many Western NGOs, eager to retain influence after independence, there was a ‘humanitarian calculus’ demanded by decolonization akin to the ‘economic calculus’ made by Western governments. Their long-​term interests were best served by prompt recognition of liberation movements, the quest for favoured relationships, and the goodwill of post-​colonial leaders. The difficulty of navigating one’s way across this late-​colonial and post-​colonial divide is well illustrated by the experience of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which, within barely a decade, had swung from largely avoiding contact with liberation movements to cultivating a dialogue with them. In 1962, the former Swiss army officer and future ICRC President Samuel Gonard headed an information-​ gathering mission to Equatorial and Central Africa, visiting British, French, and Belgian colonies and ex-​colonies.33 The mission was prompted by the fear that what had hitherto been ‘an essentially European organisation’ was not regarded as sufficiently ‘free from the prejudices acquired from centuries of colonial domination’ to establish itself on the continent.34 Africa was then largely unknown to the ICRC’s Executive and Assembly, and the attitudes of many African observers in Geneva highly paternalistic. To be fair, the ICRC was far from alone here. Like other reformist projects, a post-​war generation of humanitarians was not averse to reductive racial stereotyping. Talk of the innate psychological traits of ethnic groups may have been grounded in a desire to know; that desire was nevertheless frequently frustrated by its own racial stereotyping. Over the next decade the ICRC’s delegates in Africa opened up regular contact with liberation movement leaders in Angola, Rhodesia, Namibia, and South Africa. Liberation movement leaders requested medical and other forms of relief, as well as co-​ operation on matters of mutual interest, especially the visiting of detainees. The ICRC—​ the only organization to gain widespread access to political prisoners—​commented on the conditions and not the causes their detention; Amnesty’s approach differed. It campaigned for the release of ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, but only if they neither advocated nor practised the use of violence. Otherwise, Amnesty limited its concern to detention conditions, like the ICRC. Amnesty and the ICRC are said to exemplify the different modus operandi of humanitarian and human rights organizations—​compassion and charity versus justice and solidarity, material support versus an emancipatory vocabulary of rights, and private persuasion versus public denunciation. However, the reality was always more complicated. Jacques Moreillon, the ICRC’s Delegate-​General for Africa from 1972–​1975, recalls leaving Geneva for Africa to conduct detention visits, routing via London, and stopping off at Amnesty’s offices to check their files, something one would not learn

Unravelling the Relationships    463 from the archives.35 Whereas disputes often became public, co-​operation occurred behind closed doors. Indeed, it was the quiet and unannounced revolution in detention visiting—​to which we shall return—​which provided the main terrain upon which humanitarian and human rights organizations converged. Their combined if not always co-​ordinated interventions on behalf of political detainees undermined the idea that liberation movements were primarily responsible for late-​colonial violence, whether that was the intention or not.36 As mentioned earlier, decolonization ushered in unconventional and asymmetric forms of warfare that revolved around the control of people as much as territory and entailed their enforced movement or flight. Even the ICRC, which prided itself on proximity to all parties in armed conflict, struggled to come to terms with these changes. The organization did not draft its first ‘Code of Conduct’ for ‘non-​state armed groups’ until the late 1970s, recognizing that basic humanitarian law was unlikely to be observed by irregular combatants unless it was more actively disseminated. Here, the ICRC was motivated by its experience of the ferocious Rhodesian bush war, fought without oversight or rules—​neither side took prisoners, and both sides killed civilians. In the midst of this conflict, two ICRC delegates, André Tièche and Alain Bieri, and their African colleague, Charles Chatora, were murdered on 18 May 1978.37 While they may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, their deaths were more likely a reprisal attack by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) for alleged, if mistaken, ICRC complicity with the actions of the Rhodesian Security Forces, a mistake for which Robert Mugabe later albeit privately apologized. The exploitation of humanitarian aid on behalf of insurgent groups remains a highly controversial issue. Perhaps the most debated aspect of humanitarian and human rights involvement with liberation movements was the question of the material support given to fighters who escaped oppressive colonial regimes to settle in neighbouring territories from which they could then plan to overthrow them. In the historiography, two genealogies of revolution are juxtaposed: peaceful change and armed struggle. The first is represented by the moral authority and passive resistance of civil society, the latter by the violent opposition and revolutionary warfare of liberation movements. The two genealogies were often entangled, however. Many liberation movements, unable to support their members, turned to the international arena for help, and many parts of the UN system were increasingly under pressure to respond. As one contemporary commentator observed, ‘the struggle between colonialism and nationalism now pervades the entire complex of world politics and international organisations—​not just the United Nations but also the specialised agencies’.38 In fact, barely had the ink begun to dry on the 1960 ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’ than the UN’s specialized humanitarian agencies were asked to assist the ‘Special Committee of Seventeen’, which was charged with its implementation. A few years later, the UN’s Special Committee Against Apartheid followed suit by setting up a trust fund, which its Swedish chair, Sverker Astrom, insisted was of ‘purely humanitarian character’.39 In practice, the fund provided legal assistance to political prisoners, relief to their families, education and employment

464   Andrew S. Thompson for refugees, and living expenses for exiles. It signalled, in the corridors of the UN, a more openly politicized and partisan approach to humanitarian aid. Between 1966 and 1974 the UN’s General Assembly and Decolonization Committee continued to pass resolutions calling upon the specialized humanitarian agencies to actively participate in the realization of the 1960 Declaration and to provide non-​military assistance to liberation movements either directly or via the Organisation for African Unity. Precisely what this meant in terms of field activity is difficult to say. The experience of UNICEF, the most active of the agencies at this time, and which rapidly established itself as a key player in the development community, highlights the need for more research. UNICEF took seriously its founding resolution that aid should be dispensed on the basis of need only. Under its Executive Director Henry Labouisse, the agency gained a reputation for working on all sides of post-​colonial civil conflicts, even if this meant ignoring the diplomatic niceties of state sovereignty—​this happened between 1967–​1970, when UNICEF served as a conduit for relief from the Portuguese island of Sao Tome into rebel-​held Biafra.40 However, far less is known about UNICEF’s operations during the previous decade. What is known is that, in situations where the UN was fiercely critical of the actions of the ‘administering power’, the Decolonization Committee not only asked its specialized agencies—​and the ICRC—​to provide refugee assistance, but also actively enquired whether they were able to do so,41 for example, in Aden, upon which the UN and ICRC were in close correspondence. From recently released archives, we know that by the mid-​1960s the ICRC’s delegate in Aden, Andre Rochat, a self-​styled humanitarian Lawrence of Arabia, had developed close links with the Egyptian-​backed National Liberation Front (FLN). As the price of the continuation of the ICRC’s large relief operation in the Yemen, the FLN demanded greater protection for its fighters detained in the notorious Fort Morbut prison and the Al-​Mansura detention camp. Rochat had little choice but to press the British colonial authorities for access, chillingly describing what he witnessed when visiting al-​Mansura as ‘L’empire de la peur’.42 By the following decade the Decolonization Committee was, in fact, regularly using the UN’s own funds to support liberation movements, while the United Nations Development Programme (founded in 1965) had established a National Liberation Movement Trust Fund to support health, education, and training programmes, to the tune of several million dollars.43 The UNDP’s fund aimed at developing self-​ reliance in countries of asylum and preparing dependent territories to govern themselves. Many UN programmes, like those of the Commonwealth, were targeted at Tanzania and Zambia, two African states that played host to large numbers of exiles and refugees. Unsurprisingly, the meaning of ‘non-​military’ humanitarian assistance was particularly fraught. Several liberation movements had close connections with, or even grew out of, youth groups, charitable bodies, and humanitarian associations. They did not necessarily, therefore, draw clear-​cut distinctions between the military and welfare wings of their operations. Indeed, organizing field hospitals and procuring medical supplies was a recurrent problem for insurgents, as was providing material and financial aid to

Unravelling the Relationships    465 the families of those captured and imprisoned.44 The blurring of such boundaries receives little attention in the scholarship on decolonization and humanitarianism. Sweden is a particularly interesting case, given its relationship with the non-​aligned movement and the fact it was neither a member of NATO nor the EEC. For Sweden, humanitarian interventions became an expression of solidarity as much as charity. When the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA), which had earlier contributed to UN multilateral programmes for Southern Africa, moved to set up its own ‘refugee million fund’ for scholarships and training programmes, Swedish government officials came into direct contact with military and political representatives of liberation movements.45 These included Frelimo, Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), and the African National Congress (ANC), all of which sent officials to Sweden to request humanitarian aid. The Swedish government granted requests on the condition of guaranteed control over the use of funds. But what could such guarantees mean when SIDA officials were unable to regularly visit conflict zones, and what happened when (as was the case) it subsequently transpired funds had been channelled to other purposes? What, indeed, was a humanitarian purpose? Schools and health clinics were supported; weapons and ammunitions were deemed off limits. But vehicles—​supplied in significant numbers—​could be used for military purposes as well as to distribute relief. Moreover, like the UN’s Special Committee on Apartheid, SIDA stretched the term ‘non-​military’ assistance to provide funds for broadcasting facilities on the grounds they supported educational efforts. SIDA’s ‘refugee million fund’ was, in fact, the tip of a humanitarian iceberg. Across Western Europe and North America, a vast network of agencies was assembled to provide educational assistance to African refugees studying in Britain, France, Switzerland, and the US—​a network of which hitherto very little is known except anecdotally. In 1967, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) established a Bureau for Placement and Education of African Refugees. By this date, there were at least twenty major voluntary organizations—​American, French, Danish, Norwegian, and British—​involved, alongside other organizations (including the Africa Educational Trust, International University Exchange Fund, and World University Service) specializing in this field.46 Together they claimed to have helped at least 3.5 million African ‘refugees’ during the period from 1960 to 1967, a rough approximation as several agencies had no recorded numbers, only recorded expenditure, while others included the forcibly displaced in their tally. At the sharp end of the action, organizations like the International Refugee Council of Zambia (IRCOZ) extracted liberation movement fighters to the relative safety of Zambia from the escape hatch of Francistown in Botswana, a High Commission Territory in which refugees were a feature of the political landscape.47 In reality, IRCOZ was a one-​man band. The strong-​willed former Scots Guards officer and Rhodesian newspaper reporter Peter Mackay drove his battered Land Rover up and down the 380 miles of ‘Freedom Road’, smuggling hundreds of Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and South Africans to the relative safety of refugee camps where many were then trained as guerrilla fighters. The Botswana end of the operation—​a

466   Andrew S. Thompson transit centre, bombed most probably by the South African security forces in 1964—​was supported by Oxfam, Christian Aid, and Amnesty, as well as a variety of Scandinavian NGOs. IRCOZ was unusual, however, in operating so openly in militarized refugee camps. The UNHCR described the whole question of refugee eligibility as ‘political dynamite’.48 When distributing rations to Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco, the organization’s stated policy was not to feed those who were ‘mobilised’ (i.e., taking part in armed activity).49 Later, in 1978, the agency actually stopped much of its assistance to ZAPU-​affiliated camps and limited itself to emergency aid for this very reason. By then, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had introduced as a basic principle of refugee protection that camps should be situated sufficiently far from the border of the country from which refugees had arrived to prevent them from attempting to destabilize its government.50 Several other international agencies followed suit. When charities or NGOs involved themselves with liberation movements they often met with disapproval from government and/​or their donor publics, as was the experience of Christian Aid in the 1970s. It was, however, the World Council of Churches (WCC) that pushed the boundaries of humanitarian action the furthest. In 1969 the WCC approved a ‘Programme to Combat Racism’, which turned Southern Africa into a test case for the achievement of human rights.51 This was the region, it argued, where racism was most strongly entrenched. Alongside economic sanctions, the WCC provided practical assistance to resistance movements by instigating its own humanitarian special fund to strengthen medical, educational, and legal support. By 1974, US$500,000 of contributions had been received, which funded information and propaganda activity, as well as activity to locate the whereabouts of people arrested but not brought to trial. Grants to liberation movements attracted fierce opposition from some church leaders, yet others, influenced by liberation theology, willingly realigned themselves with the more confrontational approach pursued by the WCC, the UN, and other international organizations against racial discrimination. What role should we assign to decolonization in the evolution of humanitarianism and human rights? Time and again, the pursuit of principled humanitarian and human rights interventions met with the contrary realities of highly charged, heavily politicized, and strongly polarized military and security situations. Through their interaction with liberation movements, we gain a sense of how international norms were challenged, and how aid workers and rights activists were themselves influenced by the very objects they sought to transform. To be sure, challenges to humanitarianism ‘minimalism’ came from human rights groups, yet the humanitarian agenda was itself broadening and starting to serve new purposes. Nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to a key institutional development of the period—​namely, that of protecting political detainees. The mainstreaming of a hitherto marginal activity thrust into the spotlight the evolving relationship between humanitarianism and human rights.

Unravelling the Relationships    467

Human Rights in Armed Conflict: a ‘No-​M an’s Land in Humanitarian Action’? Jean Pictet, distinguished international lawyer and main drafter of the Fourth Geneva Convention, referred to the protection of prisoners in internal armed conflict as a ‘humanitarian no-​man’s land’.52 The problem lay with common Article 3, a treaty in miniature which sought to bring the array of conflicts that occurred within states under the laws of war. Article 3 enshrined basic rights for those caught up in ‘non-​international’ armed conflict, yet left open the question of the threshold of violence to be crossed for a conflict to qualify as such. Its shortcomings were felt all the more acutely as decolonization suddenly tilted the scales away from inter-​towards intra-​state warfare. For its part, the ICRC championed the widest possible interpretation of Article 3, effectively any collective armed action which could not be supressed by ordinary means. European powers had, however, created a highly permissive legal environment, and they regarded any colonial difficulties they faced as purely domestic, and hence outside the scope of international law. The ICRC responded by setting in train a series of enquiries into states operating outside the framework of legality by invoking emergency legislation. Beginning in the 1950s, and gathering momentum in the 1960s, it spearheaded an international campaign to reconstruct the laws of war.53 This campaign paved the way for the last major set-​piece rhetorical battle over decolonization—​ the 1974–​1977 Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Law (CDDH), convened by the Swiss Federal Council, and leading to the two Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 1977.54 Two key staging posts along the way were the Tehran Conference on Human Rights and resulting UN resolution 2444 regarding ‘Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts’ (1968), and the long-​forgotten yet highly symbolic seminar on international humanitarian law organized by the OAU for African liberation movements at Dar-​es-​Salaam (1974). The backdrop to the Additional Protocols was the widespread resort to detention after 1945.55 Detention was a method of choice for colonial powers confronted by nationalist opponents and armed insurgents. From the early 1960s to the mid-​1970s, the ICRC visited an estimated 100,000 detainees in over 70 countries, which was a staggering increase on anything previously undertaken. Three decades of intensive lobbying by the ICRC, Amnesty, the ICJ, and other organizations for improved detention conditions shone a spotlight on the limits of international law in the face of the ‘implacable and ruthless character’ of colonial counter-​insurgency operations. As Jacques Moreillon, who lived through the last decade of colonial rule in Africa, lamented, ‘This is one of the crazy situations of today’s international law. The alien is better protected than your own national’.56

468   Andrew S. Thompson It is briefly worth noting that a wholescale revision of the Geneva Conventions was not the only option on the table at this time. Other proposals actively canvassed include an international prison under UN control used by member governments during states of emergency, international areas for the purposes of providing asylum to political refugees, and new UN prison rules with special provision for ‘political prisoners’ and ‘freedom fighters’.57 But, by the beginning of the 1970s, humanitarian and human rights organizations had fixed their attention firmly on expanding the realm of humanitarian law, while, for their part, African and Asian liberation movements had resolved to expose that body of law much more directly to the political realities of decolonization. The question of ‘human rights in armed conflict’ came to a head in Dar-​es-​Salaam.58 African and Asian states were highly reluctant to recognize international laws in which they had had no hand enacting. A seminar convened by the OAU, with ten out of 13 recognized liberation movements attending, alongside the Swiss and Norwegian governments and the ICRC, was charged with settling the question of their representation and role at the Diplomatic Conference. Discussions quickly reverted however to the methods used by colonial powers to check the military gains made by liberation movements. A memorable opening speech of Lieutenant-​Colonel Hashim Mbita, Executive Secretary of the OAU’s Liberation Committee, was nothing less than a broadside against the ‘colonial domination of African territories’. Mbita attacked ‘acts of atrocities’ on combatants, the indiscriminate bombing of fire-​free zones, the mass arrests and interrogation of hostages, and the forcible transfer and summary execution of civilians. He argued that a ‘structural defect’ existed in the Geneva Conventions in the light of radical changes in the nature of warfare since 1949, and that liberation movement fighters had to be recognized as belligerents with full POW status. Mbita flatly rejected the argument of many Western powers that there should be preconditions to any such recognition, for example, having to establish effective control over any territory claimed by insurgents, wearing military uniform, carrying arms openly, or conducting operations in accord with western customs of war. Only when liberation movement fighters were treated in the exactly same way as all other combatants, he insisted, would the Geneva Conventions be brought ‘up to the exigencies of humanity’. The seminal Dar-​es-​Salaam seminar, which barely features in the historiography on decolonization, set the stage for everything that followed. The first Additional Protocol proved extremely controversial. By acceding to the OAU’s demands for a redefinition of international armed conflict to embrace all peoples fighting against ‘colonial domination’, ‘alien occupation’, and ‘racist regimes’, the status of liberation movements was enshrined in 1977 in international law. Historically, international humanitarian law was not based on the reasons why people were fighting, simply on how they were fighting. But jus ad bellum and jus in bello proved impossible to separate in the ideologically charged environment of the 1970s. One ICRC delegate who was present at the Diplomatic Conference opined that, ‘In a way, the Additional Protocols were the revenge of the former colonies.’59 Just as UN debates over human rights were seized by the Global South in a quest to remake the international order, so the laws of war were now infused with the politics of anti-​colonialism.

Unravelling the Relationships    469 The Diplomatic Conference was a critical juncture in the relationship between decolonization and rapidly evolving humanitarian and human rights agendas. Up to that point, and under their twin banners, assorted legions had marched. Their growing post-​war engagement in the protection of political detainees is evidence of a shared determination to bring a new category of victim within the realm of international law. Humanitarianism and human rights may not have been birds of a feather, but neither were they distinct species. Rather, the concerns of the one were expanding rapidly towards those of the other. In their efforts to ameliorate state violence, and lift the veil of secrecy over places of undisclosed detention, humanitarians and human rights activists turned to the moral force and universal quality of notions of ‘human dignity’ and ‘humanitarian protection’. Distinctions between rival conceptions of charity and solidarity, and between classical neutrality and more radical conscience stirring, became decidedly fuzzy.60 It is far too simplistic therefore to argue that traditional humanitarianism reached its structural limits during decolonization. There was, in fact, great fluidity at this time in the meaning of ‘doing humanitarian or human rights work’, with different techniques and approaches as likely to be found within as they were between organizations.

Decolonization Revisited and Reframed Decolonization, humanitarianism, and human rights have inhabited different storylines in world history. Decolonization is typically framed as a story of something that was undone, the erasure of an old-​world order of imperial states, accelerated by the advent of global warfare; conversely, humanitarianism and human rights are narrated as the story of a new world order arising from its ashes. This chapter has sought to bring these two storylines together. In the midst of violent struggles to end to colonial rule, humanitarians and human rights activists assumed a larger role in world affairs. Humanitarian crises ceased to be considered aberrant phenomena and were instead regarded as a recurrent feature of a new global order, while the idea that the primacy of response to armed conflict belonged to states was challenged by a post-​war generation of inter-​and non-​governmental organizations who regarded the international community as much as national governments as the source of their authority and audience for their campaigns. Humanitarianism and human rights are manifestations of the powerful global transformations wrought by the rise of a new form of moral politics after 1945. Equally, they highlight the profound problems of bringing international governance into an unregulated globalized space. Albert Camus once said that ‘calling things by the wrong name adds to the affliction of the world’. Part of the difficulty in piecing together the web of relationships that existed between the end of empire, humanitarianism, and human rights arises from the shape-​ shifting nature of the very concepts in question. During the decades of decolonization, humanitarianism and human rights enjoyed unprecedented popularity. They were never stable bodies of thought, however, and hence they did not lead to any singular

470   Andrew S. Thompson or specific form of politics. Rather, a wide variety of actors adopted these terms to describe aspects of what they did. Indeed, in so far as decolonization was itself a contested process, the shifting meanings of humanitarianism and human rights lay at the heart of these contestations. This brings us back to the very meaning of decolonization. Perhaps the biggest questions still hanging over decolonization are not why it happened, but how it happened, when it happened, and what the consequences were of it happening. What this chapter has argued is not simply that independence did not sever the links between the colonizer and colonized, but that part of the explanation why that is the case resides with the international system of aid, development, and human rights that emerged through the end of empire. We need to revisit the question of precisely what was—​and what was not—​brought to an end by transfers of power from colonizer to colonized. To do that, we need above all to draw a sharper distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘effective’ decolonization61—​between the hauling down of one flag and its replacement by another, and the wider and more complex set of transformations that the moment of independence set in train. When viewed in a long Cold War context stretching from the 1940s to the 1990s, we see more clearly the different phases of decolonization in which new ideological struggles presented themselves and new ideas about international relations emerged. The concept of ‘effective’ decolonization is, moreover, a composite. It requires us to rethink decolonization not as a singular process, but rather as a set of processes that were still unfolding long after new constitutional arrangements had been signed and sealed. Four such decolonizing processes have been lurking under the surface of the narrative of preceding pages: post-​colonialism, second wave decolonization, re-​colonization, and de-​colonialization. Taken together, these four processes, which were accelerated by, yet far from complete at, the moment of independence, provide an alternative framework for analysing the multiple trajectories and timelines upon which the real end of empire occurred. Instead of a set of cultural practices in which unequal power relations were enshrined, post-​colonialism (or post-empire) is understood in its more literal and chronological sense: a bridging concept that directs our attention towards the formative transitional period in which aid agencies and human rights groups were seeking to protect their interests and preserve their influence through and beyond the moment of independence. How were they to navigate their way across this late-​colonial and post-​colonial divide? New political realities had to be confronted and preferred elites chosen and cultivated. At the same time, the autonomous and free-​wheeling nature of many humanitarian and human rights organizations was vigorously challenged by post-​colonial leaders. Some of these organizations quickly realigned themselves with what they saw as a global fight for social and economic justice, others adopted more pragmatic, cautious and guarded approaches. On the eve of Ghana’s independence, Kwame Nkrumah declared ‘we must show that it is possible for Africans to rule themselves’.62 The premise for second-​wave decolonization is that sovereignty was often highly circumscribed after formal independence—​ hence, the meaning of decolonization shifted away from the acquisition of legal

Unravelling the Relationships    471 sovereignty towards the struggle over the apparatus of government that would make that sovereignty real. The relentless expansion of non-​state humanitarianism was caught up in these struggles, for humanitarians were not only marked by their western origins and orientation, they also exercised power—​the power of their inevitably selective gaze; the power to decide which groups and issues had priority and which did not. The incompleteness of formal decolonization, and the lasting consequences of colonial dependency for African and Asian people’s belief in their capacity to govern their affairs, are well captured by the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. Gaining world-​wide attention for his first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe spoke of a ‘postcolonial disposition’ whereby ‘a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves’ experienced difficulty running the new systems ‘foisted upon them at the dawn of independence’.63 Often lacking the administrative depth, the resources or technical ability to deal with the abject poverty they faced, post-​colonial states were torn between the temptation to turn to a new generation of international and non-​governmental organizations to stand in for the state by providing basic healthcare and social welfare, and their refusal to be confined to the limited roles their former colonial masters had assigned to them. In the humanitarian sphere, second-​wave decolonization translated, above all, into a growing intolerance of ‘foreign’ or ‘expeditionary’ models of relief operations which marginalized non-​Europeans as incapable or inferior, and symbolized a wider lack of progress towards Africanization or Asianization. Pressure mounted upon international aid agencies to rationalize their expatriate presence in favour of indigenous religious and charitable actors. In the midst of the Biafra War, the assertion by Lagos of ‘state humanitarianism’—​in the form of National Rehabilitation Committee—​is a striking example of a post-​colonial state seeking to take back control of vital aspects of governance like social services, public health, and community development.64 The drive for second-​ wave decolonization further manifested itself in the stirring of a new wave of NGOs from the Global South—​notably, the refugee agency Amel Association in the Lebanon, the Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development (ACORD) in Africa, and the Bangladesh Relief Assistance Committee formed in the wake of the Indo-​Pakistan War—​whose aims were to build local capacity for humanitarian response and to shift its centre of gravity from the international arena towards the national arena. The related but distinct argument that humanitarian and human rights interventions deliberately seek to exercise power over the very people they are claiming to help is familiar. What many of its proponents fail to grasp, however, is that assertions of Western power in the decades after World War Two were multilateral as well as bilateral affairs. State aid may manifestly have been a pawn of Cold War politics, yet multilateral aid was hardly perceived to be agenda-​free either. The interventions of international agencies in post-​colonial conflicts raised growing concerns about what Nkrumah and others saw as the continued control of local policies ‘from outside’—​by a cabal of former colonial powers—​after independence was achieved. Hence the idea of recolonization—​the replication of western forms of authority through the agency of non-​and inter-​governmental organizations. What fuelled such fears was their ongoing reliance on the US and Western Europe for much of their funding.

472   Andrew S. Thompson Humanitarian and human rights organizations did indeed at times act in ways which served to resuscitate old colonial quarrels and reopen old colonial wounds—​the priority placed on evacuating European nationals at the beginning of the Congo crisis is a case in point. They were far from monolithic, however. Amidst transfers of power, competing schools of thought emerged within their ranks. The top down methods of ex-​colonial officials, confident in their superior knowledge and technical expertise, were increasingly at odds with a younger generation and its emphasis upon decentralized country programming, participatory approaches, and objective criteria for aid distribution.65 This mobile and noticeably more cosmopolitan generation of aid workers derived their expertise from professional training and extensive involvement in international affairs. Resistance to re-​colonization by post-​colonial states took many forms. The drive to diversify sources of aid and to reduce reliance on any particular donor or provider was one response; the formation, in short order, of a spate of non-​Western branches of international organizations was another. In order to increase their lobbying power, some of these branches grouped themselves into regional conferences—​most notably, the Arab Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the Middle East. In these—​and other—​ways the international humanitarian arena became a key site of emerging power engagement in what had traditionally been Western power discussions. In the war of words that accompanied anti-​colonial struggles, the symbolic was sometimes as significant as the substantive. To borrow the phrase of the Zimbabwean writer Chenjerai Hove, the driver behind de-​colonialization—​a concept rooted in the psychological dimensions of colonial rule—​was nothing less than ‘a cleansing of the colonial languages’.66 This cleansing extended into the realm of international law. The initial spark for the revision of the 1949 Geneva Conventions came from humanitarian and human rights activists, but the force that propelled the negotiations leading up to the Additional Protocols of 1977 was post-​colonial, viz., a radical reframing of the very idea of ‘international armed conflict’ to incorporate the wars of liberation movements when the majority of those movements had already succeeded in their independence quest. In that sense the Additional Protocols were as much as anything else a retrospective proclamation of the justice and legitimacy of the anti-​colonial cause. In a haunting exploration of the impact of the past on the present, the American novelist William Faulkner declared, ‘The past is not dead. It’s not even past.’67 Faulkner was speaking in 1951 of the historical legacy of slavery. The same sentiment may stand for colonialism, however. Just like a mooring rope, the further we have travelled from the end of empire, the more we seem to have felt its pull. To truly understand why it is not a phenomenon that may be safely consigned to the past, we need to recognize decolonization for what it actually was—​an untidy and apparently indefinite process which may have begun in 1947, but is still being contested nearly fifty years later in terms of constitutional change, let alone its cultural and other aspects. We also need to reframe decolonization as a composite rather than singular concept encompassing ‘post-​colonialism’, ‘second wave decolonization’, ‘re-​colonization’, and ‘de-​colonialization’. This quadruped of processes predated and outlived formal transfers of power, and together provide a

Unravelling the Relationships    473 basis for understanding decolonization not simply as a dramatic geopolitical shift that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century, but as something that has subsequently cast such a very long shadow over our contemporary world. Humanitarianism and human rights are fundamental to that rethinking of decolonization that is long overdue.

Notes 1. The chapter is based on my next book: Humanitarianism on Trial. How a Global System of Aid and Development emerged through the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to John Darwin, Saul Dubow, Tony Hopkins, Philip Murphy, Martin Thomas, and Stuart Ward for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. 2. A point made particularly well by Tony Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonisation”, Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008), 211–​247. 3. For the changing nature of warfare during decolonization see, in particular, Chapter by Martin Thomas, this volume. 4. Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism. The Politics of Anti-​Slavery Activism, 1880–​1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5. Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity. A  History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011), 29–​31. 6. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Human Rights and the Uses of History (London: Verso, 2014). 7. Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History, 80. 8. Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History, 80. 9. Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History, 95. 10. For an insightful study, see Michael Geyer, ‘Humanitarianism and Human Rights:  a Troubled Rapport’ in Fabian Klose, ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention. Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016), 31–​55. 11. Joanna Bourke, What It Means to Be Human. Reflections from 1791 to the Present (London: Virago, 2011), 136. 12. For the broad outlines see:  Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarianism Contested. Where Angels Fear to Tread (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), Ch. 3; W. R. Smyser, The Humanitarian Conscience. Caring for Others in the Age of Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Chs. 4–​6; Peter Walker and David Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), Chs. 1–​2. 13. A theme touched on later in the chapter, but pursued a greater length in my forthcoming book, Humanitarianism on Trial (n 1). 14. For (near) contemporary accounts of the work of Oxfam in this period, see Maggie Black, A Cause for Our Times: Oxfam–​The First 50 Years (Oxford: Oxfam Professional, 1992); Peter Gill, Drops in the Ocean: The Work of Oxfam, 1960–​70 (London: Macdonald, 1970); Mervyn Jones, Two Ears of Corn: Oxfam in Action (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965). 15. Oxfam Archives, Bodleian library, University of Oxford: T. G. Brierly to K. A. Bennett (Field Director, West Africa), 6/​6/​1967, PRG 1/​3/​1. 16. Oxfam Archives: Bulletin No.13 May 1958, No. 15 Oct. 1958; Report on North Africa 7-​24/​11/​ 1961, Bernard Llewellyn PRG 1/​1/​2.

474   Andrew S. Thompson 17. Peter Macalister-​Smith, International Humanitarian Assistance. Disaster Relief Actions in International Law and Organisation (Dordrecht: Springer, 1985), 96–​99. 18. The phrase comes from Maggie Black’s excellent The No-​Nonsense Guide to the United Nations (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2008), 151. 19. Howard Tolley’s The UN Commission on Human Rights (Boulder:  Westview Press, 1987); Norman Roger, Human Rights at the UN: the Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2008); Meredith Terrata, “We Had Been Fooled into Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World: Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonisation”, Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2012), 329–​360. 20. Roger, Human Rights at the UN, 144. 21. UN Archives (Geneva): Statement submitted by the International League for the Rights of Man, 6/​4/​1966; and Memorandum on the Costa Rican Proposal for the Appointment of a UN High Commissioner, 25/​5/​1966, SO 218. 22. Mason Sears, Years of High Purpose:  from Trusteeship to Nationhood (Washington, DC:  University Press of America, 1980), Chs. 3–​ 4; John Sankey, “Decolonisation: Cooperation and Confrontation at the United Nations” in Erik Jensen and Thomas Fisher, eds., The United Kingdom—​the United Nations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 101–​106. 23. Anne Yates and Lewis Chester, The Troublemaker: Michael Scott and His Lonely Struggle Against Injustice (London: Real African Publishers, 2006). 24. For the “orgy of disclosures” that followed the revelations of the CIA’s network of front organizations in the California-​based magazine Rampart, see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), 381ff. 25. Tom Buchanan, “Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966–​7”, Twentieth Century British History 15, no.  3 (2004), 267–​ 289; Yates and Chester, The Troublemaker, 214–​216, 258–​259,  282. 26. Oxfam Archive:  Executive Committee Minute Book, “Relief of Kikuyus in Kenya”, 18 March 1954, Gov./​1/​1/​1/​2; Oxfam Bulletin Spring 1961, 4. 27. Janet Lacey, A Cup of Water: The Story of Christian Aid (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970), 128–​131. 28. For Benenson’s involvement in the Cyprus Emergency, see John Calder, ed., Gangrene (London: John Calder, 1959), and the Introduction by Benenson; Charles Foley, Island in Revolt (London: Longmans Green & Co, 1962), 125–​127; and Kate Kennedy, “Britain and the End of Empire: a study of colonial governance in Cyprus, Kenya and Nyasaland against the backdrop of internationalisation of empire and the evolution of a supranational human rights culture and jurisprudence, 1938–​65” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2015). 29. John Calder, Pursuit:  The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder (London:  Calder Publications, 2001), 145–​150. 30. Bulletin of International Commission of Jurists 9 (1959), 32–​36; Bulletin 10, 28–​30, Bulletin 11,  5–​7. 31. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception. The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 311–​315. 32. For the relationship between Betts’ commitment to anti-​colonialism and his beliefs about international development (explored further in my next book), see his reports in the T. F. Betts Collection and the Oxfam Archive in Oxford University.

Unravelling the Relationships    475 33. Andrew Thompson, “Humanitarian Principles Put to the Test:  Challenges to Humanitarian Action during Decolonisation”, International Review of the Red Cross 97, no. 897/​8 (2015), 72–​73. 34. Georges Wilhelm and Roger Heacock, The International Committee of the Red Cross (Boston, MA:  Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 46–​48, and from the ICRC’s Archive:  Note, “Politique de cooperation du CICR en Afrique”, Pierre Gassmann, 23/​7/​1991. 35. This emerged from correspondence between the author and Jacques Moreillon during 2016. 36. On this point, see Hilary Sapire, “Liberation Movements, Exile, and International Solidarity:  An Introduction”, Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no.  2 (2009), 284–​285. 37. ICRC Archive: “Meeting of representatives of the ICRC, British Red Cross and Rhodesia Red Cross, London, on the Future Organisation and Activities of the Rhodesia Red Cross in relation to the ICRC’s emergency operations in Rhodesia”, 4/​7/​1978, and “ICRC Minutes of a Meeting with two officials from ZANU-​Mugabe and three from ZANLA”, 19/​6/​1979, B AG 122 231–​005. 38. D. W. Wainhouse, Remnants of Empire: The United Nations and the End of Colonialism (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 1. 39. Enuga Ready, “The United Nations and the Struggle for liberation in South Africa” in South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa 3, International Solidarity, Part 1, 2004, 64. 40. John Charnow, ed., Henry Labouisse:  UNICEF Executive Director, 1947–​65 (UNICEF History Series, Monograph XI, 1988), 1–​10, 73–​74; David Koren, Far Away in the Sky. A Memoir of the Biafran Airlift (Pelham Manor, NY: Peace Corps Writers, 2011). 41. ICRC Archives: N. Rifai to Samuel Gonard, 26/​7/​1966, B AG 200 001–​002. 42. Thompson, “Humanitarian principles put to the test”, 67. 43. Ready, “The United Nations and the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa”, 114–​115. 44. Macey on the FLN in Algeria, 257, 262–​263. 45. Tor Sellstrom, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa: Volume 1: Formation of a Popular Opinion, 1950–​70 (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 1999), 58–​83, and Volume 2: Solidarity and Assistance, 1970–​1994 (Stockholm: Nordic Africa Institute, 2002), 59–​62, 172–​174. 46. Archives of International Council of Voluntary Agencies, Geneva: “1968 ICVA General Conference, Conference Document 8:  Assistance to African Refugees by Voluntary Organisations”. 47. For the story of IRCOZ, see Peter Mackay, We Have Tomorrow. Stirrings in Africa, 1959–​67 (Norwich: Michael Russell Publishing, 2008), Chs. 32–​40. Mackay and IRCOZ are also to be encountered in the archives of Oxfam, one of the UK charities which provided financial support. 48. UNHCR Archive, Geneva: “Confidential Interoffice Memorandum. Algerians not eligible for relief under joint UNCHR /​League operations”, 16/​2/​1961, Fonds 11, Series 1, Box 248. 49. UNHCR Archive:  “A. R.  Lindt (High Commissioner for Refugees) to Henry Dunning (Secretary-​General of League of Red Cross), Criteria for material assistance to refugees in Algeria, 20/​4/​1960”, Fonds 11, Series 1, Box 248. 50. Michael Barber, Blinded by Humanity. Inside the UN’s Humanitarian Operations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 33. 51. World Council of Churches Archive, Geneva:  An Ecumenical Programme to Combat Racism, 21 August 1969, 4223.1.03; “Minutes of the Sixth Commission Meeting of PCR,

476   Andrew S. Thompson 2–​6 March 1975”, 4223.2.03; PCR Commission Meeting, 24 February 1977 and “Joint Consultation on the Church and the Liberation of Southern Africa, 25–​30 November 1976”, 4223.2.04. 52. ICJ Archive, Geneva: Jean Pictet, “The Need to Restore the Laws and Customs Relating to Armed Conflicts”, Review of the International Commission of Jurists 1 (1969), 34. 53. Thompson, “Humanitarian Principles Put to the Test”, 63–​64. 54. George Aldrich, “Some Reflections on the Origins of the 177 Geneva Protocols”, 129–​137 and Medard Rwelamira, “The Significance and Contribution of the Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 1949”, in Christophe Swinarski, ed., Studies and Essays on International Humanitarian Law and Red Cross Principles (New York: Springer, 1984), 227–​236; David Forsythe, “The 1974 Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law: Some Observations”, The American Journal of International Law 69 (1975), 77–​91; Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare:  The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Routledge, 1980), 315–​329. 55. For a fuller study of detention during decolonization, see Andrew Thompson, “Restoring Hope Where All Hope Was Lost: Nelson Mandela, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Protection of Political Detainees in Apartheid South Africa”, Review of the International Committee of the Red Cross, forthcoming 2017–​2018. 56. ICRC Archive: Address by Jacques Moreillon, Delegate-​General for Africa, 23 May 1975, B AG 225 231.004. 57. ICJ Archive: Summary of a Statement made by Sean MacBride, Secretary-​General of ICJ, at meeting of European-​Atlantic Group, London, 25 April 1966, Box 97/​2. 58. ICRC Archive: Seminar Organized by OAU for African Liberation Movements en vue de la Conférence diplomatique sur le droit humanitaire, Dar-​es-​Salam, 21–​25 January 1974, B AG 132/​OAU-​018. 59. Personal correspondence with René John Wilhelm, August 2015. 60. I am grateful to Kevin O’Sullivan for this point—​some organizations swung between different techniques and approaches—​a cause of considerable internal confusion as well as giving mixed messages to their supporters. 61. I am grateful to Tony Hopkins, who kindly read a draft of this chapter, for this particular suggestion. 62. For the political beliefs of Nkrumah, see Etin E. Okon, “Kwame Nkrumah. The Fallen and Forgotten Hero of African Nationalism”, European Scientific Journal 10, no. 17 (2014),  50–​77. 63. Chinua Achebe, There Was A Country. A Personal History of Biafra (London: Penguin, 2013), 2. 64. On the intervention of the NRC in Biafra, see A. Thompson, Humanitarianism on Trial (forthcoming). 65. Charnow, ed., Henry Labouisse; Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy. Recycling Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Ch. 2. 66. See Chenjerai Hove’s obituary in the International New York Times, 27 July 2015 and his novel Bones (Harare: Baobab, 1990). 67. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Routledge, 1951).

Chapter 25

De c ol oniz at i on a nd the C old   Wa r Piero Gleijeses

Introduction In the aftermath of the Second World War, all the colonial powers—​Britain, France, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal—​were white, and all the subject people were nonwhite (with the exception of the small British colonies of Malta, Cyprus, Gibraltar, and the Falklands Islands).1 Racism—​the myth of the superiority of the white man—​was a key ingredient of colonial rule. The myth, however, had been shaken by Japan’s imperial rampage during World War II. The Japanese defeat of the British at Singapore in February 1942 was, Winston Churchill lamented, ‘the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history’.2 Japan also humiliated the French in Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the Americans in the Philippines. This proved that the white overlords could be defeated. With the single exception of the United States, these overlords emerged from the war terribly weakened at the precise moment that they needed renewed strength to reassert their rule over their rebellious subjects. The two great colonial empires in 1945 were the British and the French. Whereas Britain had fought with impressive grit, the vaunted French army had collapsed under the German onslaught. ‘French prestige suffered further through the very subordinate part which the French played in the liberation of North Africa and of France itself ’, noted US intelligence.3 The impact was felt particularly in those French territories that bordered the Mediterranean, where the Second World War had been fought: French North Africa and the French mandates in the Middle East. In the interwar period, those rebels who fought against colonial rule—​such as the Syrians, Moroccans, and Palestinians—​had been virtually on their own: they received very little help from abroad. This changed after 1945. Henceforth, the backdrop of decolonization was the Cold War. While the colonial empires crumbled, two superpowers jostled for influence in the world. As Emmanuelle Saada notes in her chapter,

478   Piero Gleijeses decolonization would come in waves, at times bloody, at times peaceful. This chapter focuses on those instances when independence was won through armed struggle. These were the cases that intersected most dramatically with the Cold War and threatened the stability of the international system. The United States was sympathetic in principle to the gradual progression of colonized people towards independence. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, often insensitive to the needs of the Third World, understood that the West—​white people—​comprised only a fragment of the world’s population and that, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, it must learn to accommodate the legitimate aspirations of ‘the great mass of mankind which is non-​white and non-​European’.4 The Cold War added urgency to this imperative: ‘there is abroad in the world a fierce and growing spirit of nationalism,’ Eisenhower warned British Prime Minister Churchill; ‘Should we try to dam it up completely, it would, like a mighty river, burst through the barriers and could create havoc. But again, like a river, if we are intelligent enough to make constructive use of this force, then the result, far from being disastrous, could redound greatly to our advantage, particularly in our struggle against the Kremlin’s power’.5 The Cold War, however, also pushed US policymakers in the opposite direction. US empathy for the colonized faced two constraints that were most significant when the struggle was violent: the colonial powers were America’s allies in the struggle against the Soviet Union; and Washington insisted that the independence movements be free of the Communist virus. Therefore, US policy towards decolonization often clashed with its rhetoric. Ideology and realpolitik led the Soviet Union to support those who fought for independence. Not only did Moscow oppose colonialism in principle, but the insurgents were fighting Washington’s friends. At times, however, realpolitik acted as a brake. For example, after the Algerian revolution began in November 1954, the Soviets hesitated for more than a year before sending weapons to the rebels for fear of antagonizing the French government.6 The Soviets and Americans were not the only outside actors on the stage of decolonization. China gave crucial aid to the Vietminh and later helped the Mozambican and Rhodesian rebels.7 Two small countries deserve pride of place: Cuba, which sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Southern Africa; and Sweden, which gave vital economic assistance to African liberation movements. The list of external actors also includes the other Scandinavian countries, Tito’s non-​aligned Yugoslavia, Moscow’s East European clients (foremost the German Democratic Republic), Nasser’s Egypt, and nongovernmental organizations such as the World Council of Churches.8 The fundamental role, however, was played by the subject peoples themselves. They fought with desperate courage and paid the highest price. The curtain rose on VE-​Day 8 May 1945 in Algeria. In the town of Sétif, as the French celebrated victory over Nazi Germany, a crowd of Algerians9 surged towards the central square. They waved the nationalist green and white flag of Abd al-​Qadir, the nineteenth-​century hero of the resistance against French colonization. They demanded independence. They took over the town. That day, and immediately after, eighty-​four Europeans—​men, women, and children—​were killed in Sétif and its environs. Then

Decolonization and the Cold War    479 the repression began, pitiless in its intensity. The French army retook Sétif and bombed more than forty remote villages from Douglas dive-​bombers supplied by the United States for the war against Germany. Vigilantes seized prisoners from jails and lynched them. Between 7,000 and 20,000 Algerians were killed, among them women and children.10 VE Day, the Triumph of Democracy, would forever be etched in the memory of Algerians as a day of horror. For all that, Algeria—​and the whole of French North Africa—​seemed quiet after the trauma of Sétif. It was in Asia that the colonial empires began crumbling.

The First Wave The United States handled its departure from the Philippines with skill and intelligence: it was, for a colonizer, the ideal model. The Americans departed in July 1946, leaving in power a conservative oligarchy they had nurtured. Eager to maintain its immense privileges, this oligarchy looked to the United States for protection and readily granted its former masters the military bases they sought. Britain faced a tougher challenge. The Indian subcontinent had been the jewel of the British Empire, but the nationalist movement there, already powerful in the 1930s, had been greatly strengthened by the war. It was probably fortunate for all concerned that in July 1945 the Labour Party won the British elections, because its leaders understood that Britain ‘simply did not possess the manpower or the economic resources necessary to coerce a restive India’.11 Nor did it have the will: after the privations of war the British people were keen to improve their living standards, not to engage in costly military adventures. India and Pakistan became independent in August 1947, amid the chaos and suffering of bloody clashes between Hindus and Muslims. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948. Nationalist pressure in Malaya was less strong than in the subcontinent and the British believed that they could maintain their supremacy in the country for a few more years. This was important because Malaya was rich in tin and rubber that were sold to the United States; this helped close the ‘dollar gap’ for the starved British Treasury. In 1948, however, a Communist-​led insurgency began; the rebels were mainly ethnic Chinese (37% of the country’s six million people). It was the first time since the 1936–​1939 Arab revolt in Palestine that the British faced a widespread insurgency, and they resorted to the same methods they had used there: ‘mass arrests, deportations, the destruction of suspects’ property and arbitrary killings’.12 The colonial authorities could rely on the support of the ethnic Malays (46% of the population), but they were also able to gain the acquiescence of the Chinese through ‘a sustained, dedicated effort that held out promise for a better life to the rural inhabitants’.13 By 1955 they had crushed the rebellion. The British victory was celebrated as a great feat of counterinsurgency, a lesson studied in far-flung places—​from Kenya, where the British faced the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s, to South Vietnam, where the Americans fought the Vietcong in the 1960s and early 1970s.

480   Piero Gleijeses Nationalist forces had been gathering strength in the interwar years in Vietnam and, to a lesser degree, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, in Indonesia nationalist leaders established a government that controlled a large part of the archipelago. It took several months before the Dutch could reestablish a significant military presence in their rebellious colony. For the next few years they alternated violence and negotiations as they sought to impose a solution that would give the islands nominal independence. By 1949 they were forced to surrender these dreams. They could not destroy the increasingly effective guerrilla resistance. And the United States, which through 1948 had observed a neutrality sympathetic to the Dutch—​fellow whites and reliable partners in Europe against the Soviet Union—​suddenly changed course. In 1949, the Americans threatened to cut off the economic aid that was essential for the recovery of the Netherlands and which had also enabled the Dutch to wage the war in the archipelago. As historian Robert McMahon writes, Washington was ‘motivated not by some altruistic attachment to the hallowed principles of self-​determination, but by more tangible factors’.14 These tangible factors were central to the Cold War: the Dutch were unable to defeat the nationalists, and the continuation of their foolhardy efforts, US officials thought, would push the moderates who led the independence movement towards Moscow. Like the Dutch in Indonesia, the French sought to reverse the tide in Indochina. They were propelled by pride, particularly important after their humiliating performance in World War II, and by greed—​Indochina had been a lucrative asset for metropolitan France. With the exception of the Communists, all the French political parties supported the colonial war. To retain popular support, the French government did not send conscripts to fight in Indochina; it relied on the regular army and colonial troops. They faced a formidable enemy: the Vietminh, a Communist-​led coalition with substantial militia forces that enjoyed widespread popular support and had a charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh. By 1949 the war was stalemated even though the Vietminh had not received any outside aid. The French controlled the cities but could not subdue the guerrillas in the countryside. But in 1950 the Chinese Communists, having defeated Jiang Jieshi, began providing the Vietminh with crucial assistance—​military advisers and weapons. The tide of war turned against France. Enter the United States. Whereas in 1949 the Truman administration had pressed the Dutch to abandon their war in Indonesia, in 1950 it began giving direct assistance to the French for their war in Indochina. In both cases, Cold War considerations were decisive, but they cut in opposite ways: in Indonesia, Washington had calculated that supporting the Dutch would benefit the Soviet Union, whereas in Indochina it concluded that supporting the French would help crush a Soviet proxy (which it considered, incorrectly, the Vietminh to be). By 1952 the United States was paying 50% of the French war costs. Even with this subsidy, French public opinion was tiring of a conflict that brought neither prestige nor profit. The Eisenhower administration, which took office in January 1953, wanted France to continue fighting. In September 1953, Secretary of State Dulles told the National Security Council that ‘The task of bringing the French to make an increased effort in Indochina had been difficult, since the prevailing mood in France . . . was to get

Decolonization and the Cold War    481 out of Indochina’. The French government would make an increased effort only if the United States would ‘assume a much larger share of the total cost’.15 By early 1954, the Eisenhower administration was paying 80% of the cost of the war, and the American general who oversaw US assistance to the French in Indochina reported that by the end of the year the French army should be able ‘to dominate all areas and bring the Vietminh to battle with victory assured to the French’.16 Three months later, the French surrendered at the fortified complex of Dien Bien Phu, in northwestern Vietnam. Dien Bien Phu was not, in military terms, a crippling blow for the French: they lost only 15,000 of the 260,000 soldiers they had deployed in Indochina.17 But it devastated their morale. It was the largest defeat ever inflicted on France by a colonial people. Among the troops that surrendered were elite units of the French army. Newsreels showing long columns of French prisoners marched away by Vietminh soldiers were electrifying for the people of the Third World and crushing for the French. In Geneva in July 1954, Paris accepted the independence of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Vietnam was divided in two, with the northern half under the Vietminh. Free elections to unify the country were promised for 1956. However, with the support of the Eisenhower administration, which feared that the Vietminh would win a free ballot, Ngo Dinh Diem, the man Washington had handpicked to govern South Vietnam, cancelled the elections. The Cold War triggered the US decision to oppose free elections in Vietnam; the Cold War—​and hubris—​propelled the United States to try nation-​building in Vietnam. The attempt ended ignominiously twenty years later as the North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon and American helicopters hightailed it out.

The Middle East At the end of World War I, London and Paris had divided the spoils of the Ottoman empire—​France would rule over Syria and Lebanon, Britain over Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. When they met resistance, the new masters responded with violence. The French bombarded Damascus into submission in July 1920 and again in October 1925, and the British put down revolts in Iraq in 1920–​1921 with repeated aerial bombings. However, the British were from the outset in a stronger position than the French: it was their troops that had defeated the Turks and occupied the region when the war ended. They were also more skilful than the French in dealing with the local elites. The Second World War shattered France’s power and prestige in the Middle East. As the war drew to a close, the government of Charles de Gaulle was willing to acknowledge the independence of Syria and Lebanon, but sought to constrain that independence with treaties that granted France special economic and military privileges. Flexing their muscle, in May 1945 the French bombarded Damascus yet again, killing hundreds of civilians. It was for naught. ‘The wanton bombardment of the ancient city of Damascus,’ a journalist wrote, was the ‘racist spasm of a defeated imperial power’.18 The French did

482   Piero Gleijeses not have the strength to impose their will in Syria and Lebanon over the opposition of the local populations as well as the international community. Even the United States and Britain wanted them out. (They did not want to alienate Arab leaders who were sympathetic to the West.) After protracted, acrimonious negotiations, France withdrew from Syria and Lebanon in 1946, unconditionally. The British were more nimble than the French in the Middle East, and they had better cards. They enjoyed the prestige of having defeated Germany and occupying the Middle East during the war. They had already granted nominal independence to Iraq in 1930. In 1946, they granted independence to Transjordan. Both countries were loyal British clients—​in Jordan (Transjordan’s name after 1949) the commander of the army and all the senior officers were British; in Iraq, the British retained two powerful air bases. It was the kind of decolonization Washington appreciated: gradual, devolving power to moderate pro-​Western forces. Britain failed miserably, however, in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had stated that there would be a Jewish National Home in Palestine (at the time, the Jews constituted only 8% of the country’s population). The aim of the British leaders who drafted the declaration—​and of their Zionist counterparts—​was that Britain would control Palestine until, through immigration, the Jews had become a majority in the country. Then Palestine would become independent—​as a Jewish state and a grateful British client. ‘My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state’, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour told a group of Zionist leaders in 1918. Later he explained: ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-​old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’. In the words of an Israeli historian, ‘This was to be the Palestinians’ tragedy: They were seen as insignificant natives and usurpers, whereas the Jews were viewed both as Europeans and as the rightful owners of Palestine’.19 By 1945, there were 560,000 Jews and 1,200,000 Arabs in Palestine. The fate of the mandate had become a rallying cry for Arabs throughout the Middle East and a weakened, bankrupt Britain had to take into account their sensitivities. It therefore supported the creation of a bi-​national state in Palestine, as the Arabs demanded, rather than partition. This went against the will of the Zionists. Above all, it antagonized the United States, which favoured partition. Britain could not afford to quarrel with its senior partner, who provided vital economic aid and protection against the Soviet Union. In February 1947 London turned the fate of Palestine over to the UN General Assembly. This was the rare case during the Cold War in which Americans and Soviets stood side by side. Stalin had decided that a Zionist state would be friendly to the Soviet Union—​ friendlier than the kings who ruled the Arab countries. Urged on by both Washington and Moscow, the General Assembly approved partition, giving the Jewish state 55% of Palestine. When the British left, on 14 May 1948, troops from five Arab countries—​ Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—​entered Palestine. But the Jewish settlers (reorganized since 14 May into the state of Israel) enjoyed superiority in numbers as well as in weapons: at Stalin’s behest, Czechoslovakia had sold them heavy arms. When the

Decolonization and the Cold War    483 fighting ended in 1949 Israel controlled 78% of Palestine and it had cleansed its territory of most of the Arabs—​only 150,000 remained; 730,000 had fled. The Palestinian fiasco notwithstanding, through the mid-​1950s the British remained the paramount foreign power in the Middle East. But Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, with his fierce brand of pan-​Arab nationalism, was intent on undermining British influence in the region. London’s attempt to overthrow him in late 1956 failed utterly, dealing a heavy blow to British prestige. Jordan remained pro-​Western, but henceforth it would be Washington’s client, not London’s. In July 1958, a military coup hurled Iraq onto the neutralist path. Britain was left in the Middle East with the fragments of empire: Kuwait, Bahrain, the Gulf Emirates, and Aden. There, decolonization would be achieved smoothly in the 1960s, except for Aden, where a bloody guerrilla war forced the British out in 1967.

Algeria The French considered Algeria an integral part of their country. Close to one million Europeans lived there in 1954, dominating some nine million Arabs and Berbers. But in November 1954, a few months after Dien Bien Phu, the Algerian war of independence began. It would be a conflict of startling brutality. In the pursuit of a just cause—​their country’s independence—​the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front (FLN) perpetrated many crimes, killing thousands of noncombatants, not only French, but also Algerians deemed collaborators or opponents. The French army and police responded with far more massive crimes, killing tens of thousands of noncombatants, torturing and raping.20 In late 1956, the FLN brought the war to Algiers, launching a campaign of urban terrorism. Bombs were hidden in baskets left in public places frequented by the French. Women and children were among the victims. In Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, a French journalist asked the head of the terrorist network, who had just been captured, how the FLN could perpetrate such cowardly crimes. ‘Of course if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier’, was the response. ‘Give us your bombers and you can have our baskets’. These terrorist tactics provoked horror in the West, but they were the terror tactics used by the Americans during the Second World War: the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were designed to slaughter civilians in order to break the will of the enemy. The FLN did not have the sophisticated weapons of the Americans or, for that matter, of the French. Through its urban terrorism, it sought to demoralize the French people so that they would no longer support the war. The French army won the battle of Algiers, waged for much of 1957, through the widening use of torture and the murder of thousands. The bodies of the victims, historian Martin Evans writes, were disposed of ‘either by incineration or dumping them by helicopter into the sea. . . . Although there was no written order sanctioning torture

484   Piero Gleijeses the army was verbally encouraged to use it by [Minister-​Resident Robert] Lacoste, [Army Secretary Max] Lejeune and [Defence Minister Maurice] Bourgès-​Maunoury’.21 The government that presided over such horrors was led by a socialist, Guy Mollet, and many of its members had fought in the resistance during World War II; but in Algeria they resorted to methods the Nazis had used against them in France. In March 1957, Hubert Beuve-​Méry wrote in Le Monde: ‘From now on the French will have to accept that they can no longer condemn the butchers of Ouradour and the torturers of the Gestapo in the same way they could ten years ago.’22 Whereas the Vietminh fought for three years after World War II before receiving foreign aid, the FLN guerrillas secured weapons from Nasser soon after the insurrection began. Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, China, and Cuba also supplied munitions.23 On Algeria’s borders, Morocco and Tunisia, former French protectorates that had become independent in 1956, offered the FLN a rear base. In the United States, the CIA understood early on that Paris would be unable to crush the insurrection, which would fester and sap France’s energy. Therefore, the Eisenhower administration discreetly urged the French to agree to Algerian self-​determination, but Cold War considerations trumped Washington’s anxieties: the United States continued to provide the economic and military aid that helped Paris wage the war, because France was an important (if difficult) ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. With the support of the non-​aligned movement and the Soviet Bloc, the FLN was able to mount a strong international diplomatic campaign that kept the French on the defensive. Above all, the French people tired of the war—​of its financial cost, and the human cost too. In 1956, the French government had begun sending conscripts and reservists to Algeria, to the deep distress of their families. By year’s end there were well over 400,000 French soldiers there. As the French wearied of war, they concluded that not even victory would be desirable: to maintain the Algerians as colonial subjects would deepen France’s international isolation and guarantee a return of the insurrection, but to make them citizens was repugnant to most French because the Algerians were not white, they were Muslim, and there were too many of them. ‘Do you believe that the French polity could absorb ten million Muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty million and the day after that forty?’, President de Gaulle asked an aide. ‘How could we prevent them from coming to settle in the metropole? . . . My village would no longer be called Colombey-​ les-​Deux-​Églises but Colombey-​les-​Deux-​Mosquées!’24 In 1962 France gave up and Algeria became independent.

The Second Wave: Sub-​Saharan Africa The colonial powers had faced no major challenges in sub-​Saharan Africa in the first decade after World War II. Jailing, torturing, and killing Africans was routine, but not practised on a large scale, except in Madagascar (1947–​1948) and Kenya (1952–​1956), where there were major revolts.25

Decolonization and the Cold War    485 The French put down the insurrection in Madagascar with ‘exceptional ferocity’, a French historian writes.26 The US consulate in Tananarive reported that entire villages were sacked and burned; torture and wholesale executions were commonplace. ‘The French frequently loaded prisoners-​of-​war into airplanes and tossed them out alive high over areas supporting the insurrection’.27 By December 1948, approximately 550 Europeans and 90,000 natives had died. In France, the Communist Party alone raised its voice against the repression. The Truman administration, so vocal about Soviet violence in Eastern Europe, looked the other way: it suspected that the rebel leaders were pro-​Communist, and it did not want to criticize French Prime Minister Paul Ramadier (who had expelled the Communist Party from the ruling coalition in May 1947). Britain was equally savage in Kenya where it crushed the revolt of the Mau Mau. In late 1956, as the British fulminated against the Soviet invasion of Hungary, they were running a network of detention camps in Kenya where torture and rape were endemic. The opposition Labour Party criticized the government’s actions but was reluctant to press too hard. ‘People were much less inclined to care about colonial atrocities when African lives were at stake’, writes historian Caroline Elkins.28 There are no declassified records of how many Africans were killed or of how many died in the detention camps, but the toll ran to at least tens of thousands. By the late 1950s, however, Paris and London were ready to make concessions to the Africans’ growing demands for self-​determination. Repression was expensive, and it entailed a diplomatic cost—​the ire of the Third World and the displeasure of the United States which feared that the metropoles’ intransigence would pave the way for Soviet meddling. (US officials also feared, however, that ‘premature independence would be . . . harmful to our interests in Africa’, and they were reluctant to offend European allies. Therefore, the US role was modest, and its influence over French and British decision-​making must not be exaggerated.)29 The decisive factor was that the British and French people were coming to the conclusion that maintaining their African colonies was too costly. In happier times the ‘White Man’s burden’ had been rhetoric masking the sordid reality of the exploitation of the native populations; now the burden was becoming reality. Under the glare of international public opinion, colonial rule could be justified only through economic aid to ‘uplift the natives’, and this would be expensive. In 1958, upon his return to power, de Gaulle offered France’s African colonies the choice between independence and association with France in a French Community headed by the French president, with the key ministries held by French officials. With the exception of Sékou Touré’s Guinea, all the colonies voted in favour of the Community, but soon they demanded more: independence. De Gaulle understood that trying to delay the inevitable would risk turning the local elites into enemies, whereas promptly granting independence would allow France to retain economic and political influence. In 1960, almost all the French territories in Africa received their independence, and most maintained close ties with Paris. The British had adopted a similar policy for the same reason: to retain influence. They too were largely successful. Before departing, British officials destroyed thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful crimes their country had committed

486   Piero Gleijeses during the final years of its rule. (Colonial officials were told that ‘it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-​free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast’.) Those documents that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain and eventually 8,800 files from thirty-​seven former colonies came to light in 2011.30 The Belgians granted independence to their giant colony, the Congo, in June 1960. They were impressed by the example of the French and the British, and intimidated by the sudden wave of riots in the colony that had begun in January 1959. But unlike the French and the British, they had taken no steps whatsoever to prepare the Congo for independence, and within a few days it descended into chaos. It was only in late 1965 that the situation was stabilized, thanks to an army of white mercenaries raised, armed, and directed by the CIA to crush a revolt that US policymakers deemed—​wrongly—​to be Communist-​inspired.31 While the US contribution to the independence of sub-​Saharan Africa was slight, sub-​ Saharan Africa’s contribution to the democratization of the United States was substantial. When John Kennedy addressed the nation on 20 January 1961—​‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’—​the United States and South Africa were the only countries in the world where people were denied the right to vote because of their race, and where intermarriage was a crime. When sixteen African countries became independent in 1960, however, segregation in the United States became a matter of realpolitik. The United States was competing with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of black Africans, but it was difficult to convince Africans that the United States was the City on the Hill when African newspapers were saturated with reports of the violence inflicted on African-​Americans by their white countrymen, and hundreds of black diplomats experienced the indignities that were the daily fare of black Americans. These awkward realities in the context of the Cold War helped Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, push the civil rights legislation of 1964–​1965 through a reluctant Congress. Washington heartily approved French and British decolonization in Africa, lamented Brussels’s botched efforts in the Congo, and despaired at Lisbon’s intransigence. The Portuguese dictatorship opposed independence for its African colonies. As a result, armed struggle began in the early 1960s in Angola, Guinea-​Bissau, and Mozambique. This posed a serious problem for US policymakers because the US Air Force had critical military facilities at the Lajes air base in the Azores. From the Kennedy through the Nixon administrations, US officials asserted that the United States sold weapons to Portugal only on condition that they not be used in Africa. But the Portuguese diverted the weapons to their African territories anyway. ‘We would have been fools not to have done so’, a Portuguese general remarked; ‘Now and then the Americans would grumble. It was all for show’.32 Washington’s key European allies required no such fig-​leaf: Britain, France, and West Germany sold Portugal arms, no strings attached. The honour of the West was upheld by Sweden and the other Nordic countries. On 9 December 1968, the Swedish foreign minister made what was, by western standards, an extraordinary statement: ‘We are in touch with a number of leaders of the African

Decolonization and the Cold War    487 liberation movements. We are prepared to help . . . It is humanitarian aid that is in question. Aid that puts the members of those movements in a better position to continue their struggle for the liberation of their people’.33 Thus began a journey that saw Sweden provide assistance to liberation movements from Guinea-​Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Namibia, and South Africa—​even though these movements got their arms from the Soviet Union (and, to a lesser extent, China). The Swedes accepted the right of those who were fighting for their freedom to receive aid from anyone willing to give it. They also believed that extending aid from the West was the most effective way to counter Communist influence. Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Holland followed in Sweden’s footsteps.34

The Western Hemisphere Decolonization in the British Caribbean was relatively peaceful, at least by African standards. Between 1962 and 1966 the three main island colonies—​Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados—​became independent; they were followed over the next two decades by the other British Caribbean possessions, except for a few territories, such as the Cayman Islands, that decided to remain British dependencies. On the mainland, British Honduras became independent Belize in 1981. The one sore spot was British Guiana. In 1957, free elections had brought Cheddi Jagan, an Indian, to the position of the colony’s chief minister. Jagan was a fuzzy, eclectic thinker, but he believed in political democracy, he was scrupulously honest, and he was eager to improve the lot of the population and bridge the racial divide between Indians and blacks, the colony’s two major population groups. He advocated a neutralist foreign policy, sought good relations with East and West, and admired the Cuban revolution. Some British officials were impressed by Jagan, others disliked him, but their message to Washington was consistent: Jagan was not a Communist, and he posed no threat to the United States. Guiana, however, was in the US backyard, and the Kennedy administration would not tolerate even the hint of a threat. Kennedy’s aide Richard Goodwin framed the issue best when he told the president that the United States could not permit neutralism in the Western Hemisphere. Jagan thought his country could ‘be an India, Ghana, or Yugoslavia’. Kennedy decided that Jagan had to be ousted. Therefore, as historian Stephen Rabe has written, the CIA ‘took extraordinary measures to deny the people of British Guiana the right to national self-​determination. U.S. officials and private citizens incited murder, arson, bombings, and fear and loathing in British Guiana. Indeed, the covert U.S. intervention ignited racial warfare between blacks and Indians’. On 16 February 1962, ‘aided and abetted’ by the CIA, arsonists and rioters set the colony’s capital, Georgetown, ablaze.35 Britain was the major ally of the United States during the Cold War, and British and American leaders spoke of the ‘special relationship’ that existed between their two countries. But the drama of British Guiana is a tale of American arrogance and British

488   Piero Gleijeses servility. The British urged the Kennedy administration to refrain from intervening against Jagan, but they averted their eyes as the CIA wreaked havoc in their colony. By the time British Guiana became independent in 1966, power was in the hands of Washington’s protégé, Forbes Burnham, whom the CIA itself had branded ‘an opportunist, a thief, and a racist’.36 By the 1970s, only three thorny decolonization issues remained in the Western Hemisphere: the Falkland Islands, occupied by Britain in 1833 and claimed by Argentina; the Canal Zone, which sliced Panama in two; and the Guantanamo base, the result of a treaty imposed by the United States on Cuba in 1903. Thanks to President Jimmy Carter, the Canal Zone was finally returned to Panama, but the Falklands are still British, and Guantanamo remains in US hands.

Africa in the 1970s By the end of the 1960s most African countries were independent. The major exceptions were: the Portuguese colonies; Namibia, occupied by South Africa; and Rhodesia, ruled by a white minority regime that had proclaimed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 because London was planning to lead the country towards majority rule—​that is, independence with a black government. The guerrillas who fought against these white regimes seemed impotent. The stage was dominated by Washington’s friends—​apartheid South Africa and authoritarian Portugal. However, in April 1974 Portuguese military officers overthrew their country’s dictatorship. They moved quickly towards decolonization:  Guinea-​Bissau became independent in September 1974 and Mozambique the following June. In both countries, there had been only one guerrilla movement, which inherited power in a smooth transition. In Angola, however, there were three guerrilla movements, and they had fought each other as bitterly as they had the Portuguese. The leaders of the MPLA espoused an eclectic interpretation of Marxism-​Leninism that was, Yugoslav officials noted, ‘adapted to the specific conditions and needs of Angola’.37 Even US officials who were alarmed by the movement’s communist proclivities noted that the MPLA ‘stood head and shoulders above the other two groups’38 (the FNLA and UNITA), which were led by corrupt, unprincipled—​but anticommunist—​men. The new Portuguese government and the three Angolan movements agreed that a transitional government would rule Angola until independence on 11 November 1975. However, civil war erupted months earlier in the spring. With Washington’s collusion, South African troops invaded the country. Pretoria’s motivation was to shore up apartheid at home and eliminate any threat to its illegal rule over Namibia. South African officials feared the MPLA’s implacable hostility to apartheid and its promise to assist the liberation movements of southern Africa. (By contrast, UNITA and FNLA had offered Pretoria their friendship.) Although US officials knew that an MPLA victory would not threaten American strategic or economic interests, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed that success in Angola—​the installation

Decolonization and the Cold War    489 of a client regime—​would provide a cheap boost to US prestige and to his own reputation, which had been pummeled by the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975. He cast the struggle in stark cold war terms: the freedom-​loving FNLA and UNITA would defeat the Soviet-​backed MPLA.39 The war, however, did not progress as Kissinger hoped. The South Africans were on the verge of seizing Luanda and crushing the MPLA when 36,000 Cuban soldiers poured into Angola and pushed them out. Castro sent troops because of his commitment to what he has called ‘the most beautiful cause’: the struggle against apartheid.40 He understood that the victory of the Pretoria–​Washington axis would have tightened the grip of white domination over the people of southern Africa. Even Kissinger acknowledged that Castro ‘was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power’.41 The tidal wave unleashed by the Cuban victory washed over southern Africa. Its psychological impact and the hopes it aroused are illustrated by two statements from across the political divide in apartheid South Africa. In February 1976, as Cuban troops were pushing the South African army towards the Namibian border, a South African military analyst wrote:  ‘In Angola, Black troops—​Cubans and Angolans—​ have defeated White troops in military exchanges  . . .  and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has enjoyed and exploited over 300  years of colonialism and empire, is slipping away. White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in Angola, and Whites who have been there know it’.42 The ‘White Giants’ had retreated and black Africans celebrated. ‘Black Africa is riding the crest of a wave generated by the Cuban success in Angola’, noted The World, South Africa’s major black newspaper. ‘Black Africa is tasting the heady wine of the possibility of realizing the dream of total liberation.’43 The impact was more than psychological: Cuba’s victory in Angola marked the real beginning of Namibia’s war of independence. As Pretoria had feared, the MPLA government opened its country to the Namibian guerrillas, as well as those from South Africa and Rhodesia. It became a tripartite effort: the Cubans provided most of the instructors, the Soviets the weapons, and the Angolans the land.44

The Last Round It was in southern Africa, between 1976 and 1990, that the final battles of decolonization during the Cold War were fought. The white minority regime in Rhodesia was the first to surrender. It was defeated by the growing onslaught of the guerrillas armed by the Soviet Union and China, as well as by the implacable determination of the Carter administration to bring peace to the land. This meant that Washington insisted that no solution was possible unless the guerrillas were allowed to participate in free, internationally supervised elections. As Nancy Mitchell masterfully demonstrates, Carter was motivated by human rights considerations and by realpolitik: he believed that the white regime was doomed and the longer the war continued, the greater would be the opportunity

490   Piero Gleijeses for Moscow to extend its influence.45 Finally, in April 1980, the elections demanded by Carter took place and Rhodesia became the independent country of Zimbabwe. The Namibian guerrillas fought courageously, earning even their enemies’ admiration, but they were overwhelmed by South Africa’s military might. Pretoria adamantly opposed the independence of Namibia, fearing the impact on its own restive black population. It also sought to topple the MPLA government in Luanda. The South Africans would have succeeded had not the Cuban troops remained in Angola; even the CIA conceded that the Cubans were ‘necessary to preserve Angolan independence’.46 From 1981 to 1987 the South African army launched bruising invasions of southern Angola. But in November 1987, Castro decided to send powerful reinforcements to push the South Africans out of Angola once and for all, and to force them to accept the independence of Namibia.47 The Cuban troops gained the upper hand in Angola. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that the Cubans were in a position ‘to launch a well-​supported offensive into Namibia’, while the South African military was grim about its own prospects, noting that ‘We must do our utmost to avoid a confrontation’.48 Pretoria capitulated. It withdrew unconditionally from Angola and agreed to UN-​supervised elections in Namibia. Namibia became independent in March 1990. Soon apartheid collapsed in South Africa, and in 1994 Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president.

Looking Back In the century that followed the 1814–​1815 Congress of Vienna, the white powers conquered the nonwhite world. This was made possible by technological innovations: the telegraph, steamships, railways, and, above all, modern weapons. The ease of the conquest reinforced the myth of white superiority. The First World War did not significantly weaken the grip of the white masters. True, the German empire was defeated, but its colonies were parcelled out among the white victors, with tiny fragments going to Japan. The anticolonial movement grew in the interwar years, particularly in India, but it was World War II that opened the floodgates. The British, French, and Dutch emerged weakened from the war, whereas the subject peoples were emboldened. The colonial powers retained their military superiority, but it was blunted: unlike those who had rebelled against colonial rule before World War II, those who fought for independence after 1945 received outside assistance (the major exceptions were the rebels in Madagascar, Kenya, and Malaya). Furthermore, every victory of a subject people gave heart to the others. India’s independence in 1947 was a clarion of hope, and the Vietminh victory over the French in 1954 reinforced the heady feeling that the white man could be defeated, a particularly precious example for the Algerians who would challenge those same French. Algeria’s independence—​France’s defeat—​was a defining moment. The Cuban victory over the South African army in 1976 sent shock waves throughout southern Africa. ‘The credibility of our military is being questioned in many circles,’ the South African

Decolonization and the Cold War    491 Defence Force lamented in the wake of the Angolan fiasco. ‘This is certainly one of the reasons that . . . the morale of the revolutionary movement has improved.’49 In the century prior to 1914, colonial conquest had been spurred by the fact that the costs of subjugating and ruling the native people had been low. After World War II this basic economic calculation persisted. The French and British people continued to support colonial rule as long as the costs remained low. Few expressed moral revulsion at the violence their governments inflicted on the subject people. This was not because the crimes were secret. As Caroline Elkins demonstrates in her painstaking study of British repression in Kenya, the problem was not lack of information; the problem was that ‘few Britons were interested in human rights abuses occurring in the empire’.50 In Algeria, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from metropolitan France were witness to, and often participants in, the horrors of the repression; their letters to their loved ones in France ‘did not hold back’.51 Like the Germans during World War II, many British and French did not want to know. (Nonetheless, the role of the French Communist Party must be noted. During the Vietnamese and the Algerian wars of independence, and during the revolt in Madagascar, it denounced the violence of the repression and it was the first, despite its hesitations and contradictions, to demand the independence of Vietnam and Algeria.)52 The Cold War overlapped with the struggle for decolonization. The ‘hot’ Cold War, where blood was shed, was fought almost exclusively in the periphery, in the Third World. As Nancy Mitchell writes, ‘The Cold War was a contest that consisted of shadow-​ boxing in areas of marginal significance because real war in places that really counted—​ Berlin, Washington, and Moscow—​was unwinnable’.53 Part of this war on the periphery was intertwined with decolonization. But it is impossible to draw a simple line between the Cold War and decolonization. The connections between them depend on the specifics of each case. Take, for example, Vietnam. The Cold War prompted the United States to assist the French in their efforts to retain control in Indochina, and US aid prolonged the war. However, the only outside aid the Vietminh received as it fought the French came from China. To what extent would Beijing have helped the Vietminh had it not feared that a French Vietnam would serve as a base for US aggression against China? If neither Washington nor Beijing had intervened, the stalemate existing in 1949 might have continued at a lower level of intensity. Whether the final toll in blood and suffering would have been less is impossible to determine. Nor is it possible to assert with absolute certainty that the war would have lasted longer, or whether, without the lure of US assistance, the French would have given up sooner. At Suez, on the other hand, the impact of the Cold War was clearer. Had the Franco-​ British-​Israeli attack against Nasser succeeded in late 1956, Paris and London would have imposed a neocolonial settlement on Egypt. The attack provoked worldwide indignation and an oil embargo against France and Britain, but what doomed the operation was the strong response of the United States. The key reason impelling President Eisenhower to force the aggressors to retreat was competition with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the Arabs. If the United States failed to take a firm stand against the attack, Eisenhower told the National Security Council on 1 November 1956,

492   Piero Gleijeses ‘we lose the whole Arab world’.54 In this instance, the Cold War played an important role in preventing the return of a newly independent country to a semi-​colonial state. Southern Africa offers a complex case study of the intricate relationship between the Cold War and decolonization. It is likely that the United States would have been less dependent on the Azores without the Cold War. But what would have been the impact on the Portuguese war effort of a US refusal to supply weapons when France, England, and West Germany were willing to sell Lisbon arms with no strings attached? Would these countries have acted differently without the Cold War? Furthermore, would Moscow have supplied weapons to the guerrillas had it not been locked in a confrontation with the United States? There are no clear answers. South Africa invaded Angola in 1975 to defend apartheid. The Ford administration, on the other hand, was motivated by multiple factors that ranged from Kissinger’s ego to the Cold War. For the subsequent fifteen years Pretoria’s policy in the region continued to be driven by the defence of apartheid, and Washington’s by the Cold War. It is likely that without the Cold War President Carter would have established diplomatic relations with Angola and exerted real pressure on South Africa to allow free elections in Namibia, while the Reagan administration would not have comforted the South Africans in their war of aggression against Angola and in their refusal to allow free elections in Namibia. Turn the focus to Havana. Between 1975 and 1988 Castro helped change the course of history in southern Africa. Castro was motivated above all by his hatred for apartheid and his deeply held belief that it was Cuba’s duty to help the people of the Third World achieve their liberation—​these reasons transcended the Cold War. But Cuba could not have maintained its army in Angola without the massive economic and military aid it received from the Soviet Union. There may have been an element of idealism in the Kremlin’s policy in southern Africa, a sense of internationalist duty that hearkened to the origins of the Soviet Union. But Cold War considerations—​the confrontation with the United States—​were decisive. Without the Cold War the Soviet Union would not have underwritten the Cuban presence in Africa and there would have been no Cuban troops to confront the South Africans—​neither in 1975 nor in the years that followed. What then? Would US pressure have sufficed to restrain Pretoria? Or should we conclude that in southern Africa the Cold War had a beneficial impact because it made it possible for the Cuban troops to stop the South Africans? Too many variables; too many uncertainties. Only a few general conclusions are possible. The colonial powers—​France, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and South Africa—​were not motivated by the Cold War as they fought to retain control of their colonies; they were impelled by greed and the pursuit of prestige. As for the United States, it was, in principle, sympathetic to the end of colonial rule; it welcomed British decolonization in the Indian subcontinent and gently urged London and Paris to lead their African colonies towards self-​determination. Washington would also have liked the French to grant independence to their Indochinese possessions and to accept the inevitable—​independence—​in Algeria, just as it would have liked the Portuguese to grant sovereignty to their African colonies. But when armed struggle broke out between

Decolonization and the Cold War    493 the colonized and the colonizer, the Americans—​bowing to their perceived desiderata of the Cold War—​sided with the colonizer. The United States gave the French the arms they needed to prosecute their war in Algeria; it prodded them to keep fighting in Indochina and offered them the means to do so; and it gave the Portuguese weapons to deny Africans independence. None of this was inevitable: US policymakers could have made different choices. They could have understood that the Vietminh were not Soviet proxies; they could have challenged the French over Algeria; and they could have defied Portugal’s blackmail over the Azores, as some senior officials urged President Kennedy to do.55 The imperatives of the Cold War could have been interpreted in different ways, as was evident on the two occasions when the United States supported the colonized: Truman in Indonesia in 1949 and Carter in Rhodesia. Finally, Moscow. The Soviet role was not significant when decolonization proceeded peacefully. Thus, it was the pressure of Indian nationalism, not Cold War considerations, that made the British surrender their empire in the Indian subcontinent. But when the imperial powers’ resistance led to armed struggle, the Soviets were on the side of the rebels. At times, their aid was meagre. They gave the Vietminh diplomatic support but no weapons or other material assistance, and they let China carry the burden. However, would Beijing have dared to do so, without the protection of the Soviet alliance? Moscow’s aid to the Algerian rebels was modest, but its assistance to the rebels in sub-​Saharan Africa—​Portuguese Guinea, Angola, Namibia, Rhodesia, and South Africa—​was crucial. Furthermore, the Soviet Union made it possible for Cuba to intervene in southern Africa. Today, only one major colonial problem remains: the lands occupied by Israel since 1967. Israel claims, at times, that it is willing to accept a Palestinian state, but it continues to expand the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Half a million Jewish settlers make a vicious joke of talk of a Palestinian state. Meanwhile the United States continues to provide Israel with vital economic and military aid and there is no Soviet bloc to counter it.

Notes 1. Malta gained independence in 1964 peacefully; Cyprus in 1960 after a bloody struggle. In 1967 Gibraltarians voted to remain under British sovereignty and since 1981 they have full British citizenship. Since 1983 Falklands islanders are also full British citizens. 2. Winston Churchill, The Second World War. 7: The Onslaught of Japan (London: Cassell & Company, 1951), 81. 3. US Department of State (hereafter DOS), Office of Research and Intelligence, “The French Position in French North Africa Since VE Day”, nd, no. 3520.4, Kesaris, Reel 6. 4. Dulles to Holmes, 12 July 1955, quoted by Matthew Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-​South Conflict during the Algerian War of Independence”, American Historical Review, 105, no. 3 (2000): 741. 5. Eisenhower to Churchill, 22 July 1954, DDE Diaries Series, box 4, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS (hereafter DDEL).

494   Piero Gleijeses 6. Letter to GPRA Prime Minister, “Mission Summary”, in Pierre Asselin, ed., “The Algerian Revolution and the Communist Bloc”, no.  4, e-​dossier no.  62, Cold War International History Project, Wilson Center, Washington, DC. 7. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 118–​ 138; Vladimir Shubin, Sud’bi Zimbabwe (Moscow:  Institut Africa RAN, 2015). 8. For the Scandinavian countries and for the World Council of Churches see below, n. 34; for the German Democratic Republic, see Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom:  Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–​ 1991 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 544, n. 126; for Yugoslavia see Jovan Čavošky, “ ‘Yugoslavia’s Help Was Extraordinary’: Yugoslavia’s Political and Material Assistance and the MPLA’s Rise to Power, 1961–​1975”, Journal of Cold War Studies, forthcoming; Jovan Čavoški, “Jugoslavija, Alžir, nesvrstane zemlje i velike sile u Hladnom ratu, 1954–​1962”, in Miladin Milošević, ed., Jugoslavija—​ Alžir:  Zbornik radova sa naučne konferencije (Belgrade:  Arhiv Jugoslavije, 2013), 101–​140; Katarina Todić, “A Traditional Friendship? France and Yugoslavia in the Cold War World, 1944–​1969” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2015); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions:  Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–​1976 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 201–​202. 9. Throughout this chapter the word Algerian refers only to the Arab and Berber inhabitants of the country. 10. For the Europeans I follow the detailed count of Radouane Ainad Tabet, Le mouvement du 8 mai 1945 en Algérie (Algiers: Office des Publications Universitaires, 1985), 73. As Ainad Tabet points out, it is impossible to give even an approximate number of the Algerian victims of French repression and the estimates vary wildly. On S̀étif, see also Annie Rey-​ Goldzeiguer, Aux Origines de la guerre d’Algérie, 1940–​1945, de Mers-​el-​Kébir aux massacres du Nord-​Constantinois (Paris:  La Découverte, 2002); Jean-​Louis Planche, Sétif 1945. Histoire d’un massacre annoncé (Paris: Perrin, 2006); Roger Vétillard, Sétif, Mai 1945. Massacres en Algérie (Paris: Editions de Paris, 2008). 11. Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 212. 12. Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight:  Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 136. 13. Wm. Roger Louis, “The Dissolution of the British Empire in the Era of Vietnam”, The American Historical Review, 107, no. 5 (2002): 10. 14. Robert McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War:  The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–​49 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 304. 15. National Security Council minutes, 10 September 1953, Whitman File, NSC Series, box 4, DDEL. 16. “Summary of O’Daniel Report on Indochina”, 9 February 1954, Freedom of Information Act. 17. Jacques de Folin, Indochine 1940–​1955. La fin d’un rêve (Paris: Perrin, 1993), 321. 18. Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Arab Independence:  Riad el-​Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 577. 19. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims:  A History of the Zionist—​Arab Conflict, 1881–​1999 (New York: Vintage, 1999), 75. Balfour quotes from ibid., 75–​76. 20. Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’armée française pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–​1962 (Paris: Folio, 2001); Sylvie Thénault, Une drôle de justice: les magistrats et l’armée française pendant la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2001).

Decolonization and the Cold War    495 21. Martin Evans, Algeria:  France’s Undeclared War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 206. 22. [Hubert Beuve-​Méry], “Sommes-​nous les ‘vaincus d’Hitler’?” Le Monde, 13 March 1956, 1. 23. Asselin, ed., “The Algerian Revolution and the Communist Bloc”, esp. documents no. 4 and 7; Čavoški, “Jugoslavija, Alžir”; Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions,  31–​32. 24. Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle: La France redevient la France (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 52. 25. The revolt in Kenya had been crushed by 1956, but the state of emergency was maintained until January 1960. 26. Jean-​Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic 1944–​1958 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), 116. 27. Douglas Little, “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa: The United States, France, and the Madagascar Revolt of 1947”, Pacific Historical Review 59, no. 4 (1990): 540. (Little’s essay is based on the reports of the US consulate in Tananarive.) See also Jacques Tronchon, L’insurrection malgache de 1947: essai d’interprétation historique (Paris: F. Maspéro, 1974); Jean Eugene Duval, La Revolte des sagaies. Madagascar 1947 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002). 28. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning:  The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New  York:  Holt Paperbacks, 2005), 309. See also David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 29. NSC, “Statement of U.S. Policy toward Africa South of the Sahara prior to Calendar Year 1960”, 23 August 1957, DOS, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–​57 (hereafter FRUS followed by date), Washington, DC, 1989, 18: 79. On the US role James Hubbard, The United States and the End of British Colonial Rule in Africa, 1941–​1968 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011) is useful although he overstates the case. For a more sober analysis, see Ebere Nwaubani, The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950–​ 1960 (Rochester, NY:  Boydell and Brewer, 2001), and James Meriwether, “ ‘A Torrent Overrunning Everything:’ Africa and the Eisenhower Administration”, in Kathryn Statler and Andrew Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 175–​196. 30. “Britain Destroyed Records of Colonial Crimes”, The Guardian, 17 April 2012. See also Mandy Banton, “Destroy? ‘Migrate?’ Conceal? British Strategies for the Disposal of Sensitive Records of Colonial Administrations at Independence”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 2 (2012): 321–​335; Caroline Elkins, “Archives, Intelligence and Secrecy:  The Cold War and the End of the British Empire”, in Leslie James and Elizabeth Leake, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War:  Negotiating Independence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 257–​283. 31. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 57–​184; Jeffrey Michaels, “Breaking the Rules: The CIA and Counterinsurgency in the Congo 1964–​ 1965”, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 25, no. 1 (2012): 130–​159; Klaas Voss, Washingtons Söldner: Verdeckte US-​ Interventionen im Kalten Krieg und ihre Folgen (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014), 33–​196. 32. General Francisco da Costa Gomes, quoted in José Antunes, Nixon e Caetano: Promessas e abandono (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1992), 110. 33. Quoted by Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2002), 2: 52. 34. Piero Gleijeses, “Scandinavia and the Liberation of Southern Africa”, International History Review 27, no. 2 (2005): 324–​331; Sellström, Sweden; Tor Sellström, ed., Liberation

496   Piero Gleijeses in Southern Africa—​Regional and Swedish Voices (Uppsala:  Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999); Tore Linné Eriksen, ed., Norway and National Liberation in Southern Africa (Uppsala:  Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2000); Christopher Munthe Morgenstierne, Denmark and National Liberation in Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003); Iina Soiri and Pekka Peltola, Finland and National Liberation in Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999). 35. See Stephen Rabe’s pathbreaking U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 89, 75–​76, 91 quoted. 36. Ibid., 9. 37. Commission for International Cooperation and Relations of the League of Communists of the Socialist Federative Popular Republic of Yugoslavia, “Angola i Narodni Pokret za Oslobodjenje Angole /​MPLA/​”, February 1971, Arhiv Jugoslavije, Arhiv Josipa Broza Tito, Belgrade. 38. Telephone interview with Consul-​General Tom Killoran, 10 April 1998. 39. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 230–​396; F. J. du Toit Spies, Operasie Savannah. Angola 1975–​1976 (Pretoria: Laserdruk, 1989). 40. “Indicaciones concretas del Comandante en Jefe que guiarán la actuación de la delegación cubana a las conversaciones en Luanda y las negociaciones en Londres (23-​4-​88)”, Centro de Información de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, Havana. 41. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 785. 42. Roger Sargent, Rand Daily Mail (Johannesburg), 17 February 1976, 10. 43. World (Johannesburg), 24 February 1976, 4 (ed.). 44. Gleijeses, Visions. 45. Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa:  Race and the Cold War (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2016). 46. CIA, “Angola Cuba:  Some Strains but No New Developments”, 9 April 1979, Central Intelligence Agency Records Search Tool, National Archives, College Park, MD. 47. Gleijeses, Visions, 166–​526. 48. US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 28 July 1988, National Security Archive, Washington DC; South African Defence Force, “Samevatting van notas mbt SAW-​operasies in Suid-​Angola”, 23 August 1988, H SAW, gr. 4, box 160, Department of Defence, Documentation Center, Pretoria (hereafter DODDC). 49. “Notas vir minister: Angola en sy invloed op die suiderafrikaanse situasie, met besondere verwysing na SWA”, June 1976, M, gr. 4, box 172, DODDC. 50. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 309. 51. Evans, Algeria, 169. 52. See Jacques Jurquet, La Révolution nationale algérienne et le Parti Communiste français (Paris: Editions du Centenaire, 1984); Danièle Joly, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991); Alain Ruscio, La question coloniale dans ‘l’Humanité’ (1904–​2004) (Paris: La Dispute, 2005). 53. Nancy Mitchell, “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter”, in Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3: 67. 54. NSC meeting, 1 November 1956, in DOS, FRUS 1955–​57, (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), 16: 910. 55. For the debate in the Kennedy administration, Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 194–​195; José Antunes, Kennedy e Salazar. O leão e a raposa (Lisbon: Difusão Cultural, 1991).

Chapter 26

Violence, Insu rg e nc y, and the End of  E mpi re s Martin Thomas

Introduction Historians of empire are used to thinking through colonialism in terms of cultural hierarchies and socio-​political rights. Much is written about spaces of inclusion and exclusion, the role of intermediaries and indigènes, and the construction of citizen and subject. Less familiar is consideration of the ways in which these categories and their dichotomies were supplanted by another, contested status—​that of the civilian—​as conflicts of decolonization spread. This chapter, which reviews the parts played by collective violence and insurgency in the end of empires, suggests that the elasticity of civilian status as applied within empires helps explain the asymmetries of insurgent and counter-​insurgent violence as colonialism unravelled. Many of the most egregious acts of violence in decolonization were directed at non-​ combatant civilians: villages razed at the stroke of an official’s pen; India’s partition refugees massacred with police connivance; a gendarme filmed executing a young Algerian on the roadside. Multiple instances of administrative, collective, and individual violence against unarmed people are easily found.1 If Britain’s suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising is any indication, many more remain unearthed.2 The 1940s saw wars of decolonization break out, first in Asia, and soon afterwards across Africa and elsewhere. Partitions were imposed to the accompaniment of mass displacement. Communities were torn apart.3 Departing administrators meanwhile struggled to comprehend the destruction unfolding around them.4 One reason for their confusion was that both insurgency and counter-​insurgency rendered civilian subjects—​the very people that most imperial governments claimed to protect—​the principal targets of coercion.5 Forcible removal of populations, restrictions and rights abuses, detention, and dispossession occurred in each and every European overseas empire in the process of dissolution.6 Civilian spaces seemed to disappear.

498   Martin Thomas The connection between contested decolonization, escalating levels of violence, and shrinking civilian spaces seems so obvious that three macro-​level actors are typically identified: the imperial authorities that resisted pressure to withdraw, settler populations wedded to white minority rule, and the anti-​colonial nationalist groups determined to impose their brand of social control. Reductive explanations of this type begin to unravel as soon as the forms of violence practiced are explored, so it is on these issues of form and practice that this chapter focuses. The point is not to suggest that political struggles between imperialists and their opponents were irrelevant to violence and the ends of empire. It is, rather, to indicate that violence in the late colonial world was rarely as binary as the notion of fighting for or against empire might imply. People were killed, starved, dispossessed, or otherwise maltreated physically, sexually, or psychologically—​ the working definition of violence applied here—​for multiple reasons.7 Most were more proximate to their social situation but more remote from any unifying narrative of adversarial decolonization. Most proximate of all was their personal status as civilians, a category whose juridical fragility was matched by its spatial insecurity.8

Why Violence? Actors and Motives Modern societies’ relationship with war and violence is unsettling. Intolerant of individual acts of violence, contemporary humans invoke the authority of an external, coercive arbiter—​usually, the nation-​state—​to regulate conflict. Societies’ claims to civilizing impulses do not, therefore, require overall reductions in violence, only a diminution in inter-​personal conflict.9 Collective violence thus presents two analytical dilemmas: disaggregating the reasons for its eruption, and explaining which individuals or groups, acting through or on behalf of the state, ‘can legitimately do violence to other people’.10 Some contend that not only are democracies perfectly capable of perpetrating extreme violence and even genocide, but also that higher levels of inter-​group violence typically occur during societal transitions to mass political participation.11 Empires bring home the ethical dilemmas intrinsic to such violence in several ways. Citizens of imperial mother countries, excepting Salazar’s Portugal, typically enjoyed robust democratic freedoms after 1945 but saw state violence inflicted in their names in denial of those same freedoms to colonial peoples. At the same time, the scale, persistence, and forms of colonial violence enacted became powerful agents of change, not least because, as Andrew Thompson’s chapter demonstrates, they confronted metropolitan publics and the wider global public sphere with the human costs of colonialism. More basically still, contests to retain or seize the reins of political power are necessarily integral to collective political violence in colonies as in nation-​states.12 Indeed, as Brad Simpson’s chapter also reminds us, local demands for basic rights were typically understood by regional officials and imperial governments within a wider colonial context of pressure for statehood, in other words, for self-​determination and legal decoupling, or decolonization.13

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    499 Prevailing interpretations of anti-​colonial violence suggest that intransigent imperial powers and their discriminatory legal regimes left nationalist groups with ‘no other way out’ than rebellion.14 Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham suggests that organizations committed to self-​determination turned to violence when their attempts to negotiate or bargain that option were denied.15 Conflict then escalated as each side sought to control the civilian population caught in the crossfire between armed anti-​colonialists and imperial governments. A potential flaw in this analysis is its failure to explain the timing of violent outbreaks. Colonialism was always authoritarian, and colonial laws invariably racially uneven. So what triggered the nationalists’ turn to violence? While a meta-​theory, or overarching model, is overly reductive, a common pattern behind these violent choices was fragmentation or factionalism within nationalist movements themselves.16 From Morocco to Madagascar, Mandate Palestine to Mozambique, competition for power or influence within and between anti-​colonial groups typically pushed some of their members towards killing. Often, they directed their violence at internal rivals as well as at colonial security forces and authority figures.17 Rebel leaderships might resolve on violent action, but acts of violence frequently ensued, not from their orders but from pre-​existent social tensions ‘in the gaps that emerged between central directives and local reality’.18 At the end of French empire in Algeria, for example, the master narrative of French-​Algerian conflict was superseded by two other, internecine—​or civil—​wars. The first pitched the army ultras of the colonialist Organisation armée secrète (OAS) against Charles de Gaulle’s civil government. The second was a multi-​pronged contest between rival factions of the National Liberation Front (FLN) and its military National Liberation Army (ALN) wing both inside and outside Algeria. It was this last conflict that would determine the political complexion and ideological direction of Algeria’s post-​independence regime. It would resurface in that regime’s 1965 overthrow by another FLN-​military coalition, key members of which shared a common connection to a particular faction based across the Algerian border in Morocco before 1962.19 A decentred interpretation of violent anti-​colonial outbreaks chimes with recent social scientific writing on civil wars and rural resistance.20 This literature offers insights into micro-​and macro-​level sources of political violence, as well as the links between the two. Much of this work rejects the assumption that mass violence represents the effusion of national, ethnic, or religious hatreds or the untrammelled pursuit of resource and reward (phenomena often described pace the economist Paul Collier as ‘greed’).21 Useful for historians of empire disintegration is the recognition both of the agency of violence actors and of the contingent loyalties, alliances, and other choices that shape violent action during internal conflicts.22 A more discomfiting conclusion is that organized political violence need not signify the ‘breakdown’ of social systems or the abandonment of ethical norms. Collective violence is perhaps better understood as an ingrained community practice—​a choice that is socially constructed and discursively embedded as one among many political options. If so, the challenge is to explain why collective violence is selected rather than to view its outbreak as somehow abnormal.

500   Martin Thomas Collective violence requires two types of agents. First are what Richard Jackson and Helen Dexter term the ‘conflict entrepreneurs’: those typically in positions of influence who exploit a society’s social cleavages and structural divisions to justify the initial turn to violence. To these must be added the second category: those members of wider society prepared to instrumentalize violence, whether actively as fighters, suppliers, and supporters or, more passively, through acquiescing in the violent turn occurring in their midst.23 Leaders and followers, one might say. But these agents are more accurately depicted as members of overlapping networks that were animated by combinations of local grievances and broader political objectives. Conflict entrepreneurs in particular are both catalysts to violence and products of tense societies whose internal fault lines they exploit. For example, Kikuyu activists mobilized support for the Mau Mau rebellion within rural communities in which land hunger, under-​employment and consequent inter-​generational frictions were already acute. Many of those who took, or were coerced into taking, Mau Mau oaths then reapplied physical force and intimidation, not just to oust the British but to re-​order power, land and wealth at village level.24 Likewise, Algeria’s FLN leadership quickly discovered that their regional military commands pursued strategies designed to eliminate rivals and cement their local supremacy. Both were measures at variance with the FLN’s declared aims of ‘national’ solidarity among Algerians.25 The imperial states confronting these and other rebellions had several means at their disposal to assure sustained military superiority. Soldiers from other parts of the empire offered cheap reservoirs of manpower for use in counter-​insurgency operations. Where decolonization conflicts culminated in state collapse and proxy war, as in the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola, mercenaries and other foreign fighters appeared.26 These violence workers circulated within, and sometimes across, empires transmitting ideas and practices between conflicts. Long-​service police officers were equally pivotal to such violence actor networks. Senior officers remodelled individual forces, often adapting legal precedents tested elsewhere before recruiting the local agents vital to intelligence gathering and policing through locally-​raised auxiliaries.27 Historians of modern Germany have been especially productive in tracing how violent practices were transferred between colonies and metropolitan homeland. Closely linked to genocide studies, the focus of this work has been the mass killing of the Herero and Nama peoples in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1907 and, to a lesser extent, repression of the Maji Maji revolt in German-​ruled Tanzania before 1916.28 Conclusions vary. Isabel Hull suggests that army methods in south West Africa initially mirrored, and then magnified, strategies of military violence applied within Germany’s European wars. Jürgen Zimmerer goes further, finding echoes of German colonialism in Nazi readings of Eastern Europe as a colonized zone to be racially cleansed through genocidal violence.29 Contentious certainly, these examples remind us not only that practices of colonial repression circulated within empires and transnationally between them, but that the presumptive division between ‘civilized’ warfare and smaller ‘police actions’,

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    501 between European and non-​European state violence, was porous: ideas and practices seeped constantly between the two.30 Clearly vital, these networks of circulation should not blind us to the abiding preference among colonial authorities to rely on local populations to shoulder heavy burdens of repressive violence. Paramilitary militias were armed and trained as ‘loyalist’ formations, plantation guards, and ‘self-​defence forces’.31 These units enabled a progressive reduction in regular troop numbers, which was vital in containing metropolitan opposition to wars of decolonization. In Kenya, for instance, African troops of the King’s African Rifles and the Kenya Regiment, as well as Kenyan police reservists, worked alongside British regular units. But it was the loyalist paramilitaries of the Home Guard that responded most viciously to Mau Mau attacks. By March 1954 some 25,600 Home Guards were serving in Kenya’s Central Province, a figure larger than the number of Mau Mau fighters based in the region’s forests. Most Home Guard were Kikuyu, and most Kenyan soldiers and police were Kamba, but their reasons for joining up cut across ethnic lines. Some were motivated by loss and community insecurity. Others discerned better chances of acquiring land and enhanced social capital by strengthening contacts with the locally powerful and by dispossessing or removing local rivals. Kamba communities received disproportionately large quantities of British development spending.32 To be sure, Home Guards, like their army and police counterparts, became emotively bound up in cycles of violence and reprisal, but few were empire ‘loyalists’ in any meaningful sense of the term. Motivated overwhelmingly by local factors, these were rational violence actors whose choices mirrored the insecurities of civil war.33 In the biggest massacre of the Kenya Emergency in the village of Lari, the local Home Guard gave proof of this dreadful escalatory dynamic of violence and counter-​violence in conditions of extreme insecurity. It was their militiamen who perpetrated a wave of exterminatory violence in retaliation for the earlier killing by insurgents of some 120 Kikuyu chiefs, ex-​chiefs, headmen, councillors, and prominent Home Guard members and their families.34

When Violence: Post-​War Turns? The contention that wars of decolonization rehearsed the unrestrained violence of the nineteenth century’s ‘savage wars of peace’ is persuasive, but inadequate. For all the continuities in racially coded military practices, imperial powers’ freedom to use violence without fear of criticism gradually diminished in the early twentieth century. During the inter-​war years, the League of Nations, its Mandate Commissions, and other regulatory agencies were one source of constraint; the growing chorus of anti-​colonial activist groups and aggrieved colonial publics, another.35 In Mandate Iraq as well as on India’s North-​West Frontier, early and untrammelled use of aerial

502   Martin Thomas bombardment against otherwise inaccessible rural populations grew problematic for the British government and its subordinate authorities in Baghdad and Delhi. Once celebrated as a cost-​effective application of lethal force and a triumph of western modernity over oriental backwardness, imperial bombing was eventually condemned for what it was: mass killings of defenceless civilians, more redolent of Guernica than of early aviators’ derring-​do.36 Claims to national self-​determination and recourse to anti-​colonial violence to achieve them became more prominent after the First World War.37 But it was after the Second World War that national liberation became the declared objective of most anti-​colonial movements. Several groups won out over their colonial rulers. But, with the exception of the Vietminh in French Vietnam and Amilcar Cabral’s Partido Africano para la Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) in Portuguese Guinea, few did so through outright military victory.38 Rather more achieved their aims attritionally through escalating political violence. Usually this took the form of terror attacks against soldiers, authority figures, and perceived enemies among the civilian population. Among such groups could be counted the Jewish Irgun Zwai Le’umi (Irgun), the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (or EOKA), and Algeria’s FLN. Extraneous changes to international society after 1945 enhanced the violent anti-​colonialists’ chances of success.39 Self-​determination became, in theory at least, both a shared aspiration and an operating principle of the United Nations (UN), if not of the UN’s main sponsor, the United States (US).40 It was certainly a core rationale for other regional blocs such as the Arab League, the Non-​Aligned Movement, and the Organization of African Unity.41 The political wings of anti-​colonial movements also worked hard in sustaining international public and media interest in human rights abuses and colonial demands for freedom, building transnational networks of support in the process.42 If international organizations and transnational opinion turned away from empire as the chorus of condemnation from the global south grew louder, European political and cultural attachments to empire were less easily reversed. The gargantuan loss of life and innumerable traumas of the Second World War, itself a global imperial conflict, did not induce metropolitan publics to reject colonialism as an intrinsically violent way of politics. Even those drawn to democratic universalism struggled with the proposition that their particular national brand of imperial rule was less an instrument of social progress than a barrier to it. Popular imperialism as it emerged from the ruins in 1945 was not so much ‘popular’ in any active sense as it was a presumptive condition, a banal present in which state-​sanctioned violence against colonial subjects was an unfortunate corollary of positive societal change.43 This banality towards violence against civilians was ingrained within imperial security forces, particularly among garrison units that lived apart from the publics they policed.44 For all that, the Second World War’s acceleration of colonial breakdowns transformed the stakes involved for European publics, nowhere more so than in Southeast Asia, where colonial violence was widely perceived less as a facet of routine social control than an existential imperative for imperial authorities struggling to re-​impose control after the war’s upheavals.45

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    503

The Violence of Insurgency and Counter-​Insurgency Most of the organized military violence of European decolonization occurred in the context of insurgencies—​asymmetric conflicts in which lightly armed guerrillas operate from inaccessible base areas, often concealing themselves within the civilian population, especially in the conflict’s opening stages.46 The tactics adopted by colonial security forces against such insurgents were bluntly coercive, always racially coded, and sometimes terroristic. Their cumulative impact undermined imperial governments’ claims to be prosecuting counter-​insurgency within strict legal parameters. During Algeria’s war of independence, for instance, quite arbitrary military violence, including mass detentions and summary killing, recalled the exterminatory colonization of the nineteenth century. Yet its late twentieth-​century practitioners claimed to be applying precepts of scientific rationalism to clear a path to social modernization.47 In Algeria as elsewhere, flouting cultural norms, particularly those relating to sex and sexuality, became coercive instruments and favoured means of torture.48 Women, as embodiments of the nation and symbols of purity, were especially prone to such victimization.49 Indeed, strategies of counter-​insurgency were—​and are—​highly gendered in their ascription of discrete roles, rewards, and punishments to women and men.50 Collective punishments, counter-​terror tactics, intensive aerial bombing, and severe population control were also markers of Britain’s late colonial wars; even more so of Portugal’s.51 British counter-​ insurgency in Malaya, once held up as the archetype of a ‘minimum force’ police action, favoured unrestrained violence in its first phase and remained collectively punitive throughout.52 Perhaps most strikingly, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime redrew the country’s constitution and legal code to facilitate the prosecution of a ruthless counter-​ insurgency in the 1960s and 1970s. Its Rhodesian security force architects, many of them schooled in Britain’s late colonial wars, unhesitatingly described their preference for search and destroy operations as ‘maximum force’, with no effort being made to safeguard black civilian populations caught up in the resultant killings.53 What accounts for these forms of violence? Labeling them ‘colonial’ or linking their outbreak to wider pressures to decolonize doesn’t take us far. More may be gained by considering the local conflict environment. Most insurgencies were protracted and occurred in wide geographical expanse. In trying to deny resources to guerrillas, operations sought to cut them off from civilian population centres and the resources—​ shelter, money, food, and additional manpower—​that local inhabitants conferred, willingly or not.54 As guerrilla units dispersed, so colonial militaries attempted to break rebel connections with the surrounding population by forcibly removing entire communities from areas of high rebel activity. What Christian Gerlach terms the ‘spatial dichotomization’ between ‘safe’ and ‘contaminated’ areas caused the largest number of civilian deaths, particularly among infants, during the late twentieth-​century wars of decolonization. In trying to isolate their anti-​colonial opponents, imperial security forces

504   Martin Thomas focused their efforts on containing civilian populations in purpose-​built settlements, often without the infrastructure necessary to assure basic sanitation, welfare, or psychiatric health. Whether in Malaya’s ‘New Villages’, Northern Vietnam’s ‘agrovilles’, Algeria’s ‘centres de regroupement’, or the aldeamentos in Portuguese Angola, such population control was intrinsically coercive. In each of these instances, colonial authorities justified forcible relocation on two grounds: as restoring security, and as prelude to economic development. But in rural communities dependent on attachment to land and livestock, removal could be devastating over the longer term. At minimum, freedom of movement was denied; at maximum, entire population centres were uprooted never to return.55 The demographic impact of forced population removal was seismic. Women and children were disproportionately affected, the elderly only marginally less so. From 1959 Algeria’s FLN insisted that up to 150,000 Algerians, most of them children, were dying each year in the country’s resettlement centres. This figure was broadly consistent with the findings of Michel Rocard, a government finance inspector and future French socialist leader. His 1959 inquiry into the Algerian resettlement camp system calculated a daily infant mortality rate of 400. Rocard’s statistics produced an annualized death rate close to FLN estimates.56 Population removal on this industrial scale was not unique to empires, but nor was it new to its European protagonists. In the Algerian case, forced relocation and indefinite internment were well-​established colonial legal practices to contain political dissent.57 Those left behind in villages supervised by the French army’s special administrative service faced an equally uncertain future. Accused of working with the authorities, and thus exposed to FLN reprisal, Algerian peasants were assigned a yearly ration of eighty kilograms of grain—​less than that granted by the Nazis to Soviet POWs.58 In Gerlach’s calculations, almost 40%—​near three million—​of Algerians were displaced. Figures were higher still in Vietnam, where nine million Southerners plus millions more from the North lost their homes over the course of the French and, later, American wars.59 Forced removal of populations, the slow violence of environmental spoliation, and consequent starvation were major colonial killers in decolonization, much as epidemic infection and resource denial had been during the conquest period.60 Civil administrators, albeit not directly engaged in fighting insurgents, were the key instruments in this regard. Their decisions about resource distribution, restrictions on freedom of movement, the identification of local danger zones and the troublemakers within them were integral to what David Anderson terms the ‘securitization of the countryside’. This was a process that undermined people’s ability to assure their own economic welfare. So devastating was the social dislocation occasioned by counter-​insurgency that it sometimes precipitated the outcome such operations were meant to avoid: tipping the civilian population into active participation in rebellion.61 The likelihood of allegiance to regime opponents, as much from self-​interest as ideological sympathy, increased as the costs of passivity became prohibitive.62 This helps explain why certain anti-​colonial insurgencies, such as those in Algeria and Mozambique, subsisted, and even increased in intensity after imperial colonial security forces imposed harsher population control measures, including forced removal and mass detention.

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    505

Permitting Violence: Dirty Wars and Violence Actors Numerous writers describe decolonization conflicts of the sort described above as variants of dirty war without quite explaining what the term means. To do so, the nature of the violence practiced must be considered; its victims, and its logic as viewed by the violence actors on all sides. Dirty wars combine highly demonstrative acts of collective violence that are designed to compel popular compliance, with other, more covert actions, which are typically intelligence-​led and intended to disrupt insurgent organization. The civilian population is the primary focus of both forms of dirty war violence. Civilians are targets of demonstrative acts, including massacre, collective punishments, and rape, and they are equally prominent as victims of the covert abuses of torture, arbitrary detention, secret prisons, and mass ‘disappearances’. For the political and military actors involved, the unspoken logic behind such abuses was that the civilian population harboured regime opponents who posed an existential threat to established authority. But regime violence was enabled when security force advocates insisted that the sanctions available to them under criminal law, and sometimes even under martial law restrictions, were insufficient to meet the anti-​colonial challenge they faced. These were—​and are—​the circumstances in which, as Smith and Roberts put it, ‘a political authority goes to war against a section of its own population’.63 Intrinsic to dirty war, then, is a departure from what may be characterized as the ‘criminal justice model’ of counter-​insurgency. Its central tenet is that security operations must be transparently constrained by the rule of law. Military personnel remain bound by local legal codes and by international law, engagements with enemy forces are strictly monitored, and combatant-​civilian distinctions maintained. State violence, in other words, is held to exacting legal standards and is proportional to the threat faced, making it easier, in theory, to win popular support for the security effort conducted.64 Admittedly, the very fact that counter-​insurgency operations begin indicates that the panoply of existing laws and civil police powers has failed to contain internal sedition. Even so, the criminal justice model rests on the liberal maxim that state power must, at all costs, be subject to legal constraint. The model outlined above contrasts with the more Hobbesian approach to counter-​ insurgency. Realist in inspiration, it posits that violence is inevitable and may be curbed with whatever means necessary to protect the regime’s favoured political community from external and internal dangers.65 Existing legal regulations may be subordinated to the military requirement to wage war without limits to overcome an existential regime threat. Military, or martial, law supplants criminal law, individual freedoms are strictly curtailed, media reportage is curbed, and any suspected civilian collusion with rebel forces incurs severe, often capital, punishment. Laws, in other words, remain—​ indeed, they multiply—​but they serve security force interest at the expense of civil rights protection. This model of counter-​insurgency, which some tellingly describe as ‘rule by

506   Martin Thomas law’, does not itself equate with dirty war. Rather, it creates the permissive security environment in which dirty war violence flourishes. Fatally, in the British imperial case, as in the French, ‘emergency powers’ removed the restrictions on military action without needing to invoke martial law.66 To give a few examples, emergency powers typically introduce curfews and media restrictions. Both make night arrests and disappearances easier to perpetrate. Broader definitions of collusion create new spheres of criminality, rendering civilians liable to detention, even to death, if they contact the wrong person, carry prohibited goods, or say the wrong thing. ‘Shoot on sight’ policies and free-​fire zones extend the space of security force violence and further collapse the boundary between rebel and civilian—​a boundary that, in practice, is often indiscernible to military personnel in the first place. Proportionality is gone.67 Evidence from numerous decolonization conflicts indicates that security forces killed colonial civilians in large numbers, in part because demonstrative violence was perceived as a means to coerce communities whose loyalties they doubted, and in part through a process of acculturation to the killing of ‘suspects’ broadly defined.68 All of this indicates that decades before the so-​called ‘war on terror’, mobilizing legal restrictions as an instrument of state violence, or ‘lawfare’, was a grim fact of colonial life.69 Reminding ourselves of the violence actors involved in these variants of counter-​ insurgency is essential at this point because, returning to the comments made at the start of this chapter, the division between imperial security forces and local insurgents was rarely reducible to colonial versus anti-​colonial oppositions in practice. For one thing, loyalist paramilitaries frequently perpetrated a high percentage of the violence in contested decolonization. For another thing, these auxiliaries, as well as other locally recruited police and military personnel and their anti-​regime opponents, sometimes pursued their own interests through violence while notionally working either for the colonial state or an anti-​colonial movement. From the seizure of land and other assets to the elimination of local rivals for power and influence, the local—​or micro-​violence—​ perspective on colonial conflicts was closer to the civil war typology delineated by Stathis Kalyvas.70 Eschewing the idea of a simple master-​cleavage dividing the warring parties, Kalyvas stresses the interplay between the opponents’ fundamental ideological clashes and the multiplicity of local or private conflicts played out. Violent decolonization, as discussed, was often characterized by alliances of convenience between imperial security forces and loyalist auxiliaries on the one hand, and between anti-​colonial movements and their informal networks of local supporters on the other. Amidst high levels of local insecurity, community members, even if they did not take up arms, might provide or withhold the information necessary to safeguard others—​or to condemn them. The resulting conditions were experienced as civil war by the populations caught up in them to the extent that the conflict enabled actors on all sides to redress their grievances or advance their local interests through violence.71 How, then, could violent anti-​colonial movements cohere? Because insurgent groups operate outside and in opposition to the state, they must enforce their codes of conduct, including recruitment, loyalty, and discipline, endogenously. There is, in other words,

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    507 no external legal realm to which either recruits or their commanders can appeal if rules are broken. This helps explain why extreme violence was so often sanctioned against dissenters or any others perceived to threaten the leadership line. The need to conserve secrecy to ensure a movement’s survival further explains why killings became integral to insurgent action, particularly in its initial organizational phase. The proclivity to employ coercive violence within the rebel group was heightened within ethnically diverse movements in which group identity—​or what Scott Gates terms ‘ethnic distance’—​was commensurately weaker.72 To frictions over ethnicity might be added religious and ideological schisms as evidenced by the internecine killings of Islamists, Communists, and nationalist republicans during Indonesia’s late 1940s decolonization. All of these frictions—​ethnic, religious, and ideological—​coalesced in the reciprocal violence between Portuguese Angola’s three main guerrilla movements, the MPLA, the FNLA, and UNITA, as well as that inflicted on the rural communities on which they depended.73 Nor is it difficult to find examples of anti-​colonial movements that splintered, their factionalism becoming violent as competitors vied for dominance.74 To take but one example, the descent into the Indochina War during 1945–​1946 was prefigured by intra-​Vietnamese violence between pro-​Chinese nationalists, Vietnamese Trotskyists, and their Stalinist Indochinese Communist Party rivals. Each justified assassination campaigns and tit-​for-​tat reprisal in terms of defending their organizational integrity.75 In Jeremy Weinstein’s terms, successful anti-​colonial insurgents were ‘high-​ commitment groups’. Their core activists participated in long-​term struggle, not for immediate reward but for the long-​term realization of a cause. Internal divisions there might be, but underlying continuities in membership and objectives ensured these movements’ basic organizational coherence.76 Malaya’s Communist fighters, for instance, faced grinding attrition from 1950 onwards, but a hard core persisted, even after the first ‘emergency’ was formally declared over in 1960.77 The FLN fought a rival nationalist movement, the Mouvement National Algérien inside Algeria and mainland France throughout the 1954–​1962 war of independence.78 And the FLN’s internal schisms between the organizers of rebellion inside Algeria and the movement’s political leadership in exile would re-​emerge in violent changes of regime in the years after victory was declared.79 The violence practised by such high-​commitment groups, while socially coercive and often large-​scale, was rarely unfocused. Leadership decisions about sanctioning violence were conditioned by the relationship between violent acts, collective reputation, and levels of civilian support.80 This is not to deny that anti-​colonial movements could be merciless, notably against their civilian compatriots. It is, however, to suggest that it was when lines of internal authority broke down, as, for example, in disputes between the FLN’s regional commands and its external political leaders, that more egregious violence, including civilian massacres, tended to occur. Such was the case in Algeria in August 1955 and the summer of 1957. Telescoping forward, Jenna Jordan’s work on the killing of radical Islamist leaders is pertinent here. Her evidence confirms that so-​called ‘leadership decapitation’ is counterproductive because of its deleterious effects. Targeted assassination hardens the group’s determination to resist; it increases the likelihood of

508   Martin Thomas retaliatory attacks; and it fosters public sympathy for organizations that can convincingly portray themselves as victims of state persecution.81 If tight organizational discipline, singularity of purpose, and sensitivity to community reaction tended to limit, or at least to focus, insurgent violence, the systematic coercion of communities, families, and individuals often worked in contrary fashion, cowing some into compliance while provoking others into dissent. Insurgents shared one objective with their security force opponents. Each sought to shrink the ground left to the non-​committal, to those whose paramount concern was to survive by not taking sides.82 Commonly identified in asymmetric wars literature as a more critical conflict escalator than fights over territory, the struggle for popular obedience is better seen as fluid, conditional, and locally variable rather than binary and absolute.83 Certainly, the points of contact between violence workers and civilians became the decisive sites of contestation in such conflicts. Direct experience of these contacts perhaps determined individual political choices more than anything else. The concealment of insurgent fighters in a village, the brutal enforcement (or breaking) of strikes and boycotts, security force destruction of homes in retaliation for alleged rebel sympathies and, of course, the killing, abuse, or summary detention of loved ones: these were the violent dynamics that shaped patterns of individual attachment and community allegiance. Another example may help to prove the point. Norma Kriger’s fieldwork in Zimbabwe’s Mutoko region suggests that specific moral economies of local grievances, lineage tensions, and land hunger mapped onto peasant involvement in anti-​colonial violence during the 1970s. Rejecting Terence Ranger’s conclusion that Zimbabwe’s peasants mobilized as a class, Kriger’s more multi-​causal analysis left space for conflict within rural communities. Her insight was to recognize that the Bush War was more than an anti-​ colonial struggle; it was a multi-​layered internal conflict closer to revolution than civil war. To be sure, regime loyalists and rival nationalist movements competed for power, often coercing peasants into compliance. But once compelled to become violence actors, those peasants pursued their local interests. Matters of access to land and an individual’s community standing figured larger than the more abstract cause of national liberation.84

Laws of War, Combatants, and Non-​C ombatants Establishing some of the factors that created more permissive conflict environments goes a long way towards accounting for the normalization of extreme violence in the end of empires. But it is necessary to look elsewhere to explain the stark asymmetry of such violence. To delve deeper, this final section dwells on the juridical dimensions of late colonial conflicts. European legal publicists of the early modern period maintained that legal regulation of warfare applied strictly to the civilized world; that is, one inhabited by Europeans or

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    509 those of European origin settled further afield. Prompted by the American Civil War, Francis Lieber, a political science professor of Prussian immigrant descent, wrote the 1863 General Orders 100—​a handbook of military conduct that codified distinctions between combatants, civilians, citizens, and seditionists. Its aim was to establish what rights and obligations applied to each. In its preoccupation with combatant and civilian, General Orders 100 became a canonical text underpinning the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.85 Both Conventions connected this distinction to the civilizational level of the populations involved. Concepts of racial hierarchy and the normative presumption of a progressive shift from barbarous primitivism to civilized modernity were foundational elements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ international laws of war.86 Colonial conflicts remained juridically unregulated because they were conducted in spaces to which the restrictions imposed by international law on military violence between civilized peoples were judged inapplicable. A matter of imperial self-​interest perhaps, but also a source of ethical contradiction: colonial armies, led by men from the civilized world and thus capable of the moderation that supposedly marked out ‘civilization’, were neither required nor expected to display such restraint in ‘savage’ colonial wars. This civilized–​non-​civilized distinction, and its attendant implications for the treatment of rebel forces and colonial civilians, persisted to the very end of empire. The French army’s use of torture during the Algerian war mocked France’s claim to be acting in defence of liberal democratic values.87 Frantz Fanon turned this civilizational discourse against France, arguing that the country was besmirched by actions at odds with its foundational values. He was right. Even the grandly named Commission for the Protection of Individual Rights and Freedoms originated as a tool of government designed to pre-​empt accusations of systemic rights abuses rather than to expose them.88 Practising violence in ways that shamed the nation, the French in Algeria, like the Dutch in post-​1945 Indonesia, or the British in Kenya and elsewhere, were at the same time drawing on funds of military experience and discrete practices of colonial repression. Imperial governments insisted that the conventional warfare of regular uniformed armies and set-​piece encounters was a mark of civilization; effectively, the precondition to war between racial equals. The irregular guerrilla tactics of colonial insurgents were, by extension, condemned as illegitimate and undeserving of the limited protections afforded to recognized combatants under international law.89 In truth, local insurgents were typically compelled by the pressures of occupation and the meagre weaponry available to them to decentralize their organizational structures and adopt paramilitary methods, using their one residual advantage—​the possibility of concealment within the indigenous community—​to sustain their resistance.90 Time and again, colonial military commands condoned free-​fire tactics against rebel forces in response. Officers justified this unrestricted military violence less on tactical grounds than as a logical response to the savagery and tribal recidivism of their opponents. As Paul Kramer notes, in the context of the American conquest of the Philippines in 1898–​1899, for an imperial occupier it was a small step from characterizing its opponents as unworthy and illicit to the institutionalized maltreatment of the colonial population as complicit in the actions of the fighters hidden within it. Racialized depictions

510   Martin Thomas of guerrilla forces—​often articulated in a soldierly patois of racist epithets for insurgent fighters—​fostered more a permissive military environment for the summary execution of captives, torture of detainees, and systemic abuse of civilians.91 This is what Kramer tellingly identifies as ‘exterminist warfare’. While not genocidal in intent, it rendered non-​combatants legitimate targets for the duration of combat even though co-​existence was the post-​war objective declared by the colonial power.92 The point here is that, in the final years of empire, imperial authorities’ refusal to recognize insurgents as politically representative or militarily legitimate perpetuated a longer tradition of denying any equivalence of rights between European citizens and non-​European colonial subjects. Much as ethnic hierarchy underpinned colonial judicial practice, so locating armed rebels outside ‘the community of reciprocal obligation’ denied colonial combatants the protections of international law.93 The conduct of colonial wars returns us to the nature of rebel insurgencies and the colonial strategies counter-​insurgency devised to thwart them. There is an argument to be made that because insurgent groups resorted to unconventional means of fighting—​ variants of classic Maoist revolutionary warfare focused on social control rather than open battle and territorial acquisition—​ counter-​ insurgents necessarily responded with equally unconventional means of coercion. Among these, as discussed, were forced removal of populations, collective punishments, and targeted assassinations. In this reading, the laws of war, which are devised to impose constraints on conventional inter-​state warfare, might not apply. Take, for instance, the explicit targeting of non-​combatants. This was precluded under the Hague Conventions and condemned in all four of the 1949 Geneva Conventions because it violates the requirement that armed force be applied against an enemy military—​and only against that military—​in pursuit of political objectives.94 For all that, in numerous post-​1945 cases of violent ends of empire, these protections were ignored, because supporters of colonial counter-​insurgency insisted that these legal constraints were inapplicable in the absence of a clearly identifiable enemy military: in uniform, in organized formation, and in the open.95 According to this logic, neither the principle of proportionality in the use of violence nor the prohibition on reprisals against civilian populations could be expected in combat conditions in which the distinction between combatant and non-​combatant was invisible.96 The argument is unconvincing on several counts. Putting aside for a moment any pacifist injunction against killing, even those who consider military violence legitimate apply what Maja Zehfuss identifies as ‘hierarchies of acceptability’. Two distinctions are commonly upheld: the first between combatant and civilians, the second between intended killing and unintended deaths or ‘collateral damage’. This second aspect is an articulation of the so-​called ‘double effect’. Following just war theory, it acknowledges that non-​combatants may be unintentionally killed in the course of permissible military operations, thereby opening the door to extreme violence against civilian populations in situations where distinctions between fighter and civilian were blurred. In this reasoning civilians should not be intentionally targeted, although accidental civilian deaths—​the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—​become excusable. The problems inherent in this viewpoint when it is transposed to colonial

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    511 counter-​insurgency are easily summarized. If ‘enemy soldiers pose a threat that may be countered by violent means’, then what about rebel paramilitaries that remain embedded among civilian populations?97 What of the numerous non-​combatants who faced coercion by the warring parties, often as the prelude to co-​option into supporting one side or the other with money, food, or information?98 Sustained efforts by colonial governments to label insurgents as terrorists and to criminalize the communities from which those ‘terrorists’ sprang opened the door to violence wider still.99 The implications of such thinking were—​and are—​dangerous: determining codes of violence from a security force perspective denies civilians any agency in deciding what may be done to them.100 This was a visceral dilemma for those caught up in the violence at the end of empires, and it remains one today.

Notes 1. Ian Talbot, “The 1947 violence in the Punjab”, and Yasmin Khan, “Out of Control? Partition Violence and the State in Uttar Pradesh”, both in Ian Talbot (ed.), Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics and Violence in the Indian Sub-​Continent, 1947–​2002 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–​ 3 and 36–​ 59; Matthew Hughes, “From law and order to pacification: Britain’s suppression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–​39”, Journal of Palestine Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 6–​22; Emma Kuby, “A war of words over an image of war: The Fox-​Movietone scandal and the portrayal of French violence in Algeria, 1955–​1956”, French Politics, Culture, and Society 30, no. 1 (2012): 46–​67. 2. David M. Anderson, “Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘lost’ British Empire archives: colonial conspiracy or bureaucratic bungle?”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 699–​7 16; Mandy Banton, “Destroy? ‘Migrate’? Conceal? British strategies for the disposal of sensitive records of colonial administrations at independence”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 40, no. 2 (2012): 323–​337. 3. Joya Chatterji, “The fashioning of a frontier: the Radcliffe line and Bengal’s border landscape, 1947–​52”, Modern Asian Studies 33 (1999): 185–​189. 4. Catherine Coombs, “Partition narratives: displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab”, Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 1 (2011): 201–​224; see also Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5. Ironically, as Beatrice Heuser notes, theorists of counter-​insurgency, pre-​modern and modern, usually attached high priority to civilian protection: Beatrice Heuser, “Atrocities in Theory and Practice: An Introduction”, Civil Wars 14, no. 1 (2012): 12–​14. 6. David French, The British Way in Counter-​ Insurgency, 1945–​ 1967 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 107–​112; Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ­chapters 4–​12. Civilian victimization was not, of course, confined to colonial insurgencies; for instance, see Greg Grandin, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 7. I am thus concerned with three forms of violence above all: firstly, direct political violence (epitomized by lethal conflict between colonial security forces and their opponents); secondly, the structural violence of extreme economic inequality and social exclusion that

512   Martin Thomas registered in phenomena such as higher morbidity, epidemic illness, or starvation; and thirdly, the everyday violence of low-​level brutality and collective punishments evinced during “states of emergency” before decolonization. For broader consideration of these distinctions, see Philippe Bourgois, “The power of violence in war and peace: Post-​Cold War lessons from El Salvador”, Ethnography 2, no. 1 (2001): 7–​10. 8. Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 9; also cited in Robert A. Nye, “Western masculinities in war and peace”, American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (2007): 420–​421. 9. Sinisa Malesevic, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 144. 10. John Higginson, Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6. 11. Michael Mann in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–​33; also cited in Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-​Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. 12. Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, 9; also cited in Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses, and Klaus Weinhauer, “Europe in the world: systems and cultures of violence”, in Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-​Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27. 13. We should, though, recall Fred Cooper’s crucial insight that colonial peoples frequently worked for enhanced rights and opportunities within an imperial framework, no in outright opposition to it; see:  Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation:  Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–​1960 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 14. Nicholas Sambanis, “What is a civil war? Conceptual and empirical complexities of an operational definition”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (2004):  814–​858, at 827; Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out. States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–​1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 15. Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Inside the Politics of Self-​Determination (New  York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 16. Adria Lawrence, “Triggering nationalist violence: Competition and conflict in uprisings against colonial rule”, International Security 35, no.  2 (2010):  90–​98; on racially coded colonial law, see Jordanna Bailkin, “The boot and the spleen: when was murder possible in British India?”, Comparative Studies of Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006): 462–​494; Gregory Mann, “What was the indigénat? The ‘empire of law’ in French West Africa”, Journal of African History 50, no. 2 (2009): 331–​353. 17. Lawrence, “Triggering Nationalist Violence”, 101–​104. 18. Martin Conway and Robert Gerwarth, “Revolution and counter-​revolution”, in Bloxham and Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-​Century Europe, 141–​144, quote at 144. 19. Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 20. Landmark texts include Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars. State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); James C. Scott, The Art of

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    513 Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Interpretations of violence are addressed in Laia Balcells, “Rivalry and revenge. Violence against civilians in conventional civil wars”, International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2010): 291–​313. 21. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000); Patrick M. Regan and Daniel Norton, “Greed, grievance, and mobilization: the onset of protest, rebellion, and civil war”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 3 (2005): 1–​18. 22. Roel Frakking, “Beyond sticks and carrots: local agency in counterinsurgency”, Humanity 5, no.  3 (2014):  393–​395, 401–​404; Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion:  Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 8–​10. 23. Richard Jackson and Helen Dexter, “The social construction of organized political violence: an analytical framework”, Civil Wars 16, no. 1 (2014): 8–​18. 24. Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya:  Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), 36–​ 39; David M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: Norton, 2005), 11–​12, 28–​43 passim. 25. Mahfoud Kaddache, “Les tournants de la Guerre de libération au niveau des masses populaires”, in Charles-​Robert Ageron (ed.), La guerre d’Algérie et les Algériens, 1954–​1962 (Paris:  Armand Colin, 1997), 52–​54; Benjamin Stora, “Le massacre du 20 août 1955:  Récit historique, bilan historiographique”, Historical Reflections 36, no.  2 (2010): 97–​107. 26. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions:  Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–​ 1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Miles Larmer, “Of local identities and transnational conflict:  the Katangese Gendarmes and Central-​ Southern Africa’s forty-​years war, 1960–​1999”, in Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins, eds., Transnational Soldiers:  Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 160–​174. 27. Taylor C. Sherman, “Tensions of colonial punishment:  perspectives on recent developments in the study of coercive networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean”, History Compass 7, no. 3 (2009): 659–​677; Emmanuel Blanchard, “Contrôler, enfermer, éloigner. La répression policière et administrative des algériens de métropole (1946–​1962)”, in Raphaëlle Branche and Sylvie Thénault (eds.), La France en guerre 1954–​1962: Expériences métropolitaines de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (Paris: Autrement, 2008), 318–​331; French, The British Way,  19–​33. 28. Insightful recent work on Maji Maji approaches the rebellion from the inside out: Felicitas Becker, “Traders, ‘big men’ and prophets:  political continuity and crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania”, Journal of African History 45, no. 1 (2004): 1–​22; Heike Schmidt, “(Re)negotiating marginality:  The Maji Maji War and its aftermath in Southwestern Tanzania, ca. 1905–​1916”, International Journal of African Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (2010): 27–​62. 29. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Jürgen Zimmerer, “The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism: a postcolonial perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination”, Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005), 197–​219; both cited in Todd Weir, “Between colonial violence and socialist worldview: the conversions of Ernst Däumig”, German History 28, no. 2 (2010): 148–​149.

514   Martin Thomas 30. Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses, and Klaus Weinhauer, “Europe in the world:  systems and cultures of violence”, in Bloxham and Gerwarth, Political Violence, 20. 31. Daniel Branch, “Loyalists and the war Against Mau Mau”, Journal of African History 48, no.  2 (2007):  291–​ 315; Douglas Wheeler, “African elements in Portugal’s armies in Africa (1961–​1974)”, Armed Forces and Society 2, no.  2 (1976):  233–​250; Roel Frakking, “ ‘Who wants to cover everything covers nothing’:  the organization of indigenous security forces in Indonesia, 1945–​50”, in Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence:  The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 111–​127. 32. Myles Osborne, “Controlling development:  ‘martial race’ and empire in Kenya, 1945–​ 1959”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 42, no. 3 (2014): 464–​485. 33. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau,  72–​79. 34. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 125–​132; Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 194. 35. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians:  The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015); Natasha Wheatley, “Mandatory interpretation: legal hermeneutics and the new international order in Arab and Jewish petitions to the League of Nations”, Past & Present 227 (2015): 206–​235; Andrew Arsan, “ ‘This is the age of associations’: committees, petitions, and the roots of interwar Middle Eastern internationalism”, Journal of Global History 7 (2012): 166–​188. 36. Priya Satia, “The defense of inhumanity:  air control and the British idea of Arabia”, American Historical Review 111, no.  1 (2006):  16–​ 51; Brandon Marsh, Ramparts of Empire: British Imperialism and India’s Afghan Frontier, 1918–​1948 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 250. 37. Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia:  dreams of East-​ West harmony and the revolt against empire in 1919”, American Historical Review 111, no.  5 (2006): 1327–​1351. 38. The level of social mobilization achieved in Vietnam still sets it apart:  Christopher E. Goscha, “A ‘total war’ of decolonization? Social mobilization and state-​building in Communist Vietnam (1949–​54)”, War & Society 31, no. 2 (2012): 136–​162. 39. Heinz-​Gerhard Haupt and Kaus Weinhauer, “Terrorism and the state”, in Bloxham and Gerwarth, Political Violence in Twentieth-​Century Europe, 194–​195. 40. Brad Simpson, “The United States and the curious history of self-​determination”, Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (2012): 675–​685; Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 9–​19. 41. Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution. 42. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:  Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Fabian Klose, “The colonial testing ground. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the violent end of empire”, Humanity 2, no. 1 (2011): 107–​126; Jennifer Johnson, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), especially ­chapters 4–​6. 43. On banal imperialism:  Krishnan Kumar, “Empire, nation and national identities”, in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 301; more generally, see John M. Mackenzie, “Passion or indifference: popular imperialism in Britain: continuities and discontinuities

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    515 over two centuries”, in John M. Mackenzie, ed., European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 57–​89. 44. Matthew Hughes, “The banality of brutality:  British armed forces and the repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–​39”, English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (2009), 313–​354; Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 45, 85; for a fascinating counter-​example of policing closer to the community, see Marieke Bloembergen, “The perfect policeman: colonial policing, modernity, and conscience on Sumatra’s West Coast in the early 1930s”, Indonesia 91 (2011): 165–​191. Violent, racist machismo cultures were not confined to colonial security forces—​see Keith Breckenridge, “The allure of violence: men, race and masculinity on the South African goldmines, 1900–​1950”, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 669–​693. 45. Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Far Away Places:  The Genesis of the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 2013), ­chapters 6–​8; Thomas, Fight or Flight, ­chapters 4–​5. 46. Definition adapted from Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, “How ‘free’ is free riding in civil wars? Violence, insurgency, and the collective action problem”, World Politics 59, no. 2 (2007): 178, note 8. 47. Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire. From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 48. Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie (Paris:  Gallimard, 2001); Judith Surkis, “Ethics and violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War”, French Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 2 (2010): 38–​42. 49. Natalya Vince, “Transgressing boundaries:  gender, race, religion, and ‘Françaises musulmanes’ during the Algerian War of Independence”, French Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (2010): 447–​448, 452–​474. 50. Ryme Seferdjeli, “The French Army and Muslim women during the Algerian War (1954–​62)”, Hawwa 3, no.  1 (2005):  40–​79; Keally McBride and Annick T.  R. Wibben, “The gendering of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan”, Humanity 3, no.  2 (2012):  199–​ 215; Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, “Reconsidering women’s roles in the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, 1952–​1960”, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, eds., Decolonization and Conflict (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 159–​176. 51. French, The British Way, 105–​132; Bruno C. Reis, “The myth of British minimum force in counterinsurgency campaigns during decolonization (1945–​1970)”, Journal of Strategic Studies 34, no. 2 (2011): 245–​279; Mustafah Dhada, “The liberation war in Guinea-​Bissau reconsidered”, Journal of Military History 62, no. 3 (1998): 574–​576; Bureau of Intelligence and Research memorandum to State Department, 5 November 1963, Foreign Relations of the United States 1961–​1963, vol. XXI, 579–​580. 52. Huw Bennett, “ ‘A very salutary effect’:  The counter-​terror strategy in the early Malayan Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949”, Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 415–​444; Karl Hack, “Everyone lived in fear: Malaya and the British way of counter-​insurgency”, Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 4–​5 (2012): 671–​699. 53. Michael Evans, “The wretched of the empire: politics, ideology and counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–​80”, Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 2 (2007): 186–​187.

516   Martin Thomas 54. For a macro-​survey of anti-​insurgent violence in 147 post-​war insurgencies, see Benjamin A. Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-​Lindsay, “Draining the sea: mass killing and guerrilla warfare”, International Organization 58, no. 1 (2004), 375–​407. 55. Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 177–​179. 56. Michel Rocard, Rapport sur les camps de regroupement et autres textes sur la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003). 57. Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale. Camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011). 58. Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 183–​184. 59. Ibid., 177–​179. 60. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 4–​15; Sugata Bose, “Starvation amidst plenty: the making of famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942–​45”, Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (1990): 699–​727. 61. Neil MacMaster, “The Roots of insurrection:  the role of the Algerian village assembly (djemâa) in peasant resistance, 1863–​1962”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 2 (2013): 436–​438, 442–​445. 62. Kalyvas and Kocher, “How ‘free’ is free riding in civil wars?”, 179–​183; on the collective action problem in insurgencies, see Elisabeth Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 63. M. L. R. Smith and Sophie Roberts, “War in the gray: exploring the concept of dirty war”, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31, no. 5 (2008): 379–​384. 64. Smith & Roberts, “War in the gray”, 385–​386. 65. Lauren B. Wilcox, Bodies of Violence:  Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 18–​20. 66. French, The British Way, 76–​94; US National Archives, RG 59, 751S.00, box 3375, Algiers Consulate to State Department, 13 April 1955. 67. Smith and Roberts, “War in the gray”, 387–​389. 68. Rémy Limpach, “Business as usual:  Dutch mass violence in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945–​49”, in Luttikhuis and Moses, Colonial Counterinsurgency,  64–​78. 69. David French, The British Way, 229–​232; idem, Fighting EOKA: The British Campaign of Counter-​Insurgency on Cyrpus, 1955–​1959 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015), 95–​ 97; Neve Gordon, “Human rights as a security threat: Lawfare and the campaign against human rights NGOs”, Law and Society Review 48, no. 2 (2014): 311–​318. 70. Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The ontology of ‘political violence’: action and identity in civil wars”, Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475–​494; more generally, see idem, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 71. Kalyvas, “The Ontology”, 479–​483, 486–​487. 72. Scott Gates, “Recruitment and allegiance: the microfoundations of rebellion”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 1 (2002): 112–​113. 73. Inge Brinkman, “War, witches and traitors: cases from the MPLA’s Eastern front in Angola (1966–​1975)”, Journal of African History 44 (2003): 303–​325; Linda Heywood, “Unita and ethnic nationalism in Angola”, Journal of Modern African Studies 27, no. 1 (1989): 50–​54. 74. Causes of insurgent group disunity are explored in a contemporary South Asian context in Staniland, Networks of Rebellion, part I: “Theorizing rebellion”. 75. Christopher E. Goscha, Vietnam:  Un état né de la guerre (Paris:  Armand Colin, 2011), 246–​247; more generally, David G. Marr, Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–​1946) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), ­chapter 7.

Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires    517 76. Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion:  The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6–​11. 77. Karl Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as counter-​insurgency paradigm”, Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 383–​414; Weichong Ong, Malaysia’s Defeat of Armed Communism: The Second Emergency, 1968–​1989 (London: Routledge, 2015), ­chapters 3–​4. 78. Jacques Valette, La guerre d’Algérie des Messalistes 1954–​1962 (Paris:  Harmattan, 2001); Linda Amiri, La Bataille de France. La guerre d’Algérie en France (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004). 79. Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 70–​83; Jeffrey James Byrne, “Our own special brand of socialism: Algeria and the contest of modernities in the 1960s”, Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 427–​447. 80. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion, 201–​206. 81. Jenna Jordan, “When heads roll: assessing the effectiveness of leadership decapitation”, Security Studies 18, no. 4 (2009): 755. 82. Neil MacMaster, “The ‘silent native’:  attentisme, being compromised, and banal terror during the Algerian War of Independence, 1954–​1962”, in Martin Thomas, ed., The French Colonial Mind:  Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 283–​303; French, Fighting EOKA, 158–​170. 83. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau,  8–​18. 84. Norma Kriger, “The Zimbabwean War of Liberation:  struggles within the struggle”, Journal of Southern African Studies 14, no. 2 (1988): 306–​307, 310–​312, 319. 85. David M. Crowe, War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice (Basingtoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014),  80–​82. 86. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–​1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33–​50, 127–​131. 87. Helen M. Kinsella, “Discourses of difference: civilians, combatants, and compliance with the laws of war”, Review of International Studies 31, Suppl 1 (2005): 175–​180. 88. Raphaëlle Branche, “La commission de sauvegarde les droits et libertés individuels chronique d’un échec annoncé?”, Vingtième Siècle 62, no. 2 (1999): 14–​29. 89. Crowe, War Crimes,  66–​78. 90. Paul A. Kramer, “Race-​making and colonial violence in the U.S. Empire: the Philippine-​ American War as race war”, Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (2006): 195–​197. 91. Walter L. Hixon, American Settler Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 109, 172; Kramer, “Race-​making”, 184–​201. It is significant that the US military occupiers applied Lieber’s American Civil War army regulations that distinguished between “civilized” and “savage” warfare, affording no protection to civilian populations in the latter. 92. Kramer, “Race-​making”, 171–​172, 172 (n. 5). 93. Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses, and Klaus Weinhauer, “Europe in the world:  systems and cultures of violence”, in Bloxham and Gerwarth, Political Violence, 14. 94. Alex J. Bellamy, “Emergencies and the protection of non-​combatants in war”, International Affairs 80, no. 5 (2004): 830, 839. 95. Johnson, The Battle for Algeria, 128–​132, 145–​148, 156. As Johnson points out, only in 1977 when the ICRC responded to pressure from Third World states by adding two additional protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions were the status of combatants and non-​ combatants in internal conflicts squarely addressed.

518   Martin Thomas 96. Bellamy, “Emergencies”, 831–​835. 97. Maja Zehfuss, “Killing civilians: thinking the practice of war”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 14 (2012): 424–​426. 98. Britta Stime, “Counterinsurgency agent networks and noncombatant-​targeted violence”, Intelligence and National Security 32, no. 1 (2017): 107–​110. 99. Philip Deery, “The terminology of terrorism:  Malaya, 1948–​52”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (2003): 231–​247. 100. Zehfuss, “Killing civilians”, 433–​434, quote at 434.

Chapter 27

Nationa l i sm, Devel opment, a nd W e lfare C ol onia l i sm Gender and the Dynamics of Decolonization Barbara Bush

Much has been written on multiple aspects of gender and empire since the 1980s. As Rosalind O’Hanlon has pointed out, such studies not only restore women to historical visibility, but remind us that men, too, are gendered as are the public arenas in which they dominated.1 The importance of gender in the ending of empires has, however, been accorded less attention, although gender continued to be highly significant in understanding the dynamics of decolonization.2 Decolonization was, and still is, represented as a process in which the key actors were male development experts, politicians, and colonial officials who negotiated the post-​colonial future with male nationalist leaders. This resulted in policies to shore up masculine authority and exclude women from the public realm obscuring their active agency in nationalist protest and politics. This given, women were central to the emergent development discourse premised on colonial gender stereotypes.3 This article focuses on the relationship between gender, welfare, and colonial modernization as a key strategy to manage and contain nationalism, that is, the potential of development ‘to serve purposes of control’.4 It will critically evaluate these strategies and assess how they impacted on gender relations and identities of colonizer and colonized alike. In developing the argument that a gender perspective can enhance our understanding of decolonization, three key themes emerge: gendered perspectives on welfare colonialism, on nationalism and resistance, and, finally, on gendered initiatives to ensure a smooth transition to independence. As Dieter Rothermund has observed, decolonization was not a sudden moment but rather the consequence of forces of disintegration, including global changes that inspired resistance.5 This chapter focuses primarily on British colonial policy in sub-​ Saharan Africa from the late 1930s to the 1960s—​the era of war, threats to the Asian

520   Barbara Bush empire, and Indian independence, when the African colonies were given higher priority. Global developments, however, also affected other colonial powers who adopted parallel strategies; Thomas and Thompson note that the collapse of European colonialism was intertwined, even co-​dependent.6 Colonial development became a focus of international concern, and both Britain and France moved to embrace a development framework to ‘reinvigorate’ and ‘re-​legitimise’ empire.7 The gendered ‘development discourse’ pioneered in British colonial policies was subsequently incorporated into international development policies adopted by United Nations (UN) agencies, non-​governmental organizations (NGOs), and the World Bank. French colonial officers, argues Veronique Dimier, recycled their imperial experience in shaping the African development agenda of the European Economic Community (EEC). 8 As Joseph Hodge has observed, the practice of development in Africa took on multiple forms over the course of the twentieth century.9 Nonetheless, important continuities existed, particularly in relation to gendered policies. Though not within the scope of this chapter, the rise of international feminism and the influence of a new international humanitarian agenda sets the wider context. The late colonial era synchronized with the emancipation of western women and feminist demands for equality and women’s rights, articulated in international forums, stimulated concern for the welfare of colonized women. Feminism transcended formal boundaries between nation states and empires and also influenced some colonized women’s engagement in nationalist movements.10 Before 1940, however, international women’s organizations were dominated by elite women from Europe and ‘neo-​Europes’, who, argues Leila Rupp, demonstrated a ‘feminist orientalism’; colonized women themselves had no voice.11 European women who were actively engaged in welfare and development in the colonies also retained stereotyped perceptions of colonized women. This flags an underlying thread to my discussion: the durability of gendered race orders that that persisted into the post-​colonial era. Colonial welfare and development policies were first formulated in the inter-​war years but were expanded after 1940 in response to colonial unrest and American criticisms of European colonialism. British policy evolved from a ‘top-​down’ paternalist trusteeship to a development agenda that prioritized enhanced welfare, preparation for self-​rule, and more attention to the active participation of the colonized.12 Lucy Mair, an anthropologist with close connections to the Colonial Office, defined welfare as embracing health, education, labour, and social welfare. Social welfare in the British Empire was formerly the responsibility of individual colonial authorities who relied heavily of voluntary initiatives but the war years saw more direct intervention from the metropolitan centre.13 The Colonial Office established a Social Welfare Advisory Committee in 1943 and more professional welfare workers were trained and appointed, creating a ‘marked cleavage’ between pre-​war voluntary workers and younger professionals holding key administrative posts.14 Colonies were now required to send annual progress reports, and after the war the government was also obliged send representatives to the United Nations Committee on Information from the Non-​Governing Territories.15 More government finance was provided through amendments to pre-​war Colonial Welfare and

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    521 Development Acts, including—​for social research and social welfare—​areas in which emancipated British women had made a mark. However, despite official efforts to put education and social welfare on a more professional footing, constant shortage of finances led to a continued reliance on religious missions in the field of welfare and education up to, and even after, independence. From the 1920s, colonial development policies promoted the modernization of gender roles and relations as a strategy to stabilize colonial cultures in flux.16 More attention was now given to the welfare and ‘uplift’ of colonized women that constituted the eradication of ‘primitive’ cultural practices. All colonial powers promoted education in domestic skills, childrearing, and hygiene aimed at transforming colonized women into modern mothers and wives who would have a moderating influence on men and diffuse colonial unrest.17 With the growth of nationalism, the Colonial Office recognized the ‘social and economic importance’ of women in developing African societies and targeted them as the main ‘stabilising’ element.18 Welfare of women and children was also regarded as a strategy to deflect male discontent over poor working conditions. In 1941 the Nigerian Government Colliery in Enugu appointed a ‘Lady Welfare Officer’, the wife of the Staff Welfare Officer. The Colonial Office confirmed the appointment as an ‘excellent move’ as she was doing ‘very important government work’. An African midwife was also employed and funding allocated to a building for ‘examinations’ and supplies of disinfectant. In justifying her post, the welfare officer stressed that the families of male workers lived in ‘grossly overcrowded conditions’; the women were ‘very backward’ and had ‘no idea how look after families or keep home clean’.19 The Inspector of Labour stressed that female welfare work in the colliery camps was of prime importance to the ‘health and efficiency’ of the men and ‘the encouragement of workers’ confidence in management’s good intentions’. Male workers, he added, had tended to regard welfare as ‘just so much dope’ as their chief preoccupation was with more pay and better quarters; domestic welfare to ‘counteract . . . neglect’ would hopefully eliminate the ‘suspicion and resentment which had caused trouble . . . in recent years’.20 Education of African girls and women was deemed fundamental to gendered welfare policies. Where it existed, however, girls’ education was delivered primarily by white female missionaries and restricted to basic literacy and domestic science. The few government secondary schools for girls, such as Queen’s College established in Lagos in 1927, also adopted gendered curriculums aimed primarily at preparation for marriage and motherhood. In contrast, at the elite King’s College, Lagos, founded in 1909, boys received an English public school education that prepared them for professional careers and public service.21 By 1950, some progress had been made in all African colonies, but still only a minority of girls finished primary education as they left school when they ‘reached the age of being useful at home’.22 An official report concluded that girls remained educationally disadvantaged by lack of money for school fees and jobs for educated girls. Educated girls were also ‘less acceptable as wives of educated men’ as they were more expensive to maintain than their ‘uneducated sisters’ and ‘less willing to undertake tasks of housekeeping’.23As Walter Schicho has pointed out, efforts to educate

522   Barbara Bush women did not change African societies, but rather strengthened masculine power and dominance.24 Colonial officials, apparently less comfortable with educated African women than with their male ‘detribalised’ counterparts, implied that female education could create as many problems as it solved; thus ‘innovations’ should be brought in slowly given the ‘complexity’ of problems involved.25 When defending policies to the UN, officials argued that European concepts of female equality with men could not be imposed on ‘peoples unprepared by tradition and education’. Government policy was to foster education and emancipation by ‘encouragement and persuasion, rather than compulsion’. This policy was achieving ‘notable results’ and social and professional opportunities for women were ‘steadily increasing’.26 Despite these claims, inadequate female education, lack of vocational training, and cultural constraints impeded the employment of women in the modern sector. In 1962, the International Labour Organization (ILO) requested information from colonial governors for a proposed conference on the ‘Employment and Conditions of Work of African Women’ to be held in 1964. The responses confirmed that due to lack of training and ‘social attitudes’, only a very small minority of women worked in the modern economic sector (on average ≤15% of the employed labour force).27 African girls’ education and training had a Cinderella status when development monies were allocated. Dr Sara Burstall, head of Manchester School for Girls and a member of the Advisory Committee on Education, alerted the Colonial Office to ‘disquieting accounts’ of ‘Government neglect’ of Queen’s College. The English female head had ‘courageously’ endured ‘disheartening conditions’, but her health had suffered from overwork and the ‘constant anxiety’ about the morals of her girl boarders who lacked ‘proper supervision’. The government’s only concession was the appointment of a ‘suitable African’ as matron.28 During the war the same headteacher complained to the Nigerian governor about the lack of girls’ vocational training and, given a shortage of office workers, a British woman was appointed to teach shorthand at the College. The governor reported that the colony also needed more midwives and nurses.29 The Colonial Office conceded that women’s education in the ‘broadest sense’ lagged behind that of boys and men although it was essential for ‘social progress’. Some women teachers had been trained in missions but were heavily outnumbered by men. There were no African women doctors.30 These problems were compounded by shortages of trained British women to meet development objectives. Anticipating that the need for education would expand ‘indefinitely’ after the war, the government established a sub-​ committee of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies in 1941 with a brief to consider recruitment and training of women of the ‘right sort of women’, given past problems.31 Evidence of the ‘right sort of women’ to help steer colonies to self-​government, that is, with progressive ideas and more egalitarian attitudes to race, was rare before the 1940s. Female missionaries and women employed in the colonial welfare services retained superior racial attitudes. A British woman with experience of social research in Southern

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    523 Sudan noted that the European nurses she met, ‘with notable exceptions’, were ‘scrambling for postings to European hospitals, greatly disliked native work, and had little sympathy or patience with natives’.32 Even European women closely involved in the evolution of development policy were unable to move beyond gendered racial stereotypes. The anthropologist Audrey Richards conceded that her UNESCO-​funded study of Buganda women’s fertility was the ‘first piece of fieldwork [she had] found difficult’; the women were insolent and laughed at her questions. In turn, she referred to the ‘futility [of] having a heart to heart with successful prostitutes [to] learn what are mysteriously called their “values” ’.33 Metropolitan commitments to raising the status of women were also undermined by concern in the colonies that women would become troublesome without patriarchal controls. Men were co-​opted by the colonial administration to police their womenfolk. Rather than protecting traditional cultures, concludes April Gordon, this support for African patriarchy was a creative response to preserve male privilege in a colonial society in flux.34 Colonial authorities also feared that interventions in traditional gender relations could upset male nationalists, for example, the reluctance to take action on missionary campaigns against female circumcision in Kenya.35 Where modernization programmes were introduced, Kenyan authorities continued to see women as adjuncts of men. African welfare workers were chosen by European District Officers and were exclusively male, and wives accompanying them during training had to agree to take a course in housewifery and child welfare.36 More generally, colonial administration, and thus welfare policy, remained dominated by European men. Only forty-​eight ‘Women Administrative Assistants’ were recruited for work in all colonies from 1948–​1949 and, due to resignations on health grounds or through marriage, only twenty-​eight were still serving in 1950.37 Colonial welfare and development policies thus prioritized men whose political activism colonial authorities viewed as a greater threat to colonial stability.38 Male labour was regarded as essential to colonial economic development; women were relegated to the home, and they were ignored in economic planning. 39 A government-​commissioned study of the economic role of Cameroonian women in the late 1940s criticized these dominant assumptions of female passivity and the lack of recognition of crucial female roles in local economies.40 From a cynical viewpoint, initiatives to modernize maternity and childrearing practices to reduce high infant mortality rates derived from a need to ensure a healthy, male workforce, rather than to improve women’s lives. Yet even these initiatives were inadequate. A 1941 report on the health of women and children in the colonies claimed that progress was impeded by poverty, lack of female education, family breakdown resulting in ‘promiscuity, illegitimacy and venereal diseases’, and the ‘inadequacy’ of European women medical officers, nurses, and health visitors. The author recommended improvements in health services for women and children, more education in hygiene, and reform of nurse training with wider recruitment. Yet no real action ensued and the report was still languishing in the Colonial Office in 1944.41 Little had changed by 1950 and officials acknowledged that ‘too little attention’ was given to the ‘women’s side of our work in the colonies’.42

524   Barbara Bush Melinda Adams argues that in the last decade of colonial rule, more emphasis was placed on promoting women’s participation in public life and greater opportunities for education and employment. In assessing the impact of colonial policies implemented in the colonial era on African women’s potential to contribute to post-​colonial development, Heather Starkey stresses difference between colonies; in East and Southern Africa little progress was made, whereas Northern Sudan, for instance, witnessed rapid progress for women, supported by progressive male nationalists.43 Women’s progress was also affected by religion, class, and levels of westernization. In colonies with large Muslim populations, women were more tightly controlled and there was greater resistance from men, for example, to women’s education.44 Generally, though, improvements in women’s status and welfare were constrained by lack of finance, persistent gender discrimination, and economic development. Deep contradictions existed between a gendered discourse centred on ‘welfare’ and the colonial labour policies that took men away from their villages to work in the modern economic sector. Male migration undermined domestic life, gave women a heavier workload, and created what Audrey Richards described as ‘hungry manless areas’.45 Embedded within colonial development policies was a paternalistic concern for the welfare of African women, but also fears of powerful female agency that had to be firmly controlled. A preoccupation with fertility, maternity, and childrearing, common to all modernizing colonial powers, involved deep intrusions into African women’s cultural practices and attempts to control colonized women’s bodies in the name of ‘progress’.46 Women thus resisted or subverted efforts to transform them into modern wives and mothers and such policies did not diffuse anti-​colonial unrest and produce the desired stability.47 On the contrary, development became associated with a breakdown in traditional gendered constraints and morality. Education allegedly created ‘instability’ as educated girls were less fitted to return to ‘life in the bush’; unable to find jobs, but with no place ‘among . . . their own tribe’, they drifted into towns and became ‘prostitutes’.48 The common use of the derogatory term ‘prostitute’ reflected fears of women’s active agency. Thus, Kenyan women involved in nationalist struggles were condemned as ‘prostitutes’ in contrast to ‘respectable’ women who did not engage in politics.49 Colonial modernization thus enhanced fears that the authorities and African men were losing control over women as ‘runaway tribal girls’ added to anxieties about urbanization, rapid social change, and nationalism.50 To counteract threats to colonial stability, officials attempted to co-​opt moderate male nationalists in a supposedly joint enterprise that would prepare colonies for a smooth transition to self-​government. This perpetuated the assumption that only men were active political agents, whereas there is ample evidence of women’s participation in anti-​colonial resistance and nationalist movements, including armed struggle.51 When women challenged the colonial state, the heavy-​handed treatment they experienced undermined the image of colonial authorities as protectors of women’s welfare; in Nigeria, women protesters were beaten and fired upon, and during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya many women were imprisoned and endured violence and dreadful conditions.52 At the same time, the Kenyan authorities championed the rights of colonized

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    525 women to secure their support for the colonial state and adopted gendered ‘divide and rule’ tactics to undermine resistance; welfare provision was made dependent on women not helping ‘terrorists’, although though this was only marginally successful.53 Similarly, during the war of independence, the French encouraged Algerian women to ‘modernise’ through abandoning the veil, regarded as symbolic of male oppression, but women continued to aid the resistance and re-​adopted the veil as a symbol of anti-​ colonial defiance.54 Such gendered interventions intensified the cultural conflict inherent in the juxtaposition of ‘superior’ European and ‘inferior’ African masculinities dominant in colonial discourse. For colonized men, involvement in nationalist struggles was a way of reclaiming positive masculine identities that informed post-​colonial politics.55 In androcentric nationalist writings women were rendered invisible or represented as icons of a reconstituted ‘traditional culture’ and ‘mothers of the nation’, vital to its regeneration.56 In her study of Hannah Kudjoe, a leading woman nationalist in the struggle for Ghanaian independence in the 1940s and 1950s, Jean Allman has demonstrated that women’s contribution to nationalist struggles have ‘disappeared’ from written histories.57 Additionally, Antoinette Burton observes that colonial policy fostered a connection between ‘patriarchal colonialism’ and ‘patriarchal nationalism’, and that women’s voice is absent from archives.58 This included women in leadership positions. The Nigerian feminist and nationalist Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, as a founder member of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), was the only women in a seven-​member delegation to London in July 1947 to register protests with the Colonial Secretary. When the delegation met with Colonial Office officials to discuss grievances and ‘demand steps towards self-​government’, she reportedly had an equal turn at speaking.59 Yet a letter to the Prime Minister from an expatriate Nigerian resident who travelled on the same ship as the delegation refers only to the six males in advising the government not to listen to nationalist ‘propaganda’.60 Other Nigerian women, including the women’s rights activist Margaret Ekpo, were active in the NCNC, but it was men such as Azikiwe Nnamdi, a key member of the London delegation, who dominate contemporary and historical accounts.61 Female participation in nationalist movements and post-​independence nation building was restricted by cultural factors, unequal access to education, and lack of political and civil rights. Few women had the ‘western’ education that enabled their educated male counterparts to articulate ideas of nationalism and western modernity on which aspirations of independence were premised.62 With the exception of the Jamaican activists Una Marson and Amy Ashwood Garvey, women from the colonies rarely participated in nationalist politics in the metropolitan centre, the cauldron of anti-​imperialism, where activists from across the empire exchanged ideas.63 Most African-​Caribbean women, however, experienced similar barriers to political participation as African women, despite enfranchisement in the 1940s which allowed entry of middle-​class women into public life.64 By 1950, the colonial government focused more attention on the political status of colonized women. A report observed that, unlike in the West Indies, universal suffrage was ‘unknown’ in the African colonies. In West Africa, women, as the ‘bulwark ‘of the

526   Barbara Bush economy, played ‘a very large part’ in community life. In East Africa, however, where ‘tribal civilization’ was ‘less advanced’, the status of women was lower; only European and Indian women participated in elections. Throughout the remaining empire, women were generally debarred form serving on juries.65 Officially, wherever new constitutions were introduced as a precursor to self-​government, women were enfranchised and given equal rights. In practice, however, women’s ability to participate in politics remained limited. In the first Buganda elections in 1953, for instance, Richards recorded that ‘a number of women [illegally] voted’, although the colonial government had not provided for this in the belief that Bugandan men ‘wouldn’t hear of such a thing’.66 War-​time developments, however, did raise female consciousness of political and social inequalities. In recognition of the shortage of indigenous women to meet development objectives, more women were educated and trained in Britain and hence exposed to the modernizing influences of the imperial centre. In 1944, the Victoria League established a residential Club for Colonial Girls in London, and by 1947, female students, mostly from West Africa or the West Indies who studied nursing, medicine, law, teaching, domestic science, and the social sciences, greatly increased demand for these facilities. Concise numbers are difficult to establish, but the rise in numbers is reflected in the appointment of a woman liaison officer for female West African students in the UK, based at the Colonial Office Welfare Department.67 Additionally, by 1945 young African women were reputably demanding better education as they saw the advantages education gave to western women’.68 When Audrey Richards visited a Girl’s Junior Secondary in Uganda, she was ‘amazed’ at the girls’ interest in access to UK scholarships. Women now arguably had more confidence to participate in nationalist politics; writing of the Uganda National Congress, Richards remarked that ‘the girls are allowed to speak at meetings and have got over their stage fright’.69 After 1945, African women’s organizations proliferated, providing a forum to more forcefully articulate demands. Such ‘non-​political’ organizations were officially encouraged, but any hint of female politicization caused concern. An official report on a Conference of Women of African and African descent held in Accra in 1960 was widely circulated, including to High Commissioners and British Ambassadors in Africa, Paris, and Washington. Over a hundred delegates attended, of whom fifty-​four were from the Ghanaian Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP), twenty-​two from the US (possibly including ‘spies’ from the US embassy), eighteen from Liberia, and twenty-​four from other countries. No women attended from East, Central, and Southern Africa, or from francophone Africa. The agenda was allegedly ‘non-​political’ and aimed to promote leadership and citizenship of women in ‘emergent’ societies and improve the social welfare of women. British officials, however, claimed the conference, opened by Kwame Nkrumah, was highjacked by the pan-​Africanist CPP.70 Official reports on African women’s organizations pre-​and post-​independence reflect colonial race and gender stereotypes and a misogynistic fear of women’s political empowerment. The Cold War also enhanced concerns about women’s politicization; as Rupp notes, the communist influenced Women’s International Democratic Federation had greater success in organizing ‘Third World’ women than did previous international

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    527 women’s organizations.71 These concerns are voiced in a report on the All-​African Women’s Conference (founded in 1962) held in Dar-​es-​Salaam in July 1972. Three hundred women attended, including an Afro-​American delegate whose ‘bulky frame’ was adorned with ‘enough jewellery to finance a fair-​sized freedom fighter movement’. The report concluded that the conference was a badly organized ‘shambles’ and a ‘nauseating affair’, particularly for its ‘cynical exploitation [by] fraternal advisors from communist countries’.72 A record of the meeting produced by the women themselves does, indeed, reflect enhanced political consciousness. Delegates were hosted by the Tanzanian Women’s Organisation and attended a reception given by President Nyerere in recognition of women and their contributions to ‘the struggle against colonialism, neo-​colonialism and underdevelopment’. The conference supported ongoing liberation struggles in Africa and acknowledged the African woman’s ‘heavy responsibility in the new society’ and ‘decisive role’ in economic development. A ten-​year programme for the future included improving education and vocational training so women could participate more widely in economic and political life.73 Developments in African women’s political consciousness were linked to the wider changes catalysed by war and decolonization. During the war the colonies were vital to the war effort and more colonized men and women came to Britain as workers and to join the armed forces. Wartime experiences further stimulated race consciousness and demands for independence that threatened European empires. In response to these challenges, the British government now prioritized the transition from empire to a multiracial commonwealth and from subject to citizen. Post-​war, the UN charter enshrined gender equality and international feminist organizations found a stronger voice, promoting women’s rights and demonstrating sisterly solidarity with colonized women. Women were now in official positions and the Human Rights Commission, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, focused debate on women’s issues.74 This ‘feminization’ of international organizations also influenced British women’s attitudes to colonized women and anti-​colonial nationalism. In December 1950, the International Women’s Day Committee attended a conference in London to discuss the ‘Struggle of the Women in Africa and Asia for Freedom and Happiness’. A resolution passed declared: Despite the difficulty of communicating with our colonial sisters, we understand their problems and are conscious of our responsibility towards them. We pledge to make known to the women of Britain the position of women in colonial Africa and to do everything in our power to help them in their struggle for freedom and equality.75

The greater emphasis on gender and racial equality also influenced the roles of European men and women living and working in the colonies and their relations with colonized men and women. With indigenization of administrative and political structures, colonial officers focused more on aiding development in closer collaboration with colonized men, rather than top-​down governance. In contrast to the pre-​war years, married men could now apply to the Colonial Administrative Service and their

528   Barbara Bush wives were able to work in the colonies to which they were posted; more British women were attracted to government service in the colonies and married women were able to apply for government posts.76 White women in the colonies were more reconciled to a gradual transition to self-​government and committed to improving race relations, even if they were unable to divest themselves of white privilege. For instance, Molly Huggins, wife of Sir John Huggins, Governor of Jamaica from 1943 to 1951, described herself as an ‘ardent feminist’ against ‘any form of colour discrimination’ and regarded herself as a progressive and stabilizing influence on Jamaican society as nationalism intensified.77 Wives now took a greater interest in their husbands’ work and were keen to engage in related welfare projects. In a letter to Violet Creech Jones (wife of the Colonial Secretary), one such woman observed that ‘. . . there must be hundreds of wives in the colonial empire seeking to escape from the tyranny of morning bridge parties’.78 She was one of four wives who accompanied their husbands to Paris in 1949 on a visit organized by the French Colonial Office for British officers in training. The women, she recounted, were invited meet with the Association des Femmes de l’ Union Française to exchange information concerning ‘social problems’ in overseas territories. This included information about similar women’s organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands that the French Association met with to discuss ‘common problems’. All three organizations, she added, were sponsored by their respective states to engage with colonized women and improve welfare in their colonial empires. Each sent a representative to the UN to ‘refute propaganda stories about the colonies put out by other powers’ (presumably the US and Soviet Union). Such an organization in the British colonies, where there were ‘enormous problems’, the letter concluded, would help wives to feel that they were ‘helping to bring about an understanding between the two races’.79 In response, Violet Creech Jones proposed that the Colonial Office establish a Colonial Women’s League to encourage joint welfare activities of wives of officials and colonial women. Officials, however, appeared to resent her interference and concluded there was ‘no real need’ for such an organization as there were ‘ample voluntary initiatives’ and lack of available funding.80 Despite this lukewarm response, the Colonial Office recognized the need for more training for colonial wives to harness their energies in the development of the colonies. The solution was found in the Women’s Corona Club, an offshoot of the Corona Club for men in the Colonial Service, which had a network of overseas branches. In 1950, this was incorporated into a new Women’s Corona Society (WCS), based at the Colonial Office, whose members now included women employed in the Colonial Service as well as officers’ wives. Whereas the Corona Club had focused mainly on social events and social bonding across the empire, the WCS requested Colonial Development and Welfare funding ‘to encourage and support voluntary social work in the colonies’. After some debate, funding was granted in recognition of the WCS’s important role in running training courses, providing advice, ensuring ‘the [appropriate] behaviour of European women abroad’, and maintaining the ‘morale’ of the Colonial Service.81 More emphasis was also placed on multiracial membership of colonial branches in an attempt to bridge

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    529 cultural differences and progress the modernization of African women, with European women providing role models. Melinda Adams, however, observes that as independence approached elite African women in the WCS’s Cameroonian branch preferred to form their own organisations.82 After independence the Colonial Office continued to recognize the ‘good work’ the WCS did ‘in fields of interest to us’, including recruitment. In the metropolitan centre the organization contributed to decolonizing the Empire in running short training courses for unmarried women and wives of married men appointed by the Ministry for Overseas Development. The government provided free office accommodation and administrative support and officials stressed that the organization’s work would be ‘even more valuable’ if it could get away from its ‘former colonial image’. In response, the WCS leadership confirmed that it was ‘anxious’ to do so and publicized itself as ‘a circle of women of many races who . . . work for an increase in mutual understanding and friendship’.83 As decolonization approached the mission and ethos of other metropolitan-​ based women’s empire organizations also evolved to secure continued British influence in an independent commonwealth.84 Divisions now deepened between settler women defending their way of life and progressive metropolitans who supported Africans rights and self-​rule in keeping with developments in colonial policy.85 In Kenya, however, the Mau Mau uprising and the inevitability of concessions to African nationalism prompted some engagement with official policies on multiracialism and African welfare. In 1950, a government report noted that the influential East African Women’s League (founded in 1917 to campaign for equal rights for white women) was engaged in voluntary initiatives related to the ‘uplift’ of African women.86 In February 1957, the East Africa Women's League (EAWL) hosted a Convention of Women’s Societies in East Africa in Nairobi for delegates from twenty-​seven ‘non-​political’ societies in recognition that ‘goodness and understanding had come out of times of great difficulty’. All races were allegedly represented and it was resolved that organizations attending should work together for ‘increased social development and greater co-​operation between women of all races’. In effect, only Asian and European women attended. Moreover, non-​European membership of the Frangipani Club, started in 1951 by the Inter-​Racial Group of the EAWL, was ‘carefully restricted’ to elite Asian women. African women’s voices were absent although ‘more backward women’ were encouraged to join with ‘their more cultured sisters’ in the Homemakers (Naivasha) founded in 1956 to promote modern western domesticity. Most organizations declared an interest in ‘African welfare work’ and were involved in initiatives to ‘modernise’ African culture but the interests of European women remained paramount.87 Kenyan settlers ultimately had to accept black majority rule, but retained racialized gender stereotypes. A  spokesman for the settlers regarding concerns over the situation in Kenya in 1963 highlighted fears about the treatment of European women by ‘Mr Kenyatta’ after independence. He also cited a letter he had received from a female Kenyan settler that reported the alleged rape of her elderly neighbour by an African houseboy.88 This allegation evoked the durable stereotype of the black peril as a sexual

530   Barbara Bush threat to white women to plead the settler case. The home government acknowledged that settlers felt the home government had let them down, but no action was taken. Officials recognized the ‘dreadful sexual practices which were part of the . . . Mau Mau oaths’ but were clearly cynical about the use of settler propaganda.89 In the long and complex process of decolonization, gendered welfare and development strategies in the non-​ settler colonies, although underfunded, established some foundations for self-​government. They had less impact in settler societies where European minorities clung onto power leading to violence.90 In Rhodesia and South Africa segregationist policies reinforced traditional gender roles.91 There was little attempt to improve the welfare and status of women as this would constitute some acknowledgment of African rights. Before the war, the British government had supported white settlers but this diminished with decolonization and preoccupation with the emergent ‘empire within’. Gendered welfare policies implemented during the decolonization of the colonial empire were now re-​articulated in the metropolitan centre to address ‘post-​colonial’ problems. The gendered and racialized identities of colonizer and colonized on which colonial development was premised became central to redefining post-​colonial national identities.92 To conclude, welfare and development policies arguably stimulated, rather than contained, nationalism. In the transition to independence, new conflicts erupted between male nationalists and colonial governments over differing conceptions of gender orders. As Morrell and Swart have stressed, colonialism was a ‘highly gendered process with reverberations into the postcolonial world.93 Nationalist modernization thus involved the reconstruction of gender as well as the restitution of a culture denigrated by colonizers. Women’s bodies now became a site of conflict between colonial rulers and male nationalists who reclaimed greater control over the welfare of ‘their women’. The post-​colonial development agenda, integral to building modern African states, was appropriated by male African nationalist elites in conjunction with male-​dominated international aid agencies, thus perpetuating gender inequalities. This flags important continuities between colonial and post-​colonial development policies. In Joanna Bailken’s words, ‘the empire was reborn in and through a globally manufactured welfare state’. This was shaped by decolonization and its perceived demands, but delivered by the new agents, aid workers.94 Despite shifts in development practices gender was arguably neglected in development policies until the 1990s.95 Official policies to meet the challenges of nationalism also influenced changes in European men and women’s gendered identities and relationship to empire as it was transformed into commonwealth. Colonial development and welfare involved more European women who, influenced by feminism and progressive ideas on race, challenged the old patriarchal structures that sustained imperial power. Decolonization and a reassertion of colonial masculinities represented an ‘emasculation’ of imperial manhood and arguably precipitated a ‘crisis in masculinities’ in the 1950s.96 Thus gender not only influenced the colonial development and nationalist discourses that characterized the course of decolonization but also post-​colonial identities and post-​independence development and welfare.

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    531

Notes 1. Rosalind O’ Hanlon, “Gender in the British Empire”, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire:  The Twentieth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 396. For the range of research, see Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2. A rare exception is La Ray Denzer, “Gender and Decolonization: A Study of Three Women in West African Public Life”, in J. D. Ade Ajayi and J. D. Y. Peel, eds., People and Empires in African History: Essays in Memory of Michael Crowder (London: Longman, 1992), 117–​139. 3. See Barbara Bush, “Motherhood, Morality and Social Order: Gender and Development Discourse and Practice in Late Colonial Africa”, in Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf, eds., Developing Africa:  Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-​Century Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 270–​293. 4. Joseph M. Hodge and Gerald Hödl, “Introduction”, in Hodge, Hödl, and Kopf, eds., Developing Africa, 4. 5. Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 1. 6. Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation:  From ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation”, The International History Review 36, no.  1 (2014), 142–​170,  162. 7. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences:  Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1997), Introduction, 7. 8. Veronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureaucracy:  Recycling Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2–​4. 9. Joseph M. Hodge “Epilogue: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead”, in Hodge, Hödl, and Kopf, eds., Developing Africa, 367. 10. As argued in Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Verso, 1986). 11. Leila J. Rupp, “Transnational Women’s Organisations”, European History Online (EGO), Institute of European History (IEG), 16 June, 2011, http://​www.ieg.eu/​ruppl-​2011-​en. 12. Rohlan Schuknecht, British Colonial Development Policy after the Second World War: The Case of Sukumaland, Tanganyika (Berlin: Münster, 2010), 116–​117. 13. James Midgely, “Imperialism, Colonialism and Social Welfare”, in James Midgely and David Piachaud, eds., Colonialism and Welfare; Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 38. See also Lucy P. Mair, Welfare in the British Colonies (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1944), 90. 14. Memo signed K. W. Baxter, 24 September 1942, National Archives (NA), CO 859/​75/​13, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee. Constitution of 1942–​3. 15. NA, CO 936/​181, 1950–​2, Special Committee on Information from the NSGT:  Social Conditions, Social Welfare. 16. As explored in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 17. See, for instance, Karen Tranberg Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1992); Julia Clancy-​Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999).

532   Barbara Bush 18. Report of Sub-​Committee on the Education of Women and Girls in Africa, Colonial Office, February 1943, NA, CO 859/​83/​1, Advisory Committee on Social Welfare material, 1944–​6. 19. Letter from Doris Keates to Mr W.  G. Wormal, Inspector of Labour, 3 October 1940; Memos, Jan/​Feb 1941, NA, CO 583 260/​16, Colliery Department Staff Lady Welfare Officer (Vacancy for). 20. Report by Mr W. G. Wormal, Inspector of Labour, 3 October 1940, NA, CO 583 260/​16. 21. As described in the autobiography of old boy Chief Anthony Enhaoro, Fugitive Offender: The Story of a Political Prisoner (London: Cassell, 1965), 83. See also NA, CO 538 222/​15, 1937. Education: Queen’s College Lagos. 22. Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the Advisory Committee on African Education held on the 5 December 1950, NA, CO525/​217/​1, Nyasaland. 23. Report to the Advisory Committee on Education, Appx. B. Note on Female Education in the Gold Coast, NA CO 859/​229/​6, Social Welfare 1948–​50. 24. Walter Schicho, “ ‘Keystone of Progress’ and mise en valeur d’ensemble: British and French colonial discourses on education for development in the interwar period”, in Hodge, Hödl, and Kopf, eds., Developing Africa, 243–​244. 25. Report to the Advisory Committee on Education, NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 26. Memorandum on the Status of Women in the British Colonial Territories (1950), 4–​5, NA, CO 859/​229/​6, Social Welfare 1948–​50. 27. ILO questionnaire dated 26 September 1962 and governors’ responses enclosed in NA, CO 859/​1670, ILO Second Regional Conference. 28. CO memos relating to correspondence between Burstall and Miss Ransford of the Headmistresses Association, NA, CO 538 222/​15, 1937. Education: Queen’s College Lagos. 29. Telegram from B. Bourdillon, Governor, to Secretary of State for Colonies, 23 November 1942; Memo to Andrew Davidson, 7 July 1942, NA, CO 583/​260/​8, Secretarial Training Course for African Girls at Queen’s College, 1942. 30. Report of Sub-​Committee on the Education of Women and Girls in Africa, Colonial Office, February, 1943, 2–​3, 8 in NA, CO 859/​83/​1. 31. Letter from Adam Cox to K. T. Dunkley, 6 November 1941 in NA, Ed 121/​246. Recruitment and Training of Women for Educational Posts in Britain and the Empire. 32. Comments on Blacklock’s report by Mrs G C Culwick, 11 May 1942, NA, CO 859/​77/​11, Maternity and Child Welfare Women’s Services in the Colonies and Training of Personnel, for Report by Dr Mary Blacklock, 1942–​4. 33. Audrey Richards to Sally Chilver, 14 August 1952, Richards Papers, LSE Archives, London,  16/​7. 34. April A. Gordon, Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy: Gender and Development in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 31. 35. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book II: Violence and Ethnicity (London: James Currey, 1992), 237, 385–​386. 36. Minutes of 16th Meeting, 8 December 1950 in NA, CO 997/​13, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee: Reports, Sub-​Committee Minutes of Meetings and Papers 1950. 37. List in Memorandum on the Status of Women in the British Colonial Territories (1950), 5, NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 38. A point made by Joanna Lewis in “Tropical East Ends and the Second World War: Some Contradictions in Colonial Office Welfare Initiatives”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, no. 2 (2000), 42–​66, 47.

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    533 39. Gordon, Transforming Capitalism, 136–​137. 40. Phyllis M. Kaberry, Women of the Grassfields: A Study of the Economic Position of Women in Bamenda, British Cameroons (London: Taylor and Francis, 1952), Introduction, pp. v–​vii. 41. Memo by H. W. Davidson, 14 January 1944, and Blacklock’s report in NA, CO 859/​77/​11. Maternity and Child Welfare. 42. Memo by Miss Darlow (Secretary to the Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee), 12 June 1950; Memorandum on the Status of Women in the British Colonial Territories (1950), 1, NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 43. Heather J. Starkey, “Chronicles of Progress:  Northern Sudanese Women in the Era of British Imperialism”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 1 (2003), 52–​82; Melinda Adams “Colonial Policies and Women’s Participation in Public Life: The Case of British Southern Cameroons”, African Studies Quarterly: The Online Journal of African Studies 8, no. 3 (2006), 1–​2, http://​www.africa.ufl.edu/​asq/​v8/​v8i3al.htm. 44. See, for instance, the Tanzanian example provided by Denise Roth Allen, Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk:  Fertility and Danger in West Central Africa (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 88–​90. 45. Bemba Diaries, 13 May 1931, Richards Papers, File 3/​3. 46. See, for instance, Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 47. As emphasized in Luise White, “Separating the Men from the Boys: Colonial Constructions of Gender, Sexuality and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1930–​1959”, International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no.1 (1990), 1–​26, 19. 48. Appx. B., “Note on Female Education in the Gold Coast”, Report to the Advisory Committee on Education, 1950, NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 49. Cora Ann Presley, “The Mau Mau Rebellion, Kikuyu Women and Social Change”, in James de la Suer, ed., The Decolonisation Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 298. 50. Margery Perham, “The Colonial Dilemma”, The Listener, 15 July 1949, reproduced in Perham, ed., Colonial Sequence, 1930–​1949:  A Chronological Commentary upon British Colonial Policy, Especially in Africa (London: Methuen, 1967), 335. 51. For instance, Susan Geiger, “Women and African Nationalism”, Journal of Women’s History 2, no.1 (1990), 227–​244; TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–​1965 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998); Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion and Social Change in Kenya (Denver, CO: Westview, 1993); Cora Ann Presley, ed., Wambui Otieno, Mau Mau’s Daughter: A Life History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), Introduction. 52. Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian, and Susan Kingsley Kent, The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Presley, “The Mau Mau Rebellion, Kikuyu Women and Social Change”, in de la Suer, ed., The Decolonisation Reader, 303–​306. 53. Presley, “The Mau Mau Rebellion”, 308–​310. For the relationship between welfare and attempts to stabilize the colonial Kenyan state, see Joanna Lewis, Empire State-​Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–​52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). 54. Franz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”, (1965), reproduced in Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonisation: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2004), 42–​56. 55. As discussed in Frances Gouda, “Gender and ‘Hypermasculinity’ as Post-​ colonial Modernity during Indonesia’s Struggle for Independence, 1945 to 1949”, in Antoinette

534   Barbara Bush Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London:  Routledge, 1999), 161–​175. 56. Duara, ed., Decolonisation, Introduction, 10. 57. Jean Allman, “The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe; Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History”, Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 3 (2009), 13–​35. 58. Antoinette Burton, “Archive Stories:  Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories” (2004) reproduced in Burton, Empire in Question (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011), 99–​101. 59. Secret Telegram to Sir A. Richards, Nigeria, from the Secretary of State for Colonies, 31 July 1947, NA, CO 583/​292/​2, 1946–​7, National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons: Activities of. For fuller details of Ransome Kuti’s life, see Cheryl Johnson-​Odim and Nina Emma Mba, For Women and the Nation:  Funmilayo Ransome Kuti (Urbana, IL:  University of Illinois Press, 1997). 60. Letter from Lieutenant Taylor (Nigerian Regiment) to the PM, 8 July 1947, NA, CO 583/​ 292/​2, 1946–​7. 61. For instance, Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2004). 62. A  rare exception is Kofowolrola Moore, the first Nigerian women to study at Oxford. See K. A. Moore, “The Story of Kofoworola Aina Moore, of the Yoruba Tribe, Nigeria”, in Margery Perham, ed., Ten Africans (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). 63. See Tony Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-​Africanist, Feminist and Mrs Garvey, No 1 or a Tale of Two Armies (Dover, MA: Majority, 2007); Imaobong Umoren “This is the Age of Woman: Black Feminism and Black Internationalism in the Works of Una Marson, 1928–​1938”, History of Women in the Americas 1, no. 1 (2013), 50–​72. For politics at the centre, see Christian Høgsbjerg, CLR James in Imperial Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 64. Joan French, “Colonial Policy towards Women after the 1938 Uprising:  The case of Jamaica”, Caribbean Quarterly 34, no. 3/​4 (1988), 36–​61. 65. Memorandum on the Status of Women in the British Colonial Territories (1950), 2–​3, 6 in NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 66. Richards to Chilver, 21 November 1953, Richards Papers, File 16/​7. 67. NA, CO 876/​158 (1950), Liaison Officer for West African women students: account. See also the Victoria League Monthly Notes, January 1947, no. 427; June/​July 1944, no. 404. 68. Memorandum on the Status of Women: Report of a Sub-​C ommittee on the Education of Women and Girls in Africa, Colonial Office, February 1945, 12 in NA, CO 859/​83/​1. 69. Buganda Diaries 1957, 3, 38, Richards Papers, 8/​5. The first group of Ugandan women had travelled to the UK for higher education in 1950. See Memorandum on the Status of Women in the British Colonial Territories (1950), 1 in NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 70. From the Office of High Commissioner for the United Kingdom, 10 August 1960 in NA, FCO141/​17846, Tanganyika: Conference of women of African and African descent, Accra, July, 1960. Marked “Secret and Personal”. 71. Leila J. Rupp, “Transnational Women’s Organisations”. 72. British High Commissioner’s report to the East African department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in NA, FCO 95/​1453, “The All-​African Women’s Conference in Tanzania”, (July 1972). Marked “Confidential”. 73. See “All-​African Women’s Conference in Tanzania”, NA, FCO 95/​1453. 74. Glenda Sluga, “ ‘Spectacular Feminism’:  The International History of Women, World Citizenship and Human Rights”, in Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, and

Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism    535 Krassimira Dasklova, eds., Women’s Activism:  Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London: Routledge, 2012), 44–​59, 52. 75. Correspondence from Mrs F. Grimble, Honorary Secretary of International Women’s Day Committee in Memorandum on the Status of Women in the British Colonial Territories (1950), NA, CO 859/​229/​6. 76. Memo from R. A. Mc. L. Davidson to [Sir Ralph] Furse (head of recruitment at the CO), 1 December, 1941 in NA, CO 850/​192/​12, Marriage as Affecting Conditions of Service. 77. Molly Huggins, Too Much to Tell: An Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1967), 28, 33, 61, 68, 116–​117. 78. Elsie Stevens to Violet Creech Jones, 29 January 1949, in NA, CO 859/​220/​4 (1949–​50), Social Welfare: Suggestion for Creation of Colony Committees to Stimulate Joint Welfare Activities of Wives of Officials and Colonial Women. 79. Stevens to Creech Jones, 29 January 1949, in NA, CO 859/​220/​4. 80. Memo signed Miss Darlow, 2 February 1949, in NA, CO859/​220/​4 (1949–​50), Social Welfare. For examples of colonial wives’ voluntary initiatives, see “Mr Blaxland’s Talk on Social Welfare in Tanganyika, 20 January 1950”, in NA, CO859/​220/​4. 81. Letter from Treasury to H.  T. Bourdillon, 28 October 1953:  Minute by Thomas Lloyd, 27 June 1953 in NA, CO 866/​98, 1953–​4, Women’s Corona Society. Financial Assistance For. For the history of the organization, see Cecilie Swaisland, Forty Years of Service: The Women's Corona Society, 1950–​1990 (London: The Society, 1992). 82. Adams, “Colonial Policies and Women’s Participation in Public Life”, 3, 6. 83. Women’s Corona Society pamphlet publicizing introductory courses to be held in 1966–​ 1967 for women going overseas; Memo from W. D. Sweaney to Mr J. K. Thompson, 31 October 1966; Memo from J. K. Thompson to Mr Lynch, 2 November 1966, in NA OD 18/​ 120, Women’s Corona Society. 84. As discussed in Barbara Bush, “Feminising Empire? British Women’s Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation”, Women’s History Review 25, no. 4 (2016), 499–​519. 85. See, for instance, letters exchanged between Elspeth Huxley and Margery Perham in Race and Politics in Kenya (London: Faber and Faber, 1944). 86. Annual Report of the Welfare Organisation, Kenya Colony, 1949 (Government Printer, Nairobi, 1950), Appx. 2 enclosed in NA, CO 997/​13, Colonial Social Welfare Advisory Committee: Reports. 87. Convention of Women’s Societies in East Africa, Nairobi, 1957, in NA, CO 822/​1664 (1959–​7). Activities of the East African Women’s League in Kenya. 88. The Marquis of Salisbury to the Marquis of Landsdowne (a Conservative peer), 10 February 1963 and 21 March 1963, enclosed in NA, CO 822/​3283, Representation from Lord Salisbury concerning the situation in Kenya. 89. Memo from W. T. Hall, 21 March 1963, in NA, CO 822/​3283. Representation from Lord Salisbury. 90. See Caroline Elkins, “Race, Citizenship and Governance: Settler Tyranny at the End of Empire”, in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2005), 203–​233. 91. For instance, Ann Kelk Mager, Gender and the Making of a Southern African Bantustan (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999). 92. As discussed in Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, “Race,” and National Identity, 1945–​64 (London: UCL Press, 1997); Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley,

536   Barbara Bush CA: University of California Press, 2012); Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World: Volume 1: Memories of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 93. Robert Morrell and Sandra Swart, “Men in the Third World: Postcolonial Perspectives on Masculinity”, in Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert W. Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (London: Sage, 2005), 90–​113, 103–​104. 94. Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire, 2.  For a further discussion of continuities, see Mark Duffield and Vernon Hewitt, eds., Empire, Development and Colonialism: The Past in the Present (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2009). 95. For a detailed analysis of consequences of leaving women out of the development agenda, see Michael Kevane, Women and Development in Africa: How Gender Works (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004). 96. See, for instance, Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes:  British Adventure, Empire and the Imaginings of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994).

Chapter 28

Repressi v e Devel opm e nta l i sm Idioms, Repertoires, and Trajectories in Late Colonialism Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo*

Developing Control, Controlling Development The politics of planning development and the planning of politics were intertwined facets of late colonialism. Planning socio-​economic development was a paramount political act, and it was a form of imagining and enacting imperial permanence, both formal and informal. Idioms, repertoires, and techniques of developmentalism—​and its close cousin, welfarism—​became integral to the plural trajectories that constituted the multiple ends of empire. The politics and policies of late colonialism in the European empires were characterized by diverse modalities of repressive developmentalism, which were formed by multifaceted historical processes of entanglement between social control and repression on one hand, and development and welfare on the other. Repressive developmentalisms entailed two mutually constitutive processes in late colonialism: the securitization of idioms and repertoires of development, and the developmentalisation of idioms and repertoires of security.1 The first process relates to the constitution of variegated modalities in which developmental strategies of political, economic, and socio-​cultural change, and the related processes of socio-​cultural engineering, became governed by particular coercive repertoires of colonial rule, including various strategies of counter-​insurgency. Securitarian and military rationales, in their turn, permeated and frequently governed the languages and the programmes of developmentalism and welfarism. The second process relates to the predominance of socio-​economic developmental languages and rationales in the

538   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo elaboration of programmes of coercive social control as well as in the definition of late colonial strategies of security, including its most extreme form: counter-​insurgency. The eclectic post-​war market of competing developmentalisms and welfarisms—​the diversity of idioms and projects of socio-​economic development and welfare offered by several individuals, groups, and institutions,2 all of which claimed particular insights into how best to enact development, a unique ‘savoir‑développer’3—​helped shape the definition of late colonial security strategies. Their impact was enhanced by the political institutionalization, the administrative adoption, and academic embrace of colonial developmentalism and welfarism. With these processes came the proliferation of the idioms of ‘social welfare’, ‘community development’, ‘social development’, ‘rural welfare’, ‘rural development’, ‘rural resettlement’, and ‘promoção social’ or ‘animation rurale’. Each of these in different local contexts became pivotal to the post-​war transformation of imperial and colonial orders and policy-​making procedures, and their objectives included revitalizing imperial legitimacy (whether internally or abroad) while, at the same time, refining practices of social control, securitization, and population coercion. Connected to the post-​war ‘imperialism of knowledge’4 and to the post-​war history of the human and social sciences, within which constitutive colonial genealogies are now more properly recognized, the emergence of ‘professional imperialism’ played an important role in the formulation of new strategies of colonial rule.5 A wide range of experts and epistemic communities (including military ones) was involved. From ‘Applied Anthropology’ to Social Development, Development Economics, Colonial Sociology, Ethno-​Psychiatry, and Industrial Psychology, numerous disciplines and sub-​disciplines engaged systematically with late colonial situations and redefined the terms of the interaction between knowledge and power, expertise and administration, and research and policy-​making in the colonies.6 In the French case, for instance, the post-​war evolution of social scientific research was closely related to the dynamics of colonial rule.7 The collection of often-​interconnected idioms and repertoires of development and welfare being formulated, debated, shared, and negotiated, circulating internationally and transnationally in a variety of contexts and institutions,8 were crucial in the post-​war transformation of the political, economic, and sociocultural modes of colonial engagement. Debates over the political, social, and economic development of empire intersected frequently with administrative arguments over the optimum means to counteract growing social unrest within colonial territories. The interwar disputes over the ‘good “imperial and colonial” government’ now gained different contours, and a new momentum.9 Discussions among development specialists about the methods to ‘discover’ the African homo economicus10 and to mould the African homo ruralis or homo industrialis; on the ways to increase labour productivity and ensure its ‘stabilisation’;11 or about how to deal with the socio-​political effects of urbanisation and ‘de-​tribalisation’ and the related need to promote rural ‘stabilisation’ and welfare:  these were both the stuff of developmentalism and the idioms in which it was often articulated. Underlying all was a preoccupation with the societal utility that strategies of development and welfare could have, whether in the politics of late colonialism or in enhancing the security of empire.12

Repressive Developmentalism   539 Colonial developmentalisms were, as a result, configured as much by political considerations and security rationales as by more narrowly economic assessments. Equally, late colonial thinking about political threats and security options embraced the languages and practices of development and welfarism. The latter became an important instrument of colonial order as a strategy aiming at imperial resilience and, occasionally, at facilitating favourable postcolonial arrangements.13 Moreover, they were also vital elements in the definition of counter-​subversion policies. The definition of late colonial security strategies—​connected to the violent trajectories of imperial and colonial disengagement14—​was increasingly contaminated by rationales derived from competing ideas of development and welfare provision. The social—​indeed, the idea of development as a form of coercive social work—​became increasingly central to late colonial economies of force.15 Ambitious schemes of social engineering, developmental plans, resettlement programmes, and other coercive practices were thus essential facets of the political, military, and diplomatic strategies devised to counteract anti-​colonial pressures, whether in the metropoles, colonially, internationally, or transnationally.

Administering Inequality in the Late Colonial Shift The debates about alternate paths to political, social, and economic development, which took place in the context of changing post-​war geo-​political conditions, were thus central to broader governmental discussions about the array of stratagems that could be used to rule the colonies. Accordingly, the post-​war colonial situations were contexts of imperial institutional innovation. The movement from ‘assimilation’ to ‘association’ is just one example.16 As a consequence, they became milieus of pervasive engineered societal modernization, in which various politics of difference were tentatively enacted. Developmentalism replaced, or coexisted with, more conventional models of colonial exclusion. A ‘second colonial occupation’ gathered momentum in most colonial empires. Administrative and institutional realms expanded, and legal procedures were reinvented. The political and economic, but also the social and moral, demands of this post-​ war reinvigoration of empires rested on strategies of ‘accelerated economic growth’.17 A ‘second wave’ of experts, advisers, and settlers emerged and transformed European colonial empires, albeit to differing degrees and timescales. A ‘proactive or developmental state’, the late colonial state, took shape. The ‘night-​watchman state’—​marked by an emphasis on order and selective economic extraction and by a minimal financial burden on the metropole—​was gradually replaced by a more distinctive type of state. The novel type was dedicated to ‘economic modernisation’ and to the administration of ‘new spheres of social and economic life’, and subjects such as ‘native household economy’ turned into priorities, alongside more longstanding preoccupations

540   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo with agricultural activities: ‘White farmlands expanded. Black labour was conscripted. Agrarian rules multiplied. Woodlands were protected’.18 The ‘second colonial occupation’ entailed a considerable extension of the ‘scope of activity and scale of operation’ of colonial governance, and in order to satisfy, or appease, international, metropolitan and colonial audiences, colonial administrations now promised to ‘deliver swift improvement in subject welfare, competent governance, and effectively planned and managed economic development’.19 Ironically, despite being manifestly political tools, welfare and development were intended to function as powerful de-​politicizing instruments.20 As a consequence, the ‘night-​watchman state’ was partially replaced by a more ‘proactive’, ‘dense’, ‘big’, and security-​minded administrative structure within which development initiatives acquired unprecedented importance alongside other new security policies.21 A late colonial shift occurred,22 in which four goals were clear: the rejuvenation of empire through schemes of economic development and social engineering; improvements in its political organization; the minimization of sources of internal dissent by focusing more squarely on social welfare; and more systematic efforts to disarm critics at home and abroad. In this context, political, economic, and socio-​cultural modernizing and developmental projects emerged, in some cases reinforcing dynamics visible since the 1930s. Indeed, the nexus between securitarian and developmental rationales was not a novelty. The identification of development both as a means to counteract more widespread colonial emergencies and as a response to the economic pressures of global economic crisis were each apparent in the 1930s, when they promoted new ideas of governance as well as wider repertoires of protest and claim-​making.23 A well-​known case is the Office du Niger, in the Inner Niger Delta in the then-​French Soudan, where a massive scheme of irrigation, a project of (forced) resettlement, a plan of technical (agricultural) innovation, and a program of integrated social change first coalesced, and then failed.24 The underlying preoccupation with mise en valeur, central to French ‘colonial humanism’, offered an example of entangled ideas of development and securitarian (anti-​communist) rationales. These aimed to enhance imperial legitimization and colonial state-​building.25 Other types of social and economic interventions also occurred in the interwar era, whether in the realms of education, medical assistance, and hygiene, or in the details of household governance. These, too, entailed, at one level or another, the entanglement of development and security in close association with social and spatial interventions. This process was intimately connected to paradigmatic changes in the human and social sciences.26 The political, securitarian, and economic imagination of the ‘human side’ of development gained momentum, even if many of its projections failed to meet the proclaimed objectives.27 The emergence of institutions such as the Queen Elizabeth Fund for Medical Assistance to the Congo (F.O.R.E.A.M.I.) in 1930 is a good example of this tendency. It provided medical assistance to rural areas in the Belgian empire. Administrative models that conceptualized social reform within ordered colonial spaces—​for instance, the centres indigènes extra-​coutumier and the paysannats indigènes in Belgian Congo established in the 1930s, and the ‘model villages’ set up in Angola throughout the interwar period—​are another. The point is that

Repressive Developmentalism   541 ‘preventive medicine’, social engineering, economic dirigisme, and securitarian anxieties were clearly interconnected.28 Subsequent decades witnessed the intensification of government planning and economic intervention by the European colonial states. The social and political challenges arising from the hardships of the Second World War and the continued severity of colonial labour practices and fiscal exaction added impetus to the process. Basic ideas about administrative efficiency, optimum productivity, and ‘good government’ were reassessed. Development plans were formulated and tentatively applied. Novel means of imperial legitimization were devised and publicized, both internally and externally.29 The formation and dissemination of idioms and repertoires of colonial developmentalism and welfarism were central to this late colonial shift. The renewal and intensification of government planning and socio-​economic intervention entailed processes of ‘modernizing trusteeship’. Trusteeship received a ‘makeover’, development and welfare were promoted as ‘ “the method” to win hearts and minds’, liberating local communities from ‘backwardness’ and ‘tribal life’.30 Forms of racialized paternalism surely endured, which echoed the doctrines of the ‘civilizing mission’.31 ‘Collective violence and security force repression’ continued to characterize the political landscape of European colonial empires.32 But the movement from a racialized preservative paternalism, which was intimately related to the existence of a minimalist state apparatus, to a racialized developmental paternalism was a common feature, despite different rhythms and impacts across empires and colonies. Innovative ‘ruling compassions’ were shared.33 In the British empire, the Colonial Development Act of 1929 and the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 paved the way for a ‘tropical new deal’. The interventionist role of the state became a benchmark, with the provision of ‘social development’ and social services (education and health, mainly) one of the priorities, notably in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and also in the exemplary case of the Gold Coast. Despite its numerous shortcomings, the social ‘new deal’ swallowed an average 20% of the total expenditure of the colonial administrations.34 The initiatives proposed by the likes of Lucy P. Mair and Lord Hailey, and embraced by many at events promoted by the Colonial Office, meant that social welfare gained a prominent place in the rhetoric of empire, and within policy exchanges as well. This policy shift was, for instance, evident in the Colonial Office Summer Conferences in 1949 and 1953, the Agricultural Development in Africa and Rural Economic Development, respectively, or the 1954 Ashridge Conference on Social Development, which was highly influential.35 Similarly, the establishment of the Advisory Committee on Social Welfare in 1943 involved an ambitious plan: to promote ‘rural social betterment’ against ‘social collapse’; to formulate ‘remedies’ for urban maladies such as destitution and homelessness; to discipline deviance; and, most tellingly, to train ‘Africans to be their own social policemen’.36 The explicit articulation of connections between economic advancement (the stimulation of productivity and trade), social and securitarian concerns, and political calculations was clear. As a 1945 Colonial Office pamphlet declared, social welfare was the ‘aim of any reputable government’ (italics added).37

542   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo In the French Empire, the Fund for Economic and Social Development (FIDES), created in 1946, represented a colonial investment fund roughly seven times larger than the expected expenditures in the British Empire.38 Health and education projects received a considerable share in a programme primarily directed at infrastructural modernization. At the same time, in Algeria, an ambitious plan was rolled out to develop infrastructure, to expand mining capacity, to increase agricultural productivity, and to stimulate education and technical training. Significantly, these measures were overseen by a new committee charged with supervision of political, economic, and social reforms targeted at Algeria’s Muslim communities. These initiatives were pursued alongside colonial investments funded by the US Economic Cooperation Administration through the Marshall Plan.39 In 1949, another fund was created: the Rural Economic and Social Development Fund (FERDES), which invested a further 2,500 million Central African francs in French West Africa between 1949 and 1954.40 As late as 1958, within the remit of the Constantine Plan, De Gaulle’s Algerian development scheme, the imperial government determined that ‘$4 billion would be invested in the transformation of Algeria; 250,000 hectares of land would be reallocated to Muslims; 400,000 jobs would be created in the industrial and energy sectors; and more than two-​thirds of Muslim children would be enrolled in school’.41 As a 1960 report stated, this was ‘a vast program of action’ that aimed at ‘transforming the condition of men’, ‘especially of the most deprived’. It entailed more than ‘statistical progress’; it was ‘a formula for human and material progress’.42 In these efforts, the connections between social planning, economic productivism, and political-​securitarian strategies were crucial, and were fuelled by US-​influenced French social sciences. The ‘homo-​islamicus’ would be replaced by a new man, the ‘homo-​economicus’, who would be more fully integrated in society.43 Contrary to its predecessors—​the Maspétiol Plan and the Byé Report—​the Constantine plan sought a more thorough social transformation.44 The Belgian and the Portuguese cases were equally revealing, despite significant differences between them. Influenced by British and French experiences, the parastatal development agency Fonds du Bien-​Être Indigène (FBEI) operated in Belgium between 1947 and 1963. The motto of Pierre Ryckmans, former Governor-​general of the Belgian Congo between 1934 and 1946—​‘dominate to serve’, dominer pour servir—​had noteworthy consequences, and inspired future projects. One of the most notorious was the emergence of ‘technical, experimental spaces of development and security’. One example was the development scheme in Befale, connected to the penal colony of Ekafera, in the Province of Equateur’s Tshuapa district. Founded in 1939, Ekafera was an ‘Agricultural Colony for Dangerous Relegués’ (CARD). The FBEI played an important role in this meshing between development, social engineering, and securitarian (in this case, carceral) rationales. Befale supposedly marked a ‘new era of professionalized development, “native welfare”, and public health’. Its declared aims included enhanced economic productivity, social welfare, reform of longstanding porterage and corvée labour practices, psychological knowledge-​production and intervention, and new methods of social confinement (this last, a reflection of its proximity to Ekafera). Between 1948 and 1957, a total of twenty-​six territories were selected as areas of intensive intervention.45

Repressive Developmentalism   543 In 1949, a ten-​year development plan was launched. The Plan décennal also prioritized social initiatives, which were clearly connected to political intentions. As stated by Pierre Wigny, Minister with responsibility for the Congo between 1947 and 1950, a committed social intervention was seen as an ‘effective means to keep the colony within [the] Belgian orbit’, with a view to ensuring the consolidation of native ‘friendship’. Similarly, an element of ‘international justification’ was also present in a context in which development had become a recurrent topic within international organizations and NGOs.46 The plan proclaimed the primacy of native interests and the improvement of their living standards as its main goal. Of the overall budget of 49 billion Belgium francs, 7.84% was allocated to hygiene and medical facilities; 7.53% to native housing; and 7.28% to education. The largest overall proportion—​some 50.38% was to be spent on the improvement of transport and communications infrastructure. The political and economic usefulness of housing, medical interventions, and educational schemes was emphasized. As happened with other grandiose plans, many of the declared objectives were not met despite the large amount of money spent. Of the planned 12.000km of roads only 1.700km were completed. Of the estimated 460,000 Congolese families scheduled for resettlement into paysannats, just 210,000 were actually installed. Of the projected 40,000 ‘native dwellings’ overseen by the Office des Cités Africaines, only 35,000 were actually built. Notwithstanding these facts, a second plan was formulated for the period 1959–​1969 in which additional rural interventions were planned.47 As these plans indicate, the Belgian ‘development regime’ involved many institutions, actors, and projects.48 The related bureaucracy expanded greatly within the Congo. From 1939 to 1958 the number of officials involved rose from 2,205 to 9,382.49 Cities of ‘experts’ were created, such as Yangambi, near Stanleyville, which focused on agronomical research.50 Among them figured institutions such as the Institut national pour l’étude agronomique du Congo belge (INÉAC), founded in 1933, and the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale (IRSAC), founded in 1947, the latter an organization with five interdisciplinary research centres in the colony, including discreet sections for cultural anthropology and socio-​economic inquiries. Another institution with a powerful influence on colonial social policy was the Centre d’Etude des Problèmes sociaux indigènes (CEPSI), founded in 1946 by progressive intellectuals in Elisabethville as a private institution focused essentially on the production of operational social knowledge.51 A further institute, the Fondation de l’Université de Liège pour les Recherches Scientifiques au Congo et au Ruanda Urundi (FULREAC), established the Belgian Congo’s first experimental rural centre in which the educational programme was determined by the Foundation’s productive mission. In practice, it functioned as a ‘cooperative under scientific control’.52 Another, the Institut de Sociologie Solvay, became an important interface between political concerns (including security), administration (the instruction of colonial cadres in social work), academic research (including the human and social sciences), economics, and social engineering. From 1955, the Institute focused on societal change in Belgian Africa and promoted studies on colonial labour or on the ‘social determinants of

544   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo [native] thought’. The head of the foyer social at Ruashi, Yvette Pirlot, used the methods of psychodrama and sociodrama, as developed by Jacob L. Moreno. These ‘methods’ supposedly enabled a scientific analysis of social conflicts. Sessions of puppet theatre were organized to make women ‘reveal precious information’ about native ‘psychology and customs’. The underlying purpose was to identify culturally specific motivations for engaging in conflict and violence.53 All these institutional activities were connected with more widespread rural and urban foyers sociaux which catered to Congolese men and women. In Usumbura (Rwanda-​Urundi) alone, by 1957 approximately 50% of the region’s women fell within the purview of the local foyers sociaux, receiving psychosocial interventions, teaching in household governance, and lectures on the value of acquiring reproductive skills, which aimed to foster their supposed propensity for maternity and domestic work.54 Some foyers were administered by the state; others were controlled by private or non-​ governmental organisations. Those in Coquilhatville, controlled by Assistance Sociale au Congo (A.S.A.C.) or by the Colonial Transport Agency (OTRACO), exemplified private or non-​governmental foyers sociaux. The Solvay Institute was responsible for several such foyers. Urban and rural centres sociaux and co-​operatives, plus the aforementioned paysannats indigènes, were among a web of other agencies that aimed to modernize rural economies, to ‘moralize’ and regulate urbanization, and to prevent, or at least to limit, social unrest. Further community development projects gathered momentum alongside these initiatives. At the same time, investment on the school system, which had reached 70% enrolment of primary school-​age children by 1959, and in health services placed the Belgium Congo at the forefront of the provision of welfare services in the ‘tropics’.55 With some noteworthy differences, the Portuguese late colonial trajectory shared certain aspects of the developmentalist impetus of the time, although these were enacted in different political and ideological circumstances. The post-​Second World War informational and institutional redefinition of imperial and colonial policies was also an important facet of Portuguese late colonialism. Heightened interventionism and new development projects were prioritized in order to enhance social, economic, and political reform overseas and, it was hoped, to appease local and international opposition. From the beginning of 1950, several developmental plans—​Planos do fomento—​were devised to modernize the imperial and colonial worlds. The 1953 plan became the first experiment in centralized economic planning and interventionism within the metropole and the colonies and combined economic, political, and social objectives. Employing techno-​scientific rationales to justify the pursuit of political and securitarian aims, the plan, and its successors, merged economic exploitation with rural welfare and ethnic colonization with native community resettlement. These plans were in dialogue with international reformist rhetoric and developmentalist methods. The developmental focus was most apparent in relation to transport and communications, as well as in increased extraction of raw materials through greater commercialization of the mining industry. The plans also fostered white settlement, seen as a powerful tool of imperial resilience. Gradually, scientific and social activities

Repressive Developmentalism   545 were also sponsored. The social element, namely initiatives in education and health, received 14% and 6% of the overall budget in Mozambique and in Angola, respectively. These numbers rose with the second six-​year plan (1959–​1964). Reflecting the security concerns that intensified with the outbreak and later spread of the colonial conflicts in Portuguese Africa, the political, economic, and social dimensions of development became even more interwoven in the mid-​term plan (1964–​1967) and its successor, the third plan (1968–​1973). Apparent throughout was a combination of state-​directed economic development with managed colonization, a strategic social intervention, and a reinvented ideology of exceptionality (typified by the doctrine of lusotropicalism). In the eyes of the regime, this combination was pivotal to the survival of the late colonial state.56 These dynamics also informed the tentative redefinition of mechanisms and institutions of administrative intelligence and information gathering. The Centre for Political and Social Studies of the Overseas Provinces Research Board, created in 1956, was crucial in this regard. The Centre drew upon other colonial models such as the British Colonial Research Service and, even more so, the French Office de la Recherche Scientifique Coloniale.57 In subsequent years, numerous in situ investigations were conducted that enhanced the empire-​state’s ability to make legible local agricultural practices, the operation of the labour market, problems of productivity, the impact of urbanization, the political and economic usefulness of community development projects, or the role of women within colonial societies.58 All these enquiries were closely associated with international and inter-​imperial cooperation between institutions such as the International Institute of Civilizations (INCIDI) or the Commission for Technical Co-​ operation in Africa South of the Sahara (C.C.T.A.). The institutional re-​organization of the Ministry of Colonies, heralded by the 1959 constitution of the Gabinete dos Negócios Políticos (GNP), marked another revealing moment of tentative institutional innovation. The GNP aimed to coordinate the work of the empire’s information collection agencies, thereby introducing greater informational and statistical rigour to governmental decision-​making processes.59

Containing Claims for Equality: Repressive Developmentalisms The late colonial shift was therefore related both to new imperial models of legal and administrative practice and to novel paradigms of socio-​economic reform. These were formulated in part to help confer international legitimacy on imperial formations in the mid-​twentieth century and, in part, to respond to greater post-​war intellectual, political, and institutional challenges to colonial authority. Multiple developmental strategies of political, economic, and socio-​cultural change were advocated, although fewer were wholly implemented by the late colonial states. Longstanding traditions of imperial

546   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo statecraft were revised, and processes of transfer or imitation of policy initiatives from other polities, imperial or not, occurred. Empire state building and welfare projects became closely intertwined. With different timescales, contexts, and consequences, the late colonial shifts also produced distinct repertoires of coercive social control. Some were connected to the emergence of a colonial security state, which was marked by processes of militarization of colonial societies that aimed to combat the social and political tensions associated with anticolonial movements. Two illustrations of these processes in action include widespread civil and military schemes of population (re)settlement, and recourse to diverse social strategies of counter-​insurgency. Late colonial developmental strategies of political, economic, and socio-​cultural change were thus bound up with ambitious social engineering and strategies of securitization. Schemes of forced native rural resettlement served political and military purposes of counter-​subversion, but were articulated in terms of their proclaimed socio-​cultural purposes.60 They offered an overarching conception of a developmental plan, combining specific military-​strategic rationales—​ typically, the confinement of insurgencies—​with a comprehensive modernizing agenda. The latter merged economic productivism with educational acculturation, evangelization, social instruction, and medical and sanitary advice. Of course, political control and indoctrination were not discarded. The new native villages were therefore envisioned as models of economic and social development, and played a decisive part in securitarian strategies. They became central mechanisms of an overarching counter-​insurgency policy that unfolded steadily following the spread of late colonial conflicts after 1945. In Kenya, village settlements were promoted as ‘the foundation for a new society’, providing the social foundations for political and economic integration, and if, during the Mau Mau rebellion, the Kikuyu were supposedly animated by a form of ‘mass psychosis’ arising from ‘a crisis of transition between primitive and modern worlds’, the villages, it was claimed, might counteract this psychosis through social and moral re-​education.61 In 1954, a forced-​resettlement programme was enforced in Kiambu, Nyeri, Murang’a, and Embu Districts, and within eighteen months some one million Kikuyu were assigned to 804 villages containing approximately 230,000 huts.62 Punishment, ‘rehabilitation’, social and moral re-​education, and community development were combined.63 In a decade, 1.2 million Kenyans were forcefully placed in ‘strategic villages’. The political, strategic, social, and economic dimensions of forced relocation became fundamentally inseparable. The ‘global paradigm’ of ‘counter-​revolutionary modernization’ and, simultaneously, of socially engineered counter-​insurgency and repressive developmentalism, became a stark reality during the Mau Mau Emergency. The conflict created the optimal conditions for innovative, sometimes radical, programmes of social engineering whose enactment entailed high-​levels of coercion and violence. Villagization became a powerful tool. Its effects were registered in altered social practices, crises of identities, belongings, and hierarchies, as well as disruptions to traditional techniques of agricultural production, property ownership, and land distribution.64 Examples such as the Swynnerton Plan demonstrated the repressive goals of developmentalism, and the contamination of development and welfarist initiatives by techniques of repression.65

Repressive Developmentalism   547 The language and practices of community development played an important part in these events. In British Kenya, the movement from colonial social welfare to the ‘popular concept of community development’, which started to play a central role in efforts to ‘socially engineer’ pacification (especially in 1950–​1952), was crucial.66 In British Malaya, too, Mau Mau-​era restrictions turned the colonial state into ‘an authoritative presence in the lives of many Malayans for the first time’. A ‘far-​reaching militarization’ of society occurred, whether in new settlements or in the workplace. Political education and community development characterized the new combination of ‘pre-​war paternalism and post-​war Fabianism’. Refining the welfarism of the ‘second colonial occupation’, the doctrine of community development was considered a powerful instrument to combat the ‘uncertainties of social change’ and, more particularly, of communism.67 In Algeria, the Constantine Plan entailed a campagne de mille villages plus the formation of numerous villages de regroupement. By the end of 1958, the first initiative resettled almost one million inhabitants, while the second forcefully removed some two million inhabitants by 1961, causing lasting hardship instead of the promised modern conditions and safe environments.68 Repression and violence were manifest throughout. So was déracinement—​part physical uprooting, part cultural alienation—​which affected a third of the rural population between 1954 and 1962. Forced removal and relocation were core political, economic, and sociocultural instruments, and they were frequently justified by the appropriation of social scientific terminology.69 This developmental-​securitarian rationale for population resettlement would be replicated in post-​independence Algeria with the ‘Thousand Socialist Villages’ plan of 1973, which had undeniable commonalities with its colonial precedent. They were both examples of a dirigisme d’état, which invoked a scientific rationality, envisaged the socio-​economic integration of rural populations into a modernizing society, and sought to transform cultural beliefs and social practices.70 Combining as it did both securitarian and developmental rationales, the role played by the Specialized Administrative Sections reveals all these dynamics in action.71 The destruction of traditional villages and the promotion of large-​scale resettlements were central to the coercive modernization that was an integral part of the war in Algeria. As in Kenya and elsewhere, resettlements in Algeria were, simultaneously, ‘disciplinary spaces and laboratories of social transformation’.72 Again, so-​called développement communautaire (and its close rhetorical cousin, animation rurale) played a part: both were depicted as ‘non-​revolutionary models’ of social intervention.73 In the Belgian Congo, as in some French colonies, the policy of paysannats indigènes proved important. It had three fundamental goals: agricultural, social, and economic. The social goal was clear: to ‘stabilize’ rural populations and provide welfare, improving ‘the material and moral conditions for works of public interest’.74 The fact that the extra-​ coutumière population grew from 6.1% of the total in 1935 to 22.9% in 1956 prompted the reinforcement of this policy.75 This operation, which was a huge experiment in community development, was supported by many scientific disciplines and fostered a multi-​ layered process of social change. This was visible in the degree of actual intervention in the life of the peasant within the paysannats.76 The main purpose was to challenge traditional customs and farming practices considered detrimental to economic productivity

548   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and barriers to social development. The spatial fixation—​with priority given to rural areas, in order to avoid the potentially dangerous consequences of urbanization—​and the provision of social facilities, such as schools and agricultural training centres, also had a political and securitarian rationale. By 1960, half a million Congolese were resettled into paysannats agricoles. To many of them, the system of state-​sponsored settlements seemed ‘little more than a sophisticated form of agricultural bondage’, which also entailed heightened political and social control.77 The political-​securitarian dimensions of development were particularly clear in the ways in which the Belgian colonial state dealt with the Kitawala, a politico-​religious movement condemned as subversive. The response to the perceived threat, which was frequently framed as anticolonial, was ‘surveillance, incarceration, banning, forced labour camps and, occasionally, summary executions’. Development and resettlement were also part of the strategy. Ever since the 1944 Masisi-​Lubutu uprising, the Belgian authorities explained the movement’s success by reference to socio-​economic deprivation. To some extent, this was a means to de-​politicize the movement’s objectives. Nonetheless, the authorities delegated the coordination of the FBEI and the Plan Décennal projects in the Stanleyville District to the so-​called Kitawala Team. These projects ranged from the building of educational and sanitary facilities to a scheme that established several plantations in a bid to increase local employment. Development also became more closely integrated with repression and official propaganda. The latter involved state-​coordinated events such as film screenings, sports, and rural theatre groups. But the entanglement between development and repression was also reflected in infrastructure projects such as road building: one of the roads promoted by the Plan Décennal ran precisely through areas under Kitawala influence. When social welfare projects or infrastructural development failed either to mitigate insurgency or to decrease support for the Kitawala movement, the Force Publique assumed responsibility. The collaboration between the colonial state’s civil and military agencies proved how repression and African development and welfare were ‘tightly interwoven’.78 In Mozambique and Angola, by the time of formal decolonization in the mid-​1970s, approximately two million Africans were regrouped in aldeamentos, loci of ‘progress’, population control, and proselytization. In Portuguese Guinea, before the end of the decolonization war, some 150,000 natives, or 30% of the total population, were resettled. On paper, the aldeamentos, and to some extent the colonatos, the white settlements, would be arenas of modernized, market-​oriented agricultural production that was organized around regulated forms of property ownership and land use. They would also be based on new modalities of labour (forced labour having been legally abolished in 1961–​62)79 and on putative new forms of social relations (the regime of indigenato having been formally extinguished in 1961). In varying ways and with distinct consequences, population control, economic and social development, political indoctrination, carceral initiatives, and counter-​subversion were strategically fused. The key doctrine was social promotion, which was enacted through schemes of rural development. The political utility of such initiatives, whether as a state security

Repressive Developmentalism   549 tool or as the stuff of regime propaganda, plus their economic rationality as an inexpensive catalyst to economic growth, meant that these doctrines became commonly advocated as the colonial wars extended from Angola to Mozambique and Guinea-​ Bissau between 1961 and 1964. Large-​scale social engineering was frequently justified in the language of community development, which gained a prominent place in the regime’s broader counter-​insurgency strategy.80 Indeed, rural resettlement (and the rich typology of modalities of resettlement), governed by rationales and techniques of social promotion and community development, was a pivotal political instrument of colonial counter-​insurgency. In Angola, in just two years, from 1965 to 1967, the amount spent on rural resettlement rose from 5,000 to 19,591 contos. Rural resettlement facilitated social welfare, ‘psychological action’, economic and productive transformation, coercion and, it was thought, security. The possibilities were vast, and they were frequently debated along the bureaucratic chain, bringing military, security, and intelligence agencies together with social and economic experts.81

Conclusion Late-​colonial conflicts were ‘laboratories’ for testing models of ‘forced modernization’.82 All the examples of population control and (forced) resettlement mentioned in this chapter exemplified the ‘spatialization of the colonial state of emergency’, a process in which the engineering of social and economic welfare, the management of inequality, the planning of politics and economics, and the militarization of society coexisted.83 In varying ways and with distinct configurations, the post-​war cross-​fertilization of securitarian and developmental idioms, repertoires, and techniques was fundamental to the political and moral economies of late European colonialism, entailing different trajectories and varieties of repressive developmentalism. These processes surely merit further study.

Notes * This text is a result of the research project “Change to Remain? Welfare Colonialism in European Colonial Empires in Africa (1920–​1975)”, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Ref: IF/​01628/​2012). 1. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “ ‘A battle in the field of human relations’: The official minds of repressive development in Portuguese Angola”, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, Decolonization and Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 115–​136. 2. See, for instance, Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Marc Frey, Sonke Kunkel, and Corinna Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development (1945–​ 1990) (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hodl, and

550   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo Martina Kopf, eds., Developing Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). See also Joseph M. Hodge in this volume. 3. Marc Poncelet, “Colonisation, développement et sciences sociales. Éléments pour une sociologie de la constitution du champ des ‘arts et sciences du développement’ dans les sciences sociales francophones belges”, Bulletin de l’APAD 6 (1993). 4. Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development concept”, in Cooper and Packard, 64–​92, at 64. 5. James Midgley, Professional Imperialism (London: Heinemann, 1981). 6. For some examples see Robert L. Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2005); Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’ (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press 1995); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); George Steinmetz, ed., Sociology and Empire (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2013); Frederick Cooper, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa”, in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, eds., The Ends of European Colonial Empires (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15–​50. 7. Benoît de L’Estoile, “Science de l’homme et ‘domination rationnelle’ savoir ethnologique et politique indigène en afrique coloniale française”, Revue de synthèse 121, no. 3–​4 (2000): 291–​323; Christophe Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930–​1970”, Osiris 15 (2000): 258–​281. 8. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “Competing developmentalisms:  international and interimperial dynamics in late colonialism, 1940s-​1970s” (forthcoming). 9. Veronique Dimier, “On Good Colonial Government:  Lessons from the League of Nations”, Global Society 18, no. 3 (2004): 279–​299; J. M. Lee, Colonial Development and Good Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 10. Inter-​ African Labour Institute, The Human Factors of Productivity in Africa (London: CCTA, 1956). 11. See Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12. Crawford Young, The Postcolonial State in Africa (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 13. Marc Frey, “Control, Legitimacy, and the Securing of Interests: European Development Policy in South-​east Asia from the Late Colonial Period to the Early 1960s”, Contemporary European History 12, no. 4 (2003): 395–​412. 14. Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and Larry Butler, Crises of Empire (London: Hodder, 2008); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 15. Patricia Owens, Economy of Force (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 173–​208. 16. On the political imagination of these forms see Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014). 17. D. A. Low and John Lonsdale, “Towards the new order, 1945–​1963”, in D. A. Low and Alison Smith, eds., History of East Africa, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 12. 18. John Darwin, “What Was the Late Colonial State?”, Itinerario 23, no. 3/​4 (1999): 73–​82, at 76. For the developmental state see Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 208–​217, and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Repressive Developmentalism   551 19. Crawford Young, “The African Colonial State Revisited”, Governance 11, no.  1 (1998): 105–​106. 20. James Ferguson, The Anti-​Politics Machine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21. For more on this see John Darwin (n 18). 22. Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact, 12–​17, 116–​118, 147. 23. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society. 24. Emil Schreyger, L’Office du Niger au Mali 1932 à 1982 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984); Monica van Beusekom, Negotiating Development (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002). 25. Martin Thomas, “Albert Sarraut, French Colonial Development, and the Communist Threat, 1919–​1930”, Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (2005):  917–​955; Tony Chafer, “Friend or Foe? Competing Visions of Empire in French West Africa in the Run-​ up to Independence,” in Martin Thomas, ed., French Colonial Mind, vol. 1 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 279. 26. Marc Poncelet, L’invention des sciences coloniales belges (Paris:  Karthala, 2008); Pierre Singaravélou, Professer l’Empire (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011). 27. Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 117–​143. 28. Maryinez Lyons, “Public Health in Colonial Africa: the Belgian Congo”, in Dorothy Porter, ed., The History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 371–​ 372; Jeannôt Kassa, Politiques Agricoles et Promotion Rurale au Congo-​Zaire (1885–​1997) (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 135–​182; Samuel Coghe, “Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–​45”, Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2017): 16–​44. 29. Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds (London: Leicester University Press, 1995); Matthew Stanard, Selling the Congo (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 30. Joanna Lewis, Empire State-​Building (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 298–​359, cit. 15. 31. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1997); Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, The ‘civilizing mission’ of Portuguese colonialism, 1870–​1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 32. Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), at 8. 33. Joanna Lewis, “The Ruling Compassions of the Late Colonial State: Welfare versus Force, Kenya, 1945–​1952”, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 2 (2001), § 7. 34. Leigh Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 126–​158, cit. 157–​158. For more bibliography see Joseph M. Hodge’s chapter in this volume. 35. See Lucy P. Mair, Welfare in the British Colonies (London:  The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1944); A. H. M. Kirk-​Greene’s introduction to Native Administration and Political Development in British Tropical Africa. Report by Lord Hailey, 1940–​42 (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1979). 36. Joanna Lewis, Empire State-​Building, 75, 78–​79. 37. Colonial Office, Social Welfare in the Colonies, in NA-​UK, CO859/​519, 1954–​1955, Ashridge Social Development Conference 1954—​preparatory notes. 38. Nicholas White, “Reconstructing Europe through rejuvenating empire:  The British, French, and Dutch experiences compared”, Past & Present 210, Suppl. 6 (2011): 211–​236, at 222. For one example, see Martin Atangana, French Investment in Colonial Cameroon (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). 39. Daniel Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 240–​263. 40. Tony Chafer, “Friend or Foe?”, 285–​286.

552   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo 41. Jeffrey James Byrne, “Our Own Special Brand of Socialism: Algeria and the Contest of Modernities in the 1960s”, Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009), 427–​447. 42. Plan de Constantine, 1959–​1963 (Délégation Générale du Gouvernement en Algérie, 1960), 33, 65; quotation in Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 282–​283. 43. Muriam Haleh Davis, “ ‘The Transformation of Man’ in French Algeria:  Economic Planning and the Postwar Social Sciences, 1958–​62”, Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2017), 73–​94. 44. For a comprehensive assessment, see Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 366–​425. 45. FBEI, A Work of Co-​operation in Development (Gent: Snoeck-​Ducaju, 1964); Nancy Hunt, A Nervous State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 24, 167, 171, 198–​199, 201. 46. See, for instance, Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 47. Guy Vanthemsche, Genèse et portée du ‘Plan décennal’ du Congo belge (1949–​1959) (Bruxelles: Académie royale des sciences d’outre-​mer, 1994), 8, 27, 29–​30, 32, 38, 130. 48. For the notion of development regime see David Ludden, “India’s Development Regime”, in Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 247–​287. 49. See Vanthemsche, ‘Plan décennal’, 90, n. 249. 50. Johan Lagae, “Sur la production du savoir et le role de la science dans le contexte colonial belge”, in Jean-​Luc Vellut, ed., La mémoire du Congo (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 2005), 130–​138, at 136. 51. V. Drachoussoff, “Agricultural Change in the Belgian Congo 1945–​1960”, Food Research Institute Studies 5 (1965):  137–​201; Benjamin Rubbers and Marc Poncelet, “Sociologie coloniale au Congo belge. Les études sur le Katanga industriel et urbain à la veille de l’Indépendance”, Genèses 99, no. 2 (2015): 93–​112. 52. Marc Poncelet, “Colonisation”, 14–​16. 53. G. E.  J. B. Brausch, “The Solvay Institute of Sociology in Belgian Africa”, Revue internationale des sciences sociales 11, no. 2 (1959): 238–​250, at 249. 54. Nancy Hunt, “Domesticity and colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946–​1960”, Signs 15, no. 3 (1990): 447–​474. 55. Crawford Young, Comparative Perspective, 212. 56. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, “A Modernizing Empire? Politics, Culture and Economy in Portuguese Late Colonialism”, in Bandeira Jerónimo and Costa Pinto, Ends, 51–​80; Cláudia Castelo, “Developing ‘Portuguese Africa’ in late colonialism: confronting discourses”, in Hodge, Hödl, and Kopf, Developing Africa,  63–​86. 57. Sabine Clarke, “A technocratic imperial state? The colonial office and scientific research, 1940–​1960”, Twentieth Century British History 18, no.  4 (2007):  453–​480; Christophe Bonneuil and Patrick Petitjean, “Science and French Colonial Policy:  Creation of the ORSTOM: From the Popular Front to the Liberation via Vichy, 1936–​1947”, in T. Shinn, J. Spaapen, and V. V. Krishna, eds., Science and Technology in a Developing World (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 129–​178. 58. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “Ordering Resistance: The late colonial state in the Portuguese Empire (1940–​1975)”, Political Power and Social Theory, forthcoming (2017). 59. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, “A Modernizing Empire?”. 60. Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–​234.

Repressive Developmentalism   553 61. Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, 70. For Malaya as blueprint see, for instance, K. Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counterinsurgency Paradigm”, Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 383–​414. 62. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckonings (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 234–​235; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 294; Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 156–​157. 63. A. R. Baggallay, “Myths of Mau Mau expanded: rehabilitation in Kenya’s detention camps, 1954–​60”, Journal of Eastern African Studies 5, no. 3 (2011), 553–​578. 64. Moritz Feichtinger, “ ‘A Great Reformatory’: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63”, Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2017): 45–​72. See also his excellent thesis ‘Villagization’: A people’s history of strategic resettlement and violent transformation Kenya and Algeria 1952–​1962 (Ph.D diss., University of Bern, 2016). 65. Joseph Hodge, “British Colonial Expertise, Postcolonial Careering and the Early History of International Development”, Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (2010): 24–​46. 66. Lewis, Empire State-​Building, 298, 359. 67. Tim N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 149–​194, cit. 150–​151, 310–​311. 68. Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algerie (Paris:  Harmattan, 1998); Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie colonial (Paris: Jacob, 2012); Fabien Sacriste, “Déplacer, discipliner, guider la population rurale? Les ‘regroupements’, une politique de peuplement pendant la guerre d’indépendance algérienne”, in Fabien Desage, Christelle Morel-​Journel, and Valérie Sala Pala, eds., Le peuplement comme politiques (Rennes: PUR, 2014), 87–​104. 69. Considering existent critiques of this thesis, see Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Déracinement (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1964). For the social sciences, see Noara Omouri, “Les Sections Administratives Specialisées et les sciences sociales”, in J.-​C. Jauffret and M. Vaisse, eds., Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2001), 383–​397. 70. Djaffar Lesbet, Les 1000 villages socialistes en Algérie (Alger/​Paris: Office des publications universitaires, 1983). See also Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, at 283. 71. Grégor Mathias, Les sections administratives spécialisées en Algérie (Paris: Harmattan, 1998). 72. Feichtinger, “Great Reformatory”, 13. 73. Jean-​Pierre Chauveau, “Participation paysanne et populisme bureaucratique. Essai d’ histoire et de sociologie de Ia culture du developpement”, in J.-​P. Jacob and Ph. Lavigne Delville, eds., Les associations paysannes en Afrique (Paris: Khartala, 1994), 25–​60, cit. 34. 74. J. Kassa, Politiques Agricoles, at 139. See also Bogumil Jewsiewcki, Modernisation ou destruction du village africain (Brussels: CEDAF, 1983). 75. Guy Vanthemsche, ‘Plan décennal’, 30. 76. Bogumil Jewsiewicki, “African peasants in the totalitarian colonial society of the Belgian Congo in Peasants in Africa”, in Martin Klein, ed., Peasants in Africa (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980),  45–​75. 77. Maryinez Lyons, ‘Public Health’, 372–​373. 78. Dominic Pistor, Developmental colonialism and Kitawala policy in 1950s Belgian Congo (MA diss., Simon Fraser University, 2009), 1, 86, 114.

554   Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo 79. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, “Internationalism and the labours of the Portuguese colonial empire (1945–​1974)”, Portuguese Studies 29, no.  2 (2013): 142–​163. 80. For the early 1960s see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “ ‘A battle in the field of human relations’ ”; idem, “ ‘Ordering Resistance’ ”. For the early 1960s see Diogo Ramada Curto, Bernardo Cruz, and Teresa Furtado, Políticas Coloniais em Tempo de Revoltas Angola circa 1961 (Porto: Afrontamento, 2016). 81. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘ “A battle in the field of human relations” ’; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, “A Modernizing Empire?”. 82. Moritz Feichtinger and Stephan Malinowski, “Transformative Invasions: Western Post-​9/​ 11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism”, Humanity 3, no. 1 (2012), 35–​63, cit. 41. 83. See Klose, Human Rights, at 236. For similar ideas, see Nicole Sackley, “The village as Cold War site: experts, development, and the history of rural reconstruction”, Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 481–​504.

Chapter 29

Isl am ic Revolu t i ona ri e s and the End of  E mpi re David Motadel 1

Introduction The fall of the European empires shook the Islamic world more than any other event of the modern age, radically transforming societies and states from Sub-​Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the great Muslim gunpowder empires were crumbling, the European powers had expanded into Islamic lands, eventually subjugating most of the world’s Muslim populations. After the Second World War, the age of European domination came to an end.2 By the 1960s, most of the world’s Muslims had gained independence from direct or indirect European rule, to live in sovereign post-​colonial Muslim majority states or as minorities in newly independent non-​Muslim states. As elsewhere in the world, independence was achieved through various means, ranging from negotiated withdrawals of the imperial powers to bloody wars of independence.3 Islamic movements were at the very centre of the struggles against the empires. From the first days of Europe’s expansion into Muslim-​populated lands, imperial authorities were confronted with Islamic resistance groups. Across the world, Islamic movements challenged colonial rule, regularly calling for armed jihad against foreign subjugation. They formed a significant part in the history of the end of empire and the creation of independent Muslim states. Scholars have tended to write the history of decolonization in the Muslim world as one of secular, national liberation. The fall of the European empires and the creation of post-​colonial states are usually seen as an era of secularism and Western ideologies, ranging from nationalism to socialism, rather than a period of piety and religious upheaval. The master narrative of decolonization in the Muslim world has left little room for Islamic movements. Yet, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the secular nature of anti-​colonial movements in the Muslim world has been exaggerated. The secular elites and intellectuals of the post-​colonial states have regularly deliberately marginalized the

556   David Motadel involvement of Islamic political movements in their accounts of the anti-​colonial struggles; and most western scholars, often influenced by paradigms of secular modernity, have long shown little serious interest in religious movements in the era of decolonization in general. As the following pages demonstrate, Islamic groups were among the first and most persistent forces of anti-​colonial (and, later, post-​colonial) resistance across the lands of Islam. Of course, we need to be careful not to generalize about the nature and significance of Islamic movements in the struggle against empire. The Muslim world was far from homogeneous, and Islamic movements could vary significantly, playing very different roles in the struggles against colonialism. Similarly, forms of colonial control and paths of decolonization could differ considerably across countries and continents.4 Given the religious, social, and political diversity of (and within) Muslim majority societies across the world, the global relevance of Islamic anti-​colonial movements is striking. Although shaped by their specific social and political contexts, they had remarkably much in common.5 They all engaged not only in resistance against the colonial state, but also in internal struggles with the aim of transforming their communities. One of their most important aims was to establish Islamic states based on the shari‘a. Their slogans were religiously charged, couching anti-​colonial defiance in the language of jihad and martyrdom, although the meaning of this language was fluid and changed over time. Some were led by Islamic authorities, who were religiously learned, politically astute, charismatic. To be sure, most of these movements were driven not only by religious but also by socioeconomic and political forces.6 It would be a mistake to connect all anti-​ colonial resistance in Muslim societies to Islam, as classical colonial narratives did, portraying all Muslim opposition to the imperial state as rooted in irrational religious fanaticism. Yet, to ignore Islam would be equally misguided. In many Muslim societies, Islam was central in shaping social and political life and, consequently, formed an important element in social and political movements. Islam could unite ethnically, socially, and linguistically fractioned societies and legitimize political resistance, and even violence. Most importantly, perhaps, Islam constituted one of the most obvious demarcations between rulers and ruled, and appeared to be a bulwark against European imperial hegemony. The forms of anti-​colonial resistance adopted by the various Islamic movements were diverse, and included violent opposition, which ranged from guerrilla insurgency to open revolt to peaceful protest. Likewise, their forms of organization varied, ranging from guerrilla groups and rebel movements to political parties and mass organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive account of the history of Islamic groups in the anti-​imperial struggle from the colonial to the post-​colonial era. It discusses the rise of Islamic anti-​colonial movements in the colonial age, their involvement in the process of decolonization, which saw their relative decline and the ascent of secular nationalist and socialist groups, and, finally, their position in the post-​independence era, when Islamic groups emerged as one of the most potent forces of opposition to the new states.

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    557

Colonialism and the Rise of Islamic Resistance In the heyday of empire, Muslims from French West Africa to the Dutch East Indies were subjugated to colonial rule. European officials in the Muslim-​populated regions of their empires were, from the beginning, anxious about Islam and adopted various policies towards religious institutions and authorities, ranging from suppression to toleration to accommodation. In the eyes of imperial bureaucrats, Islam appeared to be a powerful source of authority that had to be contained. They commonly tried to employ Islamic dignitaries and integrate Islamic institutions, such as mosques, courts, and madrassas, into the colonial state. This policy of accommodation not only gave imperial authorities the opportunity to control Muslims, but also allowed them to actively use Islam to strengthen colonial rule. The responses of Muslims to European imperial conquest varied as well, and included confrontation, emigration, and submission. Most ordinary Muslims would continue their lives, accepting, or at least not resisting, their new masters. At times, they chose to emigrate in order to live in regions ruled by Muslims—​the dar al-​Islam—​for instance, in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, where many Muslims decided to leave for the neighbouring Ottoman empire.7 Resistance, as elsewhere in the colonial world, was another common phenomenon. Islamic movements were central in the defiance of the European empires, from the days of conquest to the retreat of the colonial powers.8 A major role in these movements played Sufi brotherhoods, Mahdist movements, and reformist and revivalist groups.9 Less important were the traditional ‘ulama, though they frequently supported the resistance. Messianic movements became one of the most prevalent threats to European rule in Islamic lands.10 The most notable example was the Mahdist uprising in late nineteenth-​ century Sudan, led by Muhammad Ahmad, who had proclaimed himself Mahdi in 1881.11 Ahmad called on his followers to wage jihad against Ottoman-​Egyptian rule and its British protectors, took Khartoum, and proclaimed an Islamic state. In 1896, an army under Herbert Kitchener attacked the Mahdi state, then led by Ahmad’s successor, ‘Abd Allah al-​Ta‘ayishi. The campaign took three years and countless lives; tens of thousands of Muslims were killed by the new Maxim machine gun. One of the British officers who served in Sudan was the young Winston Churchill, who, after his return to England, published his account of events, The River War, in which he notoriously denounced ‘the curses’ of ‘Mohammedanism’ with its ‘fanatical frenzy’: ‘No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith’.12 Messianism also fuelled anti-​colonial revolts in other parts of Africa. After the turn of the century, British troops fought Mahdist uprisings in North Nigeria—​in Burmi (1903), Satiru (1906), and Dumbulwa (1923).13 In 1907, the Germans waged a colonial war against Mahdist movements in North Cameroon.14 In the East Indies, the Dutch had already been confronted with anti-​colonial messianism

558   David Motadel in the early nineteenth century. During the Dipanegara revolt of the 1820s, Javanese rebels drew not only on mystical Islam, but also on various messianic ideas to mobilize for jihad against the Dutch crown.15 The most widespread anti-​colonial resistance forces in the Muslim world were Sufi orders.16 Among the most famous was that of ‘Abd al-​Qadir, a shaykh of the Qadiri order, which fought against France’s colonial conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s.17 During the struggle, ‘Abd al-​Qadir forged a theocratic state, with its capital in Tagdemt, based on Islamic and modernist Ottoman models of statecraft. Al-​Qadir and his followers were not the only organized militant resistance movement in French Algeria.18 Across North Africa, Sufi tariqas spearheaded anti-​colonial resistance. After the turn of the twentieth century, the warriors of the Sanusi brotherhood, led by Ahmad al-​Sharif al-​Sanusi, fought French troops in the Sahara.19 Ahmad al-​Sharif al-​Sanusi turned the Sufi lodges into centres of resistance. The Sanusiyya later also opposed the Italian occupation of Cyrenaica. Italian colonial troops waged a merciless war against the Sanusi rebels, finally crushing the resistance in the 1930s, ruthlessly celebrated with the public execution of the legendary Sanusi commander ‘Umar al-​Mukhtar.20 Sufi brotherhoods became similarly crucial to organized anti-​colonial opposition in sub-​Saharan Africa. In the mid-​nineteenth century, followers of the Tijaniyya, led by al-​Hajj ‘Umar Tal, waged jihad against the French presence in West Africa.21 In French Senegal, Amadu Bamba and his disciples of the Muridiyya engaged in anti-​colonial resistance.22 On the other side of the continent, in Somaliland, the Salihiyya of Muhammad ‘Abd Allah Hasan, the ‘mad mullah’ as the British called him, fought Italian, British, and Ethiopian troops.23 The Salihiyya was also in conflict with the rival Qadiri order, which opposed the Germans in East Africa.24 Sufi resistance was not an exclusively African phenomenon. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the three great imams, Ghazi Muhammad, Hamza Bek, and Shamil, waged a holy war against tsarist troops in the mountains of the North Caucasus.25 The imams organized the local communities of the region within an imamate, a fragile Islamic state, enforcing shari‘a legislation and strict religious observance. The Russians fought the rebels mercilessly, finally breaking their resistance and declaring victory in 1864. The Naqshbandi brotherhood proved important in organizing the anti-​tsarist struggle and in unifying the Muslims of the region, although the heterogeneity of the movement should not be underestimated. At least equally important was Islamic revivalism; in fact, a main concern of the imams was the enforcement of the shari‘a. Scholars have also shown much interest in the influence of puritanical, reformist Islam on anti-​colonial Sufi movements. While some have described reformist-​inspired Sufi orders as neo-​Sufi movements, others have questioned altogether the importance of Sufism in anti-​imperial movements that have commonly been characterized as Sufi resistance, instead emphasizing the importance of reformist and revivalist Islam.26 Islamic reformism influenced anti-​colonial resistance considerably.27 Among the most influential reformist movements were Islamic revivalist groups, which emerged since the eighteenth century—​most famously, the Wahhabis in the Arabian peninsula, the Padris in Southeast Asia, and the Fulanis in West Africa—​and became powerful

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    559 forces against Europe’s imperial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The revivalist Salafi movement may be considered one of the most influential Islamic political movements of the years of decolonization and the post-​colonial era.28 Muslim revivalists preached a renewal and purification of Islam, advocating a strictly literalist reading of the Qur’an and the hadith. Their ideal was the recreation of the early Islamic society of the days of the Prophet. Only the return to an ‘uncorrupted’ and ‘authentic’ Islam would prevent the perceived global decline of their faith and the hegemony of the European powers. Other reformist movements—Islamic modernists—urged for the adoption of Western sciences, technologies, and forms of learning to strengthen Islam from within. Both criticized the traditional ‘ulama as intellectually weak and not prepared to cope with the challenges of the modern world. In a way, they were both reactions to the realities of modernity, offering solutions for its problems, as well as expressions of modernity. To be sure, Islamic reform movements were not inevitably connected to anti-​imperial militancy. In British India, for example, the puritan and revivalist Deoband school (founded in 1866) and its modernist rival, the Aligarh school (founded in 1875), were accommodated within the colonial state.29 Similarly, Jadidism, a reformist movement of Muslim intellectuals and scholars in late nineteenth-​century tsarist Central Asia, never turned against the state.30 Still, there were various reformist groups with an open anti-​ colonial agenda, and some of them fuelled anti-​colonial revolt. In French Algeria, for instance, the Association of Algerian Reformist ‘Ulama, founded by scholars around the Zaytuna-​educated theologian ‘Abd al-​Hamid ibn Badis in 1931, became fully involved in the anti-​colonial struggle.31 Similarly, the Malayan Kaum Muda (Young Faction), emerging in the intellectually vibrant metropolitan cosmos of colonial Singapore, became one of the spearheads of Islamic anti-​colonial activism in the 1930s.32 Revivalist Islam also influenced numerous resistance movements in British India.33 Among the first was that of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi and his successors, which first fought the Sikhs and, later, the British in North India. On the notorious North-​West Frontier, colonial troops struggled with (allegedly) Wahhabi-​inspired rebels. Although the conflicts in the region were at times simply a result of the raiding that was vital to the frontier economy, a consequence of geostrategic conflict—​notably the Anglo-​Afghan Wars—​or a reaction to the collective punishment inflicted by the colonial rulers, many of the rebellions had a distinctly religious character; often, of course, these different factors were interwoven. The frontier region remained a hotbed of insurgency until the end of British rule, and beyond. In the Dutch East Indies, too, Islamic revivalism was crucial in anti-​colonial mobilization. Muslim guerrilla groups in the Padri War (1803–​1837), the Banten Uprising (1888), and the Aceh War (1873–​1913) drew upon Islamic revivalist rhetoric to unite the faithful against both internal rivals and imperial intrusion.34 Anxious about such agitation, the Dutch introduced various instruments of surveillance and control. They were particularly concerned about the connections that Indonesian Muslims had with Islamic centres in the Middle East, worrying about the return of radicalized Mecca pilgrims and students who had attended Salafiyya seminaries in Egypt, Syria, or the Hijaz.

560   David Motadel As networks of Islamic activists and scholars expanded beyond imperial borders, colonial officials increasingly viewed Islamic renewal movements as a global threat. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the corridors of power in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London were haunted by the spectre of pan-​Islamism.35 Across the world, pan-​Islamic activists and thinkers—​men like Jamal al-​Din al-​Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida, Isma‘il Gasprinski, Maulana Barkatullah, and many other, lesser known figures—​spread their ideas of religious solidarity and a united Islamic front against European supremacy.36 Although pan-​Islamism was mainly a phenomenon of the elite worlds of urban intellectuals, it could nevertheless inspire popular revolt. In Egypt, the ‘Urabi rebels allied with major pan-​Islamic activists and used Islamic slogans to rally the pious against Great Britain’s intervention in 1882.37 In Iran, the Tobacco Protest of 1891 was fuelled by the agitation of pan-​Islamist ‘ulama, among them al-​ Afghani himself.38 In Morocco, pan-​Islamic activists organized urban resistance to French colonialism in the early twentieth century.39 In interwar India, British authorities were challenged by the pan-​Islamic Khilafat movement.40 More importantly, early twentieth-​century pan-​Islamists were among the first proponents of the modern Salafi movement, which after the First World War emerged as the major force in the anti-​ colonial (and, later, post-​colonial) fight. In the interwar years, Muslim revivalist Salafi groups began to organize themselves in modern mass organizations. Their forms of resistance were not large-​scale guerilla insurgencies or open revolts, but political opposition, including street protests, strikes, and rallies, and, at times, small-​scale violence, including underground terrorism, assassinations, and ambushes. Organized in modern, bureaucratic, hierarchical associations with headquarters in urban centres, they soon became powerful forces of resistance to the colonial state. Their leaders advocated an Islamic state, based on their interpretation of the shari‘a, and radical social reform. The most significant of these emerging organizations was Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the al-​Ikhwan al-​Muslimin, which was founded in 1928 by a group of pious activists around the Salafi schoolmaster Hasan al-​Banna; within a few years it became a mass movement, inspiring Muslim political groups around the world.41 Its followers decried the British presence in Egypt, agitated against Western culture and moral deprivation, from gambling to alcohol consumption, and demanded an Islamic state. The organization not only engaged in political activism but also in social welfare activities. On the eve of the Second World War, it counted no fewer than two million members. Egypt and its British overlords tried to control the Muslim Brotherhood, and at times supressed it. In 1948, when some of its members became involved in terrorist attacks, the movement was banned. A year later, al-​Banna was assassinated and succeeded by Isma‘il al-​Hudaybi, a senior judge with a working-​class background. In the 1930s and 1940s, branches of the Brotherhood emerged in Palestine (1935), Syria (1945), Jordan (1945), Libya (1949), Sudan (1949), and beyond. Only in sub-​ Saharan Africa did most Muslim-​populated regions remain dominated by the powerful Sufi orders, which left little room for Salafi mass organizations. In British India, the pendent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Abu al-​A‘la Mawdudi’s Jama‘at-​i Islami (Islamic Society), founded in 1941, soon became the largest Islamic

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    561 anti-​colonial association.42 The Jama‘at-​i Islami opposed both imperial rule and the nationalists of the Muslim League, advocating a shari‘a state and a society based on Islamic values. In contrast to al-​Banna, who promoted Islamization from below, Mawdudi wanted to influence his country’s elites to enforce Islamization from above. The Jama‘at-​i Islami expanded quickly across South Asia. Its branch in British Malaya, the Hizb al-​Muslimin (Muslim Party; also Hizbul Muslimin), founded in 1948, was quickly supressed.43 In the Dutch East Indies, similar organizations emerged. The first was the Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union), founded in 1911 by Muslim batik traders, which united various groups, from modernist to mahdists, and became a major anti-​colonial mass organization before infiltration by communists and internal divisions prompted many to turn instead to the modernist Muhammadiyyah movement, founded in 1912, and its traditionalist rival, the Nahdat al-​‘Ulama (Awakening of the ‘Ulama; also Nahdatul Ulama), founded in 1926.44 While Muhammadiyyah did not become significantly involved in anti-​colonial activism, the Nahdat al-​‘Ulama grew into a powerful anti-​colonial  force. Although all of these organizations existed separately, anti-​colonial Islamic internationalism flourished, as could be observed during the great Islamic congresses in Mecca and Cairo (both in 1926), Jerusalem (1931), and Geneva (1935).45 Throughout the interwar period, colonial intelligence authorities were anxious—​ indeed at times paranoid—​about the spectre of anti-​colonial jihad.46 Yet there were new, secular resistance groups emerging, among them socialists and, more importantly, nationalists.

Decolonization and the Relative Marginalization of Islamic Resistance In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalist independence movements emerged across the Muslim world, and, after the First World War, as all hopes for self-​determination were shattered and the Ottoman caliphate was abolished, became the most powerful anti-​colonial forces.47 In the interwar period, the anti-​colonial political landscape was dominated by new nationalist movements and parties, such as Egypt’s Wafd (Delegation) Party (1919), Tunisia’s Dustur (Constitutional) Party (1920), Algeria’s Étoile Nord-​Africaine (1926), Morocco’s Istiqlal (Independence) Party (1943), Syria’s National Block (1928), India’s Muslim League (1906), the Indonesian National Party (1927), and the United Malays National Organization (1946).48 Their ideologies could vary significantly, blending ethnic, linguistic, and territorial forms of nationalism, but they all promoted independence as their primary goal. They were led by bourgeois and colonial elites, who were not only adept in the politics of government chambers, social salons, and officer clubs, but equally well aware of the rising importance of mass politics. In the end, they (and their successors) played the central role in the creation

562   David Motadel of post-​colonial states after the Second World War, to some extent sidelining Islamic movements. The Second World War triggered the end of European rule across the Islamic world, undermining prior structures of imperial superiority, dependence, and domination. In the Atlantic Charter, the victors had promised their colonial subjects independence and self-​determination for supporting the Allied war effort. Although Europe’s imperial elites tried everything to revive their empires, initially even with some success, the war invigorated the long process of decolonization. In most cases, this process was peaceful, facilitated through negotiations with Muslim political elites. In the Middle East, France’s and Britain’s mandates were dissolved at once.49 In 1946, French troops left Syria and Lebanon, giving way to authoritarian republics. The British gave up their mandate in Jordan, now ruled by the Hashemite dynasty and, soon after, in Palestine, where conflict erupted between Arab and Jewish populations about the country’s future political order. In Iraq, the region’s second Hashemite kingdom, British mandate rule had officially already been abolished in 1932. In North Africa, the imperial retreat took longer. Libya, which had been liberated by the Allies from Italian rule, and which had been briefly under British military administration, became an independent kingdom in 1951, headed by Sanusi shaykh Muhammad Idris al-​Sanusi, whose followers had fought loyally on the side of the Allies during the war.50 In the rest of North Africa, the end of European domination was more violent. On 23 July 1952, the British-​controlled Kingdom of Egypt was overthrown in a military coup led by Muhammad Najib (also Muhammad Naguib), Jamal ‘Abd al-​Nasir (in the following Gamal Abdel Nasser), and their comrades of the Free Officers group, and was replaced by the independent Republic of Egypt.51 Soon after, in 1956, Nasser’s pressure led to the peaceful end of Anglo-​Egyptian rule in Sudan, where the nationalist Isma‘il al-​Azhari, a former colonial civil servant, became the first president of the newly founded republic.52 The French, as Sylvie Thénault’s chapter in this volume indicates, were more reluctant to concede power in the Maghrib.53 In post-​war Tunisia, they were unable to suppress increasing anti-​colonial agitation and civil disturbances, led by the Neo-​Dustur under Habib Burqibah (in the following Habib Bourguiba), which finally led to independence in 1956, the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of an authoritarian one-​party state. Similarly, in Morocco, the nationalist movement, with the Istiqlal Party at its heart, gained momentum in the post-​war years. As guerilla activities and anti-​colonial violence mounted, the French and Spanish agreed to independence talks, and in spring 1956, the Kingdom of Morocco regained its sovereignty. Algeria, in contrast, was the bloodiest chapter in the history of French decolonization in North Africa. As elsewhere, the Second World War had sparked hopes for self-​determination, which were soon shattered. On Victory Day, pro-​independence rallies were crushed in the Sétif and Guelma massacres.54 In 1954, frictions between the colonial rulers and the socialist-​nationalist National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN), which had grown out of the Étoile Nord-​Africaine, escalated into the Algerian War. A long, bloody conflict characterized by guerilla fighting, massacres, and terrorism, it ended in 1962 with Algerian independence, the escape of nearly one million pieds-​noirs

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    563 and harkis to France, and the establishment of the authoritarian regime of Ahmad ibn Billah (in the following Ahmad Ben Bella), who was soon followed by Hawari Bu-​ Madyan (in the following Houari Boumediene). In South Asia, the Second World War led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, which led to a huge population migration accompanied by murderous communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.55 Jinnah and the Muslim League had, from the 1930s, promoted a state for Muslims and used the war to push for an independent Pakistan. In contrast to the Hindu-​dominated Indian National Congress, Jinnah had loyally supported the British war effort, anticipating in return a Muslim state. In Southeast Asia, in contrast—​in the Dutch East Indies and in British Malaya—​colonial authorities were not prepared to leave without a fight. The Japanese wartime occupation, which had cut off connections to the metropolis, had given anti-​colonial nationalists new momentum. The Indonesian War of Independence, which broke out after Japan’s retreat in 1945, ended four years later with the foundation of Sukarno’s Indonesian Republic.56 In Malaya, too, the Second World War precipitated an anti-​colonial guerilla war fought out between British and Commonwealth troops and Malay insurgency groups; it led to independence in 1957.57 In sub-​Saharan Africa, finally, the end of colonial rule affected Muslims from West Africa to the Swahili Coast, from Nigeria, Guinea, Senegal, and Mali in the west to Tanzania and Somalia in the east, though almost all of these countries also had significant non-​Muslim populations.58 By the mid-​1960s, Muslims across the world had gained self-​determination, with the exception of the British protectorates on the Persian Gulf, which reluctantly accepted independence in 1971.59 The Muslim leaders in these decolonization struggles and transformation processes were urban, middle-​class nationalists—​men like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Ahmad Ben Bella of Algeria, Sékou Touré of Guinea, Muhammad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan, and Sukarno of Indonesia. Many of them had been part of the colonial elite, as army officers and bureaucrats, and envisioned a secular, modern nation state. In other cases, monarchs took power, either reviving pre-​colonial dynasties, which had nominally remained in power, as in Morocco and on the Persian Gulf, or establishing new monarchies, as in Jordan, Iraq, and Libya. Islamic leaders, however, were largely excluded, with the exception of Libya’s Sanusi shaykh Idris. Overall, it was a triumph of new, secular, nationalist elites and of old and new monarchies, not of Islamic revolutionaries. This, however, does not mean that Islam was insignificant. First, depending on the circumstances, various nationalist movements made attempts to draw on Islam in their anti-​colonial struggles—​some out of conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. Islam not only provided slogans for mobilization but often also institutional structures for resistance. In Egypt, many of the Free Officers, who also referred to themselves as the ‘blessed movement’, had been Muslim Brothers, and in the 1952 coup, they claimed to act in the name of Islam, with Nasser describing the revolution as a ‘holy march towards the great goal’.60 Privately, Nasser remained a practicing Muslim all his life, routinely pointing to affinities between Islam and socialism. In Tunisia, Burguiba’s Neo-​Dustur, despite

564   David Motadel its rigidly secular agenda, reached out to the pious, choosing mosques and zawiyas as meeting places, praising the country’s Islamic heritage as a bulwark against French intrusion, and presenting itself as defender of the faith.61 A French colonial bureaucrat once noted that the ‘Neo-​Destour often has been reproached for its two faces: western and democratic before westerners, Islamic and xenophobic when it addresses its troops’.62 In fact, many of the Neo-​Dustur’s early members, including its founder, ‘Abd al-​Aziz al-​Tha‘alibi, had been close to the Salafiyya. In Morocco, too, the leaders of the Istiqlal, most notably ‘Allal al-​Fasi, had been influenced by Salafi teachings in their youth and never fully gave up their religious convictions.63 Even Algeria’s National Liberation Front, though ardently secular, did not miss the opportunity to invoke Islam to mobilize the pious. Its leaders initially promised a post-​colonial state that was based on the ‘principles of Islam’.64 One of its main ideologues, radical thinker Frantz Fanon, described Islam as an integral part of the Algerian nation and denounced French attacks on the Muslim veil: ‘Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defense were in the process of dislocation, open and breached’.65 Algerian revolutionary propaganda portrayed French colonialism as an attempt to Christianize the country and called for a revival of Islam.66 Bernard Lewis observed in the early 1960s that the most common slogan of the rebels was ‘Algérie musulmane’, not ‘Algérie algérienne’ or ‘Algérie arabe’.67 In combat, Algerian guerrilla commanders called upon their followers to crush the French ‘army of infidels’ and ‘heretics’.68 Only as French propaganda increasingly tried to depict the conflict as a war against Islamic extremism, did National Liberation Front leaders become more anxious of being portrayed as religious zealots. In British India, Muhammad Jinnah also reached out to the pious parts of the population, frequently portraying his struggle as a struggle for Islam, while his followers publicly pledged ‘in the name of Allah’ their determination to build a ‘Muslim Nation’.69 In the Dutch East Indies, Surkano, who had taught at a Muhammadiyah school and was married to the daughter of a Muhammadiyah leader, not only invoked Marxism and nationalism, but also Islam.70 In Sub-​Saharan Africa, too, anti-​colonial leaders used Islam for mass mobilization.71 In Sudan’s independence struggle, Isma‘il al-​Azhari pacted with the Islamic Kathmiyya order and even briefly cooperated with the Mahdi movement, which had transformed itself into a modern political mass organization, now called the Umma Party and led by the Mahdi’s son ‘Abd al-​Rahman al-​Mahdi.72 Indeed, almost everywhere, anti-​colonial nationalist leaders allied with Islamic movements. Although Islamic groups had played the most crucial part in the long struggle against imperial rule, their involvement during the actual transition from colonial to post-​ colonial rule was marginal. And yet Islamic movements, especially revivalist organizations, were not insignificant during the last phase of the independence fight. During the Egyptians’ struggle against British control in the early 1950s, fida’iyun guerrillas, most of them controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, attacked British army bases and barracks, shot at guards and convoys, and destroyed military infrastructure in the Canal Zone.73 The Muslim Brothers supported the 1952 coup, though this did not prevent Nasser from turning against them afterwards.74 In Algeria, the Association of the Reformist ‘Ulama

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    565 aligned with the National Liberation Front during the war of independence, and some of its members assumed important posts in the post-​colonial state.75 In British India, the Jama‘at-​i Islami remained largely in the shadow of the Muslim League during the independence struggle and subsequent partition, but it organized humanitarian aid for tens of thousands of refugees.76 At the outset of Indonesia’s War of Independence, on 22 October 1945, the Nahdat al-​‘Ulama declared jihad against the Dutch empire, and its followers, as well as those of other major Islamic organizations, participated in the guerrilla war.77 Moreover, various smaller revivalist Islamic revolutionary groups across the Dutch East Indies tried to establish local Islamic polities. In the Malay Emergency, the Pan-​Malaysian Islamic Party (Partai Islam Se-​Malaysia), founded in 1951, succeeding the suppressed Hizb al-​Muslimin, became fully involved in the war of liberation.78 In short, although they rarely led the final fight for independence, Islamic movements contributed to it. In the end, however, they remained largely excluded from power in the post-​colonial state, a situation that inevitably led to new confrontations.

Post-​C olonial States and Islamic Resurgence Many of the newly independent states were run by urban, secular, nationalist elites; most had formerly served in the colonial bureaucracy and military. The independent Muslim states were often remarkably similar to their colonial predecessors.79 Paternalistic and authoritarian, the new ruling elites relied on a strong army, oppressive police apparatus, and overblown bureaucracy. Their aim was to transform their societies through modernization, westernization, and secularization. Their language was dominated by the terminology of development and progress. To achieve their goals, the new rulers turned to Western ideologies ranging from capitalism to socialism, and many followed the path of the non-​aligned movement. The predominant state ideology was, of course, nationalism, which promised to bolster the state and mobilize popular support. The most notable example, which, in a way, combined all of these trends, was Nasserism, which inspired nationalists across the Muslim world and beyond. It is also striking that, initially, the most effective opposition to the post-​colonial regimes came not from Islamic movements, but from within the circles of the post-​colonial, Western-​inspired elites, as witnessed in ‘Abd al-​Karim Qasim’s coup in Iraq (1958), the Ba‘thist takeovers in Syria (1963) and Iraq (1969), Ja‘far Nimayri’s seizure of Sudan (1969), Siad Barre’s military coup in Somalia (1969), Mu‘ammar Qadhdhafi’s overthrow of Libya’s King Idris (1969), and Suharto’s coup in Indonesia (1965–​1968). The role of Islam in the early post-​colonial state was often quite complex. Like their colonial predecessors, the new states responded to Islamic movements with numerous different measures ranging from accommodation to suppression. Most of the ruling elites, absorbed in their textbooks on social science, modernization models, and development

566   David Motadel theory, saw Islam as an obstacle to progress, and promoted secular visions of modernity. Their ‘postage stamps’, as Albert Hourani once observed, ‘no longer showed mosques’ but instead ‘workers and peasants in heroic attitudes, shaking their fist at fate’.80 From Bourguiba of Tunisia to Sukarno of Indonesia, Muslim leaders sought to control Islam in society and state. Just like the colonial states, the new regimes tried to regulate the role of Islam in society, setting up religious bureaucracies, with state-​licensed imams, registered madrassas, and monitored mosques. And yet most of the Muslim post-​colonial leaders, from Morocco to Pakistan, no matter how secular their visions of modernity, were actutely aware of the pious segments of their populations, and soon found it inevitable to make some advances towards them. Most drew not only on nationalist but also on religious rhetoric when addressing the masses, and they all tried to cultivate good relations with trusted Islamic authorities. Of course, there were variations in their attempts to accommodate Islam, depending on the societies’ ethnic and religious composition and the strength of popular national and religious sentiment. The post-​colonial monarchies often found it easiest to accommodate Islam—​after all, the sultan of Morocco and the Hashemite kings of Jordan and Iraq prided themselves on being direct descendants of the Prophet’s tribe, the Quraysh, carrying the title ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (al-​amir al-​mu’minin). In most parts of sub-​Saharan Africa, the Sufi brotherhoods were integrated into the new post-​colonial states. The rulers of Pakistan went one step further when, in the 1956 constitution, they declared (at least formally) their country an Islamic Republic and gradually made Islam a pillar of the state.81 Others were more reluctant. But even some of the most secular post-​colonial figures increasingly saw Islam as a potent tool of mass politics. Sukarno, for instance, though committed to a secular, multi-​religious state and often critical of Islamic groups, knew how to address the pious, announcing:  ‘But we shall inflame the whole people with the fire of Islam, until every representative in Parliament is a Muslim, and every parliamentary decision is imbued with the spirit and soul of Islam’.82 Bourguiba, likewise, despite all his attempts to curtail religious education, law, and rituals like the Ramadan fasting, continuously tried to co-​opt Islam, creating an official state Islam and proclaiming himself mufti.83 His very title, al-​mujahid al-​akbar (supreme combatant), had a religious connotation.84 ‘Whoever does not believe in the word of Bourguiba’, an eminent shaykh of the Zaytuna Mosque-​University declared in 1958, ‘does not believe in the word of God or his Prophet’.85 In post-​colonial Algeria, too, Islam remained an important part of the political sphere. After victory, on 6 July 1962, a mob raided the Cathedral of Algiers, which under the French had been converted from a mosque into a church, and the building was soon reconverted into a mosque.86 Though committed to a secular state, Ben Bella, confronted by pious opposition, repeatedly declared that Islam was part of Algeria and made some concessions to accommodate it.87 Some of his ideologues even promoted a synthesis of Islam and socialism.88 Nasser also made attempts to integrate Islamic institutions into the state, for instance, nationalizing the religious endowments (awqaf) and al-​Azhar.89 While these measures caused some resentment, many ‘ulama eventually submitted, calling on their followers to support the state.

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    567 During the Suez Crisis in 1956, the regime tried to mobilize the population with chants for jihad.90 As the first bombs hit Cairo, Nasser climbed up the minbar of al-​Azhar to give a combative speech, calling the crowd to fight against the invaders: ‘God will render us successful’.91 In the West, some saw in him an Islamic agitator. On the eve of the Suez conflict, French premier Guy Mollet alerted his British colleague Anthony Eden about Nasser’s alleged ‘pan-​Islamism’. ‘Colonel Nasser, in his writings, has made his objective known: to recreate the empire of Islam around Egypt’, he warned: ‘There is only one game which is being played out in the Near East as in North Africa: that of the expansion of pan-​Islamism’.92 Similarly, three years earlier, in the conflict over the nationalization of the British-​controlled Iranian oil industry, Muhammad Musaddiq, despite his secular, nationalist, and socialist leanings, found it necessary to ally with some leading ‘ulama, most famously the influential Ayatollah Abu al-​Qasim Kashani, to mobilize the people.93 These efforts, however, were insufficient to divert Islamic opposition to the post-​ colonial state. Although Islamic movements had been a major force in the anti-​colonial struggle, they found themselves almost everywhere excluded from power. In the eyes of their followers, the new states were simply a continuation of the colonial regimes and their elites. They denounced their new masters as unrepresentative of the ordinary people, blamed them for promoting secularism, and accused them of slavish emulation of the West. They condemned socialism as atheist, and nationalism as un-​Islamic. Their ideal of a global religious community, the umma, seemed incompatible with the idea of nationhood. State-​sponsored nation building—​the forging of a territorial nation state within borders that had often been artificially drawn up during the colonial era—​ appeared to undermine global Islamic unity. To be sure, the nature and aims of Islamic opposition groups could vary significantly. The most forceful ones were Salafi organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jama‘at-​i Islami, which fought for the establishment of theocracies based on their interpretation of the shari‘a, and which criticized not only their own Westernized elites, but also the traditional religious establishment and Islamic modernists. Indeed, among all the Islamic movements that had opposed the colonial state, from Mahdist militants to Sufi brotherhoods, revivalist groups emerged as the strongest forces, often leading the opposition in the post-​colonial state. In practice, these movements were at the forefront of the major social and political conflicts of the post-​colonial era, getting involved in struggles over land reform, the nationalization of industry, education policies, and the regulation of religious life. They fought against gambling, alcohol, nightclubs, prostitution, and Western clothing. Their followers came from the pious majority—​workers, minor civil servants, students (especially of the natural sciences and engineering), bazaar merchants, lower-​ranking army officers. They had a particularly strong support base among the masses who, in pursuit of employment and education, had moved from rural areas to the cities, where they found in reformist and revivalist Islam, suited to the conditions of urban life and its problems, a viable alternative to the traditional forms of religion practised in their villages.94 Although they formed many different kinds of organizations, including

568   David Motadel underground terrorist cells and guerrilla groups, the most potent Islamic movements transformed themselves into political mass associations and parties. In many Muslim states, the conflict led to violent clashes. Soon after the 1952 coup, Nasser turned against the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing its demands for an Islamic theocracy.95 The Muslim Brothers put up resistance, organizing terrorist attacks, assassinations, and street riots. Following an attempt to kill Nasser by a Brotherhood member in 1954, the officers outlawed the organization, denouncing its alleged misuse of Islam: ‘The revolution will never allow reactionary corruption to recur in the name of religion’.96 Its headquarters was ransacked by regime-​controlled mobs and set on fire. Its followers went underground. In the following years, Egyptian security forces arrested thousands of Muslim Brothers and executed many of their leaders, most notably their self-​proclaimed chief ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in a Cairo prison in summer 1966. In most other post-​colonial Muslim states the situation was similar. In independent Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood was increasingly suppressed, and eventually, after the Ba‘thist coup of 1963, outlawed, although, as in Egypt, many of its members went underground, radicalized, and became one of the most vigorous anti-​Ba‘thist resistance forces.97 Similarly, in Iraq, the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, an Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Muhammad Baqir al-​Sadr’s Shi‘a Islamic Call (al-​Da‘wa al-​Islamiyya) Party, declared war on secularism and socialism, confronting both ‘Abd al-​Karim Qasim’s regime and later the Ba‘thist state, which suppressed both.98 Less violent were the confrontations between the post-​colonial state and the Islamic opposition in South and Southeast Asia. In Pakistan, Mawdudi’s Jama‘at-​i Islami was permitted to participate legally in the political process, despite its continuous calls for theocratic rule.99 Although security authorities periodically suppressed the organization, it was overall accommodated, and the increasing Islamization of the country was celebrated by Mawdudi and his followers as personal victories. Similarly, in independent Malaya, the Pan-​Malaysian Islamic Party, in spite of its aim to establish a theocratic state, engaged legally in politics, though usually in the opposition.100 Indonesia’s modernist Muhammadiyyah movement and its traditionalist rival, the Nahdat al-​‘Ulama, too, were accommodated in the post-​colonial order, despite decrying Sukarno’s secular policies.101 This does not mean, however, that violent Islamic opposition did not exist in Indonesia. In the first years after independence between 1949 and 1962, Sukarno’s state became embroiled in a bitter guerrilla war against the extremist Dar al-​Islam (House of Islam; also Darul Islam) rebels, who fought for a shari‘a state.102 Even in Sub-​Saharan Africa, Salafi groups emerged, increasingly challenging the post-​colonial order.103 Although all Islamic groups paid lip service to the idea of the umma, in practice they generally adapted to the framework of the post-​colonial nation state. The Jama‘at-​ i Islami organizations across South Asia had only few connections with one another, as did the Muslim Brotherhood branches from West Africa to the Middle East. Most Islamic movements were territorialized and, to some extent, nationalized. Still, after independence, some Islamic groups toyed with Islamic internationalism. At the forefront was the Muslim Brotherhood, with al-​Banna’s charismatic son-​in-​law, Sa‘id Ramadan, setting up a global network of Salafi activists, centred in Geneva. Another attempt was

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    569 made by Saudi Arabia with the creation of the Muslim World League in 1962 and the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1969. The founding meeting of the Muslim World League in Mecca brought together the international Salafi jet-​set, from Sa‘id Ramadan to Abu al-​A‘la Mawdudi.104 Riyadh’s policies to forge this global Islamic alliance aimed to counter the perceived threat of Arab nationalism, socialism, and secularism. As the Cold War spread across the Islamic world, Washington and its European allies began to sponsor these efforts, perceiving Islamic political groups as bulwarks against non-​aligning secularist regimes, and the Muslim countries from the Maghrib to Southeast Asia as a geopolitical belt against the Soviet Union.105 Under pressure from the pious parts of their populations, from the late 1960s the ruling elites of many post-​colonial regimes drew more heavily on Islam to strengthen their authority. This was most apparent in states that had, from the outset, embraced Islam to mobilize support, such as Pakistan, where in the early 1970s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto turned more and more to Islam to appease his Islamic opponents, a trend that intensified under Muhammad Zia ul-​Haq, who ruthlessly Islamized the country.106 But even post-​ colonial regimes that had long resisted the demands of their Islamic opposition turned to religion. The most prominent example was Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood himself, who in the 1970s took the title ‘Believer President’ (al-​ra’is al-​mu’min), employed religious rhetoric and symbols, proudly carrying his prayer bump (zabiba), built new mosques, and legalized the Muslim Brotherhood.107 By the early 1970s, many other former Nasserists had followed, among them Sudan’s Ja‘far Nimayri, who increasingly sided with the country’s Islamic movements, including the neo-​Mahdiyyah, Algeria’s Houari Boumediene, who showed greater interest in Islam than Ben Bella, and Libya’s Mu‘ammar Qadhdhafi, who periodically fashioned himself as a defender of Islam.108 Somalia’s Siad Barre, too, saw his regime as distinctly Muslim and commemorated the jihad of ‘mad mullah’ Abdullah Hasan, building a grand statue of him in Mogadishu.109 Even Ba‘thist autocrat Saddam Hussein would eventually begin portraying himself as a devout Muslim, claiming to be a descendant of the Prophet, inscribing the words ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the Iraqi flag, and bizarrely putting on display in Baghdad’s newly built Umm al-​Ma’arik Mosque a 605-​page Qur’an allegedly written with his own blood.110 Perhaps not surprisingly, these transformations appeared to many as insincere, and could not appease the Islamic opposition determined to replace their regimes with an Islamic state. As it became increasingly obvious that the post-​colonial rulers were unable to solve their countries’ social and political problems, old slogans of Westernization, development, and modernization lost their appeal and Islamic opposition movements, with their visions of social justice and theocratic statehood, grew stronger.111 Many took inspiration from Khomeini’s victory in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–​1979. In 1979, the Afghan mujahidin began their jihad against the socialist regime in Kabul and its Soviet protectors. The same year, Wahhabi militants seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca, demanding that the house of Saud abdicate. In 1981, Islamists assassinated Sadat at a parade in Cairo. Across the Muslim world, the old ruling elites were challenged by a new wave of Islamic opposition groups, among them Sudan’s National Islamic Front

570   David Motadel (1976), Nigeria’s Izala (Removal) Society (1978), Indonesia’s new Dar al-​Islam offshoots (1970s), Tunisia’s Islamic Tendency Movement (1981), Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (1989), and Lebanon’s Shi‘a Amal (Hope) Movement (1974) and its rival and eventual successor Hizb Allah (Party of Allah; also Hezbollah) (1985). The rise of these movements went along with internal turmoil and civil war, from the Syrian Hama Uprising (1982) to the Algerian Civil War (1991–​2002). In many ways, this wave of Islamic unrest marked the beginning of the end of the traditional post-​colonial state in the Muslim world. To see it as an era of Islamic resurgence would, however, be too simplistic. The victories of Islamic movements since the 1970s are only an episode in the long history of their struggle against the colonial and post-​colonial order. The 1970s saw no revival of political Islam; what they did see, though, was a revival in Western scholarly interest in political Islam.

Conclusion The colonial age saw the rise of anti-​imperial Islamic resistance movements that challenged the European empires from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Their nature varied significantly, from Mahdism to Sufism to revivalist Islam. Their means of resistance ranged from guerrilla insurgency to open revolt. Although shaking the imperial order significantly, these movements overall failed to prevail over the colonial powers. In the years of decolonization, in the mid-​twentieth century, these movements—​particularly revivalist groups—​continued to play an important political role, although they were now increasingly side-​lined by more secular, nationalist groups led by Western-​educated elites. These elites took over power in most of the independent post-​colonial states, while Islamic movements, most importantly revivalist groups with their visions of a theocratic polity, again went into opposition. Eventually, as more and more post-​colonial regimes failed to establish social peace and stable states, Islamic groups gained a new momentum, challenging the post-​colonial order. Despite all breaks and disruptions, there was some continuity in the history of Islamic resistance movements from the colonial to the post-​colonial era. Both the colonial and post-​colonial state had a rocky relationship with Islamic militants. In fact, the struggle of Islamic groups for political power transcended the caesura of decolonization. And yet, the nature of the Islamic resistance changed considerably over the years. Whereas a wide range of Islamic movements, from Mahdists to Sufis to reformists, fought the ruling regimes in the colonial era, it was reformist and Salafi groups, organized in modern organizations and associations, that emerged globally as the most potent Islamic challenge to the ruling regimes in the era of decolonization and the post-​colonial period. Ultimately, this chapter has questioned the master narrative of a secular decolonization. First it has shown that many of the nationalist groups which took over power in the post-​colonial state were often less secular than is commonly assumed, and usually quite

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    571 pragmatic in their policies towards Islam. Second, and more importantly, it has suggested that Islamic movements, though at times overshadowed by other anti-​colonial groups, must be taken seriously in the history of European decolonization. This is crucial not only for our understanding of the history of the end of the European empires in the Muslim world, but also for that of the history of political Islamic movements in the modern age.

Notes 1. The author wishes to thank Emile Chabal, Houchang E. Chehabi, Bastian Herbst, Henri Lauzière, Adam Mestyan, and Harith Bin Ramli for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2. A. G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonisation”, Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008): 211–​247, questions the significance of the Second World War as a caesura in the story of the end of empire. 3. S. V. R. Nasr, “European Colonialism and the Emergence of Modern Muslim States”, in John L. Esposito, ed., The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 549–​ 599, provides a general overview. 4. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Aziz Al-​ Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London:  Verso, 1993); and Dale Eikelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Oxford:  Princeton University Press, 1996), provide discussions about the diversity within Islam, both within Muslim majority societies and across the world. The concept of the “Islamic world” is discussed by Cemil Aydin, “Globalizing the Intellectual History of the Idea of the ‘Muslim World’ ”, in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2013), 159–​186. 5. William R. Roff, ed., Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse (London: Croom Helm, 1987), emphasizes the importance of specific social and political contexts in shaping Islamic movements and discourses across the world. 6. Edmund Burke III, “Islam and Social Movements: Methodological Reflections”, in idem and Ira M. Lapidus, eds., Islam, Politics, and Social Movements (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 17–​35. 7. Kemal H. Karpat, “The Hijra from Russia and the Balkans: The Process of Self-​Definition in the late Ottoman State”, in Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travelers:  Pilgrimage, Migration and Religious Imagination (London:  Routledge, 1990), 131–​152. 8. Overviews of Islamic anti-​colonial movements are given by Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 39–​104; and Nikki R. Keddie, “The Revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993:  Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no.  3 (1994): 463–​487, especially 481–​485. Part IV of Sohail H. Hashmi, ed., Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads:  Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Encounters and Exchanges (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); and Part II of David Motadel, ed., Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) also provide comparative accounts of anti-​colonial jihad movements.

572   David Motadel 9. John Obert Voll, “Foundations of Renewal and Reform:  Islamic Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, in John L. Esposito, ed., Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1999), 509–​547, for instance, considers them part of the same wave of Islamic reformism that spread across the globe since the eighteenth century. 10. David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and more generally, Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-​World Peoples (London: Harper & Row, 1973); and Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) provide accounts of messianic movements. 11. P. M. Holt, Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–​98: A Study of its Origins, Development and Overthrow (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1958) remains the most comprehensive study of the movement; a concise overview is given by John Obert Voll, “The Sudanese Mahdi: Frontier Fundamentalist”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 10, no. 2 (1979): 145–​166. 12. Winston S. Churchill, The River War:  An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), vol. ii, 248–​250. 13. R. A. Adeleye, “Mahdist Triumph and British Revenge in Northern Nigeria:  Satiru 1906”, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 6 (1972): 193–​214; Thea Büttner, “Social Aims and Earlier Anti-​Colonial Struggles: The Satiru Rising of 1906”, in Thea Büttner and Gerhard Brehme, eds., African Studies (Berlin: Akademie, 1973), 1–​18; C. N. Ubah, “British Measures against Mahdism in Dumbulwa in Northern Nigeria, 1923:  A Case of Colonial Overreaction”, Islamic Culture, 50, no. 3 (1976): 169–​183; Asma’u G. Saeed, “The British Policy towards the Mahdiyya in Northern Nigeria: A Study of the Arrest, Detention and Deportation of Shaykh Sa’id b. Hayat, 1923–​1959”, Kano Studies, 2, no. 3 (1982–​1985): 95–​119; Paul E. Lovejoy and J. S. Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonial Rule in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1905–​6”, Journal of African History, 31, no.  2 (1990):  217–​244; Muhammad S. Umar, “Muslims’ Eschatological Discourses on Colonialism in Northern Nigeria”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 67, no. 1 (1999): 59–​84; and John Fisher, “British Responses to Mahdist and other Unrest in North and West Africa, 1919–​1930”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 52, no. 3 (2006): 347–​361. 14. Thea Büttner, “Die Mahdi-​ Erhebungen 1907 in Nordkamerun im Vergleich mit antikolonialen islamischen Bewegungen in anderen Regionen West-​und Zentralafrikas”, in Peter Heine and Ulrich van der Heyden, eds., Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995), 147–​159. 15. Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–​1855 (Leiden: Kitlv Press, 2007). 16. Jamil M. Abun-​Nasr, Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Religious Life (London: Columbia University Press, 2007), 200–​235, especially 202–​214; and Nile Green, Sufism:  A Global History (Oxford:  Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 187–​238, especially 191–​214, provide overviews of the history of Sufism. Bruce B. Lawrence, “Sufism and neo-​ Sufism”, in Robert W. Hefner, ed., The New Cambridge History of Islam, vi: Muslims and Modernity: Culture and Society since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 355–​384, offers a concise account. 17. Raphael Danziger, Abd el Qadir and the Algerians: Resistance to the French and Internal Consolidation (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977).

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    573 18. Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2009); and, more generally, Fanny Colonna, “Cultural Resistance and Religious Legitimacy in Colonial Algeria”, Economy and Society 3, no. 3 (1974): 233–​252. 19. Jean-​Louis Triaud, La Légende noire de la Sanûsiyya: Une confrérie musulmane saharienne sous le regard français (1840–​1930), 2 vols. (Paris: Perseé, 1995), especially vol. ii; idem, Tchad 1900–​1902: Une guerre franco-​libyenne oubliée? Une confrérie musulmane, la Sanusiyya, face à la France (Paris: Perseé, 1987); and Russell McGuirk The Sanusi’s Little War: The Amazing Story of a Forgotten Conflict in the Western Desert, 1915–​1917 (London: Arabian, 2007). 20. Romain Rainero, “La Capture:  L’exécution d’Omar El-​Muktar et la fin de la guérilla libyenne”, Cahirs de Tunisie 28, no. 111–​112 (1980): 59–​74. 21. David Robinson, Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 22. Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–​1913 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007). 23. Abdi Sheik-​Abdi, Divine Madness: Mohammed Abdulle Hassan (1856–​1920) (London: Zed, 1993); and, for a comprehensive overview, Robert L. Hess, “The ‘Mad Mullah’ and Northern Somalia”, Journal of African History 5, no. 3 (1964): 415–​433. 24. B. G. Martin, “Muslim Politics and Resistance to Colonial Rule:  Shaykh Uways B. Muhammed Al-​Barawi and the Qadiriya Brotherhood in East Africa”, Journal of African History 10, no.  3 (1969):  471–​486; and Michael Pesek, “Islam und Politik in Deutsch-​ Ostafrika”, in Albert Wirz, Andreas Eckert and Katrin Bromber, eds., Alles unter Kontrol le: Disziplinierungsverfahren im Kolonialen Tanzania (1850–​1960) (Hamburg: LIT, 2003), 99–​140. 25. Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London:  Routledge, 1994) is a comprehensive overview. Anna Zelkina, In Quest of God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (London: NYU Press, 2000) emphasizes the role of Sufi resistance, while Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan:  Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum ğihād-​Staat (Wiesbaden:  Reichert, 2005); and Clemens P. Sidorko, Dschihad im Kaukasus:  Antikolonialer Widerstand der Dagestaner und Tschetschenen gegen das Zarenreich (18. Jahrhundert bis 1859) (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2007), emphasize reformist influences on the resistance movement. 26. Michael Kemper, “The Changing Images of Jihad Leaders:  Shamil and Abd al-​Qadir in Daghestani and Algerian Historical Writing”, Nova Religio:  Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11, no.  2 (2007):  28–​ 58, emphasizes the dominance of reformist Islam in movements that have been commonly described as Sufi-​led. Fazlur Rahman, Islam (New  York:  Anchor, 1968), 239–​240; R. S. O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke, “Neo-​Sufism Reconsidered”, Der Islam 70, no. 1 (1993): 52–​87; and John O. Voll, “Neo-​ Sufism: Reconsidered Again”, Canadian Journal of African Studies 42, no. 2/​3 (2008): 314–​ 330, give insights into the neo-​Sufism debate. 27. Ahmad S. Dallal, “The Origins and Early Development of Islamic Reform”, 107–​147; and John O. Voll, “Reform and Modernism in the Middle Twentieth Century”, 148–​172, both in Robert Hefner, ed., The New Cambridge History of Islam, vi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), provide overviews of Islamic reformist movements, both revivalist and modernist. Ira M. Lapidus, “Islamic Revival and Modernity:  The Contemporary Movements and the Historical Paradigms”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of

574   David Motadel the Orient 40, no. 4 (1997): 444–​460, examines Islamic reform movements as a reaction to and expression of modernity. The chapters in Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London: Zed, 1994), give insights into the ideas and activism of some major Islamic reformist figures. 28. Thomas Hegghammer, “Jihadi-​ Salafis or Revolutionaries? On Religion and Politics in the Study of Militant Islamism”, in Roel Meijer, ed., Global Salafism:  Islam’s New Religious Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 244–​266, especially 248–​ 257; and Henri Lauzière, “The Construction of Salafiyya:  Reconsidering Salafism from the Perspective of Conceptual History”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 369–​389, discuss the nature and definition of twentieth-​century Salafism. 29. David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1978); C. W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (New Delhi:  Vikas, 1978); Ziya-​ ul-​ Hasan Faruqi, The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (Bombay:  Asia Publishing House, 1963); and Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–​1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 30. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 31. Ali Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940: Essai d’histoire religieuse et sociale (Paris: Perseé, 1967); and, more comprehensively, Allan Christelow, “Ritual, Culture and Politics of Islamic Reformism in Algeria”, Middle East Studies 23, no.  3 (1987): 255–​273. 32. Taufik Adbullah, Schools and Politics:  The Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra 1927–​1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). 33. Qeyamuddin Ahmad, The Wahabi Movement in India (Calcutta:  Mukhopadhyay, 1966); J. G. Elliott, The Frontier 1839–​1947: The Story of the North-​West Frontier of India (London: Cassell & Co, 1968); Alan Warren, Waziristan, the Faqir of Ipi, and the Indian Army: The North West Frontier Revolt of 1936–​37 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Hugh Beattie, Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Wazirisan (London: Routledge, 2001); Christian Tripodi, Edge of Empire: the British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-​West Frontier 1877–​1947 (London:  Routledge, 2011); and, more generally, Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 34. Michael Francis Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (London: Routledge, 2003). 35. Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-​Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and, on the wider context, Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-​Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-​Islamic and Pan-​Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–​1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); and Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam:  Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), provide accounts of the Ottoman sponsorship of pan-​Islamism. 36. Homa Pakdaman, Djemal-​ed-​Din Assad Abadi dit Afghani (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1966); Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamāl ad-​Dīn ‘al-​Afghānī’ (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 1–​ 97; idem, Sayyid Jamāl ad-​Dīn ‘al-​Afghānī’: A Political Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972); Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    575 Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966); and Mark Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009). 37. Alexander Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians! The Socio-​Political Crisis in Egypt 1878–​1882 (London: Ithaca Press, 1981), 258–​305. 38. Nikki Keddie, Religion and Rebellion in Iran:  The Tobacco Protest of 1891–​ 1892 (London: Psychology Press, 1966), passim. 39. Edmund Burke, “Pan-​Islam and Moroccan resistance to French colonial penetration, 1900–​1912”, Journal of African History 13, no. 1 (1972): 97–​118. 40. Albert Christiaan Niemeijer, The Khilafat Movement in India, 1919–​1924 (The Hague: Brill, 1972); Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilisation in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Azmi Özcan, Pan-​Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain (1877–​1924) (Leiden:  Brill, 1997), 184–​204; and M. Naeem Qureshi, Pan-​Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–​1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 41. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928–​1942 (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1998); and, on al-​Banna, Gudrun Krämer, Hasan al-​Banna (New York: Oneworld Publications, 2010). 42. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution:  The Jama‘at-​i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1994); Idem, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 43. Joseph Chinyong Liow, Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20–​23. 44. Deliar Noer, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia 1900–​1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); and, more specifically, James L. Peacock, Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/​Cummings, 1979); and Robin Bush, Nahdlatul Ulama and the Struggle for Power within Islam and Politics in Indonesia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009). 45. Martin S. Kramer, Islam Assembled:  The Advent of the Muslim Congresses (New  York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 46. Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), esp. 73–​90. 47. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 48. Marius Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt: The Wafd and its Rivals, 1919–​38 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Youssef Mnasria, Le parti libéral constitutionnaliste tunisien, 1919–​1934 (Beirut: Le Maghreb musulman, 1988); Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire du nationalism algérien, 2 vols. (Paris: Mediterra, 2003), vol. i (1919–​1951); Daniel Zisenwine, The Emergence of Nationalist Politics in Morocco: The Rise of the Independence Party and the Struggle against Colonialism after World War II (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010); Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate:  The Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–​1945 (London: Princeton University Press, 1987); M. Rafique Afzal, A History of the All-​India Muslim League 1906–​1947 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013); George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1952); and A. J. Stockwell, “The Formation and First Years of the United Malays National Organization (U.M.N.O.), 1946–​1948”, Modern Asian Studies 11, no. 4 (1977), 481–​513, provide insights into all of these nationalist movements.

576   David Motadel 49. James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 297–​367; and, with a focus on the British Empire, Wm. Roger Louis, British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–​51: Arab Nationalism, the United States and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 50. Adrian Pelt, Libyan Independence and the United Nations:  A Case Study of Planned Decolonization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 51. Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement:  Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 52. M. W. Daly, Imperial Sudan: The Anglo-​Egyptian Condominium 1934–​1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 53. Charles-​André Julien, L’Afrique du Nord en marche:  Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc, 1880–​1952 (Paris: Omnibus, 1972). 54. Martin Thomas, “Colonial Violence in Algeria and the Distorted Logic of State Retribution: The Sétif uprising of 1945”, Journal of Military History 75, no. 1 (2011): 125–​157. 55. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 56. Anthony Reid, The Indonesian National Revolution 1945–​1950 (Hawthorn: Praeger, 1974). 57. Robert Jackson, The Malayan Emergency: The Commonwealth’s War, 1948–​1966 (New York: Routledge, 1991). 58. John H. Hanson, “Africa south of the Sahara from the First World War”, in Francis Robinson, ed., The New Cambridge History of Islam, v: The Islamic World in the Age of Western Dominance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 623–​658, 643–​651; see also the chapters in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, eds., The History of Islam in Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). 59. Simon C. Smith, Britain’s Revival and Fall in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1950–​7 1 (London: Routledge, 2004). 60. Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement; Nasser’s quotation can be found in Gamal Abdel-​ Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1955), 20. 61. Norma Salem, Habib Bourguiba, Islam, and the Creation of Tunisia (London:  Croom Helm, 1984), especially, for some quotations, 100–​101 and 155; and, more concisely, Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia since Independence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), 33–​34. 62. Quoted in Moore, Tunisia since Independence, 33. 63. Mohamed El Mansour, “Salafis and Modernists in the Moroccan Nationalist Movement”, in John Ruedy, ed., Islamism and Secularism in North Africa (Washington, DC: St Martin’s Press. 1994), 53–​7 1. 64. Martin Evans, Algeria:  France’s Undeclared War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 116. 65. Frantz Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution (Paris: Maspero, 1972) 16–​47, the quote is on 24; which was originally published as L’an cinq de la révolution algérienne (Paris, 1959); and, for the English translation, Idem, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 35–​67, the quote is on 42. 66. David C. Gordon, The Passing of French Algeria (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 24–​25 and 111. 67. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (London: Harper Collins, 1964), 95. 68. Quoted in Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 36.

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    577 69. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1984), passim and, for the quotation, 261; and, more generally, Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity:  The Search for Saladin (London:  Routledge, 1997); Husain Haqqani, Pakistan:  Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC:  Brookings Institute Press, 2005), 1–​13; and Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015). 70. B. J. Boland, The Struggle for Islam in Modern Indonesia (The Hague: Springer, 1971), 21–​ 23; and J. D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography (London: Praeger, 1972), especially, on his links to the Muhammadiyah, 141–​142 and, on his synthesis of Islam, Marxism and nationalism,  80–​83. 71. Hanson, “Africa south of the Sahara”, in Robinson, ed., The New Cambridge History, 643–​ 651; see also the chapters in Levtzion and Pouwels. 72. Gabriel Warburg, Islam, Secterianism, and Politics in Sudan since the Mahdiyya (London: Hurst & Madison, 2003), 57–​141; and, on ‘Abd al-​Rahman al-​Mahdi and the neo-​ Mahdists, Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim, Sayyid ‘Abd Al-​Raḥmān Al-​Mahdī: A Study of Neo-​ Mahdīsm in the Sudan, 1899–​1956 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 73. Michael T. Thornhill, Road to Suez: The Battle of the Canal Zone (Stroud: The History Press, 2006), passim. 74. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 80–​104. 75. James McDougall, “S’écrire un destin:  l’Association des ‘ulama dans la révolution algérienne”, Bulletin de l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent 83 (2004): 38–​52. 76. Nasr, Vanguard, 103–​146; and Idem, Mawdudi,  41–​42. 77. Boland, The Struggle for Islam,  40–​41. 78. N. J. Funston, “The Origins of Parti Islam Se Malaysia”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 7, no. 1 (1976): 58–​73; and, more generally, Farish A. Noor, The Malaysian Islamic Party 1951–​2013: Islamism in a Mottled Nation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014). 79. Nasr, “European Colonialism”. 80. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–​1939 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1962), 350. 81. Haqqani, Pakistan, 1–​ 129; and, more generally, Nasim A. Jawed, Islam’s Political Culture:  Religion and Politics in Predivided Pakistan (Austin, TX:  University of Texas Press, 1999). 82. Boland, The Struggle for Islam, 45–​156, the quotation is on 127. 83. Salem, Habib Bourguiba, especially 132–​166; and, for a more concise account, Moore, Tunisia since Independence, especially 48–​60. 84. Moore, Tunisia since Independence, 48. 85. Quoted in ibid. 86. Gordon, The Passing of French Algeria, 112. 87. Ibid, 110–​111 and 147–​149. 88. Ibid, 115–​117 and 203–​204, discusses the ideas of the National Liberation Front ideologue Amar Ouzegane, who promoted a “symbiosis” of “Islam and Marxist-​Leninism” (Ibid, 115); and Raymond Vallin, “Muslim Socialism in Algeria”, in I. William Zartman (ed.), Man, State, and Society in the Contemporary Maghrib (London: Praeger, 1973), 50–​64, discusses the ideas of Tawfiq al-​Madani, another National Liberation Front leader and prominent member of the Association of the Reformist ‘Ulama, who explained that “Islam is a socialist religion, it is a religion of equity” (ibid, 51), and others.

578   David Motadel 89. Malika Zeghal, “Religion and Politics in Egypt:  The Ulema of Al-​Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952–​94)”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999): 371–​399. 90. James B. Mayfield, Rural Politics in Nasser’s Egypt:  A Quest for Legitimacy (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1971), 54. 91. Keith Kyle, Suez (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 418; and, for the quotation, Anthony Nutting, Nasser (London: Constable & Robinson, 1972), 175. 92. Quoted in Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, 91. 93. Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup:  1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-​Iranian Relations (New  York:  New Press, 2013), passim; and, on Kashani in particular, Yann Richard, “Ayatollah Kashani: Precursor of the Islamic Republic?”, in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi‘ism from Quietism to Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 101–​124. 94. Judith Nagata, The Reflowering of Malaysian Islam: Modern Religious Radicals and their Roots (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), provides a case study of this phenomenon in the context of Southeast Asia. 95. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 105–​162. 96. Quoted in Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement, 105. 97. Raphaël Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama:  The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013). 98. Basim al-​‘Azami, “The Muslim Brotherhood:  Genesis and Development”, in Faleh Jabar, ed., Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues: State, Religion and Social Movements in Iraq (London:  Saqi, 2002), 162–​176; and, on the Sh‘ia, Florian Bernhardt, Hizb ad-​Da‘wa al-​Islamiya:  Selbstverständnis, Strategien und Ziele einer irakisch-​islamistischen Partei zwischen Kontinuität und Wandel (1957–​2003) (Würzburg:  Ergon, 2012); and also the more general studies, Joyce N. Wiley, The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shi‘as (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), esp. 31–​44 and 53–​7 1; and Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi‘is of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 132–​138. 99. Nasr, Vanguard, 116–​223; and Idem, Mawdudi,  41–​46. 100. Noor, The Malaysian Islamic Party. 101. B. J.  Boland, The Struggle for Islam, 45–​156; and, more specifically, Leslie H. Palmier, “Modern Islam in Indonesia: The Muhammadiyah after Independence”, Pacific Affairs 27, no. 3 (1954): 255–​263; J. L. Peacock, Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/​Cummings, 1979); and Bush, Nahdlatul Ulama. 102. C. van Dijk, Rebellion under the Banner of Islam:  The Darul Islam in Indonesia (The Hague: Brill, 1981). 103. Lansiné Kaba, “Islam in West Africa: Radicalism and the New Ethic of Disagreement, 1960–​1990”, in Levtzion and Pouwels, eds., The History of Islam in Africa, 189–​208; and Abdin Chande, “Radicalism and Reform in East Africa”, in Ibid, 349–​369. 104. Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert:  Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der islamischen Weltliga (Leiden: Brill, 1990). 105. Matthew F. Jacobs, “The Perils and Promises of Islam:  The United States and the Muslim Middle East in the Early Cold War”, Diplomatic History 30, no. 4 (2006): 705–​ 739; and, similarly, Matthew F. Jacobs, Imagining the Middle East:  The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–​1967 (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 55–​94; and, on the late Cold War, Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History

Islamic Revolutionaries and the End of Empire    579 of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (London: Penguin, 2004). 106. Haqqani, Pakistan, 131–​ 197; and, more generally, Surendra Nath Kaushik, Politics of Islamization in Pakistan:  A Study of Zia Regime (New Delhi:  South Asian Publishers, 1993). 107. Abdullah Al-​Arian, Answering the Call:  Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially 86–​88. 108. George Joffé, “Qadhafi’s Islam in Local Historical Perspective”, in Dirk Vandewalle, ed., Qadhafi’s Libya, 1969–​1994 (London: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 139–​154; Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830–​2000: A Short History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 147–​148 and 171–​172; and Warburg, Politics in Sudan, 142–​201. 109. I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali:  Nation and State in the Horn of Africa (Oxford:  James Currey, 2002), 219–​223; and, on the statue, James Fergusson, The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia (London: Black Swan, 2013), 228. 110. Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party:  Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 259–​268. 111. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London: Harvard University Press, 2002), provides a comprehensive overview of Islamic political movements since the 1970s. Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Islamic Resurgence and its Aftermath”, in Hefner, The New Cambridge History of Islam, vi, 173–​197, offers a concise account.

Chapter 30

Refugees a nd t h e End of E mpi re Panikos Panayi

Introduction While nationalist leaders may always celebrate the expulsion of the external ruler as the victory of indigenous peoples, in reality, such victories often signal the arrival of a new type of nationalism, which often proves more ethnically exclusive than the imperial ideologies that preceded it. These imperial beliefs may have operated on the basis of racial hierarchies, with a ruling elite emerging from a ‘mother country’ hundreds or thousands of miles away, but the system had to have an element of de facto multiculturalism in order to survive. The most visible consequence of the replacement of imperial multi-​ethnicity by a more exclusivist nationalism is to be found in the creation of the twentieth-​century concept of the refugee. We can identify three basic causes of refugee creation over the last century: the rise of intolerant regimes, war, and state collapse. The first of these does not, in itself, tend to lead to mass population expulsion, as the example of the immediate aftermath of the Nazi seizure of power would indicate, which created a short-​term refugee crisis.1 As scholars of the Second World War and the Nazi regime have demonstrated, however, the expansion into Eastern Europe and the collapse of the short-​lived regimes established by the Germans caused mass population displacement affecting not only Jews, but also other groups that the Nazis decided to ‘relocate’ as part of their plan to create a racially ordered Europe. At the end of the War, those affected by the collapse of this short-​lived Empire, above all the tens of millions of Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years, also found themselves facing expulsion.2 Many of the major empires which collapsed during the twentieth century produced successor states which developed new forms of exclusivist nationalist ideologies which identified, and often expelled, sectors of their populations which did not possess the right ethnic ‘credentials’. This process first manifested itself with the end of the Ottoman

Refugees and the End of Empire    581 Empire, where successor states in the Balkans ‘exchanged’ populations and the newly nationalist rump Turkey eliminated or expelled its Armenian and Greek populations. These processes continued after 1945 because the collapse of both the British and French colonial Empires were accompanied by population ‘exchanges’ and expulsions, especially in the case of India/​Pakistan. Finally, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire triggered a new mass refugee crisis. This chapter examines the relationship between imperial collapse, the emergence of successor nationalism, and the exclusion of ethnic groups with the wrong ‘credentials’.

Empire and Ethnicity The empires that controlled large swathes of the world from the early modern period contained a wide variety of ethnicities located throughout their territories. This ethnic mixing reflected the ways in which imperial populations had evolved historically before the age of the nation state, whether in Eastern Europe or the overseas territories taken over by France, Britain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. The history of the Muslim and German populations of Europe illustrate this phenomenon. Those who converted to Islam in the Balkans or who moved out of the German heartlands to Eastern Europe did so in an age where living in close proximity to other ethnic groups represented the norm. Their descendants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would, however, confront the dangers arising from the abandonment of such normative standards of ethnic heterogeneity. Cyprus, for example, has a history of ethnic plurality partly because it became victim to numerous invasions.3 The most important turning point in this process consisted of the Ottoman conquest completed in 1571, which resulted in the evolution of a significant Turkish population because of settlement and conversion.4 In the age before nationalism the Greek and Turkish communities managed to co-​exist, as evidenced by the numerous mixed Turkish and Greek villages on the island.5 Similar mixed population structures existed in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, above all the Balkans.6 In the same way, German settlements had emerged in Eastern Europe as a result of migration before the emergence of the nation state. From the twelfth century, people from German-​speaking Europe had actually moved into the territories, later to become Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. German elements began to enter Hungary from the first millennium with missionaries and economic migrants later followed by permanent settlers. German settlement increased further as a result of the of the Habsburg Empire’s expansion through Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century.7 These two examples illustrate one of the long-​term causes of ethnic cleansing and consequent refugee creation after the end of empires: the prior acceptance of ethnic diversity within imperial systems of government. Settlement patterns had emerged in an organic and haphazard way. Ethnic diversity survived because empires had to accept it as a result of the vast territories they controlled and the range of populations living

582   Panikos Panayi within their domains. However, the acceptance of difference was always conditional on the primacy of the ruling ethnic elite remaining unchallenged. These primary groups consisted of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire,8 white Britons in the British Empire,9 and Communist Party apparatchiks in the USSR.10 In the first and third of these cases, people with the wrong ethnic credentials could move within the society of the ruling ethnic elites, but only if they accepted the dominant ideology. Unlike the short-​lived Nazi Empire, which imposed a racial hierarchy in which suppression, murder, and plunder became central features,11 the long-​standing imperial regimes could not operate in such a way. Certainly, the Ottoman, British, and Soviet forms of control used violence throughout their histories,12 but prima facie reliance on coercion was neither feasible nor sustainable. Consequently, these long-​term empires recognized, in their different ways, the existence of ethnic, national, and religious groups. This situation existed during the early modern period in the Ottoman Empire,13 in the nineteenth-​century British Empire,14 and during the height of the Soviet Union.15 Implicit in such systems of governance, however, was the confinement of subject populations to lesser political status, but this subordinate position was likely to be challenged once ideas of ethnic nationalism emerged more strongly.

The Rise of Nationalism The rise of nationalism changed the tactical peace that existed between ethnic groups within Europe, whether modern or pre-​modern in origin. As Anthony Smith in particular demonstrated, the new nation-​based ideologies that emerged during the nineteenth century usually had pre-​modern antecedents.16 Greeks, for example, could trace their identity back to antiquity, although medieval and early-​modern Greek ethnicity essentially became rooted in Greek Orthodox Christianity, a concept perpetuated by the Ottoman millet system which tolerated religious difference. This system may have kept the peace for centuries but, following the birth of nationalism in the American and French revolutions, this ideology spread across the globe. From the point of view of ethnic unmixing in areas with fairly ethnically unified populations, particularly in western Europe, the rise of this ideology proved relatively unproblematic.17 However, in the diversely populated areas controlled by the Ottomans, where large mixed populations lived in close proximity, it would prove catastrophic for millions of people. At the same time as these minority nationalisms emerged in this entity, Ottoman imperialism would evolve into Turkish nationalism; in ideological terms, the states which emerged at the end of the First World War in Eastern Europe and the Balkans had all prepared themselves for acts of ethnic purification. While the ideology of nationalism in central and western Europe did not seem quite so bent on excluding minorities in the peace treaties which followed the First World War, the rise of Nazism, with its extreme concepts of ethnic purity, would change this. On the one hand, the Nazi expansion into Poland, the Soviet Union, and the rest of

Refugees and the End of Empire    583 central Europe gave a boost to a centuries-​long anti-​Semitism in these areas, which then led to the murder and ethnic cleansing of other minorities, especially in Poland and the Soviet Union. However, as in the case of the Ottoman Empire, where desires for ethnic purification fed off each other, the collapse of Nazi control resulted in the forced removal of the German minorities, which had resided in areas controlled by the Habsburgs for hundreds of years. As the extreme nationalist ideologies which surfaced in the Balkans in the era of the First World War moved westward, the same result occurred in central and Eastern Europe. In the meantime, nationalism had also spread to the colonial empires, which, like their older counterparts on European soil, had heterogeneous populations whose composition had evolved over centuries. In the case of India, for example, the rising Hindu-​ and Muslim-​based ideologies integral to partition in 1947 ignored the complex history of settlement patterns, which had emerged following the Moghul invasions from the twelfth century onwards. Regional, linguistic, caste, and religious boundaries often overlapped, and the lines between them blurred as they all competed with each other but also maintained a sense of equilibrium.18 Although this case established the pattern for subsequent ethnic unmixing in other parts of the world (in the sense that two rival, territorially based nationalist ideologies built upon European precedents, felt that they could eliminate people with the wrong ethnic credentials), the rise of nationalism in Algeria posed a new problem. Constitutionally, Algeria was fully integrated with France, although its population of Arabs, Berbers, Jews, and European settlers were sharply divided by ethnicity, religion, and differing civil status as citizens or ‘French Algerian Muslims’. The violence of the armed struggle here resulted in the flight of over half a million settlers and tens of thousands of Algerians, mainly colonial security force personnel and their families, following independence.19 In the colonial sphere in particular, violent nationalism sometimes surfaced suddenly. In Cyprus, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire until 1878 and by the British after that time, the independence struggle resulted in the clumsy power-​sharing compromise of 1960. However, the Turkish and Greek Cypriots would not work together primarily due to the mutual hatred engendered by Greek and Turkish nationalism that had emerged in the early twentieth century; this hatred also viewed ethnic cleansing as a natural solution to minority problems even before the First World War.20 Similarly, some African nationalisms only became bent on ethnic purification in the later 1960s, years after independence. Notable victims here included the South Asian populations, which had moved to Kenya, Tanzania, and, most notoriously, Uganda under the British Empire.21 The Soviet Union and its demise reveals a similar picture. Just as the Ottoman millet system had artificially frozen ethnic identities, so the USSR followed suit. However, just as the Ottomans had offered the concession of religious toleration as a way of appeasing the different ethnic groups which lived within its territories, so the Soviets allowed and even encouraged the development of national identity through the evolution of both political structures and cultural activity, although this did not mean the absence of persecution, especially against those perceived as enemies during the Second World War.22

584   Panikos Panayi Subsequently, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to the emergence of exclusivist nationalist ideologies which preached the type of ethnic cleansing practised throughout the world over the previous century. While some of these remained locally based conflicts with roots predating the Soviet Union, especially in the Caucasus,23 others resembled the type of revenge nationalism that emerged against the German populations of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World and which, in this case, focused upon the Russians in the Baltic states.24

The End of Empire The collapse of empire therefore led to refugee creation for several reasons. First, it meant the end of the ethnic compromises that had characterized imperial control. The emergent nation-​based political entities often established power using markers of ethnicity, ie, to order their populations using a system that excluded those identified as enemies or outsider groups. Nevertheless, the type of mass population expulsion that characterized imperial collapse was catalysed by the chaos that followed the end of empire in particular regions. In cases where refugee creation did not happen immediately, such as the expulsion of Ugandan Asians, the numbers involved and the extent of brutality remained more limited. It is important, therefore, to consider the importance of war, especially during the ‘age of catastrophe’ from the outbreak of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second.25 But two more elements are required here. First, the tit-​for-​tat nature of population expulsion demonstrated through ‘population exchange’ was first applied to the actions of Greeks and Turks in the early 1920s, but it was equally applicable to India and Pakistan in 1947. Both of these cases also point to a further fundamental factor which has facilitated mass refugee creation during the twentieth century: the tendency among diplomats and peacemakers to acquiesce to ethnic cleansing as a legitimate and legal part of the process of nation-​state building—​something epitomized by the mass displacements occasioned by the Lausanne Treaty, the Potsdam Treaty, and the Radcliffe Line. The human suffering caused by such pieces of paper played little role in the conscience of those who reached such decisions against the background of the countless deaths during the inter-​and post-​war decades. Population expulsion represented just one of the many trials and tribulations of war. The end of the Ottoman Empire provides an illustration of the types of extreme nationalisms which emerged with new states bent on ethnic purification, although Justin McCarthy has demonstrated that Muslims and Turks had faced persecution and deportation throughout the nineteenth century.26 But the era of the First World War changed the nature and scale of population expulsion. This was epitomized by the actions of the rump Turkish state, which, with the seizure of power of the revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in 1909, had abandoned Ottoman multi-​ethnicity for Turkish nationalism.27 While intolerance had risen before the outbreak of the First World War, the destabilization provoked by the conflict helped the new Turkish rulers

Refugees and the End of Empire    585 to carry out a genocide of Armenians in a situation in which the boundaries between the murder of soldiers and the murder of civilians became blurred. Nor were mass expulsions confined to the Balkans as the forced removal of populations also occurred inside the German Empire.28 Just as importantly, the ethnic cleansing and murder of Armenians took place in what Mark Levene has described as ‘rimlands’,29 which were areas remote from the main sites of military conflict in which humanitarian efforts could, in theory, save the victim minority.30 Turkish nationalist ethnic cleansing did not end with the Armenian genocide but would continue into the post-​First World War period following the Greco-​Turkish War of 1919–​1922. Once again illustrating how the stresses of war could be used to legitimize population expulsion, this conflict also provided a template for many subsequent acts of refugee creation for two related reasons. First, because of the tit-​for-​tat nature of the actions of the Greeks and Turks, a process which began in the Balkan Wars of 1912–​ 1913 when Greece expelled 69,000 Muslims from the territories which it had gained. The Turkish state settled them in the western areas of Asia Minor inhabited by Greeks, which increased resentment among both of the ethnic populations living in these settlements. In fact, both the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and the CUP had already started talking about ‘population exchange’ before 1914. The events of the First World War, including the crucial precedents set by the Armenian genocide and the subsequent Greco-​Turkish War, made this process a reality. Greeks and Turks had started fleeing before the signing of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923, especially after the burning of Smyrna in September 1922. But Lausanne formalized this process, with at least 1.5 million people fleeing in either direction.31 Lausanne represented a crucial turning point in the history of ethnic cleansing and consequent refugee creation. It acted as a template for the Potsdam Treaty and the Mountbatten Plan, both of which implemented similar actions.32 The Second World War resulted in analogous processes of state collapse; in this case, the Nazi Empire combined with the acceptance of a culture of killing, the evolution of a tit-​for-​tat policy (in which the long-​term German settlers became the final victims of the conflict as revenge for the actions of the Nazi invading forces), and the desire of local rulers and diplomats to redraw boundaries with little consideration for the millions of ruined lives which such actions would cause. If the First World War initiated the blurring of boundaries between soldiers and civilians as legitimate targets, the Second World War effaced this differentiation, particularly on the Eastern front. Genocide became part of everyday life in Eastern Europe as the Nazis reordered the populations they encountered along racial lines.33 At the same time as the Nazis tried to eliminate European Jewry,34 the killing of civilians from the air became a standard policy practised by all sides in defiance of international law.35 The expulsion of millions of Germans from newly liberated areas of Eastern Europe at the end of the war was also formalized under the Potsdam Treaty of August 1945.36 The removal of the Germans from Eastern Europe took place shortly before the other mass population expulsion of the mid-​1940s in the form of the ‘population exchange’ between India and Pakistan consequent upon independence and partition. The

586   Panikos Panayi background of war may have played less of a role here because India had not directly experienced active conflict on its soil in quite the same way as Europe had,37 although it had impacted upon nearby British Far Eastern territories. At the same time, one of the regions to experience the most violent population transfers—​the Punjab—​had become highly militarized under colonial rule.38 Clearly, in the case of India and Pakistan in 1947, the newly constituted central governments had agreed on the transfer, but its implementation resulted in reprisals and counter-​reprisals on the ground which led to numerous deaths.39 Decisions taken by politicians through the Mountbatten Plan and the establishment of the Radcliffe Line took little account of the human suffering that would follow.40 Set against this background, following the creation of the state of Israel the late 1940s also witnessed the emergence of one of the most long-​lasting refugee crises in which Israel carried out ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs.41 Ethnic cleansing also took place in the British imperial possession of Cyprus. This was the final chapter in the tit-​for-​tat expulsions in the Greco-​Turkish conflict of the twentieth century, which took place following Turkey’s military invasion of the island in 1974.42

Refugee Creation Clearly the political processes associated with the end of empires discussed here played a central role in refugee creation in the twentieth century, but so too did recognition by international bodies. Stateless persons first became accepted as such with the creation of the League of Nations Office for Refugees, which emerged partly from growing international concern for Armenians.43 At the end of the Second World War the newly established United Nations dealt with refugees initially through the International Refugees Organization, then via the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and finally through the High Commission for Refugees created in 1949.44 While the dying Ottoman Empire had exiled people before 1914, this issue really came to the fore in the era of the First World War, when newly emerging nation states forcibly removed people from their territories. Although the Ottoman Empire represented the heart of the refugee problem, exiles emerged in other parts of Europe, especially in the three collapsing landmass empires of Russia, Germany, and Austria-​Hungary. In Russia, over three million people faced displacement in the era of the Great War,45 while other accounts have pointed to the forcible removal of another three million as a result of the Bolshevik revolution. Many of these exiles made their way westwards, especially towards France and Germany.46 At the same time, the initial expansion and subsequent contraction of the Wilhelmine Empire during the First World War also created refugees, especially in Belgium47 and Russia.48 The collapse of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, however, resulted in relatively little population displacement.49 The unravelling of the Nazi Empire, as well as the redrawing of boundaries from 1943 meant ‘Europe choked with refugees’.50 A series of migratory flows spread across Europe in different directions, resulting in as many as twenty-​five million displaced people

Refugees and the End of Empire    587 between 1945 and 1947,51 with Germany as the focus. About thirteen million Germans may have fled westwards towards rump Germany between 1944 and 1947. This number included people who simply escaped the advancing Soviet Armies, but much of the migration occurred as a result of the redrawing of the Soviet border further westward. The Polish boundary also shifted further west in turn, leading to an ethnic cleansing of German parts of Poland. Those nation states invaded by, but now liberated from, the Nazis, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, also expelled their German populations. By 1950, out of a total population of 50.8 million people living in the newly created Federal Republic, 7.9 million consisted of refugees and expellees. East Germany counted 3.5 million expellees in 1966, while the figure in Austria totalled around half a million.52 At the same time as this westward movement occurred, millions of foreign labourers and prisoners of war working in the Nazi Reich during the War made their way home, the majority of them returning to their original homelands in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Some of the five million who eventually reached the USSR were transported there by force.53 Those who refused to return found themselves designated ‘displaced persons’, living in camps established for them, especially in the Allied occupation zones of West Germany.54 Jews liberated from concentration camps located in Poland also, paradoxically, made their way to Germany. Many sought refuge from a murderous resurgence of post-​war anti-​Semitism in Poland, their number rising to approximately 200,000 by 1947. Most would later proceed to Palestine/​Israel in defiance of British imperial efforts to block their entry.55 The end of the Second World War also generated mass expulsions outside Europe, either as an immediate result of imperial collapse or because of the legacies of empire. Within the former category, 726,000 refugees were created by ethnic cleansing following the creation of the Israeli state.56 Meanwhile, the partition of India may have resulted in the displacement of fifteen million people, with the Punjab facing the most dramatic demographic transformation. Other badly affected regions included New Delhi, which lost 300,000 Muslims, while large Muslim population flows also occurred out of the provinces of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the city of Bombay towards Pakistan. Large Hindu populations moved from Sindh, the North-​West Frontier Province, Punjab, and East Bengal. While 1947 may have resulted in the most visible and violent ‘population exchange’, this process would continue into the 1950s. For example, after a flashpoint in Bengal province in March 1950, 1.1 million people fled to East Pakistan.57 Following the orgy of expulsion in the aftermath of the Second World War, the number of refugees in the world remained relatively low for several decades, despite continuing imperial collapse, largely as a result of the Cold War freeze. However, they did not disappear, as indicated by the examples of Algeria following independence,58 the expulsion of Indians from Uganda,59 and the ethnic cleansing following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.60 Similarly, the number of refugee flows produced by decolonization and its aftermath also grew.61 Several of the most serious examples of population displacement were in sub-​Saharan Africa. James Milner has identified two types, each connected with the short-​and long-​term consequences of imperial collapse. The first

588   Panikos Panayi ‘included refugees from wars of national liberation in minority and colonial-​governed states’ such as those fleeing the Portuguese controlled Angola, Guinea-​Bissau, and Mozambique to neighbouring states between 1961 and 1975. The second evolved because of dormant conflicts, rekindled following independence as in the case of Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda. By the early 1970s, Africa housed about one million refugees, almost half of whom lived in Zaire having arrived from Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, Burundi, and Zambia.62 By the end of the decade a total of 349,000 refugees from Eritrea may have lived in Sudan, a situation which had developed over decades as a result of local conflicts caused by ethnic complexity, imperial instability, and post-​colonial collapse.63 A further increase in refugees occurred in the 1990s as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which released pent-​up ethnic tensions, and created new ones which resulted in migration in a variety of directions, especially from one part of the former Soviet Union to another. The crises that emerged here affected a series of groups. About twenty-​five million people considered ethnically Russian found themselves in former Republics outside Russia. By 1995, about two million of them, principally from Tajikistan, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, had fled to Russia.64 Movement within the boundaries of the former Soviet Union also occurred in the Caucasus.65 The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-​Karabakh may, by its seventh year in 1995, have displaced 1.6 million people. Secessionist conflicts in Georgia also led to refugee movements. The war for the independence of South Ossetia, in the centre of the country bordering Russia, which began in 1989, created 120,000 refugees who fled to Russia by 1995. Conflict in Abkhazia, in the north-​west of the country, caused 80,000 people to flee to Russia and to other former Soviet states by 1995.66

Refugees and the Emergence of Post-​Imperial  States Cleary, the collapse of empires acted as a key factor in refugee creation during the twentieth century. In some cases, above all in India and Pakistan, refugees became a central element in new post-​colonial states. In other instances, such as Greece, already established nation-​states would witness a massive refugee influx. Perhaps the most common pattern consists of the deportation after independence of populations regarded as having links with the former colonial power. Such instances include the expulsion of Germans and Russians from Eastern Europe and the deportation of European colons and Muslim harkis from Algeria. While large and established receiving states might have the capacity to absorb smaller refugee influxes, the scale of some of the movements described in this chapter often had a devastating short-​term impact, especially if the exiles moved towards countries emerging from war. For example, the 1.5 million Anatolian refugees who found

Refugees and the End of Empire    589 themselves in Greece in the early 1920s represented a quarter of the population and created a major economic and social crisis.67 In 1950, over 15% of the population of the Federal Republic of Germany consisted of refugees. These newcomers had moved to a state devastated by allied bombing, and facing chronic housing shortages and unemployment, which they consequently intensified. Similarly, the sheer scale of the refugees moving between India and Pakistan in the late 1940s had a draining effect on the new states, which had just emerged from a long and difficult nationalist struggle.68 The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus and subsequent short-​lived war meant that, following partition, 180,000 of the 574,000 people in the Greek part of the island consisted of refugees. The invasion, war, partition, and subsequent refugee crisis caused a significant fall in gross output and an unprecedented rise in unemployment.69 A longer-​term perspective, however, demonstrates the ability of both larger and smaller states to absorb the numbers involved from an economic, social and cultural perspective. For example, in the case of Greece, the refugees became a substantial proportion of Greek Macedonia’s population and also helped to transform Greece’s cities.70 In the German case, although the refugees who arrived from further east initially intensified competition for housing and employment, their labour powered the post-​War German economic miracle, after which the Federal Republic turned to migrants from southern Europe.71 Similarly, the Greek Cypriot economy would take off during the 1980s to reach a new level of prosperity as it diversified away from agriculture towards tourism, construction, and banking.72 But not all refugee movements have a ‘happy ending’, a situation epitomized by the experience of the Palestinians, who, unlike the groups just described, remain outsiders in the areas to which they moved because of the reluctance of the receiving states, especially Jordan and Lebanon, to recognize them as their own.73 This contrasts with all the examples cited here where the receiving states not only accepted the exiles as fellow citizens, but also invested major effort into their economic and social integration. The Federal Republic of Germany is an exceptional example. It established a dedicated Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims and, in 1948, the newcomers received a Bill of Rights. Most importantly, the Federal Constitution of 1949 recognized them as full citizens.74

The Individual and Collective Refugee Experience Individual and collective refugee experiences reveal a depressing picture. In the short term, exiles faced a variety of problems. Many, no matter what their previous social status, arrived in their new place of residence with little more than the shirts on their backs. Once in their new place of residence their first priority was to find somewhere to live. This usually meant makeshift accommodation that could be tents, bombed out

590   Panikos Panayi houses, camps, or even the former residences of refugees who have moved in the opposite direction. Those Turks who had left Greece in the early 1920s resettled in the areas in and around Smyrna that had been vacated by Greeks on their way to Macedonia and elsewhere where they would come across other Turkish refugees who had settled in the region as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912–​1913.75 In the German town of Osnabrück in the late 1940s, newcomers had three short-​term residential options open to them in the form of living in camps, setting themselves up in a shed, or sharing the homes of locals.76 Even refugees who moved into wealthier states such as Great Britain in the late twentieth century have lived in makeshift accommodation. For example, Ugandan Asians initially found themselves in transit camps.77 While most refugees typically progress to more permanent and secure accommodation, their housing conditions often remain inferior to those of resident populations in the long run, as evidenced, for example, by the plight of the Palestinians who remained in makeshift accommodation decades after their expulsion from Israel to the neighbouring states of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Similar conditions were also in evidence in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.78 Apart from the issue of shelter, another significant problem faced by refugees consists of economic wellbeing. Organizations such as the League of Nations Office for Refugees and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, followed by the High Commission for Refugees provide for the short-​term welfare of exiles.79 However, short-​ term, and in some cases, longer-​term unemployment, remains a fact of life.80 At the same time, refugees have also faced hostility from long-​established populations, exacerbated by the fact that they often moved into locations only just emerging from conflict. Those who fled from Smyrna to mainland Greece faced all types of insults, including claims about yoghurt-​based diets.81 A German police report on the town of Osnabrück from 1946 declared that: ‘The relationship of the refugees to the native population is very bad. The native population views the refugees with mistrust as they want to keep the most essential necessities of life.’82 Meanwhile, Uditi Sen has demonstrated the hostility faced by refugees who initially moved from East Bengal to camps in West Bengal and then experienced resettlement in the Indian-​controlled Andaman Islands, just off the Burmese coast between 1949 and 1971, where the native Jarawa population viewed them as a threat.83 Although these three cases actually represent instances of refugees who nominally constitute the same ethnic group as the dominant population of the areas in which they settle, treatment of the refugees by the host population was nonetheless hostile. However, the Ugandan Asians moving to Britain in the early 1970s represent a contrasting group, and they came to characterize late-​twentieth-century population movements towards a prosperous Europe from regions previously under imperial control. In this case, the newcomers did not have any ethnic connections with the land to which they moved, although they did possess British passports. Although they did not move into a country recently devastated by war, their arrival in Britain caused much hostility, with Leicester city council actually placing an advert in the Ugandan Argus telling the refugees not to move there. Ironically, this had the opposite effect, as it brought the city to their notice.84

Refugees and the End of Empire    591 All of the groups outlined above became increasingly integrated into their surroundings, despite the initial problems of housing and unemployment faced. Those of the same ethnic group as the majority often benefited from the prevalence of ethnically based state nationalism, which accepted the consequences of ethnic cleansing and the fact that this meant that they received millions of newcomers who needed economic and political support to become part of the body politic, a point perhaps best illustrated by Germany at the end of the Second World War. On the other hand, the Ugandan Asians, while initially receiving some assistance from the state, would make their way into the British (Asian) middle classes using business skills which they had developed in Africa.85 Before integration occurred, however, individual and collective trauma became everyday reality for the rootless refugees who found themselves in a new alien environment. The trauma of being a refugee was exacerbated by the lack of employment in refugee camps, while also facing hostility from the native population. This trauma began with the departure from the homeland, as recalled by Mahmood Mamdani as he left Uganda: ‘Once on the East African Airways plane . . . I could still see clearly in my mind my home, or rather, the different houses we had lived in while my father moved up from petty clerk to a well-​to-​do auctioneer’.86 While the dominant theme in Mamdani’s story consists of longing, bitterness characterized the recollections of a Cypriot refugee from the village of Argaki interviewed by Peter Loizos: ‘You know how much property I had in the village; I had many orange plantations and I was completely occupied in working them’. In contrast, he now found himself ‘in complete uncertainty’ as ‘no one knows from morning to night what will happen each day, or what to expect from the barbarous Turkish conqueror. I have neither the courage not the appetite to find land to cultivate to live’.87 The types of feelings described here nourished the development of a refugee consciousness in the land of settlement—​an attempt to preserve memories and aspects of everyday life, including languages and dialects, from the homeland. This is expected in cases where newcomers constitute a different ethnic group from the dominant populations where they settle; for example, East African Asians in Britain.88 However, in Greece in the inter-​war years, it gave rise to a new type of music in the form of rebetika, whose themes included loss, longing, and bitterness.89 In post-​war Germany organized groups called Landsmannschaften developed cultural activities to remember the specific parts of Eastern Europe from which refugees had originated. The nationally based Zentralverband der Vertriebenen Deutschen wanted to see the reclaiming of the areas lost by Germany at the end of the Second World War.90 Meanwhile, many refugees in both India and Pakistan became stalwart and ardent supporters of their new states, often displaying more extremist views.91 Identity for Palestinian refugees has proved especially complicated. Living in refugee camps, some have become radicalized, while others have clung on to a desire to return home, and yet others simply seek out an ‘ordinary life’. The concept of exile plays a central role in identities, even in cases where individuals have taken the citizenship of the states in which they find themselves, where many of them have been born, even though their lives continue in refugee camps. Generational change plays a role in the sense of belonging to the land in which Palestinians find themselves.92

592   Panikos Panayi

Imperial Collapse, Refugee Creation, and the Making of the Nation State Refugee creation was a major consequence of imperial collapse from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the death of the Soviet Union. While this began on a limited scale as the Turks withdrew from territories they had previously controlled during the course of the nineteenth century, the era of the First World War turned refugee creation into a mass phenomenon. The increasing brutalization of warfare, coupled with the acceptance of civilians as legitimate targets of violence, meant that refugee creation became one of the many ways in which people became sucked into conflict. The most momentous crisis of the twentieth century occurred at the end of the Second World War, just as empires and nation states emerged from an orgy of killing. While war and imperial collapse combined in the creation of mass refugee movements, smaller episodes took place decades after the end of imperial control. The violence of the early twentieth century made refugees just one among the many casualties of war, yet the victory of nationalism facilitated this process. Ethnic purity within nation states remains an illusion. But imperial collapse and war offered an opportunity for many to try to make it a reality. Many of those states emerged, expanded, or contracted at the end of the two World Wars as they sought to achieve greater ethnic purity. Resentments fuelled by the rise of nationalism in the case of Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, or India and Pakistan in the 1940s, or by the acts of the invading German armies in East and Central Europe, meant that nation-​states from central Europe to South Asia wished to eliminate those they perceived as aliens in their midst. International acquiescence in ethnic cleansing, especially after the Lausanne Treaty, meant that the displacement of millions of people became part of the process of state creation and re-​creation as a consequence of imperial collapse. The high-​level decisions reached by diplomats at Lausanne, Potsdam, and, following the Bosnian conflict, at Dayton93 ultimately either ignored or accepted the human suffering caused by the expulsion of countless people from their homes. Clearly, acceptance characterized the official responses of the leaders of Greece and Turkey in 1923, and of India and Pakistan in 1947, all of whom sought to deal with the influx of refugees. On the other hand, a counter-​argument might suggest that these political leaders simply adjusted to local realities rather than caused them. The same might also be held to apply to the Potsdam Treaty, although in this case, no German state existed to sanction expulsion from Eastern Europe. As these examples indicate, politicians constitute the ultimate actors in the process of ethnic cleansing and refugee creation, following on from ethnic ideologues and nationalist leaders. The acceptance of ethnic cleansing indicates a readiness to integrate refugees which frequently made up a significant percentage of the population of the nation states to which they moved. It meant an adjustment of citizenship policies if necessary, as well as efforts to find housing and employment for newcomers. Except in a

Refugees and the End of Empire    593 few cases, such as the Palestinians, the states to which they moved did not accept them as fellow citizens and therefore put limited effort into integration. Whatever the long-​term level of acceptance, newly arrived refugees found themselves in an alien, traumatic environment without work or proper housing, facing hostility from those around them, all of which bound the newcomers together in a variety of ways. In the longer term, integration usually met with varying degrees of success, but this long-​ term perspective ignores the suffering caused by ethnic cleansing following the collapse of empires.

Notes 1. See contributions to Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore, eds, Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010). 2. As an introduction see, Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire:  Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008). 3. Andrekos Varnava, Nicholas Coureas, and Marina Elia, eds, The Minorities of Cyprus:  Development Patterns and the Identity of Internal-​Exclusion (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). 4. Kiamran Halil, “The Structure of the Turkish-​Cypriot Race”, Mankind Quarterly 15 (1974): 124–​134. 5. Robin Oakley, “The Turkish Peoples of Cyprus” in M. Bainbridge, ed., The Turkic Peoples of the World (London:  Routledge, 1993), 88–​91; L. W. St John-​Jones, The Population of Cyprus:  Demographic Trends and Socio-​Economic Influences (London:  Maurice Temple Smith, 1983), 50–​62. 6. See, for example, Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1994). 7. Dirk Hoerder, Geschichte der Deutschen Migration: Vom Mittelalter bis heute (Munich: C. H.  Beck, 2010); Klaus J. Bade, ed., Deutsche im Ausland:  Fremde in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992). 8. See contributions to Vera Constantini and Markus Koller, eds, Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 9. See, for instance, Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–​1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 10. Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. 12. See, respectively: Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, “Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies:  Introduction”, Journal of Genocide Research 10 (2008):  7–​14; John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried:  A People’s History of the British Empire (London:  Bookmarks, 2006); Anne Sheehy, The Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans: Soviet Treatment of Two National Minorities (London: Minority Rights Group, 1971). 13. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–​1922 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005). 14. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds, Empire and Others:  British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–​1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

594   Panikos Panayi 15. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 16. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 1986). 17. But see Walker Connor, “A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group is a . . .”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 1 (1978): 382, who points out that in 1971 “out of 132 entities generally considered to be states”, only 12, or 9.1%, “can justifiably be described as nation states” with a unitary ethnic group. 18. Kamaljit Bhasin-​Malik, In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2007). 19. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 20. See, for example: Polyvios G. Polyviou, Cyprus in Search of a Constitution: Constitutional Proposals and Negotiations, 1960–​1975 (Nicosia: Nicolaou and Sons, 1976); Joseph S. Joseph, Cyprus: Ethnic Conflict and International Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 21. Robert G. Gregory, South Asians in East Africa:  An Economic and Social History, 1890–​1980 (Oxford: Westview Press, 1993); Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 265–​269. 22. See, for instance, Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, and A. M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and fate of Soviet Minorities at the end of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978). 23. John F.  R. Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg, and Richard Schofield, eds, Transcaucasian Boundaries (London: UCL Press, 1996). 24. Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London, 1995); Neil Melvin, Russians Beyond Russia (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1995); Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996). 25. Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe 1914–​1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 26. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–​1922 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995). 27. Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 141–​170. 28. See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 29. Mark Levene, “The Tragedy of the Rimlands: Nation-​state Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–​1948”, in Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee, eds, Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration during the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 51–​78. 30. The most important accounts of the Armenian genocide include: Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995) and Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 31. Renée Hirschon, “Consequences of the Lausanne Convention: An Overview”, in Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean:  An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 14–​15. 32. See the connections made by Matthew Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-​1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Refugees and the End of Empire    595 33. As an introduction see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 78–​415. 34. As an introduction see Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews:  The Years of Extermination (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 35. See Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939–​1945 (London: Penguin, 2013). 36. See the pioneering and indignant study of Alfred-​Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees:  Victims in War and Peace (Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1993, 1993) and the more recent and sanitized narrative of R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane:  The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 37. But see Yasmin Khan, India at War:  The Subcontinent and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 38. Swarna Aiyar, “Violence and the State in the Partition of Punjab 1947–​48”, (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1994). 39. See, for example, Ilyas Chattha, “Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim Refugees”, in Panayi and Virdee, Refugees, 196–​218. 40. As an introduction to partition and its human consequences see Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 41. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42. Peter Loizos, The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Keith Kyle, Cyprus: In Search of Peace (London: Minority Rights Group, 1997), 19. 43. See, for instance, Laura Barnett, “Global Governance and the Evolution of the International Refugee Regime”, International Journal of Refugee Law 14 (2002): 241–​245. 44. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted:  European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 298–​358. 45. Peter Gattrell, A Whole Empire Walking:  Refugees in Russia During World War One (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 46. Norman Stone and Michael Glenny, The Other Russia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), xv. 47. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (London: Yale University Press, 2001); Peter Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief in England during the Great War (New York: Garland, 1982). 48. Gattrell, A Whole Empire Walking. 49. See Julie Thorpe, “Displacing Empire:  Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-​Hungary in the First World War”, in Panayi and Virdee, Refugees, 102–​126. 50. Marrus, Unwanted, 297. 51. Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–​1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 305. 52. Siegfried Bethlehem, Heimatvertreibung, DDR-​Flucht, Gastarbeiterwanderung:  Wander ungsströme und Wanderungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett-​ Cotta, 1982); Tony Radspieler, The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955). 53. Panikos Panayi, Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (London: Longman, 2000), 201–​203. 54. Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Ausländer:  Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945–​1951 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, 1985).

596   Panikos Panayi 55. Ruth Gay, Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War Two (London: Yale University Press, 2002). 56. Morris, Birth, 602. 57. Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee, “Conclusions and Legacies”, in Panayi and Virdee, Refugees, 280–​284. 58. Shepard, Invention. 59. See, for instance, William G. Kuepper, G. Lynne Lackey, and E. Nelson Swinerton, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain: Forced Migration and Social Absorption (London: Croom Helm, 1975). 60. Loizos, Heart Grown Bitter. 61. See Louise W. Holborn, Refugees:  A Problem of Our Time, Two Volumes (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975). 62. James Milner, Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19–​20. 63. Jonathan Bascom, Losing Place: Refugee Populations and Rural Transformations in East Africa (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), 39–​48. 64. Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics; Melvin, Russians Beyond Russia; Chinn and Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority. 65. Wright, Goldenberg and Schofield, Transcaucasian Boundaries. 66. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 24. 67. Renée Hirschon, “‘Unmixing People’ in the Aegean Region”, in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean,  3–​12. 68. Panayi and Virdee, “Conclusions”, 280–​284; Talbot and Singh, Partition. 69. Kyle, Cyprus. 70. Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, “Economic Consequences following Refugee Settlement in Greek Macedonia”, in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean,  63–​77. 71. See, for example, Hartmut Berghoff, “Population Change and its Repercussions on the Social History of the Federal Republic”, in Klaus Larres and Panikos Panayi, eds, The Federal Republic of Germany Since 1949: Politics, Society and Economy Before and After Unification (London: Longman, 1996), 35–​73. 72. Peter Loizos, Iron in the Soul:  Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 48. 73. See, for example, Robert Bowker, Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity and the Search for Peace (London: Lynne Rienner, 2003). 74. Hans W. Schoenberg, Germans from the East:  A Study of their Migration, Resettlement and Subsequent Group History (The Hague:  Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 37; Betty Barton, The Problem of 12 Million German Refugees in Today’s Germany (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1949), 30–​34; Marion Frantzioch, Die Vertriebenen: Hemmnisse und Wege ihrer Integration (Berlin: Reimer, 1987), 199, 201. 75. See contributions to Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean. 76. Panikos Panayi, Life and Death in a German Town: Osnabrück from the Weimar Republic to World War Two and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 167–​171. 77. Kushner and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide, 265–​286. 78. Dawn Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 204–​230. See also contributions to Are Knudsen and Sari Hanafi, eds, Identity, Space and Place in the Levant (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

Refugees and the End of Empire    597 79. Peter Gatrell, Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 103–​109. 80. Chatty, Displacement. 81. Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, 3rd Edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 101. 82. Panayi, Life and Death, 174. 83. Uditi Sen, “Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands”, in Panayi and Virdee, Refugees, 219–​244. 84. Kuepper, Lackey, and Swinerton, Ugandan Asians; Valerie Marrett, Immigrants Settling in the City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989). 85. Joanna Herbert, Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 86. Mahmood Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee:  Ugandan Asians Come to Britain (London: Frances Pinter, 1973), 67–​68. 87. See Peter Loizos, “Argaki: The Uprooting of a Cypriot Village”, in Michael A. Attalides, ed., Cyprus Revisited (Nicosia: Jus Cypri Association, 1977), 13. 88. Parminder Bhachu, Twice Migrants:  East African Sikh Settlers in Britain (London: Tavistock, 1985). 89. Elias Petropoulos, Songs of the Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition (London: Saqi Books, 2000). 90. Hermann Weiß, “Die Organisation der Vertriebenen und ihre Presse”, in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten:  Ursachen, Ereignisse, Folgen (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1995), 244–​264. 91. Talbot and Singh, Partition of India, 129–​130. 92. For different perspectives on Palestinian refugee identity see, for example: Luigi Achilli, Palestinian Refugees and Identity:  Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday (London:  I. B.  Tauris, 2015); Maria Holt, “‘A World of Movement’:  Memory and Reality for the Palestinian Women in the Camps of Lebanon”, in Knudsen and Hanafi, Palestinian Refugees, 180–​192; and Chatty, Displacement, 226–​230. 93. Matthew Frank, Making Minorities History: Population Transfer in Twentieth Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Malcolm, Bosnia, 268–​271.

Pa rt I V

L E G AC I E S A N D M E M OR I E S

Chapter 31

P ostc ol onia l Migrations to   E u rope Elizabeth Buettner

After periods of imperial expansion and consolidation when the numbers of Europeans who left to begin new lives in the empire as settlers or expatriates greatly exceeded the numbers of colonized peoples travelling to the heart of empires, during the decolonization era there was a fundamental shift in the relationship between metropoles and colonies. Drawing on histories of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium, this chapter illuminates broader demographic contours of this post-​1945 Europe-​directed migratory phenomenon together with its causes and consequences. Equally, it considers how these transformations were experienced as Western Europe moved from the colonial to the postcolonial era and grew increasingly multicultural by the late twentieth century.1

Going ‘Home’ to Europe Declining empires, empires in the process of undergoing ‘transfers of power’ when colonies achieved formal (if often highly circumscribed) independence, and former colonies after decolonization all produced European immigrants hailing from a wide social spectrum. Their class, level of education, cultural identity, birthplace, and reasons for embarking varied markedly, but for contemporaries the most striking distinction between different groups often revolved around racial, ethnic, or religious affiliations. Although minorities with exclusively Asian, North and sub-​Saharan African, and Caribbean ethnic backgrounds tended to attract far more attention both at the moment of arrival and long after their settlement in Europe, estimates suggest that Europeans and those partly of European ancestry made up more than half of those making the journeys. Between 5.4 and 6.8 million people arrived in Western Europe from former colonies during the forty years after 1945, and between 3.3 and 4 million were either

602   Elizabeth Buettner European or at least partly so.2 Some had been born in Europe and returned home when colonial careers as officials, military personnel, or in non-​official professions ended, when decolonization made ongoing residence in ex-​colonies either undesirable or untenable, or when they no longer felt they ‘belonged’ in former imperial realms. Alongside former expatriates were European settlers—​some of whose ancestors had emigrated generations earlier, some whose colonial lives were of far shorter duration.3 In many cases, European (or European-​descended) expatriates and settlers trickled ‘homewards’ either on an individual basis or in relatively small numbers at a given moment. Such groups—​like Britons and Anglo-​Indians heading to Britain at the time of India’s and Pakistan’s independence in 1947 and from other regions in the 1950s and 1960s, or French returnees from Southeast Asia or West Africa during and after the 1950s—​did not generally attract significant national public attention. This had little to do with their aggregate totals: in Britain, for example, the 1991 census revealed that approximately 560,000 resident whites had been born in former colonies.4 While departures from former empires undoubtedly were destabilizing and often traumatic for those directly uprooted, for British society at large repatriated colonials were an unproblematic and ignored group, as were many of their counterparts in neighbouring European countries.5 Decolonizations that were relatively peaceful or uncontested rarely produced noticeable waves of European departures during the period immediately before or soon after the end of European governance. Unsurprisingly, this did not apply to those arriving en masse, often upon panicked exits from crisis-​ridden colonies at the time of independence. Within days of the Belgian Congo’s independence on 30 June 1960, Congolese soldiers of the Force publique had mutinied, adding substantially to the political tensions pervading a decolonization that saw Belgium seeking to maintain a high measure of neocolonial control, regardless of having formally transferred sovereignty. Amidst an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, and sometimes violence as some of the mutinous troops physically attacked European men, women, and children, an estimated 38,000 colonials were hastily flown back to Belgium in less than a month in a spectacular airlift operation organized by the Belgian government and Sabena airlines. Over a third of the Belgian nationals then resident in the territory fled home (many of whom later returned to Africa to reside in the former colony for the immediate future), while others took temporary refuge elsewhere in Central Africa.6 Although colonizers’ tearful arrivals at the Brussels airport dominated national news and made international headlines at the time, they soon faded from public attention, eclipsed in part by comparison with two far larger European colonial ‘exoduses’ that came in their wake: French departures from Algeria in 1962, and Portuguese retreats from Angola and Mozambique in 1974 and 1975. Approximately 1.5 million people (over 3% of the 44 million citizens of metropolitan France) were ‘repatriated’ from settler societies in French North Africa between the early 1950s and mid-​1960s, about a third from Morocco and Tunisia. But close to a million landed in port cities of southern France from Algeria, many during the summer of 1962.7 France had finally agreed to Algeria’s independence that July after an eight-​ year undeclared war against an insurgency that pitted the Algerian Front de Libération

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    603 Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) against the French army and an increasingly militarized large European settler community. By the end, settler and army extremists had formed the underground Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS, Secret Army Organization) that engaged in a diehard terrorist campaign to keep Algeria French by any means necessary. Their efforts backfired completely, making French President Charles de Gaulle even more eager to disengage and rendering it impossible for the settlers to remain after independence. Portugal’s colonial wars waged over more than a decade against freedom fighters in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea (who also included insurgents from its Cape Verde Islands) achieved a similar result in the mid-​1970s. The Carnation Revolution in April of 1974 was sparked by army officers acting against the dictatorial Portuguese state that had long insisted that Portuguese-​ruled parts of Africa did not count as ‘colonies’ but rather ‘overseas provinces’ that were—​and must remain—​integral parts of Portugal (just as French Algerian partisans had once stressed that Algeria was not a colony but departments of France itself). The shift to democracy at home brought decolonization in Africa by the end of 1975. Within little over a year, more than 500,000 settlers from Angola and Mozambique and over 200,000 Portuguese troops returned home, causing Portugal’s population to swell by 5–​10%. As with Algeria, the lengthy wars, racial hostilities, and spiralling violence made the prospects of staying on after empire impossible for many Portuguese. Like France’s repatriated pieds-​noirs (as Europeans who had been settlers in Algeria came to be known), most of Portugal’s retornados (returnees) abandoned virtually everything they owned in Africa, aside from a few suitcases, memories of the past, and resentment at having their African lives and privileges abruptly curtailed.8 Not all mass migrations to Europe from ex-​colonies happened as quickly upon decolonization. When the Netherlands conceded independence to Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) in 1949 after years of fighting an anti-​colonial insurgency, some members of the colonial community had already left. Others gradually made their way to the Netherlands or opted to relocate elsewhere (with California and Australia being popular alternatives, just as South Africa and Rhodesia attracted considerable numbers of Britons and Portuguese who hesitated to return to a Europe from which they felt estranged after their colonial lives elsewhere). Those who initially stayed on faced an increasingly insecure future by the 1950s as tensions escalated between the Republic of Indonesia and the Netherlands, mainly because the Dutch insisted on maintaining control over West New Guinea. In retaliation, Indonesia expelled remaining Dutch nationals and confiscated their property in 1957, after which tens of thousands more with Dutch ancestry left. Approximately 300,000 people came to the Netherlands from Indonesia between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. A small minority were of Moluccan, Indonesian, Chinese, or Papuan backgrounds, but most were Dutch citizens. Among the latter, about 80,000 were totoks, or ‘European Dutch’, who had been temporarily resident in colonial society and often were born in the Netherlands (or had two Dutch parents), while over 180,000 were ‘Indisch Dutch’, Eurasians of mixed descent, most of whom had never been to Europe before.9

604   Elizabeth Buettner Dutch citizens who resettled in the Netherlands after the loss of the East Indies illustrate the diversity typically found among repatriated ex-​colonial populations. European Dutch from the former Indies who were more affluent often faced far easier returns than those of mixed descent, who were less likely to have families in the metropole or sufficient financial resources to aid their transition. Most Indisch Dutch had been situated between the European minority and Indonesian majority in colonial society and benefitted from their legal status as Dutch and racial and cultural affiliation to the colonizers, yet experienced racial and class discrimination from European Dutch who looked down upon them as inferior ‘Indos’. Until the 1957 rupture, the official attitude was that Dutch who were more ‘Oriental’ in culture and appearance (and typically not well off) should remain in Indonesia and not resettle in the Netherlands, despite their legal right to do so.10 Afterwards, political circumstances forced Dutch authorities to recognize that they needed to accept them—​a reluctance reflected in a stepped-​up official involvement in the repatriation process. Public proclamations emphasized the need to welcome and accommodate citizens from the former Indies, but placed tremendous pressure upon those whose cultural leanings were more Indisch and hybrid to assimilate within conventional Dutch society.11 State policy towards the Indisch insisted that racism had no place in Dutch society and emphatically reiterated the Netherlands’ proud history as a nation tolerant of newcomers. But the reality faced by poorer Indisch was often at odds with lofty rhetoric. Having left behind material possessions, their accustomed place in society, and a convivial lifestyle in a warm climate revolving around hospitality, the Indisch sacrificed everything they knew and were expected to completely adapt to metropolitan Dutch ‘norms’:  frugality, meals of meat and potatoes instead of spicy dishes with rice, and quiet, self-​effacing respectability. Dutch policy sought to dissolve them into the mainstream and iron out colonial cultural differences, which meant discouraging them from forming ‘ghettoes’ where they would communally perpetuate Indies cultural traditions. That many Indisch persisted in eating traditional dishes, maintaining close-​knit colonial family and friendship networks, and living near other Indies repatriates reflected not only defiance of Dutch expectations that did not value their background.12 It was also a response to encountering everyday prejudices and racist ‘Indo’ stereotypes. Despite their citizenship and colonial identity that derived in large part from ancestral and cultural affiliations to the colonizers, they were commonly viewed as foreigners and outsiders in the Netherlands after empire. According to a 1966 study, arrivals from the former East Indies felt that the Dutch: feel superior, they look down on us. In their eyes, we are a lesser sort of people, who possess few abilities and are lax. Many are badly informed about who we actually are or what we were out there. They think that we are Indonesian or else Ambonese, that we lived in straw huts, that we have never walked in shoes and that we used to sleep on the ground. Many are amazed we speak Dutch. We are not seldom looked upon as intruders, who make the labour market difficult for people here and for whom extra taxes have to be paid.

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    605 Cultural biases, ignorance, and racist taunts from Dutch children who addressed them as ‘black nigger’ and ‘chin-​chin-​chinaman’ compounded their difficulties, offering evidence that the assimilation expected by officials was hindered not only by Indisch desires to preserve valued aspects of their heritage but also by Dutch who saw them as unwelcome and ‘other’, largely on account of ethnic difference.13 For Europeans or those of partial European descent who returned after empire, then, transitions from colonial to postcolonial metropolitan life were often extremely difficult, not least if they had never lived in Europe before, if many years had elapsed since they had emigrated, or if they lacked resources and supportive family members to smooth their passage. Like so many Indisch Dutch, other former colonials preferred to remain tightly connected with others who shared their background after leaving overseas life behind, often by necessity and rarely by desire. Pieds-​noirs from an Algeria that had ceased to be French often chose to maintain close contact with other repatriates, whether by resettling near other pieds-​noirs who gravitated towards southern France along the Mediterranean coastline or becoming active in pied-​noir associations.14 These groups shored up social networks, campaigned for state compensation for their losses upon leaving North Africa, and facilitated the circulation of nostalgic recollections of the lost world of Algérie française. Some Europeans never fully adjusted to decolonization transitions forced upon them. As one elderly Portuguese woman who had long lived in Mozambique wrote in her diary in 1975, settlers who fled back to Portugal faced a future so uncertain that it seemed like no future at all: ‘a cousin, to whom I was very close, left. Later, destitute in Lisbon, he killed his wife and then himself. They were good people. They were dead anyway, they only made it official’.15 Others readapted as best they could over time, often finding solace in ongoing relationships with other former colonials and memories of past times that became recast as a golden age—​tempo doeloe, as Dutch repatriates referred to the East Indies before Dutch rule lost ground to its challengers.16 Some succeeded in moving forward after challenging initial transitions that involved finding new homes and (for men in particular) new jobs. One Belgian ex-​colonial administrator later looked back on the early 1960s as a nerve-​wracking time characterized by a search for a new career after leaving the Congo. Upon finding permanent employment in the diplomatic service—​ which in his case meant further postings in Central Africa, among other places—​he recalled that ‘it was not displeasing to be thus assured that I, too, was “decolonizable” ’.17 Yet being ‘decolonizable’ was far easier to achieve if the person in question was white and fairly affluent. Many Dutch from the former East Indies visibly stood out as mixed race and came without substantial savings, while many French pieds-​noirs and Portuguese retornados were virtually penniless upon arrival. For them, shedding their former colonial identity was less straightforward, if indeed that was even their intention. Despite their different circumstances, however, integrating former colonials of European backgrounds into Europe stood in sharp contrast to the situation faced by other ethnic minorities who came from overseas empires after 1945. Terminology used to describe many postcolonial migrants of purely or partly European origin typically emphasized their connectedness to the metropole and portrayed them as deserving

606   Elizabeth Buettner candidates for public sympathy—​people who had ‘lost everything’ when they left Africa or Indonesia, for example, and worthy of being classified as victims or refugees (as was the case of Belgians who fled the Congo in July 1960). Above all, ‘repatriate’ or other words like retornado rhetorically stressed that European countries were their fatherlands to which they were rightfully coming back—​even if many described as such had never set foot in the homeland of their ancestors until decolonization turned the tables. Widespread usage of these terms suggested an official willingness, often shared by much of the wider public, to accept Europeans and Eurasians whose identities had been forged in the empire as legitimate members of national communities—​as British, French, Belgian, Dutch, or Portuguese—​that had become reconfigured after empire, including groups associated with controversial, embarrassing, and painful decolonizations that many at home preferred to forget. Even those like the pieds-​noirs and Indisch Dutch, whose colonial past remained part of their cultural identity and literally their name (or, in the case of many Indisch and other mixed-​race peoples, by physical signifiers of difference) grew ever more unproblematically European, even if their arrivals had been contentious and their hearts, politics, and some of their ancestors remained linked to the colonial world and rendered them distinct from the metropolitan majority. Repatriated Europeans and Eurasians ultimately belonged, a belonging commonly denied to postcolonial minorities who lacked identifiable European ancestral origins—​even if they too possessed the legal right to resettle in Europe as citizens when they made their journeys.

Migration, Citizenship, and Disputed Belonging Colonized peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean region were present in Europe long before empires fell into terminal decline after the Second World War. There was nothing strictly ‘postcolonial’ about the arrival and settlement of ethnic minorities of colonial origins: preexisting smaller streams of migration from the British, Portuguese, French, and Dutch empires to European metropoles grew prior to formal decolonizations, gathering pace in the late 1940s in the case of Britain and France. Significantly, increased mobility, numbers, and permanent settlement emerged in large part thanks to policies meant to preserve empires in times of transition, and had not been envisioned as heralding a changed postcolonial world order. The British Nationality Act of 1948 formalized equal British citizenship rights for all colonial and Commonwealth subjects, regardless of race.18 Arising a year after India’s and Pakistan’s independence, it marked an effort to consolidate relations with remaining colonies and former colonies within the Commonwealth at a time when centrifugal forces threatened loyalties to Britain and Commonwealth cohesion. The Act permitted free migration and settlement for all citizens wishing to live and work in Britain—​an

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    607 appealing prospect indeed for many people from underdeveloped economies at a time when Britain was entering a period of full employment and gradually recovering from the war. France, meanwhile, sought to defend its imperial status quo that had been severely disrupted by war by renaming the French empire as the French Union in 1946 and inaugurating a new constitution that turned colonial subjects into Union citizens. Colonies became ‘overseas departments’ (as was the case with Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean island of Réunion), ‘overseas territories’ (Madagascar along with sub-​Saharan African and Pacific colonies), or ‘associated states’ (the five territories composing French Indochina). French Algeria maintained its preexisting juridical status as three departments of France until becoming independent in 1962. Arabs and Berbers from Algeria, who had acquired the right to migrate to the metropole in 1914, received French citizenship in 1947. Algeria consistently sent by far the largest number of migrants to metropolitan France of any part of its empire/​Union, a flow France only tried to legally curb starting in the late 1960s.19 Comparable citizenship redefinitions also emerged in the post-​war Netherlands and Portugal, again as attempts to preserve empires at a time when maintaining them had become internationally controversial and precarious. After losing Indonesia, the Dutch government introduced a new constitutional framework in 1954: the Statuut or Charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.20 Intended to demonstrate that conventional colonial relationships had been nobly surpassed by more equitable and consensual arrangements, this made the Netherlands, Suriname on the northeast coast of South America, and the West Indian islands of the Netherlands Antilles equal partners with a common nationality and internal self-​ government. Like Britain’s 1948 Nationality Act and France’s 1946 constitution, the Charter accorded a single nationality, giving Antilleans and Surinamese (whose origins were largely African, Indian, and Javanese, reflecting the territories’ history of African slavery and, in the case of Suriname, Asian indentured labour) unrestricted opportunities to live and work in the European Netherlands. The 1950s also saw Portugal change its imperial nomenclature as it grew increasingly insistent on maintaining its empire by denying its existence (and thus the validity of decolonization) in the face of international criticism. It recast its colonies in Africa and Asia as ‘overseas provinces’ in 1951 and granted their entire population Portuguese citizenship in 1961, regardless of race or birthplace. Making Africans and mixed-​descent mestiços officially Portuguese was a defensive shift meant as proof that the Portuguese nation was a pluricontinental as well as a multiracial one where racial inequality was nonexistent—​in theory at least, if certainly not in reality. In all four countries, these symbolic colour-​blind legislative measures meant that colonial, and later postcolonial, peoples who travelled to European metropoles were often not technically ‘immigrants’ but rather internal migrants within the British empire or Commonwealth, French Union, Kingdom of the Netherlands, or a Portuguese nation that was transoceanic and discontinuous but—​allegedly—​one nation all the same. As such, they were located within the same framework as Europeans and European-​ descended repatriates discussed earlier—​that is, until European governments changed their entry policies either on account of, or in the wake of, decolonization, a topic to

608   Elizabeth Buettner which this chapter will return. In the meantime, legal provisions allowing migration into late-​colonial Western Europe created rapidly expanding ethnic minority populations after the 1940s, in some cases from places that initially remained under European rule and in other instances from former colonies. The British and French cases both demonstrate how decolonizations per se did not necessarily alter migration policies towards inhabitants of Britain’s empire/​ Commonwealth and France’s overseas departments and territories or Algeria. One contemporary study estimated that in 1960 there were 115,000 West Indians, 25,000 West Africans, and 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis in Britain, most of whom had come during the mid-​1950s as labourers within an expanding economy.21 Their numbers also included students and professionals, such as nurses from the West Indies and doctors from India who proved integral to the functioning of the newly established National Health Service within the emergent post-​war welfare state. West Indians were the most noticeable ‘coloured’ migrants in 1950s Britain, arriving at a time when these territories remained under colonial rule (which only ended in Jamaica and Trinidad in 1962 and in British Guiana in 1966, for example). Most British West African colonies achieved independence in 1960, a transition India and Pakistan had already made in 1947. Indian, Pakistani, and East African Asian migration to Britain became most prominent after empire had ended but when British official prioritization of Commonwealth ties continued to facilitate their passage. Its marked growth throughout the 1960s occurred once India and Pakistan placed fewer obstacles in the way of prospective emigrants and Uganda and Kenya made it difficult, if not impossible, for their South Asian populations to stay in postcolonial states dominated by African majorities. Migration, moreover, rose exponentially once it became clear that Britain would terminate its open-​door policy for colonial and Commonwealth peoples, which came about following the 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts and further legislation in 1971. These moves, which corresponded to the decreased domestic importance of the Commonwealth ideal as a British political priority, began by placing limits on annual entry numbers and ultimately ended primary migration altogether. The rush to ‘beat the ban’ meant that Britain’s population of South Asian origin jumped to 112,000 in 1961 and 516,000 by 1971.22 France’s largest non-​European migrant group, as noted earlier, came from Algeria, both before and after the end of Algérie française.23 By the time the FLN launched its armed liberation struggle in 1954, circular migration patterns were already firmly entrenched among thousands of Algerian men who came and went across the Mediterranean as manual labourers. Their travels to and from metropolitan France stemmed from the long-​term havoc settler colonialism had wreaked upon indigenous Algerian society. Land expropriation, chronic poverty, harsh taxation, and limited economic prospects meant many Algerians lacked the means of subsistence without wages earned in France and sent back to their families. War between 1954 and 1962 only increased the disruption and impoverishment in North Africa that acted as ‘push’ factors, while in France les trente glorieuses, the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic growth and rising prosperity after 1945, meant that the plentiful industrial jobs on offer continued

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    609 to act as the main ‘pull’. Decolonization in 1962 also did nothing to reduce the Algerian presence in France, despite the fact that France no longer formally included its three Algerian departments. Approximately 90,000 harkis (Algerian soldiers who had fought on the French side) and their families fled to avoid retribution from the victorious FLN, while labour migration not only continued unabated but increased even further. Like Africans from other former French colonies, Algerians initially kept their right to free circulation after independence.24 Ongoing underdevelopment in North Africa and the toll taken by wartime destruction and French sabotage upon their departure made the new Algerian government as desperate for the foreign exchange earnings from workers’ remittances as the families and villages migrants came from. While the 211,000 Algerians residing in France in 1954 grew to approximately 350,000 by 1962, reached nearly 474,000 by 1968, neared 711,000 by 1975, and exceeded 805,000 in 1982, migrants heading to the metropole from other overseas departments and territories also rose.25 By the late 1990s, over 200,000 people from Martinique and Guadeloupe—​over a quarter of their largely African-​descended populations—​had relocated to mainland France.26 Just as these islands never stopped being overseas departments, their inhabitants never lost French nationality or became ‘postcolonial’. This was not true of the West and Central Africans whose homelands had been part of the French Union prior to decolonization in 1960 and whose peoples, like Algerians (together with Moroccans and Tunisians), ultimately lost their legal right to French citizenship and residence. Key shifts occurred first in 1968, when the government introduced quotas on the number of Algerians allowed entry in a given year, and in 1974, when primary labour migration from outside the European Economic Community was terminated. This did not, however, mean that non-​European immigration ground to a halt in 1974.27 Family reunification in Europe gradually reshaped the demographics of existing minority communities to include more women and children. Instability in sending countries accounted for the rise of other nationalities long after restrictions had been implemented. France’s most marked increase in arrivals from sub-​Saharan Africa, for example, has only occurred since the 1980s, when wars, political upheaval, and grinding poverty across many parts of Africa enhanced France’s (and other European countries’) appeal as a promised land offering work and security.28 But as was also the case in Britain, France’s new official stance meant that countless new arrivals led a precarious existence as undocumented illegal residents. If the drawn-​out ‘moment’ of decolonization in and of itself did not produce an about-​ face in British and French approaches to migration from their empires and former empires, what prompted state decisions to reverse previously inclusive policies? Although the need for workers during times of economic expansion and boom had been a critical factor behind the retention of migration and nationality rights (that not only permitted the entry of colonial and postcolonial ethnic minorities but at times extended to active labour recruitment initiatives overseas), the economic downturn in the 1970s was not the driving force that instigated demands for change. First and foremost, it was native concerns about racial and cultural difference, social cohesiveness, and migrants’ supposed lack of assimilation—​if not categoric inassimilability—​that led to

610   Elizabeth Buettner increasingly vocal demands that the presence of minorities be limited, if not rolled back via repatriation.29 Regardless of the imperial history that lay behind their presence in late colonial and postcolonial Europe, many Europeans could not be persuaded that colonized or formerly colonized ethnic minorities had a legitimate claim to belong. Minorities typically seemed not only distinct from European society but also culturally (and economically) beneath the mainstream. Some migrants lived in isolation from the metropolitan majority, like the Algerians in bidonvilles (shantytowns) built up around cities like Paris and Lyon that could offer newcomers low-​level jobs but little in the way of decent housing. As was also the case with West Indians and South Asians inhabiting dilapidated buildings in working-​class British neighbourhoods, they became publicly associated with urban decay, overcrowding, squalor, crime, and disease. When migrants competed with working-​class British and French for scarce housing, they were condemned for ‘invading’ poor areas, accelerating their downward spiral, and turning them into overwhelmingly ‘coloured’, ‘black’, ‘Asian’, or ‘Arab’ slums.30 Along with suffering intense housing and workplace discrimination, colonial and postcolonial migrants (many of whom were initially young men) allegedly posed a sexual threat. Mixed-​race relationships were widely stigmatized, becoming emblematic of how ‘coloured’ men had audaciously breached boundaries, crossing Europe’s borders and entering nations, neighbourhoods, homes, and white women’s bodies.31 Algerian men encountered by Abdelmalek Sayad, a leading sociologist, explained that ‘the worst racism is the racism of the dance hall’. But ‘[e]‌ven at work, you can’t be anything but a labourer; . . . They’ve never seen a Kabyle foreman, an Algerian or an Arab boss . . . our place is in the immigrant jobs, as they put it, all the filthy jobs where you lose your health and perhaps even your life’; in short, to the French, ‘there’s always a frontier, you’re not the same as them’.32 This regularly placed migrants’ self-​perceptions at odds with views encountered in Europe, as the experiences of educated West Indians in 1950s and 1960s Britain demonstrate. Raised in colonial societies as native speakers of English where schools continually stressed that Britain was their ‘mother country’, life in England often shattered illusions of belonging. As a student from Trinidad put it, West Indians might ‘feel that they know the English. They expect a certain reciprocity which in the majority of cases is non-​existent. This is their first realization that they are different. Soon they are complimented on the standard of their English. Very good for a foreigner!’33 Social anthropologist Sheila Patterson concluded from her research in the 1960s that entrenched beliefs in their role as ‘civilizers’ made the British ‘uneasy living with immigrants of races they are unused to treating as equals’, writing of the ‘considerable confusion and insecurity among all classes in Britain as the erosion of imperial power and national prestige continues’. Although it had become ‘necessary to adopt new attitudes and to form new relationships with other nations and with former colonial dependants’, many seemed unwilling to do so, perhaps accounting for the seemingly wilful levels of ignorance and disdain accorded to migrants’ alleged primitiveness, inferiority, and distance from British culture so often encountered.34 A French researcher writing in 1973

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    611 felt similarly, emphasizing that ‘the French only accept foreign cultures with an air of paternalism at best’, especially if non-​European. ‘Not living “like us”, “those people” can only be uncivilized, “savage” at worst (Maghrebis, Africans), since we alone are the carriers of civilization.’ In her view, ‘colonial propaganda remains present’ past the end of empire, the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ having become transferred onto metropolitan soil.35 Time and again, European self-​distancing from (post)colonial migrants and recurrent refusals to accept their legitimacy as citizens, co-​workers (let  alone bosses), neighbours, or spouses coexisted with portrayals of these groups as outsiders who created social problems. Although migrants’ supposed lack of integration or inassimilability was often deployed as an excuse for condemning them, exclusionary agendas typically underpinned Europeans’ insistence on distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘them’. If Britain and France ultimately retreated from earlier conceptions of citizenship of late-​imperial vintage that had extended overseas and across racial divides during the 1960s and 1970s, in Belgium colonial peoples were never included to begin with. Before the Congo’s independence, Belgium had sought to maintain white superiority in Central Africa and avoid métissage (racial mixing) at home by preventing all but a handful of Africans from taking advantage of educational or work opportunities in Europe. Nor were Africans recruited as labourers after 1945. Africans might count as Belgian subjects, but they were never turned into citizens with the right to settle in the metropole. After decolonization, the numbers of Congolese remained very low in Belgium, only rising slowly as political and economic conditions in Africa deteriorated in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, people of Congolese origin form a small fraction of Belgium’s foreign-​born or foreign-​descended population, the largest groups being from Moroccan, Turkish, Italian, and other southern European backgrounds, most of whom came as industrial workers.36 Many live on the margins of society and often the law, having arrived illegally or stayed after student visas expired, with the categories of student, illegal migrant worker, and asylum seeker becoming porous and overlapping. Approaches to ethnic minorities of imperial origins in the Netherlands and Portugal reveal both similarities to and differences from these three cases. Migration rights and citizenship affirmed by the 1954 Charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands led to expanding numbers of educated and then predominantly working-​class peoples travelling across the Atlantic, mainly from Suriname but later from the Antillean islands.37 This did not occur thanks to official efforts to recruit workers in prosperous times of full employment; rather, most Surinamese came of their own initiative. Similar to the Belgian example, Dutch employers and the state often preferred ‘guest workers’ from the Mediterranean basin—​southern Europeans, but especially Turks and Moroccans—​precisely because they lacked the protective privileges of citizenship and could be readily dismissed if their labour was no longer needed. But economic stagnation and limited prospects in the Dutch Caribbean region made migration to the ‘mother country’ as appealing as it was to other West Indians who headed for Britain from its colonies and Commonwealth or to metropolitan France from French overseas departments.

612   Elizabeth Buettner Ultimately, the escalation of Europe-​bound migration from Suriname became one of the most important determinants of its decolonization in 1975. As the numbers of Afro-​and Indo-​Surinamese settling in Dutch cities became heavily working class, they bore less resemblance than the educated classes to the European Dutch in terms of language and culture. Like ethnic minorities in Britain and France, the Surinamese—​and the Afro-​Surinamese above all—​became conventionally construed as a social problem by politicians, in the media, and in the public imagination. Stereotypes widely associated them with petty criminality, hustling, drugs, pimping and prostitution, and single-​ parent families who allegedly abused Dutch welfare benefits. Anxiety about the social and cultural consequences of Surinamese settlement in the 1960s and early 1970s made many white Dutch eager to reconsider the inclusive stipulations of the 1954 Charter. Concerned about the ‘mass exodus’ to their shores, Dutch officials and the public looked to decolonization as the solution to a perceived migration dilemma, regardless of mixed views in Suriname about whether or not the territory should remain part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.38 Suriname’s independence—​partly forced upon it—​did not, however, curb mass migration, as many white Dutch had hoped it would. Like Indians and Pakistanis who hastened to Britain to ‘beat the ban’ on Commonwealth arrivals in the early 1960s, Surinamese journeys skyrocketed as it became clear that independence would herald the end of unrestricted Dutch citizenship and settlement rights. In little over a decade, more than a third of Suriname’s population of less than 400,000 left, with 50,000 going to the Netherlands in 1974 and 1975 alone and an additional 30,000 arriving in 1980 as the five-​year transitional agreement was about to expire. Those who made the journey maintained Dutch citizenship, while those who remained behind lost the rights they held under the Charter and became Surinamese—​unless, that is, they counted among the new nation’s small white population, whose hold on Dutch nationality remained largely intact.39 So did that of residents of the Netherlands Antilles who subsequently insisted on remaining part of the Kingdom, preferring to keep a status akin to that of Martinique and Guadeloupe vis-​à-​vis France rather than follow Suriname into an uncertain independence. Dutch efforts to halt colonial, postcolonial, and intra-​national migration flows from the West Indies thus largely backfired. In the case of Suriname, this was an ironic consequence of new policies that helped turn previously cyclical and impermanent stays into permanent residence and thereby consolidate settled communities. Migrants who had already come to the Netherlands knew that if they went back to their families their chances of being able to return were low, and this made them more likely to arrange for relatives to join them instead—​a development replicated across postcolonial Europe. As women and children became increasingly significant members of multigenerational minority groups, new questions arose concerning the adaptability of cultures and identities after migration—​both of the migrants themselves, their European-​born or European-​raised descendants, and the European nations of which they became part. This chapter returns to this topic in its conclusion after first comparing Portugal’s transition into a postcolonial, multicultural society with that of its neighbours.

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    613 In contrast to the Netherlands which pressured Suriname (if not its Antillean islands) towards independence, Portugal’s long-​tenacious hold on its ‘overseas provinces’ was only severed once colonial wars brought down a dictatorship wedded to the conception of Portugal as a nation that spanned continents and encompassed many races. As the poorest and least developed country in Western Europe, Portugal had a strong tradition of emigration rather than immigration. Over a tenth of its population left in the 1960s and 1970s, with the jobs available in booming countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands proving as economically attractive to impoverished Portuguese as they were to Moroccans, Turks, and other groups.40 Mass departures along with the need for Portuguese soldiers to fight African insurgencies nonetheless created an unaccustomed labour shortage that was filled by arrivals from the Cape Verde islands and other Portuguese-​speaking Africans, who did similar jobs in the construction industry and other sectors as the Portuguese themselves took at higher wages abroad.41 While Portuguese emigrants were foreigners in France and other countries, newcomers from Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique had counted as Portuguese citizens since 1961. Their circumstances changed rapidly after the 1974 revolution, however: decolonization in Africa immediately prompted a new nationality law in 1975 that restricted citizenship to persons of Portuguese ancestry. This affirmed retornados’ Portugueseness while withdrawing it from most Africans and Cape Verdeans, regardless of whether they lived in Portugal or in a former colony.42 No longer an empire that called itself a pluricontinental nation, Portugal also implicitly ceased to be an assertively multiracial one. Although race was not specified as a criterion for inclusion or exclusion, the emphasis on descent made it so to all intents and purposes. This made Portugal similar to the Netherlands when it left Dutch nationality open to Europeans in Suriname but not the Afro-​or Indo-​Surinamese majority, as well as to Britain, where immigration legislation enacted in 1968 and 1971 reworked eligibility around ‘patriality’—​British birth or ancestry.43 The link between race and nationality that recurred in popular understandings that positioned non-​whites as outsiders who did not rightfully belong in Europe took new legal form, whether upon decolonization in the Netherlands and Portugal or in the aftermath of empire in Britain and France.44 Yet in spite of Portugal’s restrictions enacted in 1975 that were subsequently reinforced by further legislation, far more minorities from its former colonies arrived in the 1980s and 1990s than before, a scenario similar to the growing Francophone African presence in France and Belgium during and after the same period. The state enforced its migration policies inconsistently in ways that favoured the construction industry and other economic sectors, where employers looked to low-​paid and often illegally resident workers from Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique as Portugal embarked on consolidating itself as a democracy and developing its backward infrastructure.45 Describing the Africans who lost French citizenship after decolonization, Frederick Cooper stresses that ‘the definition of the “immigrant” in France . . . is not a given, but a product of history.’ Africans ‘had become immigrants’, experiencing a withdrawal of status and rights also suffered by postcolonial Africans, Asians, and West Indians elsewhere that did not extend to groups like the pieds-​noirs, retornados, and others

614   Elizabeth Buettner accorded the privileges of ‘repatriates’.46 By contrast, the Europeanness of the European-​ descended—​especially of those who were white, not mixed-​race—​was rarely called into question, even for those born in former colonies whose first trips ‘home’ may only have occurred when empires receded. Some repatriates and their children, moreover, not only benefitted from their inclusion as nationals but also actively sought to deny the same status to ‘Arabs’ or other groups descended from formerly colonized as opposed to formerly colonizing peoples. The noticeable pied-​noir presence within the far right, anti-​immigration Front National in France provides only the most visible example of the political form that repatriates’ self-​distancing from the immigrant ‘other’ took.47 This phenomenon was also discernible in countries like the Netherlands where, several decades after their arrival, the Indisch Dutch were favourably compared—​by wider society and by themselves—​to other migrant groups as far better integrated.48 Significantly, those accused of falling furthest short were not the Afro-​Surinamese, Indo-​Surinamese, or Antilleans with Dutch colonial antecedents, but Moroccans, Turks, and their children—​peoples who arrived mainly as labourers from places not only disconnected from the Netherlands’ history of empire, but whose outsider status was also closely tied to being Muslim.49

Conclusion Decades after becoming transformed by unprecedented levels of late colonial and postcolonial migration, early twenty-​first-century Western Europe’s population and cultures are characterized by what Steven Vertovec calls ‘super-​diversity’.50 While migration from colonies into the specific metropoles that had governed them accounted for much of Europe’s cultural and ethnic mix, it coexisted with other global and intra-​European flows, like those that took Moroccans not only to France (which once held Morocco as its protectorate) but also to the Netherlands and Belgium, the postcolonial Congolese not just to Belgium but to France, and the Portuguese to France and Germany. These provide only several of countless examples of human mobility and resettlements—​some temporary, some permanent—​occurring since European empires declined, collapsed, and Europe’s own integration process gathered pace. Many Western European cities, neighbourhoods, and nations are now strikingly cosmopolitan and multicultural in ways once unimaginable for most people. Over time, many people from mainstream white society have not only developed a greater acceptance of diversity but responded enthusiastically to some of its most publicly prominent cultural manifestations. European youth cultures, popular music, and diets have changed radically over the past fifty years, having made space for South Asian ‘curry’ in Britain, Indonesian dishes in the Netherlands, and musical fusions involving reggae, raï, bhangra, rap, hip hop, and other influences performed and circulated across postcolonial Europe by minorities who trace their origins to the West Indies, South Asia, North, West and Central Africa, and beyond.

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    615 If postcolonial and other migrations and their ongoing cultural resonances have remade many European countries, however, not all Europeans have accepted these transformations or view the people most closely associated with them as fully or unconditionally European. Alongside aging newcomers who have settled since the 1940s are their second-​, third-​, and at times fourth-​generation descendants, European-​born and almost always qualifying as citizens. Rather than being recognized as British, French, Belgian, Dutch, or Portuguese, ethnic minority migrants’ children might still be ‘second-​generation immigrants’—​a non-​sequitur and a literal impossibility to be sure, yet a formulation that aptly conveys still-​prevalent understandings that consign them to a status as permanent outsiders who either never can fully belong or never should. As Ahmed Boubeker has written of contemporary France, ‘[t]‌he foreigner is no longer one who comes from elsewhere, but rather one who is permanently reproduced within the social body. . . . Like a social or ethnic partition of the hexagon [France], there is a radical rupture between recognized citizens and second-​class ones.’51 Many minorities in other countries would find this view depressingly familiar. Together with multicultural European realities and the spread of what Paul Gilroy describes as ‘convivial’ multiculturalism, rejection of and backlashes against diversity and multiculturalism remain recurrent.52 Some postcolonial identities are now widely considered unproblematic, like the ‘harmless identities’ of today’s Indisch Dutch and their descendants whose integration in the Netherlands has long been celebrated as a success story.53 Yet minorities continue to experience racism alongside social and cultural exclusion, with discrimination and hostility often (but never invariably) becoming predicated on cultural difference rather than colour.54 Among the forms of ethnic cultural specificity that remain most worrying today are those of religion, and none more so than Islam.55 Since the international ascent of Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism since the 1970s but already apparent earlier, Muslims—​whether they hail from within a given nation’s former empire (like France’s Algerian-​and Moroccan-​descended populations or Britain’s Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi communities), or from outside it (as is the case with peoples of Turkish or Moroccan backgrounds in Belgium and the Netherlands)—​have become subjected to the most fear and intolerance by far. Muslims’ contentious place within postcolonial European nations attests to the ongoing divisions drawn not just between Europeans and ‘others’ but among minorities themselves, peoples whose origins and whose re-​forged identities after migration defy summary description.56

Notes 1. Topics discussed throughout this chapter receive further treatment in Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Chs. 6–​8. 2. Bouda Etemad, “Europe and Migration after Decolonization”, Journal of European Economic History 27, no. 3 (1998): 457–​470.

616   Elizabeth Buettner 3. Comparative treatments of European (and European-​descended) repatriations include Jean-​Louis Miège and Colette Dubois, eds., L’Europe retrouvée:  les migrations de la décolonisation (Paris:  Harmattan, 1994); Andrea L. Smith, ed., Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2003); Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century:  Projects, Practices, Legacies (New  York:  Routledge, 2005), Part III; Buettner, Europe after Empire, Ch. 6. 4. Ceri Peach, “Postwar Migration to Europe:  Reflux, Influx, Refuge”, Social Science Quarterly 78, no. 2 (1997): 271–​273; Michael Twaddle’s contribution to Miège and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée,  45–​46. 5. Elizabeth Buettner, “ ‘We Don’t Grow Coffee and Bananas in Clapham Junction You Know!’:  Imperial Britons Back Home”, in Robert Bickers, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 302–​328. 6. Pierre Salmon’s contribution to Miège and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, 191–​212; Guy Vanthemsche, La Belgique et le Congo: L’impact de la colonie sur la métropole, new and rev. ed. (Brussels: Le Cri Éditions, 2010), 318, 260–​261; Catherine Hoskyns, The Congo Since Independence:  January 1960-​December 1961 (London:  Oxford University Press, 1965), 89–​104, 122–​124; Pedro Monaville, “La crise congolaise de juillet 1960 et le sexe de la décolonisation”, Sextant 25 (2008): 87–​102. 7. Colette Dubois’ contribution to Miège and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, 92; Jean-​Jacques Jordi and William B. Cohen’s chapters in Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 61–​74 and 129–​145; Jean-​Jacques Jordi, De l’exode à l’exil: Rapatriés et pieds-​noirs en France: L’exemple marseillais, 1954–​1992 (Paris: Harmattan, 1993); Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Persee, 1991). 8. R. Pena Pires et al., Os Retornados: Um Estudo Sociográfico (Lisbon: Instituto de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento, 1984). In English, see especially Stephen C. Lubkemann, “The Moral Economy of Portuguese Postcolonial Return”, Diaspora 11, no. 2 (2002): 189–​213, and Lubkemann’s contributions to Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 75–​93, and Elkins and Pedersen, Settler Colonialism, 257–​270. 9. Gert Oostindie, Postcolonial Netherlands: Sixty-​Five Years of Forgetting, Commemorating, Silencing (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2011), Chs. 3 and 4; Herman Obdeijn’s chapter in Miège and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, 70. 10. John Schuster, “The State and Post-​ War Immigration into the Netherlands:  The Racialization and Assimilation of Indonesian Dutch”, European Journal of Intercultural Studies 3, no. 1 (1992): 47–​58; Guno Jones, “Dutch Politicians, the Dutch Nation and the Dynamics of Post-​Colonial Citizenship”, in Ulbe Bosma, ed., Post-​colonial Immigrants and Identity Formations in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012),  36–​38. 11. Wim Willems’ contribution to Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 33–​59; Wim Willems, De Uittocht uit Indië:  1945–​1995 (Amsterdam:  B. Bakker, 2001); Ulbe Bosma, Terug uit de koloniën:  Zestig jaar postkoloniale migranten en hun organisaties (Amsterdam:  B. Bakker, 2009). 12. Lizzy van Leeuwen, Ons Indisch erfgoed:  Zestig jaar strijd om cultuur en identiteit (Amsterdam:  B. Bakker, 2008); Andrew Goss, “From Tong-​Tong to Tempo Doeloe: Eurasian Memory Work and the Bracketing of Dutch Colonial History, 1957–​1961”, Indonesia 70 (2000): 15–​22. 13. J. Ex, Adjustment After Migration (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 42, 53.

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    617 14. Andrea L. Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006); Stora, La gangrène; Joëlle Hureau, La mémoire des pieds-​noirs (Paris: Hachette, 2001). 15. Ester Lee, I Was Born in Africa (Atlanta, GA: Minerva, 1999), 75. 16. Sarah De Mul, “Nostalgia for Empire: ‘Tempo Doeloe’ in Contemporary Dutch Literature”, Memory Studies 3, no.  4 (2010):  423–​428; Paul Bijl, “Dutch Colonial Nostalgia Across Decolonisation”, Journal of Dutch Literature 4, no.  1 (2013):  128–​149. On Britain, see Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families:  Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), conclusion; Elizabeth Buettner, “Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India”, History & Memory 18, no. 1 (2006): 5–​42; Buettner, “ ‘We Don’t Grow Coffee’ ”. For a comparative overview of memories of empire in postcolonial Europe, see Buettner, Europe after Empire, Ch. 9. 17. Jan Hollants van Loocke, De la colonie à la diplomatie:  une carrière en toutes latitudes (Paris: Harmattan, 1999), 57–​58. 18. Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain:  Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1997), Chs. 5–​ 7; Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-​war Britain:  The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ch. 2. 19. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization:  The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2006), 39–​ 43; Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–​1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chs. 2–​3; Janine Ponty, L’immigration dans les textes: France, 1789–​2002 (Paris: Belin, 2003), Chs. 6–​7. 20. Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean:  Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), Ch. 5. 21. Donald Wood, “A General Survey”, in J. A. G. Griffith and H. H. Long, eds., Coloured Immigrants in Britain (London:  Oxford University Press, 1960), 9.  On Britain’s Commonwealth migration, see Wendy Webster, “The Empire Comes Home: Commonwealth Migration to Britain”, in Andrew Thompson, ed., Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122–​160. 22. Ceri Peach, “Demographics of BrAsian Settlement, 1951–​2001”, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra, and S. Sayyid, eds., A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006), 168–​181. 23. Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–​62 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient d’Algérie:  L’immigration algérienne en France, 1912–​1992 (Paris: Feyard, 1992). 24. Cooper, Citizenship, 415, 423–​429. 25. Ponty, L’immigration, 363–​364. 26. Claude-​ Valentin Marie, “Les Antillais en France:  une nouvelle donne”, Hommes et Migrations 1237 (2002): 26–​27. 27. Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers:  L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration 1938–​1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 69–​87; Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992), 46–​53; Alec G. Hargreaves, Multi-​Ethnic France:  Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), Ch. 5. 28. Dominic Thomas, Black France:  Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2007), 26.

618   Elizabeth Buettner 29. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 77; Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). 30. Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France:  Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington, IN:  University of Indiana Press, 2004), Ch. 3; Tyler Stovall, “From Red Belt to Black Belt: Race, Class, and Urban Marginality in Twentieth-​Century Paris”, in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty:  Histories of Race in France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 351–​369; Marie-​Claude Blanc-​Chaléard’s chapter in Benjamin Stora and Émile Temime, Immigrances: L’immigration en France au XXe siècle (Paris:  Hachette, 2007), 67–​96; Jim House and Andrew Thompson, “Decolonisation, Space and Power: Immigration, Welfare and Housing in Britain and France, 1945–​74”, in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013); Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–​1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Ch. 6; James Proctor, Dwelling Places:  Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2003), Ch. 2; Elizabeth Buettner, “ ‘This is Staffordshire not Alabama’: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth Immigration in Early 1960s Britain”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 4 (2014): 710–​740. 31. Webster, Englishness and Empire, Ch. 6; Elizabeth Buettner, “ ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?’: Race and Sex in 1950s Britain”, in Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel, eds., Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 219–​237. 32. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48–​49. 33. Elliott Bastien, “The Weary Road to Whiteness and the Hasty Retreat into Nationalism”, in Henri Tajfel and John L. Dawson, eds., Disappointed Guests: Essays by African, Asian, and West Indian Students (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 48. 34. Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Study of West Indians in London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 210–​211. 35. Juliette Minces, Les travailleurs étrangers en France: enquête (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 407. 36. Anne Cornet, “Les Congolais en Belgique aux XIXe et XXe siècles”, in Anne Morelli, ed., Histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration en Belgique de la préhistoire à nos jours (Brussels: Charleroi, 2004), 377–​386; Mayoyo Bitumba Tipo-​Tipo, Migration Sud/​Nord:  Levier ou Obstacle? Les Zaïrois en Belgique (Brussels:  Institut Africain-​CEDAF, 1995), 89–​98; Vanthemsche, La Belgique et le Congo, 94–​96, 319–​320. 37. Overviews include Herman Obdeijn and Marlou Schrover, Komen en gaan: Immigratie en emigratie in Nederland vanaf 1550 (Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 2008), Ch. 6; Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen, Winnaars en verliezers: Een nuchtere balans van vijfhonderd jaar immigratie (Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 2011); Hans van Amersfoort and Mies van Niekerk, “Immigration as a Colonial Inheritance:  Post-​Colonial Immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–​2002”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32, no. 3 (2006): 323–​346; Bosma, Post-​colonial Immigrants. 38. Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 103, 177–​200. 39. Ricky van Oers, Betty de Hart, and Kees Groenendijk, “The Netherlands”, in Rainer Bauböck, Eva Ersbøll, Kees Groenendijk, and Harald Waldrauch, eds., Acquisition and Loss of Nationality: Policies and Trends in 15 European Countries, Vol. 2: Country Analyses (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 401–​402.

Postcolonial Migrations to Europe    619 40. Caroline B. Brettell, “The Emigrant, the Nation, and the State in Nineteenth-​and Twentieth-​ Century Portugal:  An Anthropological Approach”, Portuguese Studies Review 2, no. 2 (1993): 51–​65. 41. Luís Batalha, The Cape Verdean Diaspora in Portugal: Colonial Subjects in a Postcolonial World (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004). 42. Rui Manuel Moura Ramos, “Migratory Movements and Nationality Law in Portugal”, in Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Towards a European Nationality: Citizenship, Immigration and Nationality Law in the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 217. 43. Ann Dummett, “Britain”, in Bauböck et  al., Acquisition and Loss of Nationality, Vol. 2, 561–​568. 44. Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’:  The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Chris Waters, “ ‘Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–​1963”, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 207–​238. 45. Ana Paula Beja Horta, Contested Citizenship: Immigration Politics and Grassroots Migrants’ Organizations in Post-​colonial Portugal (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2004); Martin Eaton, “Foreign Residents and Illegal Immigrants in Portugal”, International Journal of Intercultural Research 22, no. 1 (1998): 49–​66. 46. Cooper, Citizenship, 445, 442. 47. Emmanuelle Comtat, Les pieds-​ noirs et la politique:  Quarante ans après le retour (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009), Ch. 5; John Veugelers, “Ex-​Colonials, Voluntary Associations, and Electoral Support for the Contemporary Far Right”, Comparative European Politics 3 (2005): 408–​431. 48. Van Leeuwen, Ons Indisch erfgoed, 149–​150. It has been suggested that far-​right Dutch politician Geert Wilders is partly descended from Indonesian Dutch Jews. See Lizzy van Leeuwen, “Wreker van zijn Indische grootouders: De politieke roots van Geert Wilders”, De Groene Amsterdammer 36, 2 September 2009. 49. Oostindie, Postcolonial Netherlands, 15–​16, 43–​47; Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx, eds., Immigrant Integration:  The Dutch Case (Amsterdam:  Het Spinhuis, 2000); Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen, “The Strange Death of Dutch Tolerance:  The Timing and Nature of the Pessimist Turn in the Dutch Migration Debate”, Journal of Modern History 87, no. 1 (2015): 72–​101. 50. Steven Vertovec, “Super-​diversity and Its Implications”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6 (2007): 1024–​1054. 51. Ahmed Boubeker, “Le ‘creuset français’, ou la légende noire de l’intégration”, in Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2005), 188–​189. 52. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004); Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf, eds., The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London: Routledge, 2010); Elizabeth Buettner, “ ‘Going for an Indian’: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain”, Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 865–​901. 53. Esther Captain, “Harmless Identities:  Representations of Racial Consciousness among Three Generations [of] Indo-​ Europeans”, Thamyris/​Intersecting 27 (2014):  60; Van Leeuwen, Ons Indisch erfgoed.

620   Elizabeth Buettner 54. Étienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-​Racism’?”, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 21. 55. Thomas Deltombe, L’islam imaginaire:  La construction médiatique de l’islamophobie en France, 1975–​2005 (Paris:  Éditions La Découverte, 2005); Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Ralph Grillo, “British and Others: From ‘Race’ to ‘Faith’ ”, in Vertovec and Wessendorf, eds., Multiculturalism Backlash,  50–​7 1. 56. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities”, in David Morley and Kuan-​Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 442–​451.

Chapter 32

Beyond Depe nde nc y North–South Relationships in the Age of Development Joseph MORGAN Hodge

Development1 became arguably the most dominant concept shaping and guiding North–South relationships in the twentieth century, first between colonial states and their subject peoples, and later, among nation-​states within the postwar framework of intergovernmental organizations and agencies. In its name, teams of scientific specialists, aid providers, and development practitioners descended upon what would come to be known as the ‘third world’ with the promise of finding a solution to hunger, disease and poverty. States, both colonial and post-​colonial, would utilize the knowledge and practices generated by the development ‘apparatus’ to expand their power and bureaucratic grip over subjects (later citizens) and local communities.2 But as Frederick Cooper reminds us, development also captured ‘the hopes and ambitions of [the third world’s] leaders, its educated populations, and many of its farmers and workers in the post-​war period . . . to have clean water, decent schools and health facilities; to produce larger harvests and more manufactured goods; to have access to the consumer goods which people elsewhere consider a normal part of life’.3 This chapter examines the history of development as a state project in late colonial and post-​colonial Africa. Although the idea of development as an intentional set of practices extends back to at least the eighteenth century, it was not until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that it became enshrined as official doctrine of the leading European colonial powers. It would take the crisis of the Great Depression before the European powers were prepared to provide metropolitan funding, administrative services, and specialist personnel on a significant and extended scale. The Second World War would challenge, but also reinforce and accelerate, the new commitment to revitalizing empire in Africa. Although decolonization would bring the late-​colonial development project to a premature demise, the developmentalist state survived and held legitimacy until the world economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. The period between the 1930s and

622   Joseph MORGAN Hodge 1970s, then, constitutes the modern ‘age of development’; a distinct historical epoch when state-​directed and managed plans for the economic and social advancement of humanity were shared widely among colonial, national, and international organizations and states.

Origins of Colonial Developmentalism Although it may appear ubiquitous to us today, development as an intentional practice or intervention is a spectacle of relatively recent origins. Although often used interchangeably, the notion of intentional, state-​led development should be distinguished from an idea of development as an intransitive, self-​evolving process of change.4 The concept of material progress ‘towards opulence and improvement’, as Adam Smith put it,5 became accepted widely throughout Western Europe by the eighteenth century. It is only in the mid-​nineteenth century, however, with the spread of ‘modernization’ to the ‘peripheries’ of Europe, and then to other regions transformed by European expansion and settlement, that the term ‘development’ is first used to describe economic activities that must be consciously willed to happen.6 By the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘development’ in this transitive sense had also entered the lexicon of European empire-​builders in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. A good case in point is Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1895–​1903, who campaigned tirelessly for the use of state resources, scientific research, and technical advice to develop what he termed the ‘imperial estates’.7 French statesmen formulated a similar programme for the mise en valuer, or rational development of their colonies’ resources—​a term that can be traced back to the 1880s but which gained prominence in the early twentieth century through the advocacy of officials such as Albert Sarrault, the Minister of Colonies from 1920–​1924, and Jules Carde, the Governor-​General of French West Africa from 1923–​1930.8 Similar initiatives were launched in the early twentieth century by Dutch imperialists in the Netherlands East Indies under the Ethical Policy, and by German authorities as part of an explicit strategy of systematic colonialism in German East Africa.9 The New Imperialism doctrines of the late nineteenth and early twnetieth century are examples of what H.W. Arndt terms ‘development before settlement’10—​that is, the deployment of government programmes and resources to make development happen in places where it is absent. Just as instrumental, if not more so in the long run, is the notion of development as the means by which progress may be ‘ordered’. Development in this sense, according to Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton, emerged in the early nineteenth century as the counterpoint to progress, rather than as its equivalent, as a means by which the state could impose order on the instability and emiseration that accompanied the early industrialization of Western Europe. Embedded in the post-​ Enlightenment sense of development lies the seeds of a trusteeship of humanity: ‘No longer was development that which happened during a period of history. It became the

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     623 means whereby an epoch of the present was to be transformed into another through the active purpose of those who were entrusted with the future of society.’11 The principle of trusteeship would in time provide the primary justification underlying North–South relationships, beginning in 1919 with the Covenant of the League of Nations, which stated that the well-​being and development of the peoples of the former colonies and territories of Germany and the Ottoman Empire ‘should be entrusted to advance nations who by means of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility.’12 In practice, the nature of colonial tutelage in the mandated territories, as they were termed, remained deeply self-​ serving. For example, one of the most influential imperial administrators of the early twentieth century, and Britain’s representative on the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission from 1922 to 1936, Sir Frederick (later Lord) Lugard, argued that Britain and other colonial powers had a ‘dual mandate’ in Africa both to develop the region’s abundant resources on behalf of the industrialized nations, and to ‘exercise a “sacred trust” on behalf of the peoples who inhabit the tropics and who are so pathetically dependent on their guidance.’13 Nevertheless, the increasing scrutiny of the League in the 1920s meant that trusteeship, however defined, had to be taken into account by European colonial powers such as Britain and France.14 Under pressure from the League as well as national and international humanitarian groups, British colonial administrators in the 1920s ‘discovered’ what may be termed the ‘human side’ of development, which led to rudimentary state services for education and public health.15 The 1920s also saw French colonial administrators shifting their gaze towards Africa’s human resources as a way of unlocking the continent’s potential wealth. Strategic investments in public health and vocational education, it was argued, would improve the efficiency and productivity of ‘native producers’ and in turn expand the empire’s human power.16 In truth, both the dual mandate and mise en valeur looked better on paper than in practice. The prevailing doctrine of colonial financial self-​sufficiency meant that any proposed development initiatives had to be paid for primarily from each colony’s own revenue sources. What little funding was made available went towards building railways, irrigation works, and other forms of basic infrastructure that facilitated the extraction of the continent’s natural resources, rather than long-​term investments in the well-​being and social advancement of its people.

The Late Colonial Developmentalist State, 1930s–​1960s The modern ‘age of development’ has its beginning in the crisis of the Great Depression. It was at this moment that the two strands in the history of development as a state project came together: the New Imperialist doctrines which informed earlier ventures in

624   Joseph MORGAN Hodge colonial development were not so much replaced as overlaid with newfound concerns for the effective utilization and welfare of human resources in Africa and other colonial regions. Following Christophe Bonneuil’s periodization, I see the half-​century following the onset of the Great Depression as constituting a world historical epoch during which development and welfare policy became ‘a keystone in the construction of the state itself.’ As Bonneuil relates: ‘One can locate the birth of the developmentalist state in tropical Africa in the 1930s, when colonial governments confronted disorders and the threats of the Great Depression, adopted a more digiriste agenda, intervened more directly in the economy, and took steps towards planning and state regulation. Major welfare and development policies also emerged in the 1930s and were key milestones in state building in Africa.’17 The global crisis of the early 1930s dealt a devastating blow to many colonies, which led to significant losses in earnings from exports, higher prices for imported goods, widespread unemployment, and a sharp drop in income and livelihood for both commodity producers and wage earners.18 Across British and French colonial Africa, massive labour unrest and strike action ensued between 1935 and 1950 targeting strategic sites such as ports, mines, railways, and commercial centres.19 Rural areas were also affected. Commercial farmers in West Africa, for example, organized ‘cocoa hold ups’ in the 1930s, while new conservation measures in Eastern and Southern Africa designed to prevent soil erosion were met with scepticism, evasion, and even sabotage.20 The Second World War generated new pressures on the colonial state to mobilize Africans for military service and to intensify economic production for the war effort. Forced labour was used extensively by both the British and French to meet the heightened strains of war, while consumption was reduced drastically by restricting imports and raising taxes. Severe hardships and food shortages gripped many areas of colonial Africa. Another wave of strikes and riots spread across the continent in the war’s wake: in the gold mines of South Africa in 1946, in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam in 1947, and in Accra and Southern Rhodesia in 1948. In Francophone Africa, strikes occurred in Senegal in 1945, and the entire railway system of French West Africa stopped operation in 1947–​1948. All across Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, as Fred Cooper puts it, ‘colonial rule choked on the narrowness of the pathways it had created . . . [as] colonial regimes discovered that Africans would not stay in the limited roles assigned to them.’21 The first response of the British government to the world depression was the passage of the Colonial Development Act of 1929. The 1929 Act continued to cast policy in a Chamberlainite mould, viewing ‘development’ as something intended for the benefit mainly of the metropolitan economy by providing up to £1 million per year in Treasury grants and loans to aid schemes such as the Zambesi Bridge project in Nyasaland and a deep-​water harbour at Port of Spain, Trinidad. Most projects were modest in scale: secondary roads, housing, water and electrical utilities, hospitals, and health clinics.22 The French government introduced similar neo-​mercantilist measures and came to regard its empire as a place of secured markets and exclusive supplies of raw materials for French industries.23 The need for public funding to finance major construction projects, especially transportation, was recognized. The beginnings of a new departure in

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     625 French colonial policy, aimed at accelerating the economic integration of the empire, is apparent in the passage of the Colonial Loan Acts in 1931 and the rise in government expenditure for the plans d’équipement.24 The most high-​profile project to benefit from the shift in policy was the Office du Niger, an irrigated farming and settlement scheme in French West Africa initiated in the mid-​1920s, but expanded considerably in the 1930s with assistance from the colonial loans programme.25 In London, officials and advisers were moving decidedly away from the Chamberlainite ‘imperial estates’ doctrine towards a more expansive definition of development; one aimed at the amelioration of colonial conditions through the investment of greater financial resources and the inclusion of social welfare services. In 1940, Britain enacted the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which provided £5  million per year for ten years for development and welfare projects. The amount increased substantially in 1945, and then again in 1950. Up to £17.5 million was made available each year for ten years, with up to £1 million per year earmarked for research.26 In the years immediately following the war, the French created similar funding mechanisms: the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Économique et Social (FIDES) in 1946, and the Fonds d’Équipement Rural pour le Développement Économique et Social (FERDES) in 1949.27 Between 1940 and 1958, Jacques Marseille estimates public sector funding outpaced private investment in the French empire by a ratio of 5 to 1.28 For the first time, then, the idea of providing metropolitan funds and resources to undertake programmes of social and economic development in Africa was accepted by the leading European imperial powers. Such funds, moreover, were not only for economic purposes, but also for investments in housing, water, schools, health services, and other social improvements.29 With these policies, British and French officials aimed not only to hold on to the colonial state, but to reinvigorate it. There was a great expansion of state planning and administrative services in the 1940s. Between 1945 and 1952, for example, the British hired over 10,000 new colonial service recruits, most of them in technical areas such as agriculture, engineering, surveying, medicine, education, and forestry.30 Under the framework of the post-​war French Union, the Ministry of Overseas France was now joined by such technical ministries as Finance, Agriculture, and Education, who provided expertise and consultation in their respective areas of service, sometimes through joint committees. At the same time, a specialized entity, the Commission de Modernisation et d’Équipement aux Territoires d’Outre-​Mer, was formed to administer the FIDES, and was housed in the Commissariat Général du Plan rather than in the Ministry for Overseas France.31 And in Dakar, the government set up a planning directorate to examine development proposals prior to sending them on to the federal level.32 Post-​war reconstruction added a new set of imperatives, as European metropolitan governments sought to intensify colonial production in the hopes of meeting essential food and raw material shortages and securing protected markets for home industries and investors. ‘The real attraction of the colonial empires in the era of reconstruction’ according to Nicholas West, ‘lay in the contribution they could make to relieving acute balance of payment deficits, and especially plugging the US dollar gap.’33 Colonial

626   Joseph MORGAN Hodge exports would act as ‘dollar earners’ providing much needed foreign exchange to purchase food and goods for metropolitan reconstruction, while simultaneously serving as ‘dollar savers’ by supplying raw materials and commodities directly to the home market. To aid the process, the British government established two new public corporations: the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC), and the Overseas Food Corporation (OFC), both of which were set up specifically to increase the supply of colonial products for export as quickly as possible. The onset of the Cold War compounded this trend, leading the United States to include the colonies in the European Recovery Programme (ERP) in 1949 on the grounds that stimulating colonial exports would not only aid the economic recovery of their European allies, but also increase the supply of strategically valuable commodities.34 Some 10 billion francs of Marshall Aid spending was funnelled into French West Africa between 1948 and 1952, mostly for the construction of railways, ports, and roads.35 Much of this investment went to infrastructure and large-​scale, capital-​intensive, agricultural development projects. In British colonial Africa, the two most infamous schemes were the East Africa Groundnut Scheme in Tanganyika, and the industrial-​ size poultry farm in the Gambia designed to mass produce eggs. Both schemes were dismal failures.36 For Francophone Africa, it is estimated that over 65% of FIDES credits under the first four-​year plan, and 45% under the second, went to infrastructure, much of it to high-​profile projects such as the Vridi Canal in the Côte d’Ivoire, which transformed Abidjan into the major shipping and financial centre of French West Africa, and the Office du Niger irrigation scheme, which continued to expand after the war.37 Ultimately, the Office du Niger scheme proved disappointing with only 36,000 hectares having been brought under irrigation and approximately 35,000 tenants settled by 1959. Some of its main goals, moreover, such as mechanized deep ploughing and the use of artificial fertilizers, proved too costly and were abandoned.38 The ‘second colonial occupation’—​a phrase used by historians when describing the scale of state intervention associated with colonial development after 194539—​has been most closely tied to Britain and France. It should be underscored, however, that the emergence of the developmentalist state was a common trend occurring across Sub-​Saharan Africa in the late colonial period. Although important differences in terms of periodization and experience exist between the British and French empires on the one hand, and some of the other colonial regimes such as the Belgians and Portuguese on the other, the latter would also, in time, embrace development as a means of retaining their empires. Although the Belgian government never established a metropolitan development fund, the Belgian Congo did provide welfare provisions funded through its own revenues, which expanded dramatically during the post-​war commodity boom.40 The Belgian Congo invested considerably in an African school system, expanding from nearly nothing in 1945 to 70% enrolment of primary school-​age children by 1959. By the late 1950s, the Belgian colonial administration also boasted of having the best health services in the tropics.41 Higher education, on the other hand, was woefully neglected, with only 16 Congolese students having graduated from the colony’s two nascent

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     627 universities by the time of independence in 1960.42 In the field of rural development, the Belgian colonial state began re-​making African agriculture as early as 1936 with the introduction of large-​scale land utilization schemes, known as paysannats.43 Like the Office du Niger, however, the Congolese paysannats turned out to be less than successful in practice as officials seldom took adequate account of the challenging and variable environmental conditions at each site, or farmers’ own livelihood strategies and responses to the schemes.44 Portugal’s late-​colonial experience, as well as the timing of its demise, makes it something of an aberration. At the same time, the colonial policies and practices of the Estado Novo (New State, 1933–​1974) should be placed in the wider context of the history of the developmentalist state in Africa.45 Portugal’s African colonies gained significance under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, and later Marcello Caetano, who insisted that Angola and Mozambique be treated as an integral part of a single, unified Portuguese nation and thus designated administratively as ‘overseas provinces’. Similar to Britain and France, the Salazar regime maintained, as Martin Thomas writes, ‘that its colonial administration was a “scientific occupation”, informed by the rational study of dependent peoples, the maximization of their economic potential, and benevolent, but authoritarian, governance.’46 Portugal was able to sustain its colonial rule partly through the skilful use of ideology. In the 1950s, the Salazar regime appropriated the concept of Lusotropicalism as a ‘useful ideological veneer’, to borrow Jeanne Marie Penvenne’s term, in order to gloss over the continuing exploitation and colonization of its African colonies.47 In a sense they attempted to deflect criticism by arguing that their empire was a post-​racial, post-​imperial community of Lusophone peoples. According to the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who first delineated the idea of Lusotropicalism, the Portuguese had a special aptitude for ‘civilizing’ peoples of the tropical world by blending and assimilating indigenous cultures and values with their own.48 Determined to reinvigorate their colonial mission, the Portuguese began emulating the other colonial powers in the 1950s by introducing a series of ambitious six-​year development plans. The first Plano de Fomento para o Ultramar for 1953–​1958 provided roughly $55 million in funding to Mozambique and $100 million to Angola for investment on roads, ports, railways, and other infrastructure and communication projects. Funding more than doubled under the second plan for 1959–​1964, and investment diversified into health services, secondary and university education, and agricultural development.49 The lion’s share of agricultural investment under the second Overseas Development Plan was devoted to large, high-​profile agricultural and irrigation settlement schemes.50 But what made Portuguese colonial settlement schemes unique, compared to the other European empires, was their preference for white settlers rather than African tenants. These projects were closely tied to the promotion of Portuguese overseas migration to Angola and Mozambique from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The white population living in Angola and Mozambique grew considerably after 1945, increasing from 71,521 in 1940, to 514,000 by 1973.51 However, despite the fact that most of the new settlers came from peasant backgrounds, only a small fraction of the colonos actually

628   Joseph MORGAN Hodge settled on the government-​sponsored farms and ranches. Instead, the vast majority of the white population of Portuguese Africa remained concentrated in urban centres.52 As Cláudia Castelo observes, ‘the migration to Africa corresponded . . . to the wish of leaving the countryside. Few metropolitan peasants wanted to remain peasants in Africa; often they had previously migrated to the cities, within Portugal. Only a tiny minority went to the State sponsored rural settlements (colonatos) in Angola and Mozambique and a significant percentage eventually gave up, settling down in the major cities.’53 Large-​scale land settlement and rural modernization schemes like the ones described were among the greatest miscarriages of colonial developmentalism in Africa. They consumed massive amounts of funding and resources, including technical and administrative staff, while offering up very little in return. The Office du Niger, for example, absorbed more than half of French West Africa’s total agricultural budget in 1961, and yet produced less than 1% of the area’s cotton. Similarly, by the time the groundnut scheme was shut down in 1949, a mere 50,000 of the 3.2 million acres originally planned had been cleared and planted.54 These schemes came to epitomize the failings of the post-​ war colonial development drive, often exacerbating the discontent they had been designed to mitigate. The compulsory regulations, harsh conditions, and often forcible recruitment of settlers provoked deep hostility among African farmers and rural communities, and in turn, precipitated mass anti-​colonial resistance in the 1950s.55 It is important to note that, despite such failures, significant advances occurred in other areas, for example, the establishment of the first universities after the Second World War, and in the expansion of medical facilities, hospitals, and infrastructure. Africans unionized and formed political organizations, which led to greater political liberalization and freedom. The French created a unified Labour Code in 1952 that guaranteed all wage workers in the private sector a forty-​hour work week, paid vacations, and the right to organize. The British introduced local government reforms and later internal self-​government in many of its dependencies. Colonial development opened up new possibilities and spaces for African farmers and urban workers, while anticipations of the future inspired African political leaders to imagine alternatives that, as Cooper observes, ‘were neither continuation of colonialism nor the break-​up of empire into territorial nation states.’56

The Post-​colonial Developmentalist State, 1960s–​1970s Ultimately, however, European colonial rule was predicated on a system of exclusions. It sought to maintain a rigid hierarchical order with clearly demarcated barriers between rulers and ruled. This formal distancing influenced and shaped colonial development and the overall goals it set out to achieve. As I have argued previously, the intention of colonial modernizers was not to fashion an urban-​industrial society modelled on the

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     629 metropole, but rather, an agrarian society with an efficient export production sector and pockets of mining, and with the majority of Africans firmly tied to the land as peasant farmers.57 There were disagreements over how to achieve those objectives and how to cope with the contradictions thrown up along the way. Fissures and competing visions emerged within the metropolitan and colonial state and among governing elites which produced enigmatic policies and contributed to the sense of bureaucratic impasse.58 In the end, it was not the British or French or Belgian rulers who determined the limits of colonial developmentalism, but the diverse groups of Africans whose desires and grievances they tried unsuccessfully to channel. African grievances in response to the late-​colonial development project took many forms. As Cooper writes: ‘The demands were not, at first, focused on taking over the state. But they were focused on what states actually did: on education, on taxation, on investment in social services and productive resources, on judicial systems, and on the question of who was to participate in the making of vital decisions.’59 In effect, colonial subjects turned the promise of development back on the colonizers, viewing development as an entitlement and right, the logic of which would ultimately outstrip the boundaries of colonial rule itself.60 The European powers, in response, found themselves scrambling to guide the economic and social changes taking place as best they could while, at the same time, shoring up informal ties to the metropolitan centre in a way that would allow their commercial and strategic interests to survive the formal ‘transfer of power’. In this imperial endgame, however, control of the state was the highly coveted prize. Decolonization was a negotiated process, and one which made certain visions of independence and territorial autonomy imaginable while others were excluded. The meaning of development stood at the heart of these complex negotiations. For colonial authorities, as Cooper explains, it ‘implied that the possessors of knowledge and capital would slowly but generously disperse these critical resources to those less well endowed. But to African political parties, development meant resources to build constituencies and opportunities to make the nation-​state a meaningful part of people’s lives.’61 Although newly independent regimes rejected unpopular colonial policies such as soil conservation and anti-​erosion measures, they accepted and indeed extended many aspects of colonial development. Notwithstanding the rupture in political authority brought about by the ends of empire, the persistence of state developmentalism well into the 1960s and 1970s is striking. Despite the often-​disastrous consequences of many of the plans and schemes first initiated by colonial rulers, the early post-​independence years witnessed a bold renewal of large, technocratic programmes. The new ruling elites sought to triumph where the old colonial guard had failed, and launched immense mechanization schemes and subsidized the widespread use of artificial fertilizers.62 In hindsight, then, it is the continuities between colonial and post-​colonial development concepts and practices that seem more striking than the breaks and deviations. Drawing comparisons between the late colonial and early post-​colonial eras challenges us to rethink the historical periodization of the development age. The crucial area of hydraulic engineering and water resource management serves as a particularly good example. The case of the Cahora Bassa dam project on the Zambezi River

630   Joseph MORGAN Hodge in Mozambique has been exhaustively studied by Allen and Barbara Isaacman.63 The Cahora Bassa dam was constructed by the Portuguese in the early 1970s during the final years of colonial rule, and at the time of its completion it was the world’s fifth largest dam at a cost of $515 million. Although initially opposed to the dam, the nationalist FRELIMO government switched position once it assumed the reins of state power, championing the scheme as key to the country’s post-​colonial development strategy. By emphasizing the overlap between Mozambique’s colonial and post-​colonial pasts, the Isaacmans underscore what they describe as the ‘persistence of colonialism’s afterlife’, noting that ‘despite their very different economic agendas and ideological orientations, the Portuguese colonial regime, the postindependence socialist state, and its free-​ market successor all heralded the developmental promise of Cahora Bassa. Whether Portuguese or Africans held the reins of state power, the dam symbolized the ability of science and technology to master nature and ensure human progress.’64 Faith in technology and human progress alone does not explain this persistence. Although the Portuguese had intended to use the dam as the catalyst for a vast, regional development programme, in the context of persistent guerilla attacks from FRELIMO forces and the growing economic uncertainty that ensued, security concerns became the regime’s first priority. Out of necessity, Portugal turned to South Africa, which, in exchange for providing the capital to build the dam, was guaranteed 80% of the electricity produced at below-​market prices. These arrangements continued even after independence as the new FRELIMO government granted the Portuguese company, Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa, the right to manage the dam. What is more, security remained a top priority as South African-​backed RENAMO forces launched an aggressive military destabilization campaign against the new socialist state, cutting the dam’s power lines and sabotaging infrastructure. Even today, despite a new agreement in 2007 which gave the Mozambican government an 85% share in the dam, the bulk of the energy is still exported to South Africa, while local peasant farmers are still impoverished and living without electricity. For the local communities and residents of the Zambezi valley, the last fifty years of ‘development’—​whether at the hands of Portuguese colonial authorities or post-​colonial FRELIMO state officials—​appears as an unending tragedy, as a delusion marked by displacement, ecological degradation, and the loss of livelihoods. For them, ‘Cahora Bassa evokes memories of forcible eviction from historical homelands, of concentration in crowded resettlement camps, and of unpredictable discharges of water that destroyed their crops and flooded their fields.’65 Up until now, most scholars have treated development as a Western concept in origin that was imposed on Africa from outside, and which, as in the case of Mozambique, was met by indifference and outright hostility by local communities. But as more research is completed on African perspectives and the role of Africans as actors and agents of development, a more complex picture is emerging. Emma Hunter, for example, has traced how the concept of maendeleo (development) was taken up in the Swahili language and public sphere in Tanzania. Tanzanians held diverse, and even conflicting, viewpoints about maendeleo, which suggests that colonial exclusions of the colonized did not prevent Africans from adopting or challenging the rhetoric of development and from

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     631 evolving concepts and practices of their own in its name.66 Recent studies have probed not just the perspective of nationalist leaders and parties, who saw development as a way of building electoral support, but of everyday African workers and farmers. From the perception of the African workers involved, even development projects typically judged as failures, such as the East Africa Groundnut Scheme, might have had beneficial effects.67 The influx of monetary income may have stimulated the local economy allowing some to accumulate enough savings to invest in trade, transport or farming activities. In other cases, Africans transformed the technologies of colonial development, such as automobiles and roads, into ‘tools’ that could be used to destabilize the constrictions and hierarchical order of colonial rule by, for example, opening up new opportunities for social mobility.68 As these examples of African agency suggest, we should not overstate the durability and permanency of the development concept between the colonial and post-​ colonial era. In some cases, it is the disjunctures, rather than the resonances, that are more salient. In Tanzania, for example, there seemed to be a sharp difference between the assessment of colonial engineers and those of post-​colonial international experts concerning the hydraulic potential of the Rufiji River Basin.69 Colonial engineers conducted in-​depth surveys of the basin’s geography, hydrology, and agricultural systems leading to a cautious and even pessimistic assessment of the prospects for large-​scale irrigation schemes. In contrast, an FAO-​led team commissioned by the late colonial government in the 1950s came to very different conclusions by using aerial surveying methods that allowed them to view the Rufiji from above and at a distance. They proposed an ambitious plan for the building of a large dam at Stiegler’s Gorge to provide irrigation and electricity for the region. Subsequently, the newly independent Tanzanian government under Julius Nyerere embraced FAO’s study, and hired a Norwegian engineering firm to conduct a further feasibility study and to work up plans for the dam in the 1970s. Although Nyerere’s Tanzania African National Union (TANU)-​led government decided against the Stiegler’s Gorge project, this did not mean it had lost faith in the underlying assumptions of FAO’s study of the region’s waterways. The survey left a lasting legacy that influenced both the Tanzanian government and international institutions like the World Bank to focus on large-​scale hydropower projects to supply the country’s energy needs. Much like TANU, Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (UNIP) sought to separate the post-​independence Zambian state from its colonial predecessor by formulating an aspiring, new development vision.70 As Andrew Bowman shows, party leaders believed the Zambian countryside could be developed most rapidly through the mass participation of African small-​scale farmers producing cash-​ crops communally on cooperative farms using ‘hiring pools’ to distribute ploughs and tractors; something they termed ‘cooperative mechanization’. Zambia’s cooperative mechanization programme was also supported by a UN-​FAO team of international experts, this time led by British economist Dudley Seers, who was invited to prepare the country’s first interim development plan. This more ‘humanist’ vision stood in contrast to the ‘technocratic’ policies favoured by the Department of Agriculture (DOA),

632   Joseph MORGAN Hodge which continued to be staffed by former colonial civil servants who believed increased commodity production was more effectively achieved by concentrating resources in state-​capitalist enterprises, while at the same time taking a more gradualist approach to peasant farming. The UN-​FAO plan for cooperative mechanization was adopted, although British expatriate staff remained sceptical and non-​cooperative, which incensed UNIP modernizers, who accused them of ‘colonial espionage’.71 Cooperative mechanization also required massive outlays of capital, technical support, and coordination, which went well beyond the state’s capacity to deliver and which exacerbated rural class divisions. In the end, support for the programme dissipated and the DOA’s technocratic, state-​capitalist model of development regained the upper hand. ‘If cooperative mechanization seemed to have marked a moment of rupture in the history of development,’ Bowman concludes, ‘Zambia now moved closer to resembling the model of colonial/​ post-​colonial continuity, whereby independent African states continued with the large-​ scale, modernist agricultural production schemes of their predecessors.’72 In some countries, the transition to post-​colony was complicated by the involvement of third party actors, such as the United States and the United Nations Specialized Agencies. In his innovative analysis of the Kossou hydro-​electric dam project in the Ivory Coast, Abou Bamba employs the concept of triangulation to scrutinize the three-​way relationship that evolved between the former French colonial masters, post-​ colonial Ivorian elites, and American bilateral agencies.73 Bamba argues that development knowledge and techniques in the post-​war world were increasingly transnational forces, which were compared, circulated, and transferred by networks of international experts and agencies. An American-​style developmentalist paradigm—​with its implicit critique of European imperialism and its unique approach to integrated regional development modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority—​offered an alternative to colonial versions of modernity. Nationalist leaders from across the third world sought to emulate US modernization techniques and to draw upon American money and technical know-​how. French colonial administrators were acutely aware of the American challenge, and were determined to maintain their presence as mediators even after the independence of colonies such as the Ivory Coast. They devised a post-​colonial diplomatic strategy that involved the deployment of technical assistance personnel (coopérants) in former French colonies as a way of channelling and containing American encroachment. Examples of metropolitan experts acting as mediators include Philippe Lamour, one of France’s leading post-​war, regional planners who served as a consultant and adviser for the Kossou Dam Project, and Hugues Lhuillier, who worked at the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre Mer (ORSTOM) and later the Ivorian Ministry of Development Planning. Ironically, many of these French experts were themselves deeply influenced by American ideas and modernization techniques, having visited the US or received training from American experts who were invited to France. Although American capital and technology largely built the Kossou Dam and relations between the French expatriate community and Ivorian leaders were often times strained, a closer examination reveals as much durability as divergence, with French expatriates playing

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     633 an indispensable role as transmitters of American technical knowledge and regional planning models. Similar processes to those identified by Bamba in French West Africa were also at work in the former colonies of British East Africa.74 The Swynnerton Plan for the Intensification of African Agriculture and the Million Acre Settlement Scheme, both of which were implemented by the colonial state in Kenya in the 1950s and early 1960s, were seen by authorities at the World Bank as useful models to study and emulate. As the Bank expanded its operations throughout East and Central Africa in the mid-​1960s, it sought the expertise of colonial officials who had been instrumental in the planning and executing of these schemes. But what is also clear is that British administrators in Kenya, as well as their allies in London, hoped to use the resources and prestige of the Bank as a way of maintaining British influence in the region, through the setting up of an agricultural development service, headquartered in Nairobi and staffed by British expatriate experts. These colonial expats assisted the Bank in determining the feasibility of projects proposed by regional governments, and played active roles in the planning and managing of projects accepted by the Bank. Also striking is the number of officers with leadership backgrounds in late colonial Kenya, who went on to occupy prominent positions in the international development community in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Similar redeployment patterns of former personnel were true of all the major European colonial powers. The exponential demand for new natural resource specialists precipitated by the creation of the UN’s Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance in 1949–​50 led agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization to employ informal inquires and personal networks of its own employees to ‘poach’ serving colonial officers for the organization.75 Eager to secure post-​colonial employment before they were made redundant, colonial foresters often reciprocated by initiating informal inquiries themselves and reaching out to contacts at FAO headquarters in Rome. Officers in other professional departments, such as agriculture, medicine, surveying, and veterinary medicine, also found their services in high demand by the UN’s burgeoning network of intergovernmental agencies and subsidiary bodies, as well as by international consultancy firms. Many French and British colonial officials also continued to serve in former colonial territories for years after independence, or else found employment within the ranks of their home country’s overseas aid administration. Veronique Dimier, for example, has examined how former French colonial administrators were instrumental in the institutionalization of the Directorate-​General of Development in the European Commission. Other former French colonial officials, according to Dimier, were relocated to the Ministèr de la Coopération, which was responsible for overseas technical cooperation, or were kept on ‘détachement’ as technical advisers to the new African governments.76 My own research suggests that as many as one-​third or more of the post-​war generation of British colonial officials went on to subsequent careers in development and other internationally-​relevant fields, and that as many as 40% or more of British nationals who joined the UN in the 1950s and 1960s had some form of previous colonial background experience.77 Add to this the fact, as Uma Kothari has shown, that many of the pioneers of development studies in

634   Joseph MORGAN Hodge Britain came from similar colonial backgrounds.78 In particular, individuals who had worked previously for the British Colonial Office often found subsequent employment in the UK teaching development studies at institutes of higher education. Their extensive overseas experience, language skills, and deep regional knowledge made them a natural fit within the emerging field, even while it caused antagonisms with younger colleagues whose expertise was more theory-​based. It seems clear, then, that post-​colonial development and the post-​colonial develop­ mentalist state should be viewed not so much as a novel departure than as a remobilization and redistribution of late colonial ideas, institutions, and people within a new context of successor states, donor nations, and international actors. And although the results of development as a state project were mixed, often producing disappointing and in some cases catastrophic failures, we should not lose sight of what was achieved. As Cooper reminds us: ‘[I]‌t would be misleading to dismiss the development era as without accomplishment, even if not a single African state achieved the often-​state goal of autonomy and economic security for the mass of the population.’79 Indeed, most African states in the late colonial and early post-​colonial period benefitted from steady, if moderate, growth in per capita incomes. The real break from the past occurred in the late 1970s when the postwar growth years came to a screeching halt. ‘Whereas in the decade before 1976,’ Cooper notes, ‘GNP per capita for Sub-​Saharan Africa as a whole grew nearly 20%, in the next decade it fell 20%, and as of 1996 was only a little ahead of 1966.’80 It was the renewed and protracted crisis of the world economy, in other words, that led to the dismantling of state developmentalism in the 1980s, and with it, the end of the age of development that began with the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Notes 1. By ‘development’ I mean an intentional set of policies and practices designed to increase production, raise the living standards of people regarded as impoverished, or mitigate the unintended and often adverse effects of progress. 2. James Ferguson, The Anti-​Politics Machine:  ‘Development’, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990); James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1998); Christophe Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930–​ 1970”, Osiris 15 (2001): 258–​281. 3. Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940:  The past of the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91. 4. M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (New  York:  Routledge, 1996), vii–​ix. 5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776). 6. H. W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13–​14.

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     635 7. Cowen and Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 270–​282; Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 90–​116. 8. Albert Sarraut, Le mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris:  Payot, 1923). Also see Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–​1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Martin Thomas, “Albert Sarraut, French Colonial Development, and the Communist Threat, 1919–​1930”, Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (2005): 917–​955. 9. Suzanne Moon, Technology and Ethical Idealism:  A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies (Leiden:  CNWS Publications, 2007); Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–​1914 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1994). 10. Arndt, “Economic Development:  A Semantic History”, Economic Development and Cultural Change 29, no. 3 (1981): 462. 11. Cowen and Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 25. 12. League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22, 28 April 1919, Accessed 25 March 2015, http://​avalon.law.yale.edu/​20th_​century/​leagcov.asp#art22. 13. Frederick D. Lugard, “The White Man’s Task in Tropical Africa”, Foreign Affairs V (1926): 58. Also see Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Blackwood, 1922). 14. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians:  The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 45–​106. 15. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 117–​143. 16. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 218–​222. 17. Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”, 259. 18. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society:  The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge:  Cambridge University press, 1996), 56–​65; Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009). 19. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 57–​65, 124–​141, 225–​260. 20. Gareth Austin, “Capitalists and Chiefs in the Cocoa Hold-​Ups in South Asante, 1927–​ 1938”, International Journal of African Historical Studies XXI (1988): 63–​95; David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–​53 (London: James Currey, 1987), 149–​150. 21. Cooper, Africa Since 1940, 20. 22. Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development:  Britain and its tropical colonies, 1850–​1960 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 160–​167; Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–​1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 164–​226. 23. By 1939, the empire absorbed over 40% of French exports, and supplied 37% of France’s imports. See Martin Thomas, “The Roots of French Decolonization”, in Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler, eds., Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–​1975 (London: Hodder Education, 2008), 133; Jacques Marseille, “The Phases of French Colonial Imperialism: Towards a New Periodization”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 13, no. 3 (1985): 132. 24. Catherine Coquery-​ Vidrovitch, “La Mise en dépendance de l’Afrique Noire:  Essai de Périodisation”, Cahiers d’études Africaines 16, no. 61–​62 (1976):  39–​40; Jean Suret-​ Canale, “From Colonization to Independence in French Tropical Africa: The Economic

636   Joseph MORGAN Hodge Background”, in Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, eds., The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 1940–​1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 450. 25. See Jean Filipovich, “The Office du Niger under Colonial Rule: Its Origin, Evolution, and Character (1920–​1960)”, (PhD diss., McGill University, 1985); Monica van Beusekom, Negotiating Development:  African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–​1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002). 26. Great Britain, “Parliamentary Papers, Statement of Policy on Colonial Development and Welfare”; “Future provision for colonial development and welfare:  War Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Stanley, 15 Nov. 1944”, in S. R. Ashton and S. E. Stockwell, eds., Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925–​1945 (London:  BDEEP, 1996), 203–​205. A further £115 million extension was granted to cover the fund an additional five years from 1955–​1960. 27. Tony Chafer, “Friend or Foe? Competing Visions of Empire in French West Africa in the Run-​up to Independence”, in Martin Thomas, ed., French Colonial Mind, vol. 1 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 285–​286. 28. Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français:  Histoire d’un divorce (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), 105. As important as the new funds were, it is important to note that much investment for colonial development continued to come from internal revenues, raised through public borrowing and local taxation, as FIDES expected colonial states to match metropolitan funding at a rate of 45%. See Suret-​Canale, “From Colonization to Independence in French Tropical Africa”, 455. 29. Cooper, Africa Since 1940, 31. 30. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 196–​206. 31. Chafer, “Friend or Foe?”, 281–​288. 32. Thomas, “The Roots of French Decolonization”, 160. 33. Nicholas White, “Reconstructing Europe through Rejuvenating Empire:  The British, French, and Dutch Experiences Compared”, Past and Present 210, suppl. 6 (2011), 214. 34. Ibid., 219. 35. Thomas, “The Roots of French Decolonization”, 160–​161. 36. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 209–​213. 37. Suret-​Canale, “From Colonization to Independence in French Tropical Africa,” 452. 38. van Beusekom, Negotiating Development, 126–​ 129; Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”, 262. 39. D. A. Low and John Lonsdale, “Introduction:  Towards the New Order, 1945”, in D. A. Low and A. Smith, eds., History of East Africa, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976),  1–​63. 40. Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 118. 41. Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 212. 42. Martin Thomas, “Contrasting Patterns of Decolonization: Belgian and Portuguese Africa”, in Thomas, Moore, and Butler, Crises of Empire, 387. 43. Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”, 264. 44. On the Paysannat Turumbu near Yangambi, for example, Belgian agronomists developed a land-​use and cropping system known as the ‘corridor system’ in which rectangular bands of cleared land alternated with bands of forest, and crop rotations included a twelve-​ year fallow period. Despite years of testing, however, the experiment failed to maintain

Beyond Dependency: North–South Relationships     637 soil fertility, and in the end, farmers were advised to return to the traditional Turumbu farming practice of twenty-​year-​long fallow periods. Ibid., 272. 45. Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”, 259; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, “A Modernizing Empire? Politics, Culture, and Economy in Portuguese Late Colonialism,” in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, eds., The Ends of European Colonial Empires: Cases and Comparisons (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),  51–​80. 46. Thomas, “Contrasting Patterns of Decolonization”, 394. 47. Jeanne Marie Penvenne, “Settling against the Tide:  The Layered Contradictions of Twentieth-​C entury Portuguese Settlement in Mozambique”, in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (New  York, London: 2005), 81. 48. Kenneth Maxwell, “Portugal and Africa:  The Last Empire”, in Gifford and Louis, The Transfer of Power in Africa, 337–​338; Cláudia Castelo, ‘O modo português de estar no mundo’: o lusotropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa, 1933–​1961 (Porto: Afrontamento, 1998). 49. Penvenne, “Settling against the Tide”, 84. 50. Ibid. 51. Cláudia Castelo, Passagens para África:  o povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com naturais da metrópole, 1920–​1974 (Porto: Afrontamento, 2007), 59, 97, 143. 52. Maxwell, “Portugal and Africa”, 339; Thomas, “Contrasting patterns of decolonization”, 397. 53. Cláudia Castelo, “Colonial Migration into Angola and Mozambique:  Constraints and Illusions”, unpublished paper, 12. 54. White, “Reconstructing Europe through Rejuvenating Empire”, 221; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 211. 55. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 214–​226; Monica M. van Beusekom and Dorothy Hodgson, “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period”, Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000): 29–​30. 56. Frederick Cooper, “Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa”, Past & Present 210, Suppl. 6 (2011): 208. 57. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert. 58. See Chafer, “Friend or Foe?”, 176, 280–​288; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 226–​230. 59. Cooper, Africa Since 1940, 37. 60. Ibid.,  20–​37. 61. Ibid., 67. 62. Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”, 260–​261. 63. Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–​2007 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013). 64. The persistence continues as the Mozambican government has recently commenced planning for another project, first proposed during the colonial era, to build a second dam sixty kilometers downstream at Mphanda Nkuwa. See Isaacman and Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development, 4. 65. Ibid., 4. 66. Emma Hunter, “A history of maendeleo:  the concept of ‘development’ in Tanganyika’s late colonial public sphere”, in Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf, eds., Developing Africa:  Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-​ Century Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 87–​107.

638   Joseph MORGAN Hodge 67. Matteo Rizzo, “What was left of the Groundnut Scheme? Development Disaster and Labour Market in Southern Tanganyika, 1946–​1952”, Journal of Agrarian Change 6, no. 2 (2006): 205–​238. 68. Joshua Grace, “Heroes of the Road:  Race, Gender, and the Politics of Mobility in Twentieth-​Century Tanzania”, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 83, no. 3 (2013): 403–​425. 69. Heather J. Hoag and May-​Britt Öhman, “Turning Water into Power: Debates over the Development of Tanzania’s Rufiji River Basin, 1945–​1985”, Technology and Culture 49, no. 3 (2008): 624–​651. 70. Andrew Bowman, “Mass Production or Production by the Masses? Tractors, Cooperatives, and the Politics of Rural Development in Post-​Independence Zambia”, Journal of African History 52, no. 2 (2011): 201–​221. 71. Bowman, “Mass Production or Production by the Masses?”, 211. 72. Ibid., 220. 73. Abou B. Bamba, “Triangulating a Modernization Experiment: The United States, France and the Making of the Kossou Project in Central Ivory Coast”, Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (2010): 66–​84. 74. See Joseph Hodge, “British Colonial Expertise, Postcolonial Careering and the Early History of International Development”, Journal of Modern European History 8, no.  1 (2010): 24–​46. 75. Jennifer Gold, “The Reconfiguration of Scientific Career Networks in the Late Colonial Period:  The Case of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the British Forestry Service”, in Brett Bennett and Joseph Hodge, eds., Science and Empire:  Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800–​1970 (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 297–​320. 76. See Veronique Dimier, “For a New Start? Resettling Colonial Administrators in the French Prefectural Corps (1960–​1980)”, Itinerario 28, no. I  (2004):  49–​66; Dimier, “Administrative Reform as Political Control: Lessons from DG VIII, 1958–​1975”, in D.G. Dimitrakopoulos, ed., The Changing European Commission (Manchester, 2004), 74–​85; Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 77. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 256–​262; Hodge, “British Colonial Expertise, Postcolonial Careering and the Early History of International Development”, 24–​46. 78. Uma Kothari, “From colonial administration to development studies: a post-​colonial critique of the history of development studies”, in: Uma Kothari, ed., A Radical History of Development Studies:  Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies (London:  Zed Books, 2005), 47–​66; Kothari, “From Colonialism to Development:  Reflections of Former Colonial Officers”, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44, no. 1 (2006): 118–​136. 79. Cooper, Africa Since 1940, 105. 80. Ibid., 106–​107.

Chapter 33

Imperial Bu si ne s s Intere sts , Dec ol oniz at i on, and P ost-​C ol onia l Diversificat i on Nicholas J. White 1

Introduction Colonial capitalism, in some ways, was more inward than outward looking, as merchant firms, plantations, mines, shipping lines, banks, and processing plants were typically clustered together. The integration of business systems varied from empire to empire. The British and Dutch shared a tradition of autonomous operation from firm to firm, and which was cemented by interlocking directorships, shareholdings, and management into various groups. Portuguese capitalism was dominated by metropolitan oligopolies that fused finance and manufacturing with colonial primary production. In the Belgian Congo, the nexus was most concentrated. Through a web of mining, shipping, railway, and manufacturing subsidiaries, the Brussels-​based banking trust, the Société Générale de Belgique (SGB), exercised ‘near total control’ of the Congo.2 The centrality of metropolitan financial institutions in French Indochina equated with Belgian capitalism (although the omnipresence of trading companies in francophone Africa mirrored the Anglo-​Dutch model). Whichever variety of European capitalism overseas, one kink could dislocate entire commodity chains. The second part of this chapter discusses how the hyper-​sensitivity towards the unravelling of commercial networks explains the hostility of imperial business leaders to the ending of empires. Equally, it explains why post-​colonial regimes sought to emancipate themselves from commercial inequities, which is discussed in the

640   Nicholas J. White third section of this analysis. Concurrently, as safe investments were transformed into capital at risk—​paraphrasing Fieldhouse’s seminal study of Unilever, the Anglo-​Dutch consumer goods giant—​the expatriates attempted to liberate themselves from the shackles of post-​colonialism through diversification.3 However, the chapter begins by discussing the tensions between colonial governance and big business that were already apparent in the immediate post-​1945 period.

New Imperialisms and Second Colonial Occupations Rejuvenated pan-​European post-​war colonialism, which focused on dollar-​earning, saving, and papering over the cracks of metropolitan industrial infirmity, benefitted imperial businesses.4 French trading companies in sub-​Saharan Africa, led by the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO) and Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain (SCOA), reached their zenith in the immediate post-​war era.5 At the port of Cotonou in Dahomey during a tour of West Africa at the end of 1949, the Liverpool financier Philip Toosey was indignant that: ‘Practically all the merchandise is French’.6 Hamstrung by ‘discrimination’ in foreign-​exchange allocation, the manager of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) in Batavia/​Jakarta reflected in August 1946 that, ‘The Dutchman is a bully in commerce’.7 After the Netherlands military offensive against the Indonesian Republic in July 1947—​tellingly code-​named ‘Operation Produce’—​the expansion of business allowed staffing strength at the Dutch-​ owned Java Bank to mushroom 42% in two years.8 The belgitude and Lusitanian nature of Belgian and Portuguese colonial economic spheres likewise intensified after the Second World War.9 SGB’s diamond-​mining complex in Portuguese Angola was obliged to process and re-​export its stones via Lisbon rather than Antwerp, hire Portuguese managers, and sell shares to Portuguese investors.10 British neo-​mercantilism was less overt, but sterling-​area controls tended to disadvantage foreign investment, particularly the US variety.11 The Empire-​Commonwealth was also a safe haven for British overseas companies, especially those banks that lacked dollars to operate effectively in non-​ sterling domains.12 British enterprise found particular support from imperial governments in the protected states of the Middle East. Whitehall backing was assured by the Arab world’s geo-​strategic centrality in the Cold War and oil’s premiere position in the balance of payments.13 The Dutch equivalent was the Netherlands Antilles, where the refining of Venezuelan oil at the Curaçao refinery belonging to Anglo-​Dutch Shell hit an employment peak in excess of 12,000 by 1952.14 Far-​flung outposts of empire discovered a novel commercial prominence. In the British South Atlantic, Scottish-​based whaling experienced a post-​war bonanza in the frenzied and bloody harvest of dollar-​saving protein. In the French South Pacific, Paris-​controlled phosphate and nickel extraction achieved

Imperial Business Interests    641 unprecedented outputs in sating the regeneration of US-​supported Japan in the Asian Cold War.15 Much-​enlarged public-​funding pots for colonial development fell into European business laps. Belgian business domination of the Congo was underpinned by vast funds in the ten-​year development plan from 1949, which focused on modernizing transportation.16 The value of Congo mineral exports spiralled 265% from 1946 to 1952 alone.17 Likewise, the focus on infrastructure rather than consumption in Paris’s Fonds d’Investissement et de Développement Economique et Social des Territoires d’Outre Mer propelled French capital in Africa, especially the maisons du commerce, in partnership with metropolitan manufacturers, which expanded port-​based import-​substitution.18 There was more of a time-​lag in the escudo zone, but in the 1950s ‘the colonies reached the historical peak of their economic importance to Portugal’.19 Government spending on infrastructure equalled that of the other maritime empires, and lucrative contracts were picked up by the oligarchs. The Champalimaud group, for example, put money into cement manufacture in Angola and Mozambique, its investment underpinned by giant hydro-​electric schemes.20 Indeed, despite the official obsession with maximum primary production, secondary industry was not neglected. In parallel with British-​controlled Kenya, the colon farmers of Morocco were superseded by a wave of manufacturing, often as a springboard for export to other parts of French Africa.21 The Congo’s industrialization was stimulated by official nurturing of an intermediary middle class.22 The prevalence of counter-​insurgency operations within late colonial empires was not necessarily bad for business either. As Heineken discovered in Southeast Asia, northern European soldiery drank a lot of beer.23 Trooping contracts and war materiel supplies for the dirty wars of decolonization assisted the post-​war revival of European merchant navies. In addition to the upsurge in European and Asian settler traffic for East Africa, the lucrative military demands of Mau Mau counter-​insurgency in Kenya post-​1952 proved a boon for the London-​based P&O group (and served as compensation for restrictions in independent India and Pakistan).24 After 1954, French industrialists benefitted from the construction schemes, and Saharan petroleum exploitation, which accompanied the Algerian campaign.25 The Portuguese colonial wars from 1961 witnessed road and airfield upgrades, while the welfare provision of ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns enhanced labour productivity.26 Yet, mass violence, frequently directed at expatriate enterprise, was symptomatic of the strains of late colonialism. Indigenous populations were politicized by the economic injustices of the new imperialism. European planters found themselves in the frontline of insurgencies in Malaya, Vietnam, and Indonesia.27 Expatriate commercial populations were much larger than official ones, and, in particular locales, the agricultural estate, the mine, or the trading post was the most visible manifestation of alien encroachment. In the Gold Coast riots of February 1948, European stores were looted in revenge for high prices and shortages.28 During the April 1951 strikes at the Anglo-​Iranian Oil Company’s imperium in imperio at Abadan, three expatriates were killed, culminating in nationalization a month later.29 The vast Belgian-​owned cotton operation in Angola witnessed an explosion of peasant violence in 1961 given coerced cultivation and artificially low

642   Nicholas J. White prices.30 In practice, labour indiscipline was frequently ascribed to the colonial ‘nanny’ state. The strike of coal miners at Enugu, Nigeria in 1949 was, according to merchant banker Toosey, the fault of the Labour Department:  ‘The introduction of European Trade Union practices’ was ‘years too soon’.31 In French Africa, the Paris-​based subsidiary of the United Africa Company (UAC)—​the trading-​wing of Unilever—​was equally despondent in 1946. The strikes and wage hikes which hit the European investment groups were put down to naïve imperial reformism: ‘The Africans . . . have been taught that the black man is equal to the white’.32 Expatriate planters throughout French Africa, British mining-​executives, shipping lines, and plantation-​owners in the Gold Coast, East Africa, and Malaya, and the Belgian conglomerates of the Congo, all opposed or frustrated the legalization of trade unions.33 The link between labour mobilization and nationalist politics was a particular concern. Unilever’s board addressed the threat of Kwame Nkrumah, future prime minister of the Gold Coast/​Ghana, in January 1950: ‘His method of operation appeared to be to foment strikes with the object of attracting support towards himself ’.34 Alarming for investor confidence throughout Africa was the tendency for nationalists to recruit on redistributive themes, which were targeted at reducing foreign exploitation of natural resources and domination of import-​export trades.35 Meanwhile, the Vietminh’s desire for economic as well as political autonomy versus imperial insistence on control over customs, currency, and business regulation sparked all-​out warfare from December 1946, and made French-​led pan-​Indochinese industrialization and agricultural modernization impossible.36 Where second colonial occupations segued into power-​sharing with nationalists, quasi-​colonial regimes increasingly favoured indigenous enterprise. In the federalization of the archipelago, Dutch officials in 1947 proposed increased Indonesian participation in inter-​island shipping to complement Netherlands–​Indonesian ‘political collaboration’.37 After 1948 in Nigeria, the Department of Commerce and Industries aimed ‘to provide all possible opportunities for Nigerian businessmen’.38 In the commodity marketing boards, African entrepreneurs were increasingly admitted as Licensed Buying Agents.39 On grounds of cost-​effectiveness and counter-​insurgency in both Kenya and Malaya during the 1950s smallholder production was privileged at the expense of European coffee and rubber estates, respectively.40 Officials questioned whether expatriate business was necessary at all. In Sudan, imperial enterprise was elbowed out of the development of cotton, the condominium’s principal export. Nationalization of the Gezira scheme during the 1940s was considered a better means of boosting peasant livelihoods than the previous partnership of London financiers with the colonial regime.41 Even the most rapacious regimes, for example, in the Belgian Congo and the Portuguese ‘Overseas Provinces’, came to prioritize a prosperous property-​owning class in the countryside over support for big business.42 French firms were not immune from this favouritism: the trading houses in Africa were squeezed out of the export trade by British-​style produce marketing boards after 1951.43 Such dirigisme was decried. In 1949, when the Governor of Nigeria professed himself a ‘believer’ in produce boards, Toosey responded that ‘there was already more

Imperial Business Interests    643 than sufficient precedent to prove that Government intervention in business was a failure’.44 Throughout the British Empire, Labourite proclivities for state control of post-​war colonial economies were beaten back (as were Free French wartime suggestions of nationalization of mining in the South Pacific).45 But, the goals and methods of imperial business remained out of kilter with the colonial development and welfare ethos. As Toosey discovered in Nigeria, the Colonial Development Corporation’s role was ‘to supplement . . . not supplant private enterprise’. Even so, the UK Treasury-​ financed parastatal was considered impractical by businessmen, and the established firms on the West African coast regarded ‘the experiment with caution’.46 Barclays Bank’s own development corporation after 1946 targeted its lending in the Caribbean and east-​central Africa at ‘credit-​worthy’ settlers and plantation companies—​not the peasant cooperatives or proto-​industrialization schemes favoured by colonial regimes.47

Whinge of Change As late-​colonial officials increasingly distanced themselves from expatriate business, Decker argues that imperial firms in Anglophone West Africa achieved a development consensus with nationalist politicians. This was reflected in the Africanization of management, shifts into specialist retail and manufacture, the localization of subsidiaries and shareholdings, the expansion of banking networks, and the courting of the indigenous middle class as bank account holders. Marketing strategies and modernist architecture ‘reconfigured’ corporate identities from ‘imperial business to the world-​benevolent foreign “ambassadors of the modern world” ’.48 Simultaneous trends occurred within the trading houses of francophone Africa.49 Even so, transitions were rarely seamless. Innovations in manufacturing or lending to non-​Europeans were reluctantly taken up following nationalist pressures and legislative dictation.50 There was, meanwhile, a general antipathy towards political devolution. In francophone Africa, superficially ‘the quintessential neocolonial relationship’, there were clear continuities between late-​colonial and post-​colonial economies.51 Following blanket independence accords throughout the region in 1960, French firms swooped in fast, snapping up opportunities in media and manufacture.52 Nor was European integration dichotomous, as the francophone states were accorded preferential treatment in the post-​1957 Common Market.53 Côte d’Ivoire promoted a national maritime enterprise after 1967 in partnership with the French government only to find itself, in the 1990s, ‘as dependent on foreign shipping lines . . . as it was in the 1970s’.54 ‘Francafrique’ was not anticipated, however. CFAO’s and SCOA’s lubricious reputation among African consumers meant the trading leviathans were wary of the devolutionist loi cadre reforms of 1956.55 UAC’s French directors fretted over socialist tendencies, penal taxation, higher wages, and corruption.56 The example of Guinea, the first Francophone territory in sub-​Saharan Africa to become independent after rejection of the French Community

644   Nicholas J. White in 1958, was disconcerting. Under Sekou Touré’s socialist regime, UAC’s business was finished by 1962.57 Thomas argues that the options facing European governments in the end-​of-​empire oscillated between ‘fight’ and ‘flight’. But considering that either strategy would leave overseas enterprise dangerously exposed in the longer term, it was usually ‘fright’ that coloured imperial business attitudes to decolonization.58 Alarm at the slightest tinkering with colonial arrangements, which might lead to loss of investor confidence, was revealed by the deep reluctance of British firms to surrender their representation in West African legislatures.59 Similarly, in 1952, Malayan tin-​mining companies insisted that self-​government could only be considered if Malayan politicians would guarantee not to discriminate against ‘overseas capital or nationals’.60 In Kenya, the Lancaster House conference of 1960, which opened up merely the possibility of black-​majority rule, was labelled a ‘disaster’ by UK tea-​growing interests.61 Imperial business took on the role of Jeremiah because of the inauspicious portents in the first phase of pan-​European decolonization in Asia. Independent India had rejected blanket nationalization by the 1950s, but there was a general ‘grinding out’ of the managing agencies under heavy taxation and mounds of red tape. By 1962, only twenty-​ five of the sixty-​one agencies that had been managed by British partners in 1938 still enjoyed UK control.62 French businesses evacuated communist-​dominated North Vietnam after 1954. Below the seventeenth parallel, French plantation, banking, shipping, manufacturing, and air transport interests fared better. In 1961 rubber production in Vietnam and Cambodia actually reached its peak.63 Nevertheless, by 1960 leading colonial financier Paul Bernard was fuming at both South Vietnam’s flouting of franc zone rules and Saigon’s ‘ultra-​interventionist’ policies.64 Moreover, the French textile industry opposed decolonization in North Africa precisely because the loss of Indochina and the decline of the Vosges were hardly coincidental. Similarly, Portuguese shipping and industrial interests feared any decoupling from protected African markets given their earlier loss of trade after India’s absorption of Goa in 1961.65 Despite the financial and economic guarantees that accompanied Indonesian independence in 1949, in the 1950s Dutch and British firms in the archipelago were faced by nationalization of the Java Bank, restrictions on profit transfers and expatriate staff entry, import-​licensing and credit arrangements in favour of indigenous traders, and rising wage demands from increasingly assertive communist-​affiliated trade unions. These inconveniences coalesced with illegal occupations, thefts, and attacks on Europeans on plantations; all of which were manifestations of a grass-​roots economic nationalism frustrated by the compromises of the pragmatic politicians in Jakarta.66 Even without these precedents, imperial businesses could not help being influenced by socio-​cultural traditions. Colonial capitalists equated the end of empire with the economic collapse of the metropole. Advocating a firm stand in Singapore in 1956, British ship owner Sir John Hobhouse opined that there was ‘no hope of maintaining a decent standard of living for fifty million inhabitants of the UK, if we cease to be regarded as a great power, able and willing to look after our interests abroad’.67 Portugal’s Espírito Santo group, with fingers in multiple primary and secondary production

Imperial Business Interests    645 pies throughout Angola and Mozambique, was headed by ex-​foreign minister Franco Nogueira, who had once observed that Portugal without Africa would ‘immediately be absorbed by Spain’.68 Dutch ship owners took a tough line in Indonesia in the 1940s and 1950s given their industry’s alleged central role in the ‘vindication of Dutch national interests’ (both economic and military).69 British imperial companies embraced a ‘culture and practice of inequality’, where non-​Europeans were dismissed as either incapable or untrustworthy.70 These attitudes were encapsulated in the recollections of a retired Barclays expatriate in the 1990s: when European employees were evacuated from eastern Nigeria during the Biafra war of the late-​1960s ‘amazingly’ the caretaker African managers ‘did quite well’.71 Imperial businessmen frequently could not conceive of independent states as capable of managing economies effectively, let alone maintaining what the Dutch called rust en orde (peace and order)—​the most treasured function of the colonial state.72 A manager in a leading Anglo-​Australian merchant house justified Dutch violence in 1947 on the grounds that ‘otherwise’ Indonesia ‘will simply go back to jungle’.73 Similarly, the ideology of the Belgian commercial complex, which spilled over into Portuguese and French Africa, combined ‘paternalism, racism and repression’.74 On a visit to Kinshasa in 1964, the vice-​governor of SGB recorded that, ‘Notwithstanding the respect one must inherently show for authority, it is sometimes impossible to suppress a smile or even outright laughter’.75 Expatriate human resource philosophies infantilized non-​Europeans, a tendency epitomized in commercial advertising in West Africa, which, to the mid-​ 1950s, depicted Africa as a child growing up.76 Such constructs were entrenched within those concessionaires whose origins could be traced back to the nineteenth-​century era of territorial aggrandisement.77 An ‘unholy alliance’ of interlocking British, South African, and Belgian mining interests opposed black majority rule throughout central and southern Africa. On independence for the Congo in 1960, they sponsored secessionist regimes in the diamond and copper provinces of South Kasai and Katanga, and even proposed that the latter join their beloved settler-​dominated Central African Federation (CAF).78 There was more commercial opposition to decolonization than was publicly expressed in settler Africa. As the Joint East and Central Africa Board, a lobby group for imperial business in the UK, appreciated by 1961, firms self-​censored ‘for fear of subsequent persecution’ once independence eventuated.79 In Paris, the equivalent of the Joint Board was the Comité central de la France d’Outre-​mer. This committee opposed reform at every turn—​an obstinacy encouraged by its president, who was simultaneously head of the Anglo-​French (though mainly French) Suez Canal Company, the bastion of concessionaire chauvinism in semi-​colonial Egypt.80 As Stockwell argues for Ghana, big business was no innocent bystander in decolonization.81 In line with the Congo, leading expatriate interests backed counter-​and competing nationalisms in the Gold Coast, as well as Kenya, Malaya, Singapore, and India.82 Deeply intransigent, the aim was to build alliances ‘of property across racial lines, thereby preserving intact the key features of the colonial political economy’.83 Dutch trading companies in Indonesia, French rubber investors in Indochina, financiers in

646   Nicholas J. White Morocco, and industrialists in Algeria, as well as the less-​reactionary Portuguese conglomerates, were not opposed to political independence per se. But they did share a craving for unrealistic neo-​colonial solutions akin to the guarantees negotiated for American businesses in the independent Philippines after 1946 (including an ongoing post-​imperial military presence).84 Even the liberalism of the liberal was relative. Ronald Prain, managing director of the Rhodesian Selection Trust, developed close relationships with the African nationalist leadership in Zambia and broke with Roy Welensky’s CAF in 1959.85 Yet this orientation was reflective of majority US ownership in the mining conglomerate, and Prain himself was a late convert to ‘one man, one vote’, preferring the half-​way house of the CAF between Apartheid South Africa and Ghana’s black majority rule. His progressivism was also a smokescreen for breaking the colour bar and substituting European supervisors with less-​costly Africans. As Zambian independence approached, Prain gloomily prophesized Soviet-​and/​or Chinese-​assisted nationalization.86 Resistance to change was most marked in hostility towards the indigenization of management. Plantations, sites of hyper-​coloniality with rigid race-​based labour hierarchies, were highly reactionary.87 But they were not unique. At HSBC, it is shocking how discriminatory, ethnically tiered employment practices remained until the late-​ 1960s.88 ‘Character’ and ‘club-​ability’ (and hence whiteness and maleness) counted for more than competence in appointment and promotion criteria throughout European imperial business.89 Likewise, the observation of a non-​White Caribbean clerical worker at Barclays that his ilk in the 1950s were just a ‘few “flies” in the bowl of milk’ was sadly typical.90 Where indigenization did take place, it was pragmatism, rather than ideology, that drove innovation. Salaries as a proportion of total costs for Barclays in the West Indies declined from 54.1% to 36.5% between 1952 and 1962 through increased employment of indigenes (and female clerks especially).91 This was a cynical cost-​cutting exercise as local staff were paid less and did not require living allowances, passages for leave, or pensions. Moreover, indigenization failed to extend very far up the greasy pole: as late as 1957, a UK expatriate was parachuted in as manager of Barclays’s King Street branch in Kingston, Jamaica, while at leading Dutch trading house Internatio, a 25% premium was provided in 1955 for Europeans to try and stem their flight from Indonesia.92 The penchant for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Chinese, or Kenyan Asians, or Eurasians and light-​skinned mixed-​race West Indians unwittingly revealed a fundamental disregard for the skill sets of majority colonial populations.93 The Portuguese conglomerates had to be blackmailed by colonial governments into hiring more black Africans through the threat of withholding public-​works contracts.94 The Congo economy, meanwhile, was left ‘decapitated’ after the Belgian scuttle in 1960, given the lack of indigenization at imperial companies beyond a few technical and clerical jobs.95 Adding to the stress of decolonization, home governments could not be relied upon, and often had other agendas beyond the protection of big business. As British firms in Burma in the late-​1940s, Iran and the Gold Coast during the 1950s, and central Africa in the early-​1960s discovered to their chagrin, commercial concerns were overridden by international power-​political priorities, and the need to establish goodwill with

Imperial Business Interests    647 ‘moderate’ nationalists (notwithstanding close links to the Conservative Party among imperial business).96 Sacrificing French financial privileges, short-​term political expediency prevailed in the creation of the quasi-​independent associated states of Indochina after 1949.97 Kent asserts that Anglo-​Belgian mining conglomerates influenced the official responses of London and Brussels to the Congo crisis.98 But in September 1960 the advice to the Katanga lobby from Prime Minister Macmillan was to hold Congo together to forestall an ‘African slum  . . .  wide open to Communist penetration’.99 Meanwhile, from 1961 Belgian ministers pushed for reunification of the Congo to end Brussels’s international diplomatic isolation, and in 1964 the vice-​governor of SGB observed a ‘cruel disinterest’ on the part of his home government.100 Assertiveness was not always an effective defence, however. The Anglo-​French invasion of Egypt in 1956 (following the nationalization of the Suez Canal), and the stubborn refusal of the Netherlands to relinquish West New Guinea (after Indonesian independence in 1949), ensured the same fate for the commercial investments at stake. All British and French assets in Egypt were sequestered in November 1956, while, in Indonesia, Dutch property was occupied by left-​wing trade unions at the end of 1957, followed by de jure nationalization in 1959. Both metropolitan government actions also shared the disapproval of key business interests—​the oil majors at Suez and Unilever on the Irian Jaya question.101 Furthermore, European regimes were no longer as reliant on colonial interests as metropolitan balance of payments crises eased, and alternative economic strategies to Empire for domestic rejuvenation emerged. By the later-​1950s, influential industrial and financial sectors in the UK, Belgium, and France questioned the efficacy of overseas development spending and trade preferences that protected the antiquated capitalism of Empire. European integration and/​or inter-​industry trade within the growth trifecta of western Europe, North America, and East Asia looked considerably more remunerative.102 A decade later, Portugal’s new industrialists made their country ‘a kind of Taiwan of southern Europe’ by shunning investment in the overseas provinces.103

The Colonies Strike Back: Post-​C olonial Diversifications Economic disengagement was a two-​way process, however. Once the imperial political shackles were snapped, it is striking how rapidly developing economies diversified their trade relations as the ‘enforced bilateralism’ of colonialism disintegrated. By the mid-​1970s, for former Dutch, French, British, and Belgian territories, the earlier metropolitan trade share was falling at an annual rate of nearly 8% for exports and 6.5% for imports.104 This was not necessarily disastrous for established trading companies—​ the Americanization and Japanization of Southeast Asia’s post-​colonial trade, for example, allowed the British agency houses to pick up lucrative new contracts with US and Japanese industrialists.105

648   Nicholas J. White More fundamental was the post-​colonial assault upon fixed capital. However far firms tried to ‘localize’, ‘integrate’, or build up goodwill, the racially based economic disparities of Empire left a deep imprint in the collective memory of post-​colonialism. West African cultural constructions long past independence projected UAC, for example, as a manipulative and seductive ‘witch’.106 Such discourse legitimized revanchist take-​ overs in which key supporters of the nationalist struggle were rewarded. Following the sequestration of Dutch assets between 1957 and 1959, Indonesia’s economic landscape became dominated by military-​run businesses in combination with ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs who had proved indispensable to the survival of the nascent Republic and its armed forces through smuggling operations to beat the Dutch blockades of the 1946–​1949 war.107 Past hurts were not easily forgiven by nationalist leaders. The tendency to nurse old grievances was epitomized by the Congo/​Zaire, where General Mobutu, lauded as an anti-​communist, could not forget the Katangan secession and nationalized the Belgian-​ owned mines in 1966–​1967.108 Shell tried to cloak its Dutch identity in Indonesia under a Canadian subsidiary after 1957. But the 60% Netherlands ownership in the parent could not be ignored by the Sukarno regime, nor could the support which Shell had given to the resurrection of Dutch colonial rule in the archipelago in the ‘police actions’ of 1947 and 1948. After 1965, Shell Indonesia formed the basis of Indonesia’s state oil company.109 Marxist-​inspired regimes—​notably in former French Indochina and Portuguese Africa—​eschewed foreign capitalist investment on ideological grounds. With the fall of Saigon and the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge during 1975 the last of the diehard French rubber planters left southern Vietnam and Cambodia.110 But even non-​socialist states clamped down on foreign investment as terms of trade moved in favour of the ‘North’ of the global economy in the 1960s and 1970s. They placed restrictions on expatriate employment, the transfer of profits, and imports to conserve scarce foreign exchange.111 National shipping lines additionally provided employment and opened up new trade routes. After 1969, for example, Ceylon/​Sri Lanka entered into China and the Middle East, territories previously blocked off by the conference cartels dominated by imperial shipping lines.112 Moreover, by the 1970s, state control of natural resource exploitation was the norm throughout the developing world, and the global zeitgeist was clearly set against western capital. Colonel Acheampong’s ‘war on the economy’ in Ghana after 1972, including compulsory acquisition of 55% of the equity in the British-​owned Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, was justified on the grounds that ‘Our cocoa, our gold, our diamonds, our manganese, our timber, and the energies of our people have for too long been utilized for the benefit of foreigners’.113 Even the most western-​orientated placed restrictions, as nationalization and localization with strong state-​backing became de rigeur in the brand of development economics that dominated the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and where no third-​world diplomat dared being dubbed a neo-​colonial quisling. Malaysia and Nigeria provided classic examples of how the pro-​western ‘safe’ nationalists of the first generation could not live forever.114 During the 1970s, the technocrats

Imperial Business Interests    649 at the head of planning and development agencies in both countries found that indigenization schemes, which were originally part of an internal redistribution struggle to rectify economic imbalances between indigenes and ‘resident aliens’, could not be realized through new growth alone (especially as post-​imperial companies appeared determined to circumvent even the most minimal of localization). Both Kuala Lumpur and Lagos avoided outright nationalization. Nevertheless, via legislation, threats, and/​or ‘dawn raids’ on the London Stock Exchange, long-​established British firms were forced to indigenize both management and capital.115 The francophone concomitant was Senegal where by 1980 the honeymoon period between French capital and the Dakar government ended. Foreign-​owned textile factories were required to make 50% of their sales to homes d’affaires sénégalais. As in Malaysia’s, Nigeria’s, Indonesia’s, or Zaire’s ‘crony capitalism’, one Senegalese-​Lebanese merchant reflected in 1985 that ‘to deal in textile goods now, you need proper arrangements in the political world that the French and Lebanese just don’t have’.116 Given experiences in Congo/​Zaire, the head of SGB in 1967 prophesized (correctly) that expatriate firms would have no future as owners of fixed assets but as ‘service enterprises’ instead.117 Even in foreign-​investor-​friendly Gabon and Cameroun in the francophone sphere big business was reduced to ‘junior partner of the state’.118 All of this suggests that, contrary to dependency analysis, Afro-​Asian ‘gatekeeper’ states enjoyed considerable agency in choosing which aspects and levels of European business were to be permitted access.119 Decolonization changed the rules of the investment game from an ‘exclusive colonial system’ to an ‘internationalization of dependency’.120 In Congo/​Zaire, the Mobutu kleptocracy courted French and American interests as counters to the ex-​colonial masters in Brussels and Antwerp.121 In post-​ colonial Ghana and Gabon, US capital developed aluminium-​smelting and manganese/​iron ore exploitation respectively.122 After the restoration of the Shah in 1953, British Petroleum (BP; the new moniker for Anglo-​Iranian) had to share Iran’s oil production with American and French enterprises. The Tanzania-​Zambia oil pipeline to bypass the recalcitrant white settler regime of Southern Rhodesia after 1965 was constructed by an Italian, not a British, company.123 Indeed, Tanzania made a virtue of discriminating against British interests in the awarding of contracts, and proved a bridgehead in Africa for Communist Chinese enterprise through the construction of the ‘Uhuru’ railway after 1970. These diversification strategies were also a means of stressing Dar-​es-​Salaam’s distinctiveness with Kenya, its anglophile East African rival.124 When Mozambique resumed fishing in the international investment pond in the 1980s, it was American and British multinationals which were netted, and not the Portuguese small fry.125 To break the old imperial cartels in the seaborne carriage of commodities, many African states found the ‘brotherly love’ preached and ‘uneconomic’ freight rates charged by Soviet bloc shipping deeply attractive.126 In capitalist Southeast Asia, there was a shift towards Japan in post-​colonial investment patterns, reflecting the availability of capital but also pan-​Asian affinities.127 Given the centrality of Japan to the global oil economy, a space had to be found for the zaibatsu in the Middle East, and, after 1973,

650   Nicholas J. White in the final phase of British protection for Brunei, Shell divided off-​shore gas exploitation with Mitsubishi and the sultanate’s government.128 Throughout the post-​colonial world, British and Dutch companies complained of inadequate investment protection and trade promotion schemes provided by home governments when compared to their Japanese, US, and West German counterparts.129 Financially embarrassed in the 1960s and 1970s, Britain was in no condition to run an ‘informal Empire’.130 The overly static nature of neo-​colonial models, which viewed developing countries as locked into dependence on western capital, was manifest in the oil world of the 1960s and 1970s. Producers increasingly acted as a collective and the flexing of monopolistic muscles brought about both ownership transformations and oil market regulation in favour of host nations.131 Economic decolonization forced systemic change on BP and Shell. Much of their crude production was lost where the big profit margins had traditionally been, and which had once allowed the imperial oil barons to build global supply chains encompassing shipping, refining, and marketing, as well as extraction. By the early-​1970s, Shell expected its overseas operations to become much more localized with greater involvement of stakeholders, notably producer regimes.132 To subvert Louis and Robinson, such was the de-​globalization of decolonization.133 Additional diversification resulted from the realigning of colonial frontiers and the blowing away of intra-​and inter-​imperial integration. The operations of British shipping companies in the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, the agency houses and exchange banks of Malay[si]a and Singapore, as well as the marketing arrangements of the oil conglomerates from Burma to southern and eastern Africa, were disconnected by partitions and the collapse of federations.134 In the fracturing of the French imperial system, the ceding of the Indian enclaves to New Delhi in 1955 led to the disappearance of the Pondichéry-​AOF trade in guinée cloth, while territorial nationalisms broke down the free-​labour market in the francophone federations.135 Wars in Angola, followed by civil war after the Portuguese exit in 1975, led to the blockade of the Benguela Railway, the crucial artery for Katanga’s ores to reach the port of Lobito.136 This proved particularly problematic for the Congo Maritime Belge (CMB), the shipping tentacle of SGB. Concurrently, the closing of the border between Mozambique and Rhodesia shut off the alternative outlet at Maputo.137 Faced by impediments and uncertainties, post-​imperial firms sought to diversify from successor states. This was primarily to reduce political risk but also to exploit higher growth rates in the industrialized world. Divestment from former colonial territories was also reflective of commodity substitution, for example, the development of synthetic rubber or deploying aluminium instead of tin and copper. These technological developments in ‘the North’ of the global economy were themselves often fuelled by anxieties about political futures in ‘the South’.138 The first wave of geographical diversification had been into second-​ colonial-​ occupation Africa by panicked British, Dutch, and French Asian specialists. This underscored the ongoing colonial proclivities of imperial firms and the dream of delayed decolonization in Africa or limited devolution in favour of market-​orientated European settlers.139 But, as commercial conditions got equally tough in Africa by the 1960s,

Imperial Business Interests    651 capital was redeployed to politically predictable and economically prosperous Europe. At CFAO, for example, Africa was contributing only 17% to total turnover by 1990.140 Dutch and British oil extractors reduced their exposure in the Middle East from the late-​ 1960s, most radically in the North Sea and Alaska.141 UK trading houses in Asia and Anglo-​Belgian mining conglomerates in central Africa found bolt holes in the politically safer and culturally familiar former ‘White’ Dominions of the British Empire-​Commonwealth. By the 1980s, a minuscule 0.9% of the SGB’s shareholdings were in Congolese companies.142 Paralleling developments in UK post-​imperial shipping, CMB changed course even before loss of its minority share in the Zaire national line post-​1973: while 70% of CMB revenue had been derived from Congo in 1960, the proportion had halved by 1972.143 This part reflected infrastructural and administrative decay in Congo/​Zaire itself, but was more indicative of wide-​scale redeployment into the Far East, South Africa, the Middle East, and North and South America, as well as investment in bulk terminals and shipping facilities, offshore-​oil servicing, air and land distribution, and insurance within Europe.144 The Portuguese investment groups were getting cold feet about the future of the colonial world, too, and, as early as 1966, diversified into Europe and Latin America.145 Paralleling the experience of many developing-​world states, reinventions frequently proved unsuccessful, especially where post-​colonial shape-​shifting took imperial firms away from long-​established geo-​cultural and product know-​how. A  classic case was Burmah Oil. Shorn of its Asian and African interests through a wave of expropriations in the 1960s and 1970s, Burmah was left with a disconnected group of Peruvian, US, and North Sea oil and gas interests, and a tanker fleet well beyond its own productive needs. With the freight-​rate collapse after 1973, Burmah faced massive losses, forcing the sale of its American assets and nationalization of its North Sea interests, after Bank of England intervention.146 One of the most misguided redeployments involved the Hong Kong-​ based investment group Jardine Matheson in the wake of grave misgivings within the British business community concerning the future of the island’s economy under reunification with China in 1997. Jardines bought the drab UK discount supermarket chain, Kwik Save, just as its more aesthetically pleasing rivals introduced their own ‘no-​frills’ brands.147 Particularly problematic, and common to British, French, and Dutch trading houses, were attempts to run manufacturing enterprises in developed economies.148 The cultural shift required was too demanding: the ‘leader of a capital and research intensive industry has to think long term, while traders are inclined to think in the short term and take advantage of sudden opportunities’.149 Moreover, redeployment coincided with recession, high inflation, and the labour problems of the 1970s in western Europe, plus intense competition from the tiger economies of East Asia and southern Europe.150 Failure to diversify led to UAC being absorbed into other parts of its Unilever parent after 1983.151 For the Anglo-​Malaysian plantation groups, Sime Darby and Guthrie, insensitive redepolyment irritated post-​colonial regimes, and only served to accelerate the take-​over (by government-​linked corporations) of what was left of ex-​colonial investment.152

652   Nicholas J. White In light of these weaknesses, ex-​imperial firms often tried to return to core business. Standard Chartered, after unsuccessful attempts to break into Europe and North America, found itself in 1990 back where it had started twenty years earlier: a London-​ centred transnational bank in combination with a network of overseas branches in the Pacific Rim and Anglophone Africa.153 But it was not necessarily easy recreating past glories. The Handelsvereniging ‘Amsterdam’ (HVA), which was dispossessed of its plantations in Java and Sumatra after 1957 and its sugar interests in Ethiopia after 1975, tried to resurrect its East Indies trading roots. A focus on commodity trades without plantations, however, exposed HVA to the cruel and highly speculative global markets of the 1970s and 1980s.154 Moreover, with the colonial crutch kicked away, the harsh realities of late-​twentieth-​ century globalization often made it impossible to maintain the metropolitan ownership of redeployed firms. The post-​colonial paradox of the inability of Dutch trading house Hagemeyer to diversify from its traditional trade in consumer goods to managing manufacturing ventures (after expulsion from Indonesia and the end of its monopoly in West New Guinea by the early 1960s) was a majority share holding from 1983 by an Indonesian–​Chinese conglomerate.155 CFAO, facing slow growth in the French home market, bought out SCOA in 1996, only to be consumed in 2012 by a Japanese group. The diversification travails of the Ocean Group, once the premiere British shipping interest in western Africa and eastern Asia, were underlined first by its merger with the National Freight Corporation in 2000, then by its acquisition by the German Post Office in 2005.156

Conclusion: Capitalisms Converged The common, pan-​European experience of large-​scale imperial firms during and after political decolonization reinforces Thomas and Thompson’s assertion that the ‘collapse of European colonialism was intertwined, even co-​dependent’.157 This was especially the case for leading imperial businesses, for example, the Ocean Group, SGB, the Suez Canal Company, Unilever/​UAC, and Royal Dutch Shell, whose operations criss-​ crossed imperial frontiers. Thus, while the ‘end of Europe’s major empires was multilateral and globalising’, the consequent creation of national economies throughout the developing world was fundamentally de-​globalizing and de-​centralizing for expatriate enterprise.158 Temporarily exhilarated by the Second Colonial Occupation as European imperial regimes refortified the siege economies of the 1930s and the Second World War, big business was soon to be alienated by the big government of the new imperialism combined with the struggle over resources which exposed the impossibility of reconciling European privilege with non-​European entitlement. Thereafter, and intensifying trends evident in terminal colonialism, ex-​imperial firms found themselves surplus to requirements as once ‘open’ economies were substantially reconfigured and sometimes ‘closed’

Imperial Business Interests    653 altogether.159 The shutdown was relieved only in the 1980s with the reopening of the Chinese door, as well as ‘structural readjustment’ prescriptions for debilitated third-​ world economies. By then, however, ex-​imperial conglomerates had moved to pastures new or had been superseded by American, German, and Japanese multinationals. Even the most resilient of those that remained faced serious limitations on what could be done in emerging markets.160 Decolonization mattered.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Prof. Keetie Sluyterman for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. F. Buelens and D. Cassimon, “The industrialization of the Belgian Congo”, in E. Frankema and F. Buelens, eds., Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development (London: Routledge, 2013), 247. 3. D. Fieldhouse, Unilever Overseas:  The anatomy of a multinational 1895–​1965 (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 601. 4. N. White, “Reconstructing Europe through Rejuvenating Empire”, Past and Present Suppl 6 (2011): 212–​220; G. Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, 1885–​1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 150–​159, 172–​175, 192–​193; J-​P. Peemans, “Imperial Hangovers”, Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980): 264; G. Clarence-​Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825–​1975 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1985), 154, 158, 160–​162,  195. 5. D. Fieldhouse, Black Africa, 1945–​1980 (London: Routledge, 1986), 18–​19. 6. Merseyside Maritime Museum, Ocean Archives (hereafter OA), 2248/​1/​T, West Africa diary, 2 Jan 1950. 7. HSBC Group Archive, London, 1459/​2.03, Mabey to Hong Kong, 24 Aug 1946. 8. T. Lindblad, “From Java Bank to Bank Indonesia”, Lembaran Sejarah 8, no. 2 (2005): 18. 9. Vanthemsche, Congo, 160, 165, 166; Buelens and Cassimon, “Industrialization”, 237; G. Clarence-​Smith, “Business Empires in Angola under Salazar, 1930–​1961”, African Economic History 14 (1985): 3, 11. 10. Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 173, 206–​207. 11. B. Frank, “The formation of British colonial development policy in the trans-​World War Two period, 1942–​53” (PhD. diss, Lancaster University 2003): 132–​135; N. White, Business, Government, and the End of Empire (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), 54. 12. K. Monteith, Depression to Decolonization:  Barclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies, 1926–​1962 (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2008), 203, 258–​259. 13. S. Marsh, “HMG, AIOC and the Anglo-​Iranian Oil Crisis”, Diplomacy & Statecraft 12 (2001):  146–​149; C. More, Black Gold:  Britain and Oil in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 94; S. Howarth and J. Jonker, A History of Royal Dutch Shell, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 220, 222. 14. http://​refineriadikorsou.com/​main/​history1.aspx, accessed 29 April 2015. 15. R. Aldrich, France and the South Pacific since 1940 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 82–​83, 99–​100. 16. Vanthemsche, Congo, 163, 164–​165, 179–​180; Peemans, “Hangovers”, 265–​266. 17. Buelens and Cassimon, “Industrialization”, 238.

654   Nicholas J. White 18. C. Coquery-​Vidrovitch, “The Transfer of Economic Power in French-​Speaking West Africa”, in P. Gifford and Wm. R. Louis, eds., Decolonization and African Independence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 110–​111; C. Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930–​1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),  72–​76. 19. Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 146. 20. Ibid., 166, 168, 212; Clarence-​Smith, “Angola”, 8. 21. G. Wasserman, Politics of Decolonization (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1976), 25–​26; M. Kahler, “Political Regime and Economic Actors”, World Politics 33, no. 3 (1981): 396–​397; Boone, Senegal, 71. 22. Buelens and Cassimon, 240–​241; Peemans, “Hangovers”, 266. 23. K. Sluyterman and B. Bouwens, Brewery, Brand and Family:  150  years of Heineken, (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2014), 217, 218, 222. 24. R. Woodman, Fiddler’s Green:  The Great Squandering, 1921–​2012 (Stroud:  Endeavour, 2010), 330–​331, 336–​337. 25. Kahler, “Actors”, 399–​400. 26. Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 210–​211. 27. White, Business, 97–​133; A. Hardy, “The Economics of French Rule in Indochina”, Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 4 (1998):  835; A. Coates, The Commerce in Rubber (Singapore, 1987), 358; T. Lindblad, “British Business and the Uncertainties of Early Independence in Indonesia”, Itinerario 37, no.  2 (2013):  150; J. P. van der Kerkhof, “Rehabilitation, Reorientation and indonesianisasi at Internatio and HVA, 1945–​58”, Lembaran Sejarah 8, no. 2 (2005): 111–​112. 28. D. Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 329–​330; S. Stockwell, The Business of Decolonization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25; B. Murillo, “Gold Coast Consumers, Local Employees, and UAC, 1940–​ 1960”, Enterprise & Society 12, no. 2 (2011): 318–​319, 329–​330. 29. More, Black Gold, 94–​95; Marsh, “AIOC”, 143–​174; N. Adelrehim, J. Malby and S. Toms, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Control”, Enterprise & Society 12, no. 4 (2011): 834, 835, 847. 30. Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 173. 31. Toosey diary. 32. D. Fieldhouse, “British Merchants and French Decolonization”, in Charles-​Robert Ageron and Marc Michel, L’Afrique noire française (Paris: CNRS, 1992), 490. 33. F.  Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 264; S. Decker, “Building up Goodwill: British Business, Development and Economic Nationalism in Ghana and Nigeria, 1945–​1977” (Ph.D diss., University of Liverpool, 2006): 206–​207, 237; N. White, “The limits of late-​colonial intervention”, Indonesia and the Malay World 36, no. 106 (2008): 432–​435; Peemans, “Hangovers”, 264–​265, 270–​271. 34. S. Decker, “The Impact of Colonial Development Debates on the HR Policies of Imperial Business in Ghana and Nigeria, 1940–​1960”, Association of Business Historians Conference (Unpublished paper, March 2013): 8. 35. J. Hove, “The Volta River Project and Decolonization, 1945–​57” in R. Gendron, M. Ingulstad, and E. Storli, eds., Aluminum Ore:  The Political Economy of the Global Bauxite Industry (Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 196–​197; A. Harneit-​Sievers, “ ‘Economic Nationalism’ and British Colonial Policy”, African Economic History 24 (1996):  48–​50; P. Steyn, “Oil Exploration in Colonial Nigeria,

Imperial Business Interests    655 c.  1903–​58”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 37, no.  2 (2009):  262–​264; Decker, “Goodwill”, 134; T. Sunseri, “ ‘Every African a Nationalist’: Scientific Forestry and Forest Nationalism in Colonial Tanzania”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007): 910–​911. 36. Hardy, “Indochina”, 830–​831. 37. J. à Campo, “Dutch Shipping in Independent Indonesia, 1945–​1958”, International Journal of Maritime History 10, no. 2 (1998): 12. 38. Harneit-​Sievers, “Nationalism”, 51. 39. Ibid., 53. 40. D. Hyde, “Global coffee and rural restructuring in late colonial Kenya”, Journal of Global History 4, no. 1 (2009): 84–​87; White, Business, 197–​209. 41. S. Mollan, “Economic Imperialism and the Political Economy of the Sudan” (Ph.D diss., University of Durham, 2008): 270–​271, 275–​276. 42. G. Clarence-​Smith, “Business Empires in Equatorial Africa”, African Economic History 12 (1983): 7; G. Clarence-​Smith, “Rubber in Indonesia and the Congo”, in Frankema and Buelens, Exploitation, 205; Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 213–​216, 217–​218. 43. Fieldhouse, “Merchants”, 492, 497; Fieldhouse, Africa, 19; H. d’Almeida-​Topor, “French trading companies in sub-​Saharan Africa, 1960–​90”, in G. Jones, ed., The Multinational Traders (London: Routledge, 1998), 180. 44. Toosey  diary. 45. Hove, “Volta”, 191; S. Decker, “HR”, 7; Frank, “Development”, 183–​197; L. Butler, Copper Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 192–​193; Aldrich, Pacific, 51, 69, 79. 46. Toosey  diary. 47. Monteith, Barclays, 223–​228; Frank, “Development”, 189–​186, 241–​243. 48. Decker, “Goodwill”, 30, 89, 93, 99–​108, 146–​147, 310; S. Decker, “Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising”, Business History Review 81 (2007): 59–​86. For a parallel in East Africa see J. Morris, “ ‘Cultivating the African’: Barclays DCO and the Decolonisation of Business Strategy in Kenya, 1950–​78”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 44, no.  4 (2016): 653–​658. 49. Coquery-​Vidrovitch, “Transfer”, 112; d’Almeida-​Topor, “Trading”, 179–​180. 50. N. White, “Decolonization in the 1950s”, in M. Lynn, ed., The British Empire in the 1950s:  Retreat or Revival? (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 111–​ 112; C. Uche, “Accounting and Control in Barclays Bank (DCO)”, Accounting, Business & Financial History 8, no. 3 (1998): 240–​242. 51. R. Adbelal, National Purpose in the World Economy (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2001), 180. 52. Hardy, “Indochina”, 838; Coquery-​Vidrovitch, “Transfer”, 116; Fieldhouse, “Merchants”, 496–​497; D. Feather, “A critical analysis of the neo-​colonial explanation of Francafrique, 1960–​81” (MRes diss., Liverpool John Moores University, 2014), 27–​28; d’Almeida-​Topor, “Trading”, 175; Boone, Senegal, 75–​76, 128, 135, 156. 53. Coquery-​Vidrovitch, “Transfer”, 120–​121. 54. O. Iheduru, “Merchant Fleet Development by Legislation: Lessons from West and Central Africa”, Maritime Policy and Management 19, no. 4 (1992): 308. 55. Fieldhouse, Africa, 19. 56. Fieldhouse, “Merchants”, 493–​494. 57. Ibid., 496; Abdelal, Purpose, 186. 58. M. Thomas, Fight or Flight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

656   Nicholas J. White 59. Stockwell, Business, 119–​128; Harneit-​Sievers, “Nationalism”, 56–​57; Decker, “Goodwill”, 143–​144. 60. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Library, Singapore, H.  S. Lee papers, 64, Kiddle, Malayan Chamber of Mines to Secretary, FMS Chamber of Mines, 7 May 1952. 61. R. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1998), 357–​358. 62. M. Misra, Business, Race and Politics in British India, c. 1850–​1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 184–​189, 192, 209. 63. M. Sullivan, France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-​American Relations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 129; Coates, Rubber, 359. 64. Hardy, “Indochina”, 842. 65. M. Kahler, Decolonization in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 275; Kahler, “Actors”, 395, 398; Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 204. 66. J. Jonker and K. Sluyterman, At Home on the World Markets: Dutch International Trading Companies from the 16th Century Until the Present (Montreal: McGill-​Queen's University Press, 2001), 266–​267; Lindblad, “Uncertainties”, 152; N. White, “Surviving Sukarno”, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 5 (2012): 1286–​1288. 67. N. White, “The Business and the Impact of Decolonization in Liverpool”, History 96, no. 2 (2011): 190. 68. N. MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (Harlow: Longman, 1997), 68–​69. 69. Campo, “Shipping”, 16, 20. 70. V. Johnson, “Sowing the Seeds of Nationalism”, International Economic History Congress, unpublished paper (August 2006), 1. 71. Decker, “Goodwill”, 294. 72. As Thomas tells us for the inter-​war years:  “Colonial policing was closely attuned to the rhythms of the workplace”. M. Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 334. 73. OA/​2423, Cameron, Dalgety & Company, Perth to Holt, Alfred Holt & Co., Liverpool, 8 July 1947. 74. Clarence-​Smith, “Angola”,  6–​7. 75. Vanthemsche, Congo, 214. 76. Murillo, “UAC”, 337–​338; Decker, “Advertising”, 74, 84, 86. 77. Kahler, “Actors”, 405. 78. P. Slinn, “Commercial Concessions and Politics during the Colonial Period”, African Affairs 70, no. 281 (1971):  365–​366, 377–​378, 379–​380; Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 175; A. Cohen, “Business and Decolonization in Central Africa Reconsidered”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no.  4 (2008):  644–​646, 652; M. Hughes, “Fighting for White Rule in Africa”, International History Review 25, no. 3 (2003): 594–​595, 596, 599, 600, 605; Kahler, “Actors”, 389; Vanthemsche, Congo, 210–​211, 213, 244. 79. Kahler, “Actors”, 406. 80. Ibid., 406–​ 407; C. Piquet, “The Suez Company’s Concession in Egypt, 1854–​ 1956”, Enterprise & Society 5, no. 1 (2004): 112–​113, 120. 81. Stockwell, Business, 225. 82. Ibid., 148–​150, 191–​194; Wasserman, Independence; White, Business, 143; Misra, Race, 173. 83. Kahler, “Actors”, 397.

Imperial Business Interests    657 84. Jonker and Sluyterman, Markets, 264; Hardy, “Indochina”, 831–​832; Kahler, Decolonization, 282, 295; Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 211–​212. By the 1950s, however, there were considerable limits to American “business imperialism” in Southeast Asia; see N. Cullather, Illusions of Influence:  The Political Economy of United States-​Philippines Relations, 1942–​1960 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); J. Gillespie, “Corporate America’s Perceptions of Southeast Asia, 1950–​1961”, Business History Review 68, no. 3 (1994): 338–​340, 349–​353,  356. 85. L. Butler, “Business and British Decolonization”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 35, no. 3 (2007): 459–​484; Cohen, “Reconsidered”, 644–​651. 86. Butler, Copper, 279–​280. 87. Thomas, Fight, 86; N. White, British Business in Post-​ Colonial Malaysia, 1957–​ 70: Neo-​ colonialism or Disengagement? (London:  Routledge, 2004), 73–​ 77; Kerkhof, “Rehabilitation”, 120. 88. A. Smith, “The Winds of Change and the End of the Comprador System in HSBC”, Business History 58, no. 2 (2016): 179–​206. 89. G. Jones, British Multinational Banking, 1830–​1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 305–​ 306, 316; Decker, “Goodwill”, 233, 254–​ 255, 266; Johnson, “Sowing”, 17–​ 2 4; Adelrehim, Malby and Toms “Responsibility”, 844; Decker, “Decolonising Barclays Bank DCO?”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 33, no.  3 (2005):  432; Stockwell, Business, 143. 90. Monteith, Barclays, 240–​ 241; Decker, “Goodwill”, 257–​ 262; J. van der Kerkhof, “Indonesianisasi of Dutch economic interests, 1930–​1960”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-​, Land-​ en Volkenkunde 161–​162, no. 3 (2005): 193; Steyn, “Oil”, 265; Piquet, “Suez”, 123–​124; Lindblad, “Java”, 17–​18, 23, 25; Morris, “Cultivating”, 661. 91. Monteith, Barclays, 187. 92. Ibid., 234–​239, 244–​245; Kerkhof, “Indonesianisasi”, 193–​194. 93. Monteith, Barclays, 235, 240–​241; Lindblad, “Java”, 17–​18, 23, 25; Kerkhof, “Indonesianisasi”, 182, 194–​196; Lindblad, “Uncertainties”, 152. 94. Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 216. 95. Buelens and Cassimon, “Industrialization”, 243, 246–​247. 96. N. White, “The Business and the Politics of Decolonization”, Economic History Review 53, no. 3 (2000): 558–​562; Marsh, “AIOC”, 143–​144, 150, 151, 163; Butler, Copper, 286–​291; P. Murphy, Party Politics and Decolonization (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 88–​119. 97. Hardy, “Indochina”, 829–​833, 835; Thomas, Fight, 149, 150. 98. J. Kent, “The US and Decolonization in Central Africa, 1957–​64”, in L. Butler and S. Stockwell, eds., The Wind of Change:  Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 197, 209. 99. Hughes, “White”, 610. 100. Vanthemsche, Congo, 213–​214. 101. More, Black, 98–​99; Tignor, Capitalism, 127–​142; T. Lindblad, Bridges to New Business (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 161, 182–​185. 102. Fieldhouse, Africa, 18; Hardy, “Indochina”, 840–​841, 845; A. McKinlay, H. Mercer and N. Rollings, “The Federation of British Industries and European Integration, 1945–​63”, Business History 42 (2000):  91–​116; P. Cain and A. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–​2000 (Harlow:  Routledge, 2000), 632–​640; Vanthemsche, Congo, 146; Peemans, “Hangovers”, 271, 274–​275.

658   Nicholas J. White 103. Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 193, 195, 211, 196–​197, 202–​203, 219–​220. 104. E. Kleiman, “Trade and the Decline of Colonialism”, Economic Journal 86 (1976): 462, 471. 105. White, Business, 241; White, Malaysia, 8. 106. Murillo, “UAC”, 321, 344–​347. 107. Twang Peck Yang, The Chinese Business Elite in Indonesia and the Transition to Independence, 1940–​1950 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1998); B. Purwanto, “Indonesian Military Entrepreneurship in the 1950s and 1960s”, in A. Schrikker and J. Touwen, eds., Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Singapore:  NUS Press, 2015), 155–​159; Thee Kian Wie, “The Indonesian Economy in the 1950s and Early 1960s and America’s Proposal for Economic Aid”, in ibid., 207. 108. Vanthemsche, Congo, 220, 247–​248. 109. S. Howarth and J. Jonker, Shell, 226, 229, 231, 235; White, “Surviving”, 1306, 1313. 110. Coates, Rubber, 359. 111. Sluyterman and Bouwens, Brewery, 348–​ 349; Decker, “Goodwill”, 23, 126, 234; I. Maekawa, “Neo-​ Colonialism Reconsidered”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 43, no. 2 (2015): 327. 112. K. Dharmasena, “The Entry of Developing Countries into World Shipping”, International Journal of Maritime History 1, no. 2 (1989): 85–​122. 113. Decker, “Goodwill”, 122, 173. 114. Uche, “Oil”, 118–​119; W. Zartman, “Europe and Africa”, Foreign Affairs 54, no. 2 (1976): 338–​339. 115. C. Uche, “British Government, British businesses, and the indigenization exercise in post-​independence Nigeria”, Business History Review 86 (2012):  751–​755, 759–​761, 766–​767; Decker, “Goodwill”, 123–​124, 175, 185, 187, 193, 198; S. Yacob and N. White, “The ‘Unfinished Business’ of Malaysia’s Decolonization”, Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 5 (2010): 919–​960. S. Yacob and K. Khalid, “Adapt or Divest?”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 40, no. 3 (2012): 459–​482. 116. Boone, Senegal, 220–​221. 117. Vanthemsche, Congo, 245. 118. Clarence-​Smith, “Equatorial”, 8. 119. Zartman, “Europe”, 327. 120. Feather, “Francafrique”, 36–​37; Coquery-​Vidrovitch, “Transfer”, 132–​133. 121. Vanthemsche, Congo, 229–​230; Buelens and Cassimon, Industrialization, 244; Feather, “Francafrique”,  52–​60. 122. A. Perchard, Aluminiumville (Lancaster:  Carnegie, 2012), 105–​ 106; Hove, “Volta”, 190–​193, 197–​200, 204; S. Decker, “Corporate political activity in less developed countries”, Business History, 53, no. 7 (2011): 993–​1017; Feather, “Francafrique”, 36–​37. 123. A. Cohen, “Britain and the Breakdown of the Colonial Environment”, Business History Review 88, no. 4 (2014): 741, 751–​752, 758. 124. Maekawa, “Neo-​Colonialism”, 323–​324, 331–​332. 125. MacQueen, Portuguese, 229. 126. Woodman, Fiddler’s, 339. 127. White, Malaysia, 184–​185, 189–​190. 128. J. Bamberg, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1950–​ 1975 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 207; G. Saunders, A History of Brunei (London, 2002), 165.

Imperial Business Interests    659 129. Sluyterman and Bouwens, Brewery, 348; White, Malaysia, 113–​115, 186–​187; S. Decker, “Less Than an Empire and More than British: Foreign Investor Competition in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1960s”, in David Thackeray, Andrew Thompson, and Richard Toye (eds), Imagining Britain’s Economic Future, c. 1800–1975: Trade, Consumerism, and Global Markets (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2018. 130. Uche, “Oil”, 113, 122, 124, 126, 131; Cohen, “Breakdown”, 741, 751–​752, 758; White, Malaysia, 114, 186. 131. More, Black, 144–​145. 132. K. Sluyterman, A History of Royal Dutch Shell, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 31–​35; K. Sluyterman and B. Wubs, “Multinationals and the Dutch Business System”, Business History Review 84, no. 4 (2010): 807–​808. 133. W. R. Louis and R. Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization”, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 22 (1994): 462–​511. 134. D. and S. Howarth, The Story of P&O (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 164–​165, 173, 174, 176–​177; Woodman, Fiddler’s, 405–​406; White, Malaysia, 24–​57; Bamberg, BP, 252–​260, 263–​264,  267. 135. Boone, Senegal, 74; Fieldhouse, “Merchants”, 493–​494. 136. Buelens and Cassimon, “Industrialization”, 244; Vanthemsche, Congo, 188–​189. 137. OA/​2477, Ellerton to Swayne, Sept 24, 1973; Ellerton for Toosey, Dec 12, 1975; Ellerton to Toosey, Dec 20, 1976; 1977 CMB Annual Report. 138. White, “1950s”, 111. 139. Coquery-​Vidrovitch, “Transfer”, 112; Hardy, “Indochina”, 835–​837; R. Palmer, “The Nyasaland Tea Industry in the Era of International Tea Restrictions, 1933–​1950”, Journal of African History 26, no. 2–​3 (1985): 216, 219–​221; Jonker and Sluyterman, Markets, 276, 278; Sluyterman and Bouwens, Brewery, 222–​223; Sunseri, “Forestry”, 900–​902. 140. Sluyterman and Bouwens, Brewery, 349–​ 354; Jonker and Sluyterman, Markets, 299, 303–​ 307; Kerkhof, “Indonesianisasi”, 189–​ 190, 197–​ 198, 199, 204; Kerkhof, “Rehabilitation”, 114; d’Almeida-​Topor, “Trading”, 181. 141. More, Black, 92, 102–​103; Bamberg, BP, 271, 277–​278. 142. White, “1950s”, 113; Peemans, “Hangovers”, 283; Clarence-​ Smith, “Equatorial”, 7; Vanthemsche, Congo, 251; “Tanganykia Concessions Limited”, Glasgow Herald, 12 Dec 1969. 143. Vanthemsche, Congo, 158–​159, 246. 144. M. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 296; 1977 CMB Annual Report. 145. MacQueen, Portuguese, 52, 69; Clarence-​Smith, Portuguese Empire, 311. 146. More, Black, 104, 148–​149, 151. 147. “Yet another disaster for the Keswick brothers”, Independent, 8 Nov 1996. 148. J. Brown, “Moving with the Times”, in M. Keswick, ed., The Thistle and the Jade (Hong Kong: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 268–​270, 272; Fieldhouse, Merchant, 716, 759. 149. K. Sluyterman, “Dutch multinational trading companies in the twentieth century”, in Jones, Traders, 95. 150. Jonker and Sluyterman, Markets, 316–​319; Fieldhouse, UAC, 760–​761. 151. Fieldhouse, Merchant, 760, 680, 762; G. Jones, Merchants to Multinationals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 151–​152. 152. “MALAYSIA: Socking It to ‘Swine Bobby’ ”, Time, 24 Jan 1977; “PNB launches 901p a share bid for Guthrie”, Business Times (Malaysia), 8 Sept 1981.

660   Nicholas J. White 153. Jones, Banking, 345–​346. 154. Jonker and Sluyterman, Markets, 278; Kerkhof, “Rehabilitation”, 116–​117. 155. Jonker and Sluyterman, Markets, 350–​351. 156. N. White, “Liverpool Shipping and the End of Empire”, in S. Haggerty, A. Webster, and N. White, eds., The Empire in One City? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 180–​182, 187 n. 94. 157. M. Thomas and A. Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation”, International History Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 161–​162. 158. Ibid., 162. 159. A. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (Harlow: Routledge, 1973), 267–​292. 160. G. Jones, “Multinational Strategies and Developing Countries in Historical Perspective”, Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2010.

Chapter 34

Film and th e E nd of Em pi re Deconstructing and Reconstructing Colonial Pasts and their Legacy in World Cinemas Paul Cooke

Film History and Colonialism The history of film has, since the earliest days of the medium, been interlinked with the history of colonial struggle, and both the film industry and the images it produces highlight the complexities of colonial, post-​colonial, and neo-​colonial global relations. The legacy of colonialism has been reconfigured in many recent debates to characterize the forces of globalization and neoliberal free trade agreements. Early cinema in Britain was dominated by stories of British exploits in South Africa during the Boer War in films which accounted, as Andrew Thompson notes, for as much as 40% of production in 1900. A decade later, UK audiences flocked to music halls and other venues that exhibited films to be outraged by footage of the so-​called ‘Gaekwar incident’. This occurred during the visit of George V to India in 1911, when the Gaekwar of Baroda failed to follow proper protocol, turning his back on the royal couple after having been presented to them.1 Film was quickly identified by national elites across Europe as a powerful medium for the communication of the imperial project, evidenced in the UK most clearly by the foundation of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit in 1926. This organization had the responsibility of bringing the Empire ‘alive’ on screen and reinforcing cultural and economic ties between Britain and its colonies, often presenting, in the process, deeply paternalistic and patronizing images of the indigenous populations of these colonies.2 The Empire also appeared to be a popular topic for audiences in the wider western world, as demonstrated in the American box-​office success of British-​based film director Zoltan Korda’s stories of imperial derring-​do (Sanders of the River, 1935,

662   Paul Cooke The Drum, 1938, The Four Feathers, 1939).3 In such films, once again, the presentation of indigenous populations was frequently deeply problematic by modern standards, turning the Empire ‘into a savage, fabricated backdrop peopled by violent tribes with heathen rituals, against whom white heroes had to fight for “civilization” ’, as Lindiwe Dovey puts it in her discussion of early western cinematic representations of Africa.4 At the same time, those cultures (with the necessary economic resources to do so) that were seeking to assert their independence from European political and cultural hegemony embraced the film medium. Thus, African Film Productions, based in Johannesburg and headed by the American Isadore William Schlesinger, produced an early epic De Voortrekkers (Harold M. Shaw, 1916) to celebrate Boer supremacy over the British, as well as over the black population (which, it should be noted, was presented in as undifferentiated, savage manner in this production as it was in any British film).5 Meanwhile in India, Dadasaheb Phalke was beginning to make feature films based on Sanskrit legends (Raja Harishchandra, 1913; Lanka Dahan, 1917), sowing the seeds for what would become one of the most important global film industries by the twenty-​first century.6 Film was also a key medium through which neo-​colonial powers were able to assert their international reach and significance, a dimension that would later come to be described as ‘soft power’, or the ability of a nation to gain influence through the power of attraction rather than coercion.7 The most obvious example of this was the US, which, by the end of the 1910s, already dominated large parts of the world’s film market. A good deal of the films produced in the early decades of Hollywood were concerned with presenting a vision of a Euro-​American trans-​continental imperial project, from D. W. Griffith’s racist story of the Civil War and its aftermath, The Birth of a Nation (1915), to countless Westerns produced during Hollywood’s golden age that depicted the battle for white supremacy of the continent.8 Yet while the likes of Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn projected Hollywood’s version of the American dream on to an ever-​greater proportion of the world’s cinema screens, to be consumed by an evermore willing international audience, the American industry’s domination was also increasingly feared by cultural and political elites beyond the US as a new form of cultural imperialism. This was, and continues to be, particularly obvious in Europe. France, most noticeably, has consistently been vociferous in its insistence that film be exempted from global free-​trade agreements in order to protect national, and in particular French, cultural specificity from what it perceives to be the potential homogenization of Hollywood’s international popularity.9 In the US itself, by contrast, Hollywood has long been seen by many, not least the political elite, as an important medium for the communication of America’s meritocratic values to the rest of the world, the achievability of the ‘American dream’ ostensibly being a key message in many of the films produced by the Hollywood ‘dream factory’, particularly in the industry’s early decades. Nonetheless, it is also fair to say while much of the world has embraced US films, the message such elites might wish to broadcast is not necessarily the message that spectators have always received. Here, one might mention US cultural policy in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, where the western occupying powers considered Hollywood films to be a particularly

Film and the End of Empire    663 good way of supporting the de-​Nazification of the population. Hollywood would help to re-​educate Germans in the ways of democracy. However, as Jennifer Fay highlights, in many of the films shown (not least the types of Westerns already mentioned) German audiences saw problematic parallels with both the spectacular aesthetics and racist politics that were familiar from the Nazi period, interpreting the flood of Hollywood product on German screens as a straightforwardly neo-​colonial impulse.10 Similarly, while in Britain the audience’s response to the ‘Gaekwar incident’, for example, might have insisted upon the country’s inalienable right to rule India, it was an image that surely would been received differently by Indian audiences. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat expand upon this point in their exploration of African spectatorship, suggesting that colonial cinema had ‘complex ramifications for spectatorship’, and that such films could generate a form of ‘spectatoral schizophrenia’ in colonial audiences by asking audiences to identify with the white colonial masters against the indigenous population, which was, more often than not, presented as a nameless barbaric hoard.11 However, as Stam and Shohat also imply in their discussion of the role of colonial cinema in the writing of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (who challenged the colonial narrative), while these films attempted to generate emotional engagement with the white ‘heroes’, colonial spectators were well able to read their visual narratives against the grain, using film to construct postcolonial subject positions via colonial cultural texts.12 The counter-​reading of colonial films became ever more obvious as colonial rule itself began to be challenged more consistently in the postwar period. As Lee Grieveson suggests, while many of the films produced by the colonial powers in the 1940s and 1950s ‘celebrate one story, they unwittingly record another, of domination and exploitation’, the latter being easily legible to native audiences.13 In the aftermath of the war, film was initially seen by the UK government as a way of projecting the value of the modern colonial state in as straightforward manner as possible, in order to ensure that the native population got the message. This was an approach to filmmaking established by William Sellers, the head of the Crown Film Unit, the wartime successor to the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. The Crown Film Unit helped to set up a number of Local film production, distribution, and exhibition organizations, from Malaya to Nigeria, tasked with making and disseminating government ‘information’ films during the 1940s and 1950s. These would present heroic images of ‘decent’ indigenous populations working in partnership with the British to protect their country from barbarous communists, be that during the so-​called ‘Malayan Emergency’ or in the face of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. As the 1950s wore on, film increasingly became a tool for managing the process of decolonization. The local film units were tasked with projecting the need for the colonies to take on greater responsibility for self-​rule, while also insisting upon the logic of continued overall British authority. Yet the films produced, along with the way they were exhibited, sometimes revealed a more ambiguous message than one might expect of a government information film, highlighting irresolvable contradictions in the colonial position and, in turn, the fact that the colonial powers could not control the pace of change. On the one hand, film crews, which now included native staff, sometimes challenged western assumptions about the need for simplicity in addressing colonial

664   Paul Cooke audiences, a tactic that departed from the aesthetics enshrined in Sellers’s approach to filmmaking. On the other, the films’ mode of exhibition also provided a space for post-​ colonial critique. Tom Rice, for example, describes the way that government films in the Gold Coast were shown by mobile cinema units employing local commentators to translate the films’ English narration into the audience’s local language. These commentators would at times depart from the proper script to adopt a parodic position towards the films, ‘generating comedy by responding to the action on screen’.14 As suggested by the development of the local film units in the former British colonies, shifting patterns in the mode of production inevitably led to shifting power dynamics being apparent from the narratives audiences could see on the screen. While this might have been particularly visible at this moment of historical transition, it is important to remember this relationship when examining the entire legacy of colonialism in film, along with contemporary discussions of globalization. Indeed, many decades before commentators began to speak of globalization and transnational cultural production, industrial flows reflected the dynamics of international political and economic relations. Film talent and technicians have always been internationally mobile, and the industry itself frequently highlights a strong sense of transnational cosmopolitanism, for all its instrumentalization by national elites. Consider, for example, the large-​scale immigration of Jewish industry professionals from Europe to the US in the 1920s and 1930s who were quickly absorbed into Hollywood, bringing with them European aesthetic sensibilities that would profoundly shape the future direction of the US industry.15 Film production companies around the world have long been adept at making the most of the dynamics of global politics, along with fluctuations in exchange rates, of local tax breaks offered by national governments designed to attract film production, or of cheap labour and location costs in order to maximize the potential of the budgets available for the development, production, and distribution of their product. Here one might mention, for example, the recent rapid growth of Cape Town as a location for international film production. This has been so noticeable that some commentators suggest, somewhat hyperbolically perhaps, that Cape Town has the potential even to rival Hollywood.16 Additionally, numerous Bollywood productions, such Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham . . . (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness, Karan Johar, 2001) or Ek Tha Tiger (Once There was a Tiger, Kabir Khan, 2012) exploit local tax breaks, as well as the cosmopolitan sensibilities of India’s huge diaspora to maximize revenues.17

‘World Cinema’ and Decolonizing Film Studies The interconnected nature of global film culture is built on a complex web of competing economic imperatives and frequently asymmetrical cultural relationships, which in turn reflects the ongoing legacy of the world’s colonial past as well as the changing

Film and the End of Empire    665 dynamics of contemporary global power relations. This interconnectedness can also be identified in the ways scholars have approached film culture as an object of study. This has, moreover, had further ramifications for the films produced, and, in particular, whether they are seen or not. In recent decades, there has been a huge growth in academic interest in what has been defined as ‘world cinema’. The concept of world cinema would, on the face of it, seem to be the product of a democratizing impulse that seeks to explore all types of film culture in an attempt to challenge the hegemony of Hollywood. However, as Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim note, the term often has strongly Orientalist underpinnings. They point to analogies with concepts such as ‘world music’ and ‘world literature’ in the way world cinema tends to be used similarly to refer ‘to cultural products and practices that are mainly non-​Western’, but that have been selected by a variety of mechanisms for consumption in and by the West.18 At the same time, academic discussion of world cinema, they argue, is often also rooted in, and conflated with, an a priori valorization of cinemas that are resistant to dominant Western culture, be it the presentation of stories that seek to give the ‘subaltern’ a voice, or in the adoption of formal qualities that seem explicitly to reject the aesthetic norms of Hollywood.19 It is those films that attempt to effect such resistance which are frequently canonized in the study of world cinema and that, in turn, find their way to art-​house cinema screens and niche distribution for the home-​viewing market (DVD, video-​on-​demand services, etc.). As a result, scholars have tended to focus on the work of filmmakers and filmmaking movements from a variety of national and transnational contexts that explicitly challenge the legacies of past colonialism, as well as any potential drive towards cultural homogeneity that globalization—​frequently read as a form of US-​led neo-​ colonialism20—​appears to support in the present, be it the work of the Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène, generally credited as the ‘father’ of African cinema, Satyajit Ray’s reinterpretation of Italian Neorealism in India, or, more recently, Carlos Reygadas ‘Slow Cinema’ in Mexico.21 However, if these are the types of artists that come to mind when thinking of world cinema, of course, most films made around the world do not (at least explicitly seek to) do this. While the presence of global economic, social, and political asymmetries and the powerful role cinema can play in giving voice to those who are their victims cannot be denied, in recent years there has been a shift in emphasis away from conceptualizations of world cinema wholly as a cinema that can give a voice to the oppressed.22 As Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Durah note, focusing on world cinema as a cinema of resistance can ‘perpetuate the patronizing attitude which sees all [non-​ western] cinemas as victims; that is, purely reactive manifestations incapable of eliciting independent theory’.23 Instead, building on the work of Shohat and Stam, Nagib calls for a more ‘inclusive approach to film studies, which defines World Cinema as a polycentric phenomenon with peaks of creation in different places and periods’.24 If we adopt this perspective, ‘world cinema’ becomes ‘world cinemas’ and, in turn, a methodological heuristic which allows us genuinely to ‘de-​westerniz[e]‌film studies’, as Saer Maty Ba and Will Higbee put it, to reread film history and move the received starting point of some aesthetic innovations from the west to other parts of the globe, or redefine the economic

666   Paul Cooke and cultural models we use to define our understanding of the way film is critically received or popularly consumed.25 As Dennison and Lim insist, it is crucially important to adopt a ‘situated’ approach to discussion of the world’s cinema as a polycentric network of cultural production.26 In so doing, this allows commentators to avoid not only the kind of ‘centre-​periphery’ model that frequently dominates discussion of the medium, but also to challenge teleological versions of film history, such as that posited, however rhetorically, in the pioneering work of Teshome H. Gabriel on Third World Cinema (discussed in more detail below), and his understanding of film production in the developing world in the wake of decolonization as existing on a continuum that can be divided into a series of phases, from domination to liberation.27 In the rest of this chapter, I examine some of the ways in which world cinema as a ‘cinema of resistance’ has been both conceptualized and challenged, exploring a variety of production contexts both in the developing world and in post-​colonial diaspora communities in the west. In so doing, I wish to highlight some of the complexities of the contemporary global film landscape that reveal the continuing legacies of colonialism, along with the neo-​colonial perceptions, and realities, of globalization, as well as the competing ways these forces are negotiated by filmmakers around the world.

World Cinema, Third Cinema, and Nuancing Resistance Central to discussion of world cinema as a ‘cinema of resistance’ is the concept of ‘Third Cinema’, which emerged in the aftermath of the extraordinary growth in experimental and underground filmmaking that spread across Latin America from the late 1950s. As colonial film units in some parts of the world sought to control the narrative of post-​war decolonization, Third Cinema offered a counter narrative. This was fuelled by the reinvigoration of left-​wing thought by a new generation of intellectuals and the success of the revolution in Cuba, along with the ideas emerging from the Bandung Conference, which sought to promote economic and cultural cooperation among the post-​colonial nations of Asia and Africa emerging after the end of the western European empires. Filmmakers began to adapt the sensibilities and aesthetics of the French nouvelle vague and Italian Neorealism, along with the social criticism of John Grierson’s documentary tradition, to depict the struggles of everyday life in post-​colonial society. One of the best-​known filmmaking movements to emerge at the time was Brazil’s Cinema Novo.28 Films such as Nelson Periera dos Santos’ Vidas secas (Barren Lives, 1963), Carlos Diegus’ Ganga Zumbas (1963), and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaima (1969) infused the aesthetics of European new waves with elements of magical realism, exploring the country’s past in order to analyse the legacy of colonialism in Brazil and the ethnic and religious tensions that shaped contemporary society. But Cinema Novo was only one trend among many. In Cuba, the revolutionary government inaugurated

Film and the End of Empire    667 ‘the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry’ (ICAIC) which also supported the transnational growth of cinematic experimentation in the region.29 Although a Communist regime, the government refused to accept the restrictive orthodoxies of Socialist Realism imposed by governments in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Instead, it supported the production of complex experimental studies of revolutionary politics such as Lucía (Humberto Solás, 1968), which traces the lives of three women during three moments of political upheaval in the country, or Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968), the story of an aspiring bourgeois writer negotiating life in Cuba after the Bay of Pigs. At the end of the decade, in Argentina, this fervour of political filmmaking led to the publication by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino of the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema, part of a ‘wave of militant manifestos’ at the time that sought to realize the full political potential of this moment of cinematic creativity.30 Themselves filmmakers, Solanas and Getino rejected ‘First Cinema’, which they define as the mainstream industry, and, in particular, films out of Hollywood. Similarly, they spurned ‘Second Cinema’, which they identify primarily with European auteur filmmaking. Both these types of cinema they see as supporting the bourgeois status quo, even as those filmmakers who Solanas and Getino define as ‘Second Cinema’ frequently saw themselves as providing a necessary challenge to the bourgeois ‘First Cinema’ of Hollywood. Instead, Solanas and Getino call for a revolutionary mode of filmmaking practice, ‘Third Cinema’, which attempts to confront directly the colonial impulses of late capitalism in all its guises. The projector ‘is a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second’, they declare.31 By challenging society, Third Cinema would effect a ‘decolonization of culture’ that would not only support society as it dealt with the legacies of the past, but also protect contemporary society from neo-​colonial and neo-​fascist forces.32 Their magnum opus, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) was an attempt to put the manifesto into practice. A didactic ‘essay film’, La hora de los hornos is a montage of documentary footage, political slogans, still images and poetry that seeks to offer a comprehensive analysis of life in Latin America. Each individual screening of the film was itself constructed as a moment with revolutionary potential. In makeshift underground cinemas across the region, and frequently under armed guard by revolutionary guerrillas, the film was shown as a provocation to the audience to engage in political debate, and the film was paused regularly to allow discussion.33 Crucially, Third Cinema was not seen as being synonymous with Third World Cinema. It was presented, instead, as a mode of filmmaking practice that could be instrumentalized anywhere. However, over the next two decades, Solanas and Getino’s call to arms was adopted, adapted, and refined by filmmakers and intellectuals, particularly across the developing world. In Africa from the 1970s onwards, film festivals in Algiers, Naimey, Harare, and Ouagadougou generated numerous manifestos that sought to crystalize a variety of forms of African Third Cinema, similarly intent upon representing the post-​colonial and neocolonial realities of life in North and West Africa.34 The best known of these filmmakers is Ousmane Sembène from Senegal, whose La Noire de . . . (Black Girl, 1966)—​a film which tells the story of a young Senegalese woman

668   Paul Cooke who moves to France in search of a better life only to be exploited by a French couple—​ was the first feature-​length film to be made by a black sub-​Saharan African. Although, as Gabriel notes, Sembène was far less militant in his approach than the likes of Solanas and Getino, he was similarly committed to a project of consciousness raising among the population.35 Meanwhile, India saw the emergence of ‘Parallel Cinema’ with Bengali filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray (Pather Panchali, 1955; Pratidwandi/​The Adversary, 1970)  and Ritwik Ghatak (Jukti Takko Aar Gappo/​Reason, Debate and a Story, 1974; Titash Ekti Nadir Naam/​A River Called Titas, 1973) drawing on elements of Neorealism to make socially critical films that could challenge the escapism of mainstream Hindi popular cinema, know since the 1990s as Bollywood.36 By the 1980s, film scholars began to widely discuss Third Cinema, with the like of Sembène and Ray increasingly appearing on the Film Studies programmes of Western universities. This growth in interest was largely a result of Gabriel’s seminal study Third Cinema in the Third World. As Mike Wayne notes, while Gabriel, like Solanas and Getino, insisted that Third Cinema was not primarily to be seen as a geographical but rather a political idea, his work allowed for a degree of conceptual slippage between Third and Third World Cinema.37 On the face of it, Gabriel sought to acknowledge the different socio-​political forces at work in post-​colonial societies and their western diasporas. In so doing, on the one hand he underlined the global dimension of the original discussion of Third Cinema, while on the other, he pointed to the diversity of the experiences of those living in such societies: ‘Third Cinema includes an infinity of subjects and styles as varied as the lives of the people it portrays’.38 However, in the process, as Jim Pines suggests, his image of Third Cinema ran the risk of ‘fall[ing] into the trap of “Third Worldism” or Third World essentialism’, in which film scholars seek out a definable set of ‘Third World film aesthetics’.39 Gabriel’s work does suggest a distinct set of aesthetic tendencies across a variety of filmmaking cultures connected with the development of Third Cinema. As already noted, Gabriel suggests these can be placed on a continuum which plots the work of Third World filmmakers moving from ‘domination’ to ‘liberation’. This was hugely significant for scholars and filmmakers of World Cinema and helped to open up new ways of understanding the language of film and to challenge a view of film grammar as defined by Hollywood. For Shohat, however, there is a need to bring out more strongly the ‘fissures and contradictions’ in the narrative of Third World Cinema. In particular, she identifies the need to find a place for ‘an anticolonial feminist imaginary’ that acknowledges and investigates the growing importance of women in post-​colonial filmmaking, particularly since the 1990s.40 Shohat traces a tradition in Third World women’s filmmaking largely ignored by earlier commentators, from the likes of Sarah Maldoror, a French filmmaker of Guadeloupean descent who explores the role of women in the Angolan struggle for independence in the 1960–​1970s (Monangambé, 1968; Sambizanga, 1972), through to the work of explicitly feminist filmmakers such as Mona Smith, a native American, whose Honored by the Moon (1990) examines the experience of gay and lesbian native Americans ‘coming out’, or the Argentinian Marta Bautis’s Home is the Struggle (1990), which explores the experience of women from

Film and the End of Empire    669 across Latin America who have come to work in the US.41 Such films, Shohat suggests, frequently eschew ‘grand anticolonial metanarratives’. Instead ‘they favour heteroglossic proliferations of difference within polygeneric narratives, seen not as the embodiment of a single truth but rather as energizing political and aesthetic forms of communitarian self-​construction’.42 Shohat calls for a deconstruction of all grand narratives, including that of Third Cinema itself. British African-​Caribbean filmmaker and critic Campbell X (Fem, 2007, Stud Life, 2012)  develops this further. Reconnecting with the revolutionary potential of filmmaking expressed in Solanas and Getino’s manifesto, Campbell X demands a further nuancing of Third Cinema’s call to arms as already suggested by Shohat. For Campell X, Third Cinema must be challenged by other types of cinema that seek to give voice to the experience of subaltern and minority communities, drawing on the lessons to be learned from black and queer filmmakers who would not necessarily identify with the tradition of Third Cinema. At the same time, she suggests that the type of heteroglossia called for by Shohat should also be applied to these other filmmaking traditions in order to challenge their normative assumptions about black and gay identifications which, the filmmaker argues, do not necessarily reflect her experience, for example, as a lesbian living in the British African-Caribbean diaspora. Thus, she calls for a ‘Nu Third Queer Cinema’, that allows for multiple and competing types of resistance to be expressed through film.43

Beyond the ‘Cinema of Resistance’: a Proliferation of ‘-​woods’ and New Forms of Counter Culture The urge to provide a more differentiated understanding of the politics of Third Cinema, for example, in the work of Shohat and Campbell X, is also echoed in recent analyses of filmmaking practice across the post-​colonial world, as well as Western representations of this world and its history. Alexie Tcheuyap, for example, argues that ‘African cinema has never been as homogenous as scholars tended to (make us) believe’. Particularly in the twenty-​first century, she argues, critics need to reflect the great variety of ‘laughter, joy, sexuality and formal experimentation presently being expounded in postcolonial narratives’.44 On the one hand, concepts of ‘Third Cinema’ do not reflect the totality of the competing traditions of experimental cinema. The work of Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, for example, which draws on the sensibilities of the Gene Kelly musical alongside Eisenstein-​ian montage (Bab al-​Hadid/​Cairo Station, 1958; Al Mssir/​ Destiny, 1997), is very different from that of Sembène. A good deal of film production across the continent continues to receive support from a small number of international funders, generally based in former colonial powers (for example, Fond Francophone in France or Channel 4 in the UK). While we might assume that similarities in their

670   Paul Cooke production context could lead to a degree of homogeneity in the films produced, films made in Senegal, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Tunisia, and Egypt that tend to find an international audience, generally at film festivals, can, nonetheless, vary greatly, even as they are frequently consumed by Western cinephile communities with similar socio-​ economic backgrounds and have been read by some commentators as conforming to a new ‘festival’ genre.45 There are also more mainstream co-​productions that attempt to repackage the narratives of decolonization and its legacy for Western cinema and television audiences. Recent examples include Biyi Bandele’s UK-​Nigerian co-​production Half of a Yellow Sun, a family saga set in the run up to, and during, the Biafran War of the late 1960s, as well as a whole host of films depicting the South African struggle to end Apartheid (Goodbye Bafana, Bille August, Germany-​France-​Belgium-​South Africa-​ Italy-​UK-​Luxembourg, 2007; Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Justin Chadwick, UK-​ South Africa, 2013). One aspect that both the types of films that circulate on the Western festival scene and these more mainstream historical dramas have in common is that they frequently fail to find audiences at home. Far more popular are a whole host of video-​based, high-​volume production industries. These have emerged in recent years as a sustainable model of film production for local consumption. The best known of these is ‘Nollywood’ in southern Nigeria, which is now the largest film industry in Africa—​perhaps the world—​in terms of number of films made per annum.46 To this can be added, as Dovey notes, ‘Kanywood in northern Nigeria, ‘Riverwood’ in Kenya, or ‘Bongowood’ in Tanzania.47 And this is not to mention the huge diversity of South African cinema, which on the one hand has one of the smallest versions of the homemade video phenomenon, ‘Vendawood’. On the other, it has the most developed film facilities on the continent which, along with the types of co-​productions mentioned above, also regularly attract major Hollywood productions to the country (Lord of War, Andrew Niccol, 2005; Safe House, 2012), but which do very little to foster local creative talent.48 However, the best know of the new ‘-​woods’ globally is Bollywood, and this chapter closes with an examination of the recent Indian industry, of which Bollywood is a key part, to highlight continuing tensions between dealing with the colonial past and negotiating the neo-​colonial present. I hope to show how such filmmaking is shaped, but also, more importantly, how it increasingly shapes filmmaking culture in the West and how this points to the continuing shifting dynamics of the global socio-​economic landscape. Bollywood, the Hindi-​language film industry based in Mumbai and now considered to be the second largest in the world, dominates discussion of the country’s industry.49 As Rachel Dwyer notes, after the turmoil of independence and division ‘the new nation needed new mythologies’, and film was their primary provider. The romantic melodramas of the time, in particular, were a ready source of stories that helped to communicate the national project, such as Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), where the travails of the nation are embodied in the suffering of the film’s female protagonist, who struggles to carve a living from her land.50 As a counterpoint to this cinema, one also finds a diverse tradition of realist, regional filmmaking in the country that eschewed the song-​and-​dance fantasies that populate Hindi-​language films. From the 1960s onwards,

Film and the End of Empire    671 this was called ‘Parallel’, or ‘Middle Cinema’, and was frequently conceptualized as an Indian form of Third Cinema. This mode of filmmaking is, as Ashish Rajadhyaksha and others suggest, frequently homogenized in discussion with reference to the work of Satyajit Ray.51 It is this realist tradition that has generally received the limited state funding available from the National Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Institute in Pune, an emphasis that reflects, as Dwyer suggests, ‘the old elite’s disdain for mainstream film’.52 However, despite the lack of state support for most of its history, Hindi-​language cinema continues to dominate the Indian cinematic landscape. Most noticeably, it is one of the only film industries worldwide that is able to compete domestically with Hollywood. Although the US industry has, of late, managed to make some inroads into the Indian market with the success of dubbed versions of blockbusters such as Spiderman 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), domestic Hindi-​language films continue to dominate, with foreign films accounting for less than 10% of box office receipts.53 Up to 46% of profits come from Hindi-​language films, even though it only accounts for about 20% of the thousand films produced in the country annually.54 This is the part of the industry that has come to be known internationally since the country’s liberalization in 1991 as Bollywood, and it is defined by large-​budget, colourful, song-​and-​dance extravaganzas aimed not only at the home but also at the overseas market, including other South Asian countries, the UK, the US, and the Middle East—​all areas populated by sizable Indian diasporic audiences. Moreover, increasingly these films are exported to other markets that do not have as sizable Indian populations, including Morocco, Turkey, Vietnam, and, most significantly given the value of the potential market, Africa and China.55 The ever-​more global outlook of the Bollywood industry and its significance for the world’s cinema is reflected in the plots of many of its most successful products, such as the romantic drama Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham . . . (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness, Karan Johar, 2001), partially set in London and deliberately targeted to play to expatriate nostalgia, or the action-​packed crime film Dhoom 3 (Blast 3, Vijay Krishna Acharya, 2013), the second-​highest grossing Bollywood film of all time and partially set in the US and Switzerland. Interestingly, while some Hollywood films have had more success of late in India than previously, when Hollywood has entered into co-​productions with Indian studios to create its own version of Bollywood films, these have generally flopped. The one exception has been the Twentieth-​Century Fox/​Fox Star production, My Name is Khan (Karan Johar, 2010), and this was still relatively modest.56 Bollywood stars and talent, on the other hand, along with the sensibilities and styles of the industry, are beginning to make a mark on Hollywood, from actors such as Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle, 2008) and Bipasha Basu (The Lovers, Roland Joffé, 2015) to the director Shekhar Kapur who, in 2002, directed a somewhat pseudo-​postcolonial remake of Korda’s Four Feathers. Although this version of the story might have tried to differentiate the indigenous population more than the 1939 version, it did little to challenge its fundamental power dynamics. One also finds a ‘Bollywoodization’ taking place in the representation of Indian culture more generally in numerous Hollywood productions (The Guru, Daisy

672   Paul Cooke von Scherler Mayer, 2002; Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha, 2004). Bollywood has become the dominant brand signifier for Indian culture abroad and a key asset, as Daya Kishan Thussu discusses, in the nation’s burgeoning ‘soft power’.57 Yet, while the Bollywood brand continues to grow internationally and while all films that are distributed abroad are invariably described as Bollywood, no matter what region they come from or what they look like, domestically there exists a growing diversification of the film market, and along with it, increased interest among commentators in other regional film cultures and modes of production.58 Ashvin Devasundaram offers the first detailed study of the recent growth of the Indian ‘Indie’, or hatke cinema. He identifies the popularity of late of more socially critical films that draw on the tradition of Parallel cinema, but that also have a mainstream sensibility. Films such as Gandu (Asshole, Qaushiq Mukherjee, 2010), Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries, Kiran Rao, 2010) or Lunch Box (Ritesh Batra, 2013)  appear to be mounting a challenge, Devasundaram suggests, to the Bollywood hegemony, while also at times working with its funding and distribution infrastructure in order to secure production resources and to find an audience.59 Aesthetically, the Indian Indies look very different to Bollywood. Indeed, they frequently have rather more in common, both in terms of their sensibilities and aesthetics, with American independent films that have a similar relationship with Hollywood. The US Indies (e.g. Juno, Jason Reitman, 2007; The Art of Getting By, Gavin Wiesen, 2011) are caught between an urge to reject Hollywood’s modes of storytelling while being increasingly reliant on funding from Hollywood’s network of ‘independent’ subsidiaries (Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and so on).60 As such, the Indian Indies can be seen, on one level, as challenging the dominance of Bollywood, while on another, seeming to be appropriated by it. At the same time, the adoption of American Indie aesthetics, as well as a concern with similar themes (social exclusion and drug abuse, challenging heteronormativity, and cultural stereotyping), be they locally inflected, might also be viewed as a new form of aesthetic colonization within an Indian national cinema which has long been particularly noted for its distinctive approach within World Cinema to telling stories on screen.61 Of course, it is possible also simply to view this as the type of aesthetic cross-​pollination that has defined the history of cinema, punctuated as it has been by the type of cosmopolitan encounters and global flows of talent and ideas discussed earlier. Because the influence of European aesthetics on the development of film noir, for example, is not seen as a form of colonization, why then does the influence of the American Indie in India need to be seen in such terms? On the contrary, the growing international visibility of Indian cinema probably suggests more readily the diversity and continuing dynamism of global film culture and its power structures. This was particularly visible in 2012, when AMC, the second-​largest movie theatre chain in the US, was acquired by China’s Dalian Wanda Group. This event, along with the high-​profile discussions that were taking place between President Xi Jinping and several of the Hollywood majors aimed at building a strong Chinese-​ American film partnership, provoked a good deal of attention among industry commentators.62 These developments were seen by many as a worrying example of China’s neo-​colonial impulses, with the Chinese authorities using the country’s economic might

Film and the End of Empire    673 to buy its way into the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’, and, in so doing, attempting to gain the kind of cultural influence American governments have long sought to achieve via this particular industry.63 This was a significant moment in the history of the world’s cinema, and seemed to point to a shift in the media landscape that was symptomatic of wider developments in global power relationships; this shift was also evident at the time in the growing significance of the BRICS as an economic and political grouping, of which China, along with India, are key members. It remains to be seen if closer cooperation between Hollywood and China will have any long term material impact on the types of film Hollywood produces in the way that Bollywood has; or how future neo-​ colonial impulses, if they can indeed be seen as such, will be reflected in mainstream film culture. One would imagine, however, that in an age when film production continues to proliferate due to the increasing accessibility of cheap digital production equipment, along with straightforward mechanisms of distribution via the Internet, the diversity of film culture, and the potential of film to give voice to those who remain the victims of colonialism and the forces of globalization, will surely grow, even as the volume of images, and the proliferation of media channels on which they can be seen might make it ever harder for those voices to be heard.

Notes 1. Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back (Harlow, 2005), 89–​90. For further discussion of the Boer War and early cinema see Simon Popple, “ ‘But the Khaki-​coloured Camera is the Latest Thing’–​The Boer War Cinema and Visual Culture in Britain”, in Andrew Higson, ed., Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–​1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 13–​27. For more discussion of the changing representation of the empire in British film see Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009); James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull, Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema (London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009). 2. Stephen Constantine, “ ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’:  The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926–​33”, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 192–​231. For discussion of the wider European context see Martin Stollery, European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000). 3. Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2006), 24; Chapman and Cull, Projecting Empire, 15–​32; Julie Codell, “Blackface, Faciality and Colony Nostalgia in 1930s Empire Films”, in Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller, eds., Postcolonial Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 2011), 32–​46. 4. Lindiwe Dovey, African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 28. 5. Martin Botha, South African Cinema 1896–​2010 (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 23–​26. 6. Bapu Watve, Dadasaheb Phalke: The Father of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2004). 7. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

674   Paul Cooke 8. Edward Buscombe, ‘Injuns!’:  Native Americans in the Movies (London:  Reaktion Books, 2006). 9. This position came to the fore during the Uruguay round of the GATT talks (General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs) in 1994. See Jean-​Pierre Jeancolas, “From Blum-​Byrnes Agreement to the GATT affair”, in Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith and Stephen Ricci, eds., Hollywood and Europe:  Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–​1995 (London:  BFI Publishing, 1998), 47–​60. For an overview of the ways in which fears of US cultural imperialism have shaped French cultural policy and practice, see Hugo Frey, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945–​1995 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014). 10. Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 81. 11. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the ‘Posts’ ”, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 381–​401 (386). 12. For further discussion of Stam and Shohat in this regard, see Dovey, African Film and Literature, 28. 13. Lee Grieveson, “Introduction: Film and the End of Empire”, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, eds., Film and the End of Empire (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2011), 1–​12 (p. 10). For a fuller discussion of this period of colonial filmmaking, see this excellent anthology as a whole. 14. Tom Rice, “From the Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End”, in Film and the End of Empire, 135–​153 (149). 15. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 16. For a detailed explanation of the way Hollywood, in particular, has maximized its global influence via such mechanisms see Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John Mcmurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood: No. 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 2011). On the growth of Cape Town as a film production site, see, for example, Bianca Capazorio, “Cape Town is the new Hollywood”, The Times, September 11, 2014. 17. For further discussion of Ek Tha Tiger in this regard, see Louise Harrington, “The New Irish: Indian Diasporas in Ireland”, in Om Prakash Dwivedi, ed., Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (Amsterdam: Brill, 2014), 63–​80. 18. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, “Situating world cinema as a theoretical problem”, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London:  Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–​15  (1). 19. For further discussion, see also Dina Iordanova, David Martin-​Jones, and Belén Vidal, “Introduction:  a Peripheral View of Cinema”, in Dina Iordanova, David Martin-​Jones, and Belén Vidal, eds., Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010),  1–​19. 20. For further discussion of the conflation of globalization with neo-​colonialism in this context, see Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell, “Film and Globalisation”, in Oliver Boyd-​ Barrett, ed., Communications Media, Globalization and Empire (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2006),  33–​52. 21. Sembène and Ray will be discussed further later on. For more on Carlos Reygadas, see Tiago de Luca, Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: the Experience of Physical Reality (London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013), 31–​91.

Film and the End of Empire    675 22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–​313. 23. Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Durah, “Introduction”, in Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Durah, eds., Theorizing World Cinema (London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009), xvii–​xxxii (xxii). 24. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994); Nagib, Perriam, and Durah, “Introduction”, xxii–​iii. 25. Saer Maty Ba and Will Higbee, “Introduction: De-​Westernizing film studies”, in Saer Maty Ba and Will Higbee, eds., De-​Westernizing Film Studies (London:  Routledge, 2012),  1–​15. 26. Dennison and Lim, “Situating world cinema”, 1. 27. Teshome H. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films”, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-​ Colonial Theory (Harlow: Routledge, 1993), 340–​358. 28. For a discussion of the roots and legacy of Cinema Novo, see Lucia Nagib, Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema and Utopia (London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007). 29. For further discussion, see Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 117–​353. 30. Ella Shohat, “Post-​Third-​Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema”, in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: the Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), 39–​ 56 (41). See also Paul Willemen, “The Third Cinema Question:  Notes and Reflections”, in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London:  BFI Publications, 1989), 1–​29 (4–​10). For a good overview of the trajectory of debates on Third Cinema, see Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Rethinking Third Cinema (London: Routledge, 2003). 31. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema”, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods: an Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 44–​64 (58, emphasis in original). 32. Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema”, 47 (emphasis in original). 33. Michael Chanan, “The Changing Geography of Third Cinema”, Screen, 38 (1997), 372–​388. 34. Scott Mackenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures:  A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 275–​300. 35. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory”, 22. For further discussion of the differences in inflection between Third Cinema as proposed by Solanas and Getino and that to be found in this part of Africa, see Dovey, African Film,  29–​31. 36. Dana Rasmussen, India’s New Wave Cinema: All about Parallel Cinema (Charleston: Biblio Bazaar, 2010). 37. Mike Wayne, Political Film: the Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 1. 38. Quoted in Willemen, “The Third Cinema Question”, 14. 39. Jim Pines, “Preface”, in Pines and Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema, vii-​x (viii-​ix). 40. Shohat, “Post-​Third-​Worldist Culture”,  39–​40. 41. ibid., 47. 42. ibid., 43. 43. Campbell X, “Nu Third Queer Cinema: An Interview with Campbell X”, in Bâ and Higbee, 240–​243. For an extended discussion of Campbell X’s relationship with Third Cinema,

676   Paul Cooke see Louisa Mitchell, The Films of Campbell X: Towards a Nu Third Queer Cinema (MPhil diss., University of Leeds, 2015). 44. Alexie Tcheuyap, Postnationalist African Cinemas (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2011), 1. 45. For further discussion, see Julian Stringer, “Genre Films and Festival Communities: Lessons from Nottingham, 1991–​2000”, Film International 6, no. 4 (2008): 53–​59. 46. For further discussion, see Jonathan Haynes, “ ‘What Is To Be Done?’–​Film Studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos”, in Mahir Şaul and Ralph A. Austen, eds., Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-​First Century:  Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 12–​25. 47. Dovey, African Film and Literature,  22–​24. 48. On the diversity of recent South African film production, see Botha, South African Cinema, 165–​251. 49. For more detailed discussions of Bollywood, see Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto, Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood:  The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema (New Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 2011); Rajinder Dudrah and Jigna Desai, eds., The Bollywood Reader (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008). 50. Rachel Dwyer, Bollywood’s India:  Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 21. 51. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “India:  Filming the Nation”, in Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema: the Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 678–​689 (678). See also Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–​1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 236–​267. John W Hood, The Essential Mystery: Major Filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema (New Delhi: BlackSwan 2009), 5. 52. Dwyer, Bollywood’s India, 19. 53. Nyay Bhushan, “India Box Office Grows 10% in 2013”, The Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2014, www.hollywoodreporter.com/​news/​india-​box-​office-​grows-​10-​687933. 54. Jehil Thakkar, quoted in “Can the Indian film industry go global?”, The Hindu, April 22, 2011, www.thehindu.com/​news/​the-​india-​cables/​the-​cables/​248356-​can-​the-​indian-​film-​ industry-​go-​global/​article1716155.ece. 55. FICCI-​KPMG, The Power of a Billion: Realizing the Indian dream, March 31, 2013, www. kpmg.com/​IN/​en/​IssuesAndInsights/​ArticlesPublications/​Documents/​FICCI-​KPMG-​ Report-​13.pdf. See also Mark Lorenzen and Florian Arun Taeube, Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry, DRUID Working Paper No. 07–​06 (Copenhagen, 2007). 56. Phil Hoad, ‘Will Hollywood ever conquer Bollywood?’, The Guardian, February 14, 2012, http://​www.theguardian.com/​film/​filmblog/​2012/​feb/​14/​hollywood-​bollywood-​us-​india. See also Vanita Kohli-​Khandekar, The Indian Media Business, 4th Edition (London: Sage, 2013), 170–​171. 57. Daya Kishan Thussu, Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 127–​153. 58. On the growth in regional media see FICCI-​KPMG, The Stage is Set, March 21, 2014, www. kpmg.com/​IN/​en/​Topics/​FICCI-​Frames/​Documents/​FICCI-​Frames-​2014-​The-​stage-​is-​ set-​Report-​2014.pdf, 5. 59. Ashvin Devasundaram, Emerging from the Interstices, Creating a New Space:  India’s New Wave of Urban Independent Cinema since 2010 (PhD diss., Heriot-​Watt University, 2015),  70–​90.

Film and the End of Empire    677 60. Yannis Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 61. This Devasundaram views as an impulse towards ‘glocalization’, which he sees as a defining feature of this wave of filmmaking; see Devasundaram, Emerging from the Interstices,  87–​90. 62. Frederik Balfour and Ronald Grover, “China and Hollywood Team Up for More Co-​ Productions”, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 8, 2011, www.businessweek. com/​magazine/​china-​and-​hollywood-​team-​up-​for-​more-​coproductions-​09082011. html; Eriq Gardner, “China’s Wanda Group Gets Regulatory Approval to Buy AMC Entertainment”, The Hollywood Reporter, July 25, 2012, www.hollywoodreporter.com/​ news/​china-​wanda-​group-​buy-​amc-​entertainment-​354476. 63. See, for example, Cain Nunns, “Hollywood Bows to China Soft Power”, The Diplomat, February 16, 2012, thediplomat.com/​2012/​02/​hollywood-​bows-​to-​china-​soft-​power​; Chris Homewood, “Transformers 4:  China is using Hollywood to take on the world”, July 14, 2014, The Conversation, theconversation.com/​transformers-​4-​china-​is-​using​hollywood-​to-​take-​on-​the-​world-​28817.

Chapter 35

Remnants of  E mpi re Michael J. Parsons

In 1971, Edward Heath, a committed advocate of membership of the European Economic Community, announced that for him ‘the British Empire [was] past history’,1 and he called for accelerated decolonization of Britain’s remaining overseas territories. Already in the 1960s, as large swathes of the British Empire had either achieved independence or were on the verge of doing so, the government commissioned a survey of the smaller territories and attempted to find ways of decolonizing them. It was keen to avoid criticism from the international community, particularly the United Nations (UN) organization.2 However, Britain’s withdrawal from empire is still not complete, and a number of islands and the Gibraltar peninsula still remain linked with Britain with a degree of internal self-​ government which falls short of the UN standard for decolonization. Britain is not alone in maintaining close contacts with former colonies which may, in one way or another, still not be considered fully independent. France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and the United States (US), for example, all maintain close links with territories which, in the loosest sense of the term, may be thought of as retaining some kind of quasi-​or semi-​colonial status. There are at least thirty such territories amounting to a total of well over ten million inhabitants. The United Kingdom’s (UK) fourteen remaining overseas territories (ten of which feature in the UN list of seventeen non-​self-​governing territories) are very diverse. They include a number of Caribbean islands, some remote South Atlantic islands and part of the Antarctic continent, a prosperous island in the North Atlantic off the coast of the US, and a small but strategically placed rocky peninsula on the south coast of Spain. In the Pacific, Britain granted independence to its many islands in the 1970s and 1980s, and only the tiny island of Pitcairn, with a population of around 50, remains an overseas territory today. There are also two ‘sovereign base areas’ on the island of Cyprus and an archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The other listed non-​self-​governing territories are the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam (US); New Caledonia and French Polynesia (France), Tokelau (New Zealand), and Western Sahara (a complicated history which will not be discussed here).

Remnants of Empire    679 Britain has stated that the overseas territories are free to become independent if their populations clearly express the wish to do so.3 The situation with Gibraltar is a little complex because of its legal status under the treaty of Utrecht. But Britain has made it clear that the population has the right to decide on its political future. In a referendum in 2002, the population massively rejected (98.97%, turnout 87.9%4) the principle that Spain and the United Kingdom should share sovereignty. The sovereign base areas and the British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT) do not have permanent populations,5 nor do South Georgia or British Antarctic Territory, and so the principle of self-​ determination does not apply, although the situation with regard to the BIOT is deeply controversial. It is these overseas territories that this chapter explores, and briefly compares to examples from those administered by other comparable former maritime empires. Inevitably, this means that a number of other places or relationships that could also legitimately be considered as ‘remnants of empire’ are left out. To include informal empire or the continuation of ‘colonialism’ or ‘imperialism’ in former colonies or other imperial possessions, or what William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson have called the ‘imperialism of decolonization’,6 would be impossible in a single chapter. Focusing on the British empire and limiting comparisons to European or American maritime empires also excludes the great continental empires, not least the Soviet empire, which collapsed formally in 1991, but which has not disappeared for all that, with Russia engaging in territorial acquisition or re-​acquisition of remnants of the huge Eurasian empire that was the USSR.

Trying—​and Failing—​to Decolonize There have been a number of statements suggesting that the British government felt that decolonization would not always be possible, for various reasons, including the strategic importance of the territories concerned and the size of the population. For example, in 1954, Henry Hopkinson, the Minister of State for Colonial Affairs, told the House of Commons during a debate on constitutional change for Cyprus that: it has always been understood and agreed that there are certain territories in the Commonwealth which, owing to their particular circumstances, can never expect to be fully independent (28 July 1954, col. 508)

The general conception of the minimum population necessary for a territory to achieve full statehood changed with time, particularly when Cyprus, with approximately 550,000 inhabitants at the time,7 was granted independence in 1960 and became a member of the United Nations.8 However, there were still some territories which it was

680   Michael J. Parsons thought would be too small to succeed. One preferred solution to deal with this problem was federation. In the West Indies, a federation was set up in 1958 to bring together the very different islands in the region into a political and economic unit with sufficient population and resources to achieve independence within a few years. However, when Jamaica and then Trinidad, the two largest islands in the federation, broke away and opted for independence on their own, the federation collapsed: some of the remaining islands also became independent, sometimes as parts of smaller sub-​regional groups, but others were too small, too poor, or both. In one intriguing case, the Caribbean island of Anguilla rose up in protest against its constitutional status, rebelling not against its connection with Britain, but rather against its association with a larger island neighbour which it did not trust to allocate resources fairly. Since 1980, it has been a UK overseas territory (UKOT). The other Caribbean UKOTs are the British Virgin Islands (BVI), the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). Further north in the Atlantic, the islands of Bermuda represent a very different case. Bermuda has one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world: about twice that of the UK or France (World Bank). The population has expressed a desire to remain British despite calls for independence from some sectors of the island’s political community (most spectacularly when, in 1973, the governor was assassinated). In 1995, in a referendum with a turnout of almost 60% (one of Bermuda’s parties boycotted the referendum, see Royle 2010) almost three quarters of the voters said ‘no’ in response to the question ‘are you in favour of independence for Bermuda?’ Britain has made it clear that there can be no further moves towards internal self-​government short of independence. There are four UKOTs in the South Atlantic:  the Falkland Islands; St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha; South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; and British Antarctic Territory (BAT). In the 1960s, and again in 1980, Britain attempted to persuade the Falkland Islanders to accept a gradual transfer of sovereignty to Argentina. This was firmly rejected by the islanders. The island of Tristan da Cunha was almost decolonized after the population was evacuated to Britain in 1961 as a result of a dangerous volcanic eruption on the island: it was suggested that they would not wish to return and the island would then de facto be decolonized. However, in the end the islanders decided that they preferred life on their remote island to the attractions of 1960s Britain. St. Helena remains ‘fiercely loyal to the United Kingdom and its monarchy’9 and dependent on British aid. Ascension, on which American and British military facilities are located, has no permanent inhabitants; nor do BAT and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. In the Pacific, Britain was successful in divesting itself of all its colonial responsibilities except Pitcairn (or to be more precise the Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands). By the 1970s, Britain was on the whole keen to advance the process of Pacific decolonization as quickly as possible consistent with the responsibilities of its imperial legacy. In the Solomon Islands, for example, Britain was pursuing a policy of ‘liquidating colonial arrangements with as much speed as could be mustered’.10

Remnants of Empire    681 The most recent British decolonization was the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. The lease on Hong Kong territory was due to expire, although Hong Kong itself was British in perpetuity. However, Hong Kong without the continental territories was not considered viable. In addition, the ability of Britain to counter Chinese pressure for the release of the colony was, in practical terms, extremely limited. The decolonization of Hong Kong had one particularly important side effect. In 1981, Britain passed legislation to restrict the right of abode in the UK to passport holders in what were still called the Dependent Territories. Only those citizens who had at least one grandparent born in the UK would be allowed automatic right of abode in Britain. This was hastily altered in 1983 to restore full British citizenship to Falkland Islanders and Gibraltarians. Then, under the 2002 Overseas Territories Act, full citizenship was restored to all citizens of UKOTs. There can be little doubt that the prospect of large numbers of people from Hong Kong, mainly ethnic Chinese, leaving the colony to live in Britain was one of the decisive reasons why this change was not introduced earlier.

Disputed Territories, Barbicans and Tollgates, Offshore Financial Centres, Holiday Islands, and Natural Resources The variety of the overseas territories is so great that a member of the House of Lords, Lord Anderson of Swansea, offered a description he would give to a visitor from another planet: How could one explain the overseas territories to a Martian? They range from Bermuda, with the highest GDP per capita in the world; to the Cayman Islands, where 80 per cent of worldwide hedge funds are based; to Pitcairn, which used to depend on the sale of postage stamps; to areas such as BIOT—​the British Indian Ocean Territory—​and South Georgia, peopled only by soldiers and scientists. (Lords 5 March 2008, col. 1151).

Some of the territories are the subject of disputes with other countries: the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, the BIOT and BAT.11 Some are, or have been, important for strategic (military) reasons and represent what Lord Curzon referred to as ‘the barbicans and tollgates of [ . . . ] empire [ . . . ]’. That is most obviously the case for the Sovereign Base Areas on Cyprus, which are important for the deployment of British air power in the Mediterranean and beyond as well as for the collection of communications intelligence, and for the islands of Diego Garcia in the BIOT and Ascension Island in the Atlantic on which the US has major bases. Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands occupy strategic—​or

682   Michael J. Parsons once strategic—​locations, controlling the maritime passages of the Mediterranean and round Cape Horn, respectively. Gibraltar also features in the list of territories which offer financial services along with the UKOTs in the Caribbean: Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Anguilla, and the Turk and Caicos islands in particular. The Caribbean islands and Gibraltar have a flourishing tourist industry, too, although the long-​running crisis in the west which began in 2008 has caused a downturn in revenues from tourism, to which some island economies have found it difficult to adjust, and entry into Gibraltar from Spain is vulnerable to prolonged border checks. Finally, all the British overseas territories are either islands, parts of islands, or a peninsula. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, which introduced ‘exclusive economic zones’ extending 200 nautical miles from the coasts (or continental shelves) of all maritime territories, has vastly increased the potential for fishing, oil production, and mineral extraction.

Sovereignty Disputes . . . and a Displaced Population Undoubtedly the best-​known sovereignty disputes involving British overseas territories are those over the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, although there is also a dispute with Mauritius over the BIOT. When, in April 1982, Argentine forces occupied the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), few British people, apart from government, diplomats, historians, and stamp collectors, even knew where they were. And yet the dispute over the islands was a long-​standing bone of contention between Britain and Argentina dating back to the eighteenth century, when England and Spain had almost gone to war over the remote archipelago. By mid-​June 1982, British forces had reoccupied the islands and defeated the Argentine garrison. Fundamentally, the argument was between the view expressed by the Argentines, that the principle of territorial integrity overrides the right of the inhabitants to decide what political status they want, and that the population is no more than a ‘planted’ population and not a ‘people’ with rights over their territory, and the position defended by the Falkland Islanders and the British government, which gives special prominence to the principle of self-​determination. In a recent referendum, 99.8% of the votes cast (turnout 92%) were in favour of mantaining the islands’ current status as a UKOT.12 Gibraltar’s position is very similar. Spain claims that the continued occupation of the peninsula is an affront to Spanish territorial integrity; the people of Gibraltar, on the other hand, have made it extremely clear that they do not want to be Spanish and do not want to entertain the idea of shared sovereignty. In the case of Gibraltar, the option of independence is constrained by the terms of the treaty of Utrecht, which grants ‘propriety’ of the peninsula to Britain, but stipulates that if there is any change in sovereignty Spain should be given the first option. The dispute with Mauritius over the Chagos islands and the long-​standing pressure exerted by the Chagossians to be allowed to return to their islands has been complicated. In some respects, it represents a potentially very damaging issue for Britain’s international

Remnants of Empire    683 reputation. Mauritius claims that the islands were ‘excised’ from their territory under an agreement in 1965, by which the Mauritians were given to understand that this separation was a necessary precondition if they were to acquire independence and enjoy the benefits of a defence agreement for the newly independent nation. The archives suggest that Harold Wilson put considerable pressure on the Mauritian Premier Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam to agree to the detachment of the islands by suggesting that otherwise the independence process could be jeopardized, and also by promising substantial financial aid. Ramgoolam apparently felt that he could not run the risk of stalling the move towards independence and accepted the deal.13 More recently, however, now that independence has been secured and Mauritius has become established as a state, the detachment, which was explicitly condemned by the UN, has been vigorously challenged. The islanders were removed by Britain to make way for an American base on islands with no civilian population. In the 1960s, the government sought to present the islanders not as permanent inhabitants, but as ‘contract labourers’. Since then, the islanders have lobbied hard to be allowed to return. In 2010, the Labour government announced the creation of a marine nature reserve around the islands which would protect wildlife, but not restrict military activity. A Foreign Office official allegedly asserted that ‘establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents’.14 This action was challenged by the Chagossians in an appeal to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. The court, whose judgement is binding, ruled in March 2015 that Britain failed to respect its obligation to consult Mauritius and also illegally restricted Mauritian fishing rights. The government commissioned a feasibility report into the possibility of resettling some Chagossians on remote islands in the archipelago, but in November 2016 announced that none would be allowed to do so. It is widely felt that Britain has not treated the islanders fairly, and that it has been guilty of double standards, deploying a huge task force to free some two thousand Falkland Islanders from Argentine occupation while at the same time failing to allow basic rights to another population of a similar size in another overseas territory. It has been suggested that the essential difference is that the Falkland Islanders are white, while the Chagossians are not. British failure to take them seriously in the 1960s is evidenced by the way Sir Dennis Greenhill of the Foreign Office apparently referred to them as ‘Tarzans and Man Fridays’.15 There have also been recent suggestions that the base at Diego Garcia may have been used as part of the system of ‘extraordinary rendition’, in which suspected terrorists have been taken outside US territory to be tortured, though there is no absolutely irrefutable evidence for these claims.16

Island (or Peninsular) Bases The strategic importance of the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar arguably became less evident in the latter part of the twentieth century, in an era of international cooperation,

684   Michael J. Parsons intercontinental missiles, and air travel, but the other three island bases still remain significant or even vital assets, but not, in the case of Ascension and Diego Garcia, directly or solely for the UK. And more recently, the strategic significance of the base in Gibraltar has been reasserted: it could be an important asset for the MoD and the Pentagon in light of the new threats which burst spectacularly on the world stage with the events of ‘9/​11’ in 2001. ‘Gibraltar in the hands of our most certain ally’, wrote one American observer, ‘—​whether through a continuation of its dependent status or its inauguration as an independent state in special association with the UK—​constitutes good strategic insurance.’17 The base at Diego Garcia was also important for the US ability to launch air attacks against Iraq and Afghanistan and the sovereign base areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia on Cyprus were used to support operations over North Africa (2011) and Iraq (2014). More recently, Britain launched attacks against IS from Akrotiri.

Financial Services There are a number of ways in which Gibraltar and those Caribbean islands that offer financial services can attract business, some of which have been subjected to increasing regulation in recent years to combat tax evasion and money-​laundering. The Cayman islands, for example, have encouraged businesses to register there by offering tax-​free registration and operation, easy procedures, and guaranteed privacy, with the result that there are more businesses registered on the Cayman Islands than there are inhabitants: almost 100,000 active companies registered for a resident population of a little less than 60,000.18 Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos islands, and Gibraltar all offer financial services which represent a significant contribution to their income. All of them have signed the international agreements designed to limit tax evasion and money-​laundering, and sometimes express resentment at the way the finger of accusation is pointed at them when other states, in Europe, the Americas, or elsewhere provide similar low-​tax or tax-​free environments and similar confidentiality. At the same time, the Caymans, for example, have strict legislation limiting the powers of banks to give information about customers. Recent disclosures have reinforced criticism of the role allegedly played by some offshore banking services in shady business practice and tax avoidance and evasion.

Liabilities There has been increasing awareness within the British government that there are liabilities connected with the maintenance of overseas territories. In 1997, and again in 2007, the National Audit Office published reports on the risks that UKOTs could represent for the UK.19 The reports highlight the liabilities associated with natural disasters and also look at the ‘reputational risk’ that could be caused by a lack of proper financial

Remnants of Empire    685 supervision. They also pointed to the risk of legal challenge and potentially substantial costs if poor supervision led to financial losses in the smaller financial centres in which the Governor is responsible for regulating international finance (e.g. Anguilla, Montserrat, and TCI). Britain acted decisively in 2009 when confronted with alleged systemic corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands involving politicians—​including a former prime minister—​and civil servants. The constitution was suspended and the islands ruled directly under the authority of an Order in Council. The action was criticized on the islands (e.g., as reported in a debate in the House of Lords on 10 Mar 2011, col. 1768 et seq.) although it may be seen as a demonstration that Britain is anxious to maintain certain standards in the overseas territories. A new constitution was introduced in 2012 that gives the governor greater powers to supervise financial activities. The sex crime trials which took place on Pitcairn in 2007 also pointed to a risk—​again largely ‘reputational’—​which could damage the UK if it was seen to have been negligent with regard to its responsibilities in the territories under its administration, and substantial efforts have been made to address the situation. Disputes can also damage British trade interests:  e.g., the sovereignty disputes with Argentina and Spain over the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. In the case of the Falklands dispute, there is now substantial regional support for Argentina’s position, which must have a negative impact on Britain’s relations with most of South America, an increasingly important area for British trade. The question of Gibraltar has, on occasions, been considered as an unwelcome hindrance to good relations between the UK and Spain; the UK was keen to develop a rapport with Spain in its attempt to influence the internal balance of power within the EU (see Gold, 2008). It is as yet too early to assess the effect of ‘Brexit’ on Gibraltar, but it will doubtless be substantial. Britain’s reputation could be damaged by the controversy over the way the UK separated the BIOT from Mauritius and then cleared Diego Garcia of its population to lease the island to the US. Former Governor of Gibraltar Lord Luce called the expulsion of the islanders an ‘abuse of human rights’ (Lords 10 March 2010, col. 1777). There are also financial considerations: although the sums are not large, there is a cost involved in supporting UKOTs. Finally, it would appear that some of the UKOTs are reluctant to adopt modern European approaches to personal matters, in particular sexual orientation. The draft text of what became the 2009 Cayman Islands constitution was criticized by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons in its 2008 Human Rights Annual Report for not explicitly mentioning sexual orientation as a ‘prohibited ground for discrimination’ and for including ‘an exemption for any claim of discrimination on grounds of, inter alia, “public morality” ’. They described this deliberate omission as ‘deplorable’, but the final version of the constitution did not address this criticism. This might mean that actions in the Cayman courts could be inconsistent with the European Convention on Human Rights, a situation that the UK would no doubt prefer to avoid.

686   Michael J. Parsons Thus, it would appear there are a number of good reasons why the UK might want to divest itself of at least some of the UKOTs. Why has this not happened?

Why Are They Not Independent? In some cases, overseas territories have not become fully independent because the administering power has resisted any change in its relationship with them. However, the territories themselves have often, for one reason or another, preferred their position as non-​self-​governing entities to fully-​fledged independent states. Britain has, at various times, appeared to have accepted or even positively desired independence for many of its remaining territories. Why, then, running against the course of history in the twentieth and early twenty-​first century, have these territories remained in a state of ‘inbetweenity’, neither ruled by, nor independent of, their former colonial ‘masters’, or, as one writer has suggested, become instances of ‘upside-​down decolonization’?20 And, perhaps more intriguing still, if Britain genuinely wanted to decolonize, then why was it not able to put sufficient pressure on the territories (or provide sufficient inducements) to achieve that goal?

Why Has Britain Kept its OTs? It has been argued that the former colonial powers have acted out of a sense of moral responsibility towards their former colonies: an attitude which has been less generously referred to as an ‘imperial hangover’. There is undoubtedly a sense that failure to meet such responsibilities could damage their international reputations. There may also be more pragmatic reasons. The United Kingdom and its overseas territories have the fifth largest maritime area of exclusive economic zones (EEZs). This allows UKOTs to sell fishing licences and prospect for oil and minerals. This may be a factor explaining British willingness to preserve a close relationship with its overseas territories. However, revenues from those EEZs go to the overseas territories, and not to the UK. The ‘confidential’ financial services offered in some UKOTs are clearly very convenient for a number of people or organizations and the ‘British connection’ may be a valuable asset for them. There are also strategic reasons for keeping some of the OTs, most obviously the military bases in Cyprus, Ascension, and Diego Garcia. However, most of the other OTs have, at best, only modest strategic value today. There are sometimes unusual reasons for an attachment to a territory. For example, Montserrat became a destination of choice for musicians from the mid-​1970s to the end of the 1980s because of the studio built there by the Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin and his partner. The AIR (Associated Independent Recording) studio was used by such well-​known artists as Elton John, Paul

Remnants of Empire    687 McCartney, Dire Straits, the Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd until it was seriously damaged in 1989 by Hurricane Hugo and closed down. The musicians enjoyed the atmosphere of Montserrat and many of them took part in a concert organized in 1997 by Sir George in the Royal Albert Hall to raise money to help the islanders recover from the 1995 eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano.

Kith and Kin Perhaps one of the major reasons why the UK has maintained links with some UKOTs is their very close cultural and ethnic proximity to the metropole. There is ample evidence that the ‘white’ colonies felt they had a better claim to being British than the rest. For example, in Pink Ice, Klaus Dodds recalls that when a number of Falkland Islanders sent a petition to the Secretary of State for the Colonies to complain about the Governor and ask him to be replaced, they described the population as a ‘British community, 100% white, and noted for its loyalty to the crown . . .’,21 as if this description would give them a better chance of obtaining a sympathetic response to their request. When news broke in April 1982 that the islands had been invaded, the media made a special effort to educate the general public about this remote archipelago. Descriptions emphasized the very British character of the islands: the houses looked like the kind of houses one might find in a West Country village, and even the changeable weather was described as typically British. In fact, the people and the islands were often protrayed, as happens often with such remote outposts, as ‘more British than the British’. Klaus Dodds has written that, in the wake of the 1982 invasion, ‘a depiction of the Falkland Islands as a village-​like community of rural and quintessentially “English” character permeated political discourse and media coverage’.22 There is little doubt that the fact that the Falkland Islanders were white and culturally close to the population of Britain itself was a powerful force in the crisis, and many observers doubted whether Britain would have gone to such remarkable lengths to repossess the islands if the population had been black. In the emergency debate in the House of Commons on Saturday 3 April (the first debate in the House of Commons on a Saturday since the Suez crisis of 1956), the doughty Conservative MP Bernard Braine was incensed that the population had been left at the mercy of a ‘fascist, corrupt and cruel regime’: The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman's blood—​and the blood of Scotsmen and Welshmen—​boil, too. (HC 3 April 1982 col. 659).

Life on the islands was hard, but there was much to admire. The Falkland Islanders were, in a sense, the living embodiment of values which, it was lamented, had all but

688   Michael J. Parsons disappeared in the UK at the end of the twentieth century. They were hardy, honest, hard-​ working, resourceful people. Crime was rare. Life was refreshingly simple. In short, the media presented them as somehow quintessentially British, though perhaps caught in a kind of ‘time warp’: ‘one British ambassador from Buenos Aires remarked when about to make his first tour of the islands: “My biggest problem will be, how do I tell them that Queen Victoria is dead?” ’.23 It was as if they represented a way of life after which today’s inhabitants of the ‘mother country’ hankered nostalgically—​all the more so as the simple crime-​free life they envied so deeply may never have existed in Britain at all. It is tempting to see this in the context of a sense of irrevocable decline in post-​war Britain, against which the reassuring image of the hardy colonial of the pioneering days of Empire seemed irresistibly attractive. In White Man’s World, author Bill Schwarz studies the controversy over Enoch Powell’s inflammatory ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, examining the complex ‘relations between the many-​faceted processes of decolonization, on the one hand, and the domestic popular movement of Powellism, on the other’. He suggests that many people in Britain, especially on the right, felt the country was sinking into disorder, and regretted the robust masculine qualities of the pioneer settler which seemed to have been lost. As he put it, ‘the purity of the frontier worked to illuminate the decay and degradation of Britain’.24 Something of this attitude seems to have been at work in the construction of discourses about the Falklanders.25 The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha were also seen as possessing a certain simple dignity. The appeal of the apparently simpler life of the South Atlantic compared favourably with the hectic rush of modern life in Britain, described by the chief islander as ‘money, money, money, worry, worry, worry all the time’ (The Times, 18 March 1963). The crime-​free, rugged life of the islanders, knit together by bonds of rural solidarity, struck a chord in many observers as it seemed to epitomize the lost values of the past, perhaps before the industrial revolution spread its dark satanic mills over England’s green and pleasant land. Despite (or because of) the attractions of the consumer society and the cultural explosion of the swinging sixties, the islanders’ lifestyle had a powerful symbolic attraction. Images of Gibraltar have also followed this discourse. Any attempt to press the inhabitants into accepting a change in their constitutional status which would go some way towards meeting Spain’s sovereignty claim can be challenged by accusations in the media that the government would be disgracefully letting down a loyal population which stood firmly by Britain’s side in time of war. This kind of mythical construction can be problematic, though, e.g., Pitcairn, which, like Tristan da Cunha and the Falkland Islands, was often presented as an idyllic crime-​ free place where the door of the island’s tiny jail had rusted open for want of any criminals to lock up. However, the recent accusations of almost endemic sexual abuse of young, and sometimes very young, girls shook this narrative. Indeed, the myth of an island community initially built up by the mutineers of the Bounty and then establishing itself as a crime-​free God-​fearing micro-​society may have been partly to blame for Britain’s failure to take seriously long-​standing suspicions that there was something very disturbing taking place on Pitcairn.

Remnants of Empire    689

Why Have the UKOTs Opted to Remain British? Defence and Aid There are some obvious pragmatic reasons why the UKOTs maintained ties with Britain. The UK provides defence, which is important for all the UKOTs, particularly for the Falklands and Gibraltar. The UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) provides a certain amount of aid (though less than France provides to its overseas territories, for example), mainly to Montserrat after the disruption caused by the erupting volcano (over £19 million), and to St. Helena, especially in the form of funding for an airstrip (total investment over £27 million). Britain hopes that these infrastructural projects will help the territories concerned become more self-​sufficient, although disappointingly, it would appear that the prevailing wind conditions make the airstrip in St. Helena very difficult to use.26 Pitcairn also receives funding from the DfID (at least £3 million) in recognition of the extremely vulnerable nature of such a small and isolated community. Even when there is no direct DfID aid involved, association with Britain can be a significant asset, representing greater security for investors. For example, it has been pointed out that, in its recent assessment of TCI, the rating agency Standard and Poor’s noted that it ‘benefits from the stability imparted though its status as a UK Overseas Territory’.27 For many territories, the British connection is a useful sign of stability. The European connection is also an important factor. All the UKOTs except Gibraltar, which is part of the EU, the sovereign base areas in Cyprus, and the territories with no permanent population (BAT, BIOT, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) are members of the EU Overseas Countries and Territories Association (OCTA), and their inhabitants are citizens of the European Union and thus able to travel, settle, and work freely within the EU. The EU provides financial support to OCTs through the European Development Fund as well as through other programmes.28 It must be assumed, however, that Britain’s decision to leave the EU will alter this radically. All in all, there may be some very convincing reasons why the UKOTs have opted to hang on under ultimate British administration with a substantial degree of internal self-​ government. John Darwin has even gone as far as to refer to them as ‘limpet colonies’ (see Darwin, 1988), or to suggest that by the time Wilson announced the accelerated withdrawal from ‘East of Suez’, the remaining colonial possessions were left ‘clinging like barnacles to the old hull of empire’ (see Darwin, 2012).

National Identity Many UKOTs are proud of their British connection. In St. Helena, ‘the positive feelings of many islanders towards the British link are readily identified on visiting the island’ (see

690   Michael J. Parsons Royle, 2010) and, unsurprisingly, the Falkland Islanders also emphasize their close links with the UK. However, over the years, the populations of the territories have gradually forged their own distinctive identity. For example, the 2012 census asked the population of the Falkland Islands whether they felt first and foremost British or Falkland Islanders; 57% of residents identified as Falkland Islanders and only 24.6% defined themselves primarily as British (with 9.8% identifying as Saint Helenian and 5.3% as Chilean).29 There is undoubtedly a Gibraltarian identity30—​and even a specific Gibraltarian language, combining English and Spanish, called Llanito. In both cases, the identity has been strengthened by the sense of a threat posed by a hostile ‘other’, i.e., Argentina and Spain. Other territories have also forged their own identity, alongside, or in place of, a sense of Britishness. There are, for example, few demonstrations of Britishness in Bermuda except for some tourist attractions. Writing in 2012, Stephen Royle observed that ‘there is no British identity here; Bermuda’s link to the UK seems pragmatic, of the head not of the heart’.31 And many British people are unaware that Bermuda is still an overseas territory, so much so that it constitutes a kind of ‘concealed quasi-​colony’, an informal status shared by a number of other overseas territories, both British and otherwise.

Integrated Territories, Non-​Incorporated Territories, and Non-​Self-​G overning Territories: Examples From Outside the UK Britain is not the only nation to have non-​self-​governing territories identified as such by the UN. The US has three: American Samoa, Guam, and the United States Virgin Islands; France has two: French Polynesia and New Caledonia; and New Zealand has one: Tokelau. European administering powers and the US have pursued a variety of different policies with regard to their former and current overseas territories. France chose to integrate a number of territories as départements which, technically, are no different, apart from some minor adaptations, from their metropolitan counterparts. Other former colonial powers have also chosen integration. Holland has now fully integrated its Caribbean territories. Since 2010, the Kingdom of the Netherlands has been made up of four countries:  the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao, and St Maarten. Three other Caribbean islands, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba are ‘special municipalities’ of the Netherlands, known collectively as the ‘Caribbean Netherlands’. This integration has not been unproblematic:  Dutch public opinion, especially on the right, associates the Kingdom’s Caribbean populations with crime both in the Caribbean and in Holland itself. Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s territories on the Northern coast of Africa, are autonomous cities and an integral part of Spain, and the Canaries are an autonomous community.

Remnants of Empire    691 The Azores and Madeira enjoy a similar relationship with Portugal as autonomous regions. Greenland and the Faroe Islands are autonomous territories with a degree of self-​ government within the Kingdom of Denmark.32 The US has followed a slightly different course with some of its possessions, most notably Puerto Rico, which is an ‘unincorporated territory’ of the US, enjoying many of the rights of the fifty US states, except that the Puerto Ricans do not take part in Presidential elections and are represented in Congress by a ‘Resident Commissioner’ with limited voting rights. In 2012, a referendum was held in which a narrow majority voted in favour of incorporation as the fifty-​first state, although the results were considered to be confusing or inconclusive. A new referendum may take place sometime in the future. Guam may also organize such a referendum. Whatever constitutional changes may take place in the various unincorporated territories, the US is likely to want to retain its extensive network of military bases and listening stations around the world as facilities enabling it to project power overseas. New Zealand has been successful in bringing most of its territories to self-​ government, but in two referenda organized in 2006 and 2007, the vote fell short of the two-​thirds majority required to make Tokelau a self-​governing state in free association with New Zealand, which would have led to its removal from the UN list. In 2007, 446 voted for the changed status and 246 against. Sixteen more votes in favour of the new status would have been enough to approve self-​government. Of all these different models for decolonization, France is the most interesting for the purpose of comparison with British decolonization, especially as regards the numerous islands which both countries had incorporated into their respective empires. After the Second World War, France chose to create four new overseas départements d’outre-​mer, or DOMs: Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Reunion Island. The remaining territories were overseas territories—​territoires d’outre-​mer, or TOMs. In 2011, Mayotte became the fifth DOM after a referendum held in 2009, in which 95% (although with a disappointing turnout of a little over 61%) voted in favour of integration. In the meantime, the TOMs (French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna) have become collectivités d’outre–​mer, or COMs, with New Caledonia having a unique status as a collectivité d’outre-​mer à statut particulier. Saint-​Pierre-​et-​Miquelon was briefly a département, but is now a COM. Saint Barthélémy and Saint Martin broke away from Guadaloupe and are now COMs. Integration has not been unproblematic: there have been pro-​independence movements in the DOMs claiming that their status hides a continuing colonial relationship. However, although there have been various demonstrations, strikes, or riots in all of the original DOMs, the economic implications of independence have often been enough to ensure that there is also a powerful motive for prolonging the current status. France provides substantial subsidies to its overseas departments. It also provides inducements for state employees to work there at a total cost of more than a billion euros a year.33 Although there is frequent criticism that the metropolis does not do enough for its DOMs, it is generally recognized that the standard of living there is higher than in neighbouring territories, which do not have such a relationship with a former colonial

692   Michael J. Parsons centre. Many of the demonstrations have been directed as much, if not more, against ‘neo-​colonial profiteers’ who are believed to be responsible for a high cost of living, ‘la vie chère’, as against integration with France, although sometimes there is an overlap. The départementalisation of Mayotte also has its associated problems. France has been criticized by the UN for breaking up the territorial integrity of The Comoros. It also has now to deal with a growing influx of Comorian ‘illegal immigrants’ coming to Mayotte in search of a better life. Two territories still feature on the UN list:  New Caledonia, and French Polynesia (added in 2013). New Caledonia undoubtedly presented the most serious challenge in the 1980s, when political tensions between the indigenous Kanaks and the inhabitants of European origin, known as the Caldoches, erupted into violence, culminating in May 1988. A bloody and controversial confrontation between a group of Kanaks and special police and army units at Ouvéa resulted in the deaths of nineteen Kanaks and two gendarmes. The Kanaks, as Robert Aldrich points out (see his chapter this volume), presented themselves as victims of French colonialism. An agreement was signed in June that year to prepare for self-​determination after a period of ten years, and the proposal was ratified by a referendum in November. A substantial majority (80%) of the French population as a whole was in favour, as was a smaller majority on the islands (57%). A referendum on self-​determination was to take place in 1998, but it was postponed by joint agreement and is now scheduled to take place in November 2018. The charismatic leader of the Kanak socialist and national liberation front, Jean-​Marie Tjibaou, was murdered in May 1989 by a Kanak opposed to the agreement signed with the French government. After that, New Caledonian politics entered a new, less-​violent phase, and tensions between the two communities appear to have lessened.34 Recent controversy has surrounded disputes over the all-​important question of who can register on the electoral roll for the referendum. French Polynesia also has its independence movement but there are no plans for a referendum in the near future. Just as in the départements, the indépendantistes have not been able to persuade a majority of the population that they would be better off without the financial transfers from France and the EU, to which their current status entitles them. The strategic importance of the region to France may have diminished with the ending of the hugely controversial programme of nuclear tests on Mururoa atoll. Like New Caledonia, French Polynesia enjoys a substantial degree of administrative autonomy and elects a President of French Polynesia. France has in many ways been surprisingly open about the interest that its overseas territories represent. France’s latest defence review35 emphasizes the need to pay particular attention to them, ‘given their strategic situation, notably because of the many substantial resources existing in their maritime spaces  . . .’. The review highlights the importance of the Kourou Space Centre in French Guiana, and states that ‘New Caledonia and the communities living in French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna make France a political and maritime power in the Pacific’. Mayotte and Reunion Island are also ‘strategically significant’ and the ‘Iles Éparses (Scattered Islands) located in the maritime navigation zone of the Mozambique Channel give France an

Remnants of Empire    693 exclusive economic zone coveted by other countries due to the possible presence of oil and gas resources. The same is true for the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (TAAF) which offer substantial fishing resources.’ This, broadly speaking, is also the case for Saint-​Pierre-​et-​Miquelon off the coast of Canada. Yet, public interest in mainland France for the overseas territories remains limited, except when they occasionally hit the headlines, for example, New Caledonia in the 1980s and, more recently, Guadeloupe.36 The UK does mention the sale of fishing licences around the Falkland Islands as an important source of revenue and holds out some hope of oil production. However, it places more stress on its responsibility to protect the extensive maritime areas under its jurisdiction as sustainable environmental reserves. The dispositions of the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), which increase the areas considered as continental shelves, are of special significance in the South Atlantic. The extended continental shelves (ECSs) of the Falkland Islands, and of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands could potentially strengthen the UK’s claim to the British Antarctic Territories, although the UK has stated that it would not, for the moment, submit claims for ECSs within the Antarctic Treaty Area. Sovereignty claims south of 60° South are currently frozen, but it is undoubtedly in Britain’s interest to be ready to support a strong claim if that should change in the future. It is significant that, in 1985, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands ceased to be Dependencies of the Falkland Islands and became an Overseas Territory in their own right, with a Commissioner resident on the Falkland Islands. During the Falklands conflict of 1982, when negotiations over the ultimate sovereignty of the Falkland Islands were being conducted, Margaret Thatcher was keen to keep the question of sovereignty over South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands separate from that regarding the Falklands. In her summing up of the fourth meeting of the Defence and Oversea Committee (South Atlantic), she mentioned the need to clarify ‘the differing legal bases for British sovereignty over the various territories in the crisis area’, making it clear that ‘sovereignty over the Dependencies could prove to be of particular importance in relation to Antarctica and to future mineral discoveries’.37

Conclusion Decolonizing the last remnants of empire remains difficult, and most of the remaining OTs are unlikely to move along the road to independence in the near future. There may be progress in the sovereignty disputes over Gibraltar and the Falklands: the possibility that imaginative approaches to sovereignty and mutual good faith will prevail can never be ruled out. Britain may finally make up for the way it has treated the Chagossians and thus put an end to allegations of double standards and an embarrassing failure in its respect for human rights. The world may continue to act responsibly to protect the extremely sensitive environment of the Antarctic. The Caribbean territories may continue

694   Michael J. Parsons to cement relations between themselves to be stronger together. The post-​colonial relationship may evolve into a genuine partnership of mutual self-​interest. The future, however, is unlikely to be an easy one. There remain a number of fundamental problems to be dealt with, notably concerning the relations between largely indigenous ‘belongers’ and the colonial or post-​colonial populations which may outnumber them, e.g., New Caledonia. However, it might perhaps be useful, at least in some cases and despite the limitations and shortcomings of the status of UKOTs, to see the variety of jurisdictions and constitutional arrangements which have evolved as reflecting a sensible and flexible response to a post-​colonial environment. The concluding remarks of Robert Aldrich and John Connell’s The Last Colonies remain true today: ‘Formal political independence now means little. The “last colonies” have become the avatars of the post-​modern future’.

Notes 1. The National Archives (TNA) FCO 86/​63 ‘. . . for us . . . the British Empire is past history. A few territories which remain independent do so of their own choice, or because viable independence (whether on their own or in federation) is not open to them (as is the case, for example, of Hong Kong)’. Heath was speaking at the first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Singapore. 2. In resolution 1514 (XV) (1960), the UN proclaimed ‘the necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations’, drawing up a list of non-​ self-​governing territories and urging the administrating powers to ‘transfer all power to the peoples of those territories’. 3. ‘Our Overseas Territories are British for as long as they wish to remain British. Britain has willingly granted independence where it has been requested; and we will continue to do so where this is an option. [ . . . ] And Britain remains committed to those territories which choose to retain the British connection.’ Partnership for Progress and Prosperity: Britain and the Overseas Territories, Cm 4264, 1999, 4. The 2012 White Paper, The Overseas Territories, Security, Success and Sustainability, also emphasizes their right to self-​determination. 4. See Gold, 2005. 5. For the Sovereign Base Areas, the 1960 Treaty of Establishment asserts that Britain’s intention is ‘not to set up and administer “colonies” ’; Declaration of Her Majesty’s government concerning the administration of the sovereign base areas, United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 382, no. 5476, 1960, 162. For the BIOT there are ongoing disputes with Mauritius concerning sovereignty and with the Chagossian population, which was removed to make way for the US base. 6. William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization”, in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Ends of British Imperialism:  The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization: Collected Essays (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 451–​502. 7. TNA CAB 134/​1559. 8. This was even more true when Nauru, with a population of around 6000, became independent from Australia in 1968, although it only became a member of the UN in 1999, and a full member of the Commonwealth in 2000. 9. See Royle, 2012.

Remnants of Empire    695 10. See McIntyre, 2013: 180. 11. BAT partly overlaps Argentine and Chilean claims, although under the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 sovereignty claims are in effect frozen. 12. Falkland Islands Government Press Release 12 March 2013, available at:  http://​www. falklands.gov.fk/​results-​of-​t he-​referendum-​on-​t he-​p olitical-​status-​of-​t he-​falkland-​ islands​. 13. See Allen, 2014. 14. Guardian, 18 April 2012. 15. 24 August 1966, quoted inter alia in Bancoult, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs Rev 1 [2006] EWHC 1038 (Admin) (11 May 2006), available at: http://​w ww.bailii.org/​ew/​cases/​EWHC/​Admin/​2006/​1038.html. Cf. also Vine, 2009. 16. Guardian, 13 December 2014. 17. See Grant, Policy Review, 2002–​2003. 18. Cayman Islands General Registry. 19. National Audit Office, Contingent Liabilities in the Dependent Territories, 1997 and Managing Risk in the Overseas Territories, 2007. 20. See Baldacchino, 2010. 21. See Dodds, 2002. 22. See Dodds, 2003: 178, quoted in Royle, 2010. 23. The Times, 5 April 1982. 24. See Schwarz, 2011: 25. 25. cf. also Dodds, 2003. 26. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts report, HC 767, December 2016. 27. https://​www.gov.uk/​government/​world-​location-​news/​turks-​and-​caicos-​secures-​first​sovereign-​credit-​rating. 2 8. https://​e c.europa.eu/​e uropeaid/​regions/​overseas-​c ountries-​a nd-​t erritories-​o cts/​ oct-​eu-​relations-​detail_​en. 29. Falkland Islands Executive Council paper 79/​13, “Census 2012: Full Results and Analysis”, 24 April 2013, available at: http://​www.falklands.gov.fk/​assets/​79-​13P.pdf. 30. cf. Gold, 2005. 31. See Royle, 2012. 32. A list of ‘outermost regions’ and ‘overseas countries and territories’ connected with the EU can be found at http://​ec.europa.eu/​regional_​policy/​en/​policy/​themes/​outermost-​ regions/​and http://​eeas.europa.eu/​oct/​index_​en.htm. 33. Cour des Comptes, La Masse salariale de l’État: Enjeux et leviers, July 2015. 34. See, for example, Mrgudovik, 2012, and Pitoiset, 2004. 35. French White Paper on Defence and National Security—​2013, available at: http://​www. defense.gouv.fr. 36. Cf., for example, Fisher, 2013. 37. TNA CAB-​148–​211, 11 April 1982.

Additional Reading Adler-​ Nissen, R., and Pram Gad, U. European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games: The EU Overseas Countries and Territories (London: Routledge, 2012).

696   Michael J. Parsons Aldrich, R., and Connell, J. The Last Colonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Allen, S. The Chagos Islands and International Law (Portland, OR: Hart, 2014). Baldacchino, G. ‘“Upside Down Decolonization” in Sub-​ national Island Jurisdictions: Questioning the “Post” in Postcolonialism’, Space and Culture 13, no. 2 (2010): 188–​202. Cayman Islands General Registry. Available at:  http://​www.ciregistry.gov.ky (accessed 22 March 2015). Clegg, P., and Killingray, D. The Non-​Independent Territories of the Caribbean and Pacific: Continuity or Change (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 2012). Darwin, J. Unfinished Empire: the Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012). Darwin, J. Britain and Decolonisation:  The Retreat from Empire in the Post-​war World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). Dodds, K. Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (New York: Taurus, 2002). Dodds, K. “God Save the Falklands: postcolonial geographies of the Falklands/​Malvinas”, in R. Edmond and V. Smith, Islands in History and Representation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 177–​189. Falkland Island Government Policy Unit, 2012 Census, www.falklands.gov.fk/​assets/​79-​13P.pdf. Fisher, D. France in the South Pacific (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2013). French White Paper on Defence and National Security. 2013. Available at: http://​www.defense. gouv.fr. “Future of the Dependent Territories, Draft E of the Review”, 16 July 1973, FCO/​ODA PAR 1973, TNA FCO 86/​63. Grant, T. “Gibraltar on the Rocks: the American stake in a sovereignty dispute”, Policy Review 116 (2002–​2003). Available at http://​www.hoover.org/​research/​gibraltar-​rocks. Gold, P. Gibraltar, British or Spanish? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). Marks, K. Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-​day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed (New York: Free Press, 2009). McIntyre, W. D. Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Mrgudovic, N. “The French Overseas Territories in Transition,” in P. Clegg and D. Killingray, eds., The Non-​Independent Territories of the Caribbean and Pacific: Continuity or Change (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 2012). National Audit Office. Managing Risk in the Overseas Territories (London: TSO, 2007). Pitoiset, A. Nouvelle Calédonie: horizons pacifiques (Paris: Autrement, 2004). Royle, S. A. “Identity and the Other British Isles: Bermuda and St. Helena”, in Jodie Matthews & Daniel Travers, eds., Islands and Britishness: A Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2012). Royle, S. A. “Postcolonial Culture on Dependent Islands”, Space and Culture 13, no. 2 (2010): 203–​215. Sand, P. United States and Britain in Diego Garcia: The Future of a Controversial Base (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Schwarz, B. The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The National Archives, Cabinet Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, Sub-​Committee on the South Atlantic and the Falkland Islands, Minutes of a Meeting held at 10 Downing Street on 11 April 1982 at 7.00 pm, TNA CAB 148–​211. Vine, D. Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). World Bank, http://​data.worldbank.org/​indicator/​NY.GDP.PCAP.CD, consulted 24 March 2015.

Chapter 36

Literature a nd Dec ol oniz at i on Charles Forsdick

Introduction Recent scholarship has made it increasingly apparent that, although decolonization is a process often understood in exclusively political and economic terms, engagement with the historical phenomenon and its afterlives may also benefit significantly from additional recognition of the role within it of cultural agency.1 Such a recasting of decolonization depends in large measure on recognition that a key element of the process of uncoupling colonizer and colonized involves not only the chronicling of the end of Empire, but also the imagination (or re-​imagination) of postcolonial futures—​ practices that take place as much in the production of the novel, poetry, and theatre as they do in law, philosophy, or political theory. Such an approach might tend to focus roughly on the period 1945–​1970 with which the ‘end of empire’ is customarily associated, but attention to the contribution of a variety of cultural forces requires further adjustment of the analytical lens. This entails not only an expansion of chronological frame that permits understandings of an extended decolonizing moment that stretches back to the nineteenth century (not least to the struggle for Haiti’s independence in 1804), but also an expansion towards the present as cultural production is also seen as a privileged reflection of the ongoing and unfinished nature of decolonization. Focusing on the cultures of decolonization also emphasizes the transnational networks on which colonized cultures themselves depend as they seek resources to decolonize, highlighting the cross-​cultural and often intercontinental exchanges and translations of ideas and representations on which the literary and cultural dimensions of decolonization depend. These are the very elements that ‘national’ accounts of the ends of empire often tend to downplay or even obscure. The range of genres, media, and cultural forms in which these processes are to be tracked is highly diverse, and includes architecture, museums, exhibitions, monuments,

698   Charles Forsdick and memorials, as well as visual culture more generally.2 In the wake of Edward Said’s work, and in particular of his 1992 Culture and Imperialism, postcolonial criticism has tended, however, to focus on the literary sphere, deploying a postcolonial optic either to reassess colonial writings (and often to discern within them the silenced but already dissenting voices of the colonized), or to engage with chronologically postcolonial texts that grapple with the entanglements of globalization and neo-​colonialism.3 Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle detect even within such a body of critical engagement a partial neglect of culture and decolonization caused by a sense that the shift from empire to independence has—​by certain observers—​been ‘quietly underestimated, imagined as a containable and peaceful moment of constitutional change, left in the main to specialists in constitutional history’.4 Such an observation potentially fails to take account of the extreme violence of the final years of empire in countries including Algeria, Angola, Kenya, and Mozambique, but there is nevertheless some truth in the claim. This is not least because decolonization is at the same time often seen as entangled in other emerging histories, most notably those of the Cold War,5 emphasizing political and economic processes, and downplaying the extent to which culture—​in the colonies as well as in the former colonizing ‘centres’—​was integral to imperial decline. This is particularly reflected in the ways in which the end of empire allowed new cultural forms and dissenting voices to emerge, including in non-​print media such as radio, film, and television. A focus on cultural production can indeed challenge any residual sense of centre-​periphery dynamics, suggesting the ways in which resistance generated by what Said called the ‘voyage-​in’ of intellectuals from the colonies was complemented by transnational dialogues and forms of production—​tricontinental, non-​aligned, and other—​that developed ‘transnational [and translingual] imaginaries’ and often succeeded in short-​circuiting the old imperial centres.6

Language and the Cultures of Decolonization This chapter explores the critical yet neglected question of how the end of empire was narrated by those who not only lived through it, but who also later (and in a variety of ways) sought to reconcile themselves to it. Literature can also serve actively as the ‘conscience of the people’,7 a place in which latent ideas, otherwise unexpressed, may be allowed to coalesce. Such a focus on literature in the context of the end of empire inevitably raises questions about language: language policy, language use, and the processes of linguistic decolonization with which these are associated. It makes clear the limitations of approaches to the end of empire that at worst fail to address questions of language, or at best minimize the linguistic dimensions of such processes. In his 1986 collection entitled Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, the Kenyan novelist and essayist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explores the questions of language, history, and

Literature and Decolonization    699 national identity that have shaped his own particular creative and intellectual trajectory.8 Central to Ngũgĩ’s work is the idea that, while colonialism cannot achieve the imposition of a single language, it often depends on an ideological monolingualism that privileges European languages (and elevates them as tools of social advancement and ideological integration) to the detriment of the bilingualism or deployment of multilingual repertoires with which everyday communication and cultural production in colonized societies is often associated. This situation underpinned Ngũgĩ’s post-​ independence decision (as it turned out, a temporary one) to abandon English and deploy Gikuyu in his own writing practice. Decolonising the Mind continued Ngũgĩ’s previous interrogation of the cultural and institutional afterlives of empire, which are evident in earlier essays such as “On the abolition of the English department” (1968) in which he and his co-​authors outlined the counter-​curriculum required, in the wake of empire, by the postcolonial African university to combat residual colonial assumptions and their persistence in neo-​colonial frames.9 Decolonising the Mind remains, nevertheless, an important indication not only of the ways in which decolonization is as much a linguistic, cultural, and psychological phenomenon as it is political and legislative, but also of how it is a process that is equally driven by and reflected in the fields of literature and thought. Jean-​Paul Sartre, one of the most significant French metropolitan contributors to anti-​colonial thinking in the Francophone world, pre-​empted Ngũgĩ’s claims in “Colonialism is a system”. Published in the early years of the Algerian War of Independence, Sartre’s essay outlines a more generalized agenda involving (in his case) the intellectual decolonization of both France and its former colonies: ‘The only thing we can and must try—​but today it is the main one—​is to struggle [ . . . ] to free simultaneously the Algerians and the French from colonial tyranny’.10 For Sartre, this was primarily a political project, but one inextricably linked, through his concept of a specifically ‘committed literature’, to cultural manifestations of (and triggers for) the end of the empire. As a result, one of his major contributions was his work as the writer of paratextual material for key works of the literature of decolonization, most notably prefaces to Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948), as well as to the later essays of Fanon, which reveal the complex dynamics of the literary production that accompanies the end of empire, and even the persistent patronage on which it can unwittingly depend.11 Sartre’s work provides an eloquent illustration of the ways in which, if writing the ends of empire involves exploring how the process was narrated by those who lived through it and later sought to reconcile themselves to it, metropolitan perspectives are required to complement those non-​metropolitan narratives with which they are entangled. In his claim that decolonization must be a generalized process, impacting on colonizing countries as much as on those they colonized, Sartre also pre-​empts what Said would later dub a contrapuntal approach to the cultures of decolonization, drawing on the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized, and deploying an ‘awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’.12 As this chapter suggests, an approach along these lines is crucial to understanding literature and decolonization,

700   Charles Forsdick not only in acknowledging the multiple and often divergent narratives that the ends of empire have generated, but also in identifying the ways in which those narratives have often been interrelated, in intertextual and other ways.

Writing the Ends of Empire The intersections of decolonization and literature have generated a proliferation of textual material:  not only the writing—​creative and critical—​that invariably accompanies the process of colonialism’s undoing, but also that which, in the wake of empire, seeks to make sense of such shifts while discerning their often ambiguous and contested legacies. The corpus encapsulating such understanding is eclectic and is made up of literary, historiographic, and philosophical work, but its contents converge in the common purpose of grappling with the multiple meanings of decolonization and seek to understand the nature of the postcolonial condition by which the process is followed, and attempt to articulate the possible futures it may (or may not) permit. This chapter focuses primarily on the case of decolonization in the French Empire, and acknowledges accordingly the specific ideological, cultural, and (crucially) lingustic specificities associated with that already varied context. Where possible, reference is also made to analagous circumstances in other empires. Postcolonial criticism, on which the reading of the literatures associated with decolonization has often depended, has regularly failed to negotiate the tensions evident here between the specific and the general. Heavily dependent on paradigms evident in an Anglophone colonial context, the field emerged in a form that—​in Harish Trivedi’s mordant phrase—​had ‘ears only for English’.13 A consequence is not only that creative production in vernaculars other than English has been rarely studied, but also that an unspoken Anglonormativity has meant that reading practices elaborated from the study of texts produced in a British imperial context were often exported to understand literature emerging from elsewhere. The development of Francophone postcolonial studies (for example, Forsdick and Murphy’s 2003 work) and, in a Latin American context, Mignolo’s ‘decolonial option’,14 has encouraged more variegated forms of critical engagement, and the development of related resources (for example, see Poddar, Patke, and Jensen’s 2008 work) has at the same time triggered reflection across different post/​ colonial contexts, associated not only with the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires, but also the Belgian, Danish, German, and Dutch.15 In each of these cases, it is also important to recognize the variations in literary engagement with the end of empire that exists within, as opposed to across, colonial spheres. For example, the Brazzaville conference of January 1944 triggered parallel processes of French reform: most colonies were gathered two years later under the umbrella of the Union française in an attempt to challenge anti-​French nationalism by creating an appearance of unity between metropolitan France and its empire, and yielding a degree of limited power to territorial assemblies. However, in 1946 several colonized territories

Literature and Decolonization    701 in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean were instead granted the status of overseas departments and accordingly further assimilated into axes of power that are still evident today. Such a political split then created literary divisions within earlier literary movements such as Négritude, with Léopold Senghor rising to the rank of poet-​president in newly independent Senegal, whereas Aimé Césaire, initially supportive of the departmentalization to which Martinique was subject, became increasingly disillusioned as a politician, which was later reflected in his drama, poetry, and essays. Literary production became a privileged site in which the repercussions of those post-​war decisions were amplified. Literature thus provides an alternative and invaluable source relating to decolonization that not only complements more formal and historiographically conventional narratives, but also potentially imagines the supplementary perspectives and voices of those often silenced in (or excluded from) the official record of the end of empire. Caution is nevertheless required in approaching literary material: one of the accusations levelled against postcolonial criticism is its propensity to reduce the literary text to the status of source material, which fails to account for the distinctive literariness of fictional, poetic, and dramatic works. There is, therefore, an additional need to recognize the extent to which many works produced in the context of the end of empire manifest a specific poetics of decolonization (if not a decolonial poetics), which is often evident in the violence they do to literary language or form. The formal and stylistic elements of literary texts are highly performative, and merit attention as such, but they underline the status of literature as a privileged source in which the dilemmas, challenges, and choices of the processes of decolonization are evident in authors’ struggles to make sense of the moment of rapid, often radical, and on occasion even unimaginable transition through which they are living.

Literature as Archive and Agent of Decolonization Literature may fulfil a documentary and then archival function, but the distinctive power of the literary to speculate, synthesize, and re-​imagine can also be seen to grant such writing—​whatever the geographical origins of the author who has produced it—​ privileged access to change as it occurs, as well as to the social, cultural, and political afterlives of such shifts as their full implications become apparent in the societies and communities that emerge from the process. This means that literature produced in the context of decolonization may have multiple significations and effects: first, in the specific frame of its own production, where it can encapsulate, articulate, and often amplify the processes it describes as they occur; secondly, in parallel situations, in which processes of decolonization are actively directed along axes linking colonizer and colonized, but where key writings—​the work of Frantz Fanon being a particularly striking

702   Charles Forsdick example—​shortcircuit those patterns of control and permit creative and political dialogue between geographically and linguistically distinctive theatres of decolonization;16 and transhistorically, across different moments of decolonization, when emerging struggles to end empire draw inspiration from earlier transitions to independence, processes in which the Haitian Revolution and War of Independence (to be discussed in greater detail below) may be seen to play an exemplary role.17 It is essential to begin by acknowledging the primary role of literature as an immediate, spontaneous response to historical change, and as a privileged site at which sense is made of that change as it occurs. Part of the singularity of the literary text is rooted in its poetics, and its deployment of form and discourse in ways that capture and even harness the dynamic circumstances of the end of empire. Language choice and language use are, as Ngũgĩ and many others make clear, central to this, and the literatures of decolonization often reflect a symbiotic relationship between the poetic and the political. The power of the literary work is reflected in numerous cases of book banning, as colonial authorities sought to control the circulation of ideas deemed seditious. Léon Gontran Damas’s searing account of the coming collapse of colonial governance in French Guiana in Retour de Guyane (1937) was seized by the French authorities; the French-​ Algerian journalist Henri Alleg’s memoir La Question (1958), an account of his arrest and torture during the Algerian War of Independence, was banned sometime after its publication, when the work’s impact on debates about decolonization became clear (although so many copies were by then in circulation that such a move was ineffective); and Mongo Beti’s essay Main basse sur le Cameroun: autopsie d’une décolonisation, which critically dissects—​as its evocative subtitle suggests—​not only the post-​independence government in Cameroon, but also French neo-​colonial interventions in the wake of empire, was banned in France as well as in his own country after its publication 1971 and only circulated after the author’s successful legal challenge in 1976. Censorship provides a clear illustration of the instrumental role of literature in decolonization processes, not only because it demonstrates the perception, not least on the part of the colonial authorities, of the power of the written word, but also because the banning of books was rarely effective and may even be seen as largely counterproductive, especially given the visibility it tends to grant to works supposedly withdrawn from circulation. Although not itself banned, C. L. R. James’s 1938 The Black Jacobins, an account of the Haitian Revolution, fell out of print in the post-​war period, but continued to circulate in samizdat copies in sub-​Saharan Africa, where James himself comments (in the preface to the 1980 edition of the text) on its impact on the organization of resistance in apartheid South Africa.18 Similarly, transnational circulation allowed authors to defy attempts to silence their work: the call for a social and economic decolonization of Quebec in Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1970), a quasi-​autobiographical work by leader of the Front de libération du Québec Pierre Vallières, led to the book’s censorship in French Canada, but it was still available in a French edition and an English-​language translation appeared in the US in 1971. Such examples reveal a number of aspects of the role of literature at the moment of decolonization, which suggests that the privileged status of the literary text relates

Literature and Decolonization    703 not only to the spontaneity of witnessing, documenting, representing and otherwise processing events as they occur, but also to its potential to act as a trigger for historical change. Literature—​in its original form, in translation, or other forms of adaptation—​ has the potential to vocalize and valourize anti-​colonial struggle, to underline the inevitability of the end of empire, and to create transcolonial networks of communication and solidarity. A striking example of this process is to be found in African-​American writer William Gardner Smith’s 1963 novel The Stone Face. A reflection on French anti-​ Arab racism based on the author’s observations in Paris in the final years of the Algerian War of Independence, the work not only creates connections between the condition of the contemporary Black population of the US and Algerians in France, but also provides one of the first accounts of the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris (otherwise heavily censored in France itself), during which over 200 unarmed FLN supporters were murdered by the French authorities. The Stone Face is a striking example of the ways in which literature creates connections between situations of struggle otherwise seen as discrete and even distinctive, but also has the power to document the end of empire as it occurs. The Algerian War of Independence was a particularly potent force for such processes, and the essays of Frantz Fanon circulated beyond North Africa, often in translation, as one of the most coherent sets of reflections on colonial racism, anti-​colonialism, the role of violence in the struggle for national liberation, and the social and political structures likely to emerge at the end of empire. At the same time, in creative writing, authors such as the Algerian Kateb Yacine addressed a similar range of issues, but through the medium of fiction. Kateb’s Nedjma, which appeared in 1956 with the leading French publisher Seuil in the early years of the conflict, is an allegorical exploration of colonial Algeria centred on the story of four young men who fall in love with the eponymous heroine, daughter of a Jewish French woman and one of two possible Algerian fathers. The author spent much of the period of the war in exile, but continued to focus on the anticolonial struggle in work produced after his return to Algeria in 1962. His highly experimental second novel Le Polygone étoilé, published in 1966, reflects this continued focus on colonial rule, as well as growing disillusionment at the challenges faced by Algerian immigrants in postcolonial France and the processes of the end of empire themselves.

Revisiting the Past Literature also provides a way in which authors revisit the past—​as well as texts from the past—​in the light of the complexities of the present. The case of The Tempest, and its refigurings in the context of anti-​colonialism and decolonization, is a particularly telling illustration on several levels in terms not only of a transhistorical reflection in which authors re-​explore the colonial past in relation to the anti-​colonial present (and vice versa), but also of an often cross-​cultural intertextuality whereby writers from colonized cultures seek to negotiate their relationship with metropolitan literature

704   Charles Forsdick (and in particular its canonical works). Shakespeare’s Tempest lends itself to analysis of such processes, in part because, with its emphasis on the centrality of Prospero, it is an allegory about artistic creation set in a colonial frame, and in part because it provides a reflection on colonial contact and the power struggles this engenders. This second reading, focused in particular on a reassessment of the growing status of Caliban, was foregrounded in engagements with the play in the period of post-​war decolonizations in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.19 Ngũgĩ’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat, set in the context of the Mau Mau Rebellion, draws on The Tempest in different ways in order to create specific parallels between Prospero and its protagonist John Thompson, while Octave Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, published in 1950, drew on the play in the context of its author’s experience of the brutal French suppression of the independence movement in Madagascar in 1947 in order to develop a theory of colonialism in which Prospero and Caliban—​linked respectively to inferiority and dependence complexes—​served as prototypes. Such anti-​ colonial re-​readings challenged the traditionally Eurocentric and Manichean division between, on the one hand, Prospero’s knowledge and civilizing influence and, on the other, the supposedly malevolent magic of Caliban’s mother Sycorax. They privileged instead Caliban’s right to ownership of the island on which he had been born and lived before Prospero’s arrival. Caliban’s claim: ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, /​ Which thou tak’st from me’ (1.2.331–​32) resonates fully with the search for a literary voice of anti-​colonial resistance, and Fernandez Retamar’s 1971 essay ‘Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’ lists a series of exemplary Calibans, both historical and contemporary, including Toussaint Louverture, Fidel Castro, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Intertextual engagement also reflects the role of literature in turning to the past in order to imagine the possible futures that might follow the end of the empire. Subsequent literary works have deployed anticipatory devices to project and interrogate the worlds that have emerged in the wake of empire. Notable among these is Abdourahman Waberi’s 2006 novel Aux Etats-​Unis d’Afrique, a satirical account in which decolonization leads to a reversal of the asymmetries of power and wealth between Global North and South, with the United States of Africa dominating the world and migrants from civil war-​torn countries seeking refuge. Literature produced in the context of decolonization tends to avoid such dystopian takes, but it serves nevertheless as a point at which there is reflection on the political and cultural configurations of what might follow empire. A particularly dynamic example of this is provided by C. L. R. James’s history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, the 1938 edition of which was written in the context of interwar pan-​Africanism ‘with Africa in mind’. The 1963 second edition, substantially redrafted in the light of James’s observation of the intervening decolonization struggles in Cuba, Ghana, Trinidad, and elsewhere, has markedly different phases. For David Scott, whereas the first edition from the interwar period expressed in its interpretation of Toussaint Louverture a romantic, even optimistic anti-​colonialism, the narrative of the rewritten 1963 version sets out a more pessimistic and tragic view of postcoloniality, in which the formerly colonized is subject

Literature and Decolonization    705 to neo-​colonial interventions by the former colonizer and historical asymmetries of power are perpetuated in new ways.20

Genre and the Creation of New Literary Cultures James’s Black Jacobins raises important questions about the place of genre in discussions of literature and decolonization. The work began as play, first performed in London in 1936 with Paul Robeson in the lead role, later appeared as a narrative history in 1938 and 1963, and was subsequently rewritten as drama to be performed in newly independent Nigeria in 1967. James’s shifting between genres illustrates the formal diversity that characterizes the literature accompanying the end of empire. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues for a privileging of recognition of the novel as the genre in which authors interrogated and resisted empire. Other genres were equally important, however, and Négritude, one of the inter-​war literary movements from which anti-​colonial thought emerged, relied initially on poetry, the literary form in which its three founders, Césaire, Damas, and Senghor, found their voice. Césaire’s 1939 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal retains an immediacy in its linguistic experimentation, its exploration of the racial hierarchization on which colonialism depended, its debunking of stereotypes, and its insistence on the agency and resilience of the black subject (tracked back in the poem to the Haitian Revolution and its leader Toussaint Louverture). Damas and Senghor were both also compilers of poetry anthologies, Poètes d’expression française 1900–​1945 (published in 1946) and Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (published in 1948) respectively. These collections sought to act as a manifesto for the movement, with Damas’s in particular extending beyond a predominantly Black Atlantic frame to include poets from Indochina and elsewhere—​ an expansive movement which continued throughout the process of decolonization by prominent poets such as Edouard Glissant and Kateb Yacine. All three Negritude authors also wrote in prose, and Césaire and Senghor, in particular, were important essayists, the former remembered for his excoriating Discours sur le colonialisme (published in 1950), the latter for his numerous writings collected in the five volumes of Liberté between 1964 and 1992. The flexibility of the essay provided scope for a number of other intellectuals, including Glissant, Albert Memmi, and Fanon, to reflect on the processes of decolonization in texts outlining an anti-​colonial humanism that would become central to the emergence of postcolonial thought.21 Anti-​colonial humanism interrogates the ethnocentrism of European notions of universalism, and writes the Global South back into discussions of cultural difference and the violence inherent in colonial encounter. Many authors associated with decolonization, including Fanon himself, also wrote for the theatre, which was a space of creation and possibility where emerging ideas and

706   Charles Forsdick movements could be presented in ways that would potentially engage wider audiences than those to whom other genres were addressed. Equally important to any consideration of the range of (primarily European) literary forms with which writers engaged is an understanding of the extent to which cultural decolonization manifested itself also in the ways in which—​in the context of decolonization—​genres were selected, adapted, and critically deployed. Questions about the residual (and potentially neo-​colonial) impact of colonial languages that are central—​as discussed above—​to the work of Ngũgĩ are equally pertinent to issues of genre: while certain authors adopted Western forms as vehicles for reflection on the end of empire, others were more actively committed to an experimental search to dismantle those forms. A particularly striking example, in which generic and linguistic innovations are equally apparent, is Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances, published in 1968, a critical engagement with post-​ independence governments in Sub-​Saharan Africa that also deploys an idiosyncratic treatment of the French language to explore the ways in which African writers translate their experiences for a Western audience. While decolonization influenced the choice of language and genre, its impact on the production and distribution of literature was more ambiguous. From the early twentieth century, literature by authors from colonized cultures had, on the whole, circulated via traditional European circuits, occasionally—​as was the case with René Maran’s Batouala, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1921—​receiving recognition in metropolitan prize culture. Graham Huggan, Richard Watts, and others have detected blind spots within the production of literature in the context of, and then in the wake of, decolonization. Huggan detects a ‘marketing of the margins’, which is evident in what he dubs a postcolonial exoticism.22 He describes a centripetal literary market place in which texts written by authors from (former) colonies, or by those whose lives have been shaped by the experience of postcolonial diaspora, are subject to (neo-​)colonial pressures according to which the independence of their voice is compromised by asymmetrical conditions of production and distribution. In the light of this, literature produced either in anticipation or in the aftermath of the end of empire is often shaped by the expectations of metropolitan publishers and readers. Watts describes a process of ‘packaging postcoloniality’, whereby the paratextual trappings of literature—​including the prefaces by figures such as Jean-​Paul Sartre mentioned above—​provide a validation and even a form of patronage through which the French mission civilisatrice may be seen to persist in the literary arena. Notwithstanding these critiques, the decolonization process was nevertheless accompanied by, and led to, the creation of new forms and patterns of literary circulation as authors critical of empire (and actively committed to exploring alternatives to it) sought the means to share their writings with readers in the metropolitan centres, both in their own countries and—​where possible, and where patterns of censorship did not act as a major impediment—​in other colonized contexts. Such developments were a major challenge to the publishing apparatus (including publishers, collections, and prizes) that had accompanied colonial expansion, a phenomenon

Literature and Decolonization    707 particularly well developed in France where, as la littérature coloniale, it had sought to rival the success of its British counterpart epitomized by the granting of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Rudyard Kipling in 1907. The literary cultures associated with colonialism had progressively allowed the integration of (certain) voices of the colonized, and had even, on occasion, acknowledged the emerging anti-​colonial critique and the advocacy for decolonization they conveyed. These structures were not, however, prepared to deal with the sudden proliferation of texts that would emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, many of which continued to appear with metropolitan publishers. Often, these were in dedicated collections such as the important Heinemann African Writers Series, launched in 1962 to encourage literary production in Africa and to make texts, in affordable editions and produced locally, available for educational purposes.23 Heinemann published works by major authors, including Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ, and Nadine Gordimer, and also included several volumes in translation from French, Portuguese, and Arabic, as well as African languages such as Swahili and Afrikaans. In the French-​speaking world, with the principal exception of Quebec and to a lesser extent Haiti, publishing was centred on Paris, but the publication by Alioune Diop of the journal Présence Africaine in the period immediately following the Second World War led to a significant change in the landscape. Présence Africaine was launched in Paris in 1947 and developed a tradition of earlier interwar periodicals such as Légitime défense, L’Etudiant noir, and La Revue du monde noir, in which early anti-​colonial thought began to emerge.24 This was followed by a publishing house in 1949 and then a bookshop in 1962, both with the same name. The activity was collaborative from the start, involving other African authors including Senghor himself and Abdoulaye Sadji, another Senegalese writer, as well as Caribbean writers such as Césaire; it was also supported by a number of prominent French writers, including André Gide, Michel Griaule, Michel Leiris, and Sartre himself. From the 1950s, Présence Africaine, still published from Paris, adopted an explicitly anti-​ colonial, tiers-​mondiste editorial line, and foregrounded culture—​as its subtitle Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir suggests—​as a key element in pan-​African political thought. In 1956, Alioune Diop and Présence Africaine showed a further commitment to the place of literature in the anti-​colonial struggle by arranging in Paris the 1er Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, a major event at the Sorbonne attended primarily by Francophone and Anglophone authors from Africa, the Americas, and beyond. This activity was complemented by the launch of the Présence Africaine imprint, which published literary writing while at the same time encouraging non-​fiction, including philosophy and ethnography. Other metropolitan publishers and booksellers, including François Maspero, with whom Présence Africaine worked closely, were similarly committed to the production and distribution of texts committed to an openly anti-​colonial agenda, but Présence Africaine provided a radical alternative, complemented by a commitment to wide distribution beyond France, not least in paperback form.

708   Charles Forsdick

Patterns of Decolonization: on History and Geography A sustained reflection on the historical and geographical frames in which decolonization occurs is evident across a range of linguistic and cultural traditions. Literature contributes to the search for historical models that might anticipate, or at least provide inspiration for, the processes of decolonization as they unfolded, and perhaps, more importantly, for the establishment of postcolonial independence. Recurrent in such a process is reference to the previous endings of empire, a phenomenon associated historically with the Haitian Revolution as well as with its leaders (most notably Toussaint Louverture). The deployment of Haiti in twentieth-​century debates about decolonization had been evident since the interwar period, when the country featured prominently in writing produced in the context of the Harlem Renaissance as well as in cultural production in the interwar Soviet Union. At the same time, in Great Britain, C.L.R. James was exploring—​through sustained engagement with Louverture—​the major political movements in which he was engaged, most notably emerging Pan-​Africanism and the anti-​colonialism for which that political movement would serve as one of the foundations. This chapter has explained how James’s work is a striking illustration of the ways in which writing the end of empire can occur via detours as well as also across multiple genres. The Black Jacobins began as a play, with Paul Robeson playing the lead, but was published two years later, in 1938, as a narrative history. James uses the Haitian Revolution as a historical case study; on the one hand, it is inspirational in that it demonstrates the possibility of anti-​colonial liberation culminating in independence (and the definitive abolition of slavery), but on the other, it acts more as a warning and explores, through the figure of Louverture, the challenges inherent in leadership of a struggle for decolonization. The first edition of The Black Jacobins is anticipatory, as its author grapples with the ways in which the anti-​colonial leader might communicate a specific vision for the end of empire to the people while managing any discrepancy between that vision and what is more generally expected. Two decades later, as James revisited his text in the light of the ongoing decolonization processes in Ghana, Trinidad, and elsewhere, the contemporary relevance of the dilemmas of post-​independence Haiti—​postcolonial and yet simultaneously subject to neo-​colonial intervention—​became increasingly apparent. It is unsurprising that by the late 1950s, a number of other authors had turned to Haiti to seek, through various forms of literary engagement, to make sense of their current condition. In the departmentalized French Caribbean, Edouard Glissant wrote Monsieur Toussaint (1959), a play in which the eponymous protagonist, imprisoned at the end of the life in the Château de Joux, is surrounded by hallucinated figures from his past who hold him to account for decisions and actions during the Haitian Revolution. The following year, Aimé Césaire wrote a long historical essay on Louverture to be read in part as a reflection on his own political choices as—​like his subject—​he sought to maintain

Literature and Decolonization    709 a balance between postcolonial autonomy and the maintenance of a constitutional relationship with France. Around the same time in the Anglophone Caribbean, Derek Walcott produced the first two plays in his Haitian trilogy, Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes published in 1950, and in 1958, Drums and Colours: the former—​as with Césaire’s own play on the same figure from 1963—​focused on the life of the third leader of independent Haiti, and the latter drew Haiti into an epic history of the wider Caribbean to mark the foundation of the short-​lived political union of the West Indies Federation, one of the vehicles whereby the region attempted to negotiate its passage through decolonization. Haiti also played an important role in Sub-​Saharan African literary culture during this period: Césaire’s Tragédie du roi Christophe, published in 1963, was a centrepiece to one of the most significant cultural events to follow decolonization: the ‘First World Festival of Black Arts’ (FESMAN). The play opened in Dakar in April 1966, and the Haitian revolution continued to feature in other contemporary work that attempted to make sense of colonial history in the context of the end of empire while exploring a wider Black Atlantic frame, for example, Bernard Dadié’s 1973 Îles du tempête. While this focus on Haiti reveals a search for inspiration from historical precedents, another recurrent literary response in the literature associated with decolonization involves attempts to discern the new geographical configurations and forms of mobility emerging from the end of empire. It is striking that post-​war decolonization coincided with two significant developments: the further democratization of travel, and the increased need for migrant labour as a result of industrial expansion. It became rapidly apparent that the end of empire would not (and could not) result in a complete separation of former colonizer from former colonized, and that new forms of interdependency would indeed emerge in the wake of colonization. As a result, literature became a forum in which these issues were closely explored. A number of novels in the 1950s, produced directly in the context of decolonization, focused on questions of the immigration flows that nevertheless continued (and would indeed increase) between colonies and metropolitan centres. The Lonely Londoners, published in 1956 by Trinidadian Samuel Selvon, is an account of the social (im)mobility of members of the ‘Windrush generation’ as they seek work, adjust to their circumstances, and face everyday racism in the capital; similar issues are explored by the slightly earlier work The Emigrants, published in 1954 by the Barbadian George Lamming. In the different context of the Francophone tradition, Moroccan author Driss Chraïbi published Les Boucs in 1955, which focuses critically on the treatment of migrant workers in France, a theme also addressed by the Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembene in Le Docker noir, a novel published in the same year. In Sembene’s text, the treatment of migrant workers in Marseilles is paralleled with a narrative regarding the perceived literary abilities of authors from colonized contexts. The protagonist Diaw Falla is accused of plagiarizing a white woman’s novel on slavery and murdering her to cover up the evidence. The jury’s presumption of Diaw’s guilt suggests that there was a clear hierarchy of creative potential, and that access to the production of literature was closely policed. Despite the sudden flourishing of non-​metropolitan writing in the context of decolonization and the emergence of new means of circulation discussed earlier, control by the formerly colonized of

710   Charles Forsdick the mainstream means of cultural recognition was nevertheless restricted. The end of empire coincided with the emergence of a tradition of travel writing produced by authors from cultures undergoing decolonization. The travelogue, previously implicated in the dissemination of ideologies of empire, became, in several cases, a genre in which the new forms of mobility associated with the period of decolonization were explored. A notable example is to be found in the work of the Ivoirian author Bernard Dadié, who produced a trilogy of works recounting journeys to Paris (Un nègre à Paris, 1959), New York (Patron de New York, 1964) and Rome (La Ville où nul ne meurt, 1969). In Anglophone literature, this phenomenon was evident in the work of several Caribbean authors. The most notable of these, V. S. Naipaul, wrote two travelogues in the early 1960s to articulate his sense of postcolonial disillusion. The Middle Passage, published in 1962—​with the subtitle: Impressions of Five Societies: British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America—​recounts a journey to the Caribbean as the region went through the process of decolonization. In this condescending account of return, Naipaul reflects on the history of slavery and also the current state of the Caribbean, and tends to suggest that the flaws associated with the end of empire are more self-​inflicted than the result of centuries of colonial contact. A subsequent travelogue published in 1964, An Area of Darkness, recounts Naipaul’s journey through India in the early 1960s, another form of return—​here, to Naipaul’s diasporic roots—​ that pessimistically reflects on the prospects of the decolonized country. Banned in India for its negative portrayal of the country, it nevertheless reveals the extent to which literature acts not only as a vehicle for decolonization, but also as a source of critique of its outcomes. An Area of Darkness also reflects a new dynamic in which a writer from one decolonized culture travels to and comments on another, which suggests the extent to which postcolonial literature would continue to play a major role in capturing and making sense of what came after empire.

Conclusion: Charting the Ends of Empire Literature produced in the context of decolonization asks a question key to this volume as a whole: when (and, to a certain extent, even if) can it be said that empire has been undone and has ended? On the one hand, this is a historical issue, positing the ends of empire as part of a long, entangled process that occurs in phases and waves, characterized by feedback loops, with—​as was the case in the early nineteenth century—​ the ending of one empire coinciding with the beginning of another. As this chapter has explored, the Haitian Revolution is a reminder that empire ended in the Americas, in their hemispheric complexity and interconnectedness, over 150  years before the age of decolonization that would follow World War II. Nevertheless, it is clear that literature allowed close tracking of attitudes in the mid-​twentieth century towards the end

Literature and Decolonization    711 of empire, as the case of the Francophone novel in Sub-​Saharan Africa demonstrates amply: in the short period between the Brazzaville conference of 1944 and the wave of referenda leading to independence in 1958, there was a clear shift, for example, from the more anthropological, autobiographical observations of novels such as Camara Laye’s Enfant noir, published in 1953, in which any critique of colonialism is reformist and associated with defence of a loosely defined sense of traditional culture, to the mordant satire of works published later in the decade, such as Ferdinand Oyono’s Le Vieux Nègre et la médaille, published in 1956, which exposes the hypocrisy of French colonial discourse while calling for greater pan-​African solidarity as the processes of decolonization took hold. Careful study of literature at the end of empire reveals the extent to which interrogation of the meanings of the epithet ‘postcolonial’ over the past three decades or more have pivoted on a false dichotomy which pits a chronological and positivistic understanding (often encapsulated in the hyphenated form, ‘post-​colonial’), which suggests that the ‘moment’ of decolonization is one of a clean break, against an approach that presents the ‘postcolonial’ (or what Chris Bongie calls the ‘post/​colonial’) as a marker of the persistence of the past in the present—​a persistence that can be spectral or disavowed, but can often also, in the guise of neocolonial, be overt.25 Anne McClintock was an early critic of what she saw as the ‘prematurely celebratory’ nature of postcolonial studies,26 but the field—​following the emergence, since the turn of the millenium, of new forms of global imperialism, and the accompanying recognition that the work of decolonization remains incomplete—​has adopted an approach more aligned with what Ato Quayson has dubbed ‘postcolonializing’, a term that implies a shift away from any sense of ‘chronological supersession’ and betokens instead a ‘process of coming-​into-​being and a struggle against colonialism and its after effects’.27 Such an understanding provides a clear justification of one of the key aspects of the postcolonial project: the search for continuities between often seemingly (and actually) discontinuous sets of circumstances, ‘drawing on a notion of the centrality of colonialism for understanding the formation of the contemporary world’.28 Quayson’s aim in such a manoeuvre is not to designate certain situations or phenomena as somehow existing after empire, i.e., as essentially ‘postcolonial’, but instead to ‘suggest creative ways of viewing a variety of cultural, political, social and chronological realities both in the West and elsewhere via a postcolonial prism of interpretation’.29 Literature serves as a privileged site of such interpretations, and postcolonial literary criticism continues to work in tandem with the texts it studies to illuminate the forces of decolonization, past and present.

Notes 1. See, for example, Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle, eds., Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–​70 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2016).

712   Charles Forsdick 2. On visual cultures, see, e.g., Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy, eds., Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2006); Jon Cowans, Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946–​1959 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 3. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 4. Craggs and Claire Wintle, Cultures of Decolonisation, 5. 5. See Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 6. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 16. 7. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse:  Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). 8. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986). 9. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “On the abolition of the English department”, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 438–​442. [First published in Homecoming (London: Heinemann, 1972), 145–​150.] 10. Jean-​Paul Sartre, “Le colonialisme est un système”, in Situations V (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 25–​48 (48; emphasis in the original). 11. On this subject, see Richard Watts, Packaging Post/​Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 12. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 51. 13. Harish Trivedi, “The Postcolonial or the transcolonial? Location and language”, Interventions 1, no. 2 (1999): 269–​272 (specifically 272). 14. See Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, eds., Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (London:  Edward Arnold, 2003); and Walter Migolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 15. See Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen, eds., A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures:  Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 16. Thea Pittman and Andy Stafford, eds., “New Transatlanticisms”, special issue of Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7, no. 3 (2009). 17. William G. Martin, ed., South Africa and the World Economy: Remaking Race, State and Region (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013). 18. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1938]), xvii. 19. See Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, eds., ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000); and Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest”, Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 557–​578. 20. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 21. See Jane Hiddleston, Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). 22. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing of the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 23. James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2008).

Literature and Decolonization    713 24. V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947–​1987 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 25. See Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles:  The Creole Identities of Post/​Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 26. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), 13. 27. Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 9. 28. Quayson, Postcolonialism, 10. 29. Quayson, Postcolonialism, 21.

Chapter 37

Ap ol o gies, Re st i t u t i ons , and C ompens at i on Making Reparations for Colonialism Robert Aldrich

Demands for reparations for the misdeeds of colonialism have circulated widely in recent years, concerning groups who were, or whose ancestors were, subjected to dispossession, enslavement, torture, or execution, as well as those who see themselves as rightful owners of artefacts acquired during imperialist plunder. Public debate and historical, political, and legal scholarship traverse a thicket of claims expressed through official statements and private initiatives, demonstrations and petitions, lawsuits and parliamentary resolutions. The objectives are proclaimed to be justice and reconciliation, although other symbolic and material goals can be identified. Issues connected with colonial wrongdoings have troubled domestic electoral politics and international relations. Few conflicts have found definitive resolution, and the scale of colonialism allows for limitless demands for apologies, commemorations of victims, and compensatory payments. After discussing the historical conjuncture in which demands have arisen, this chapter explores three types of ‘reparative politics’: apologies and expressions of regret for colonial-​ era actions, restitution of heritage objects in metropolitan collections, and monetary compensation for the perceived crimes of colonialism.1 The widely chosen examples are illustrative, and not a comprehensive inventory. The concluding sections argue that no matter how well intentioned the demands made or responses offered, from a historical perspective, there exist distinct limitations and significant concerns surrounding such efforts.

Confronting the Colonial Past Though formal demands predated the early 1990s, a founding document was the Abuja Proclamation of 1993, adopted by a Pan-​African Conference on Reparations for African

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    715 Enslavement, Colonisation and Neo-​Colonisation, meeting under the auspices of the Organisation for African Unity. It recalled the precedents of German payments to Jews after the Holocaust and compensation by the United States government to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War, and it stressed the general principle of ‘compensation for injustice’. The proclamation did not focus on the notion of crime; ‘what matters is not the guilt but the responsibility of those states and nations whose economic evolution once depended on slave labour and colonialism’. It called for acknowledgement of ‘a unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to the African peoples’, and urged ‘full monetary payment’ for wrong-​doings, especially through cancellation of Africa’s international debts. The Abuja declaration also requested the return of ‘stolen goods, artifacts and other traditional treasures’.2 Similar calls have subsequently issued from various quarters. One noteworthy aspect of reparative politics is indeed how widely debates have extended, from university seminar rooms to courtrooms, public assembly halls and websites, learned tomes and boldly provocative manifestos. The Internet age has provided a new forum for a group such as Colonialism Reparation. Set up in 2008 in Italy, its homepage declares: ‘The aim of the association is that nations which gave rise to this situation [of colonialism] should condemn colonialism acknowledging their behaviour as a crime, that they reconcile with their past, apologize and pay reparations to the colonized nations.’3 The wording hints at a spectrum of issues, although as with the Abuja proclamation, it reveals the problematic nature of demands. Who determines the nature and extent of colonial-​era ‘crimes’—​historians, jurists, legislators? According to which law code (and the legislation of which era) would colonial crimes be judged, and by whom? Would present-​day statutes against ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ be applicable? What does acceptance of responsibility for real or perceived wrongdoings entail? What sentiments would apologies convey, and who decides whether they provide satisfaction? What form would reparations take, and how would any sum be calculated? What reciprocal gestures would be envisaged? What misdeeds committed by non-​Westerners or by indigenous peoples against each other would also be acknowledged? Must there be apologies and reparations for an innumerable list of deeds through the course of history? Such questions underline the difficulties posed by necessary efforts to come to terms with the colonial past. Between the Abuja declaration and the appearance of Colonialism Reparation, many developments were connected, directly or indirectly, with colonialism’s legacy. The end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 overturned a regime based on racial ideologies and institutions inherited from the colonial age. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which began hearings in 1996, offered a tribunal for victims and perpetrators.4 Similar commissions followed in other countries, but with varying briefs and outcomes. Meanwhile, discussion intensified on slavery and slave-​trading, violence (especially torture and extra-​judicial executions), ‘frontier wars’ between native populations and colonial and settler groups, displacement of individuals and communities, and the land rights of indigenous populations. Some commentators and activist groups, such as the pointedly named ‘Les Indigènes de la République’ in France, blamed many

716   Robert Aldrich present-​day problems on colonialism, while on the opposing side, others indulged in nostalgérie (with reference to Algeria) or ‘Raj nostalgia’. Other circumstances ignited controversies about the colonial past and remonstrations about historical responsibility. The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union and governments in Eastern Europe led to re-​examination of Communist policies and the imperialism of tsarist Russia and the USSR. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 horrified impotent Western observers, and raised questions about the ethnic policies of the Belgian colonial government that ruled Rwanda until 1960. Attention also focused on East Timor, the island colony occupied by the Indonesians when the Portuguese retreated in 1975; a referendum on self-​determination in 1999 was followed by bloody resistance to withdrawal from Jakarta’s army and militia, with independence formally achieved only in 2002. Meanwhile, nationalist groups elsewhere—​Western Saharans, Tamils in Sri Lanka, West Papuans, Tibetans in exile—​campaigned against ‘colonialism’ in their homelands, the ‘colonial’ powers in these cases not being Western ones. Islamism, in ideology and shockingly violent acts, targeted alleged Western colonialism and post-​colonial imperialism. The swell of demands for reparations thus relates to post-​colonial historical, political, and cultural circumstances at the end of the 1900s and afterwards: the politics of the present activated through debates about the past. However, antecedents lie much further in the past, though generally without reference to colonialism. In particular, there was a 1952 reparations agreement in which West Germany agreed to pay 3.5 billion marks to the state of Israel for atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. A decade later, the Israeli kidnapping, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann inaugurated a wave of commemorations, memorials, and discussions about the Shoah, as well as pursuit of surviving Nazi war criminals and efforts to recover property looted under Nazi rule. Meanwhile, a striking expression of remorse occurred in 1970 when West German Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees at a memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Not all governments proved willing to acknowledge the past actions of their compatriots. The East German government fully disassociated itself from responsibility for the Nazi actions. Not until 1995 did a French president, Jacques Chirac, recognize the state’s responsibility for deportation of French Jews; previous leaders labelled Vichy an illegal regime for whose policies the French Republic held no legal or moral culpability. Despite the differences, discussions concerning colonialism nevertheless often allude to the Shoah, with Holocaust reparations perceived as a template for responses to the misdeeds of colonialism. Social activism and identity politics have played major roles in recriminations about colonialism. The civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s focused attention on the long-​term effects of slavery, and much contemporary discussion there and elsewhere has centred on this most decried action in colonial history.5 The large communities of African descent in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States gave birth to theorists and activists who furthered the earlier work of the négritude movement and the Harlem Renaissance, Martin Luther King’s campaigns and Black Power, with some intent on apologies, compensation, and other reparation for enslavement.

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    717 Not only black African diasporic populations have sought redress; remonstrations come from North Africans in France, Indonesians in the Netherlands, and South Asians in Britain. One campaign that attracted particular attention (especially with support from the actress Joanna Lumley), and scored success in 2004, concerned Gurkha soldiers from Nepal; for generations Gurkhas served in the British army although they and their descendants were denied right of abode in Britain and paid lower pensions than British veterans. Meanwhile, in countries that still administer overseas territories, such as the French islands of the Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, charges that colonialism’s history contributes to current social, cultural, and economic disenfranchisement had particular resonance. Groups seeking independence, such as indigenous Kanaks in New Caledonia in the 1980s, spoke of themselves and others as ‘victims of colonialism’. The legacies of ‘native policy’ have loomed large in countries with ethnically variegated populations, and in international relations between ex-​colonies and former colonial powers. In successor states to settler colonies, indigenous populations argue that continuing marginalization relates directly to colonial-​era ideologies and policies. Such causes as land rights for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia should not analytically be confined to ‘identity politics’, yet struggles that culminated in the Mabo decision by the High Court in 1992 and the Wik decision four years later, mandating extension of certain land rights to the original Australians, reflected new militancy among peoples dispossessed under British colonial governments and the Commonwealth of Australia. Other formerly colonized countries have been summoned to confront the persistence of colonial-​era inequalities. For instance, activists have called for Brazilians to face up to racism and social disparity in a country where slavery was not abolished until 1888.6 Demands are sounded concerning the ‘Fourth World’ of stateless nomadic and tribal populations, such as those of the Amazonian jungle, who have been disadvantaged under colonial and post-​colonial rule. The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in fact, made explicit reference to ‘indigenous historical grievances’ as well as contemporary concerns. Inquiries by historians and journalists since the 1990s that have shone a spotlight on colonial misdeeds comprise a third stimulus for the emergence of reparative demands. Colonial history-​writing has experienced a resurgence aided by the opening of archives covering the final years of colonial rule and by accounts of aging figures with personal experiences. Revelations about torture practised by French soldiers in Algeria provide a pertinent example. Such deeds were well known, despite government censorship, during the Franco-​Algerian War of 1954–​1962. Subsequently, however, with what Benjamin Stora termed a ‘colonial amnesia’, the French hoped to forgot the traumatic war that had brought down the Fourth Republic, led to the deaths of 30,000 French soldiers (and many times that number of Algerians), and the ‘repatriation’ of a million Français d’Algérie. In 2000, newspapers published statements by General Paul Aussaresses, a decorated retired officer who spoke of torture carried out by himself and comrades, justifying such measures as necessary to combat terrorism. Meanwhile, Louisette Ighilahriz, an activist in the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, spoke of

718   Robert Aldrich having been subjected to torture and sexual abuse. These revelations caused intense debate on torture and, by extension, on French colonialism in general.7 Similar exposés touched other countries. In Britain, Caroline Elkins’ study of suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s (bearing an incendiary subtitle about the ‘British gulag’ in Africa), alongside David Anderson’s research, opened the way to discordant discussions among historians, former colonial officials and journalists. It also instigated legal initiatives by veterans of the Mau Mau for compensation (on which more presently).8 A more recent volume on Britain’s ‘My Lai’ in Malaysia may produce similar effects.9 In Germany, studies of the 1904 campaign against the Herero of Southwest Africa (Namibia) included accusations of genocide and examined the massacres as precedents for Nazi atrocities.10 The 1998 publication of Adam Hochschild ‘s King Leopold’s Ghost provided a harrowing account of the Belgian king’s administrators and the concessionary companies that operated rubber plantations in the Congo Free State. These actions, well publicized at the beginning of the twentieth century, forced the cession of Leopold II’s private colony to the Belgian state, but Hochschild’s book brought evidence to a new and broader audience.11 In Italy, publications accused colonialists of genocide in Libya and convincingly questioned the memory of Italians in Africa as ‘brava gente’.12 Books appeared about Spanish ‘genocide’ in the colonial Americas.13 Works concerning the Japanese ‘rape of Nanking’ and forced use of Korean and Chinese ‘comfort women’ as prostitutes sparked fierce debate about Japan’s policies in East Asia.14 The record of every colonizing country has thus been subjected to close scrutiny and critical appraisal. The general assessment by academic historians, though not unanimously accepted, is that colonial rule encompassed many serious misdeeds, and that subaltern and senior colonial authorities, at least in certain situations, not uncommonly engaged in physical and mental torture, sexual abuse, pillage, summary execution, and removal of children from their families. The scale of such exactions has led commentators, with intentional provocation, to speak about ‘genocides’, ‘holocausts’, and ‘gulags’, even if such characterizations are slippery in definition and law, as well as emotionally charged.15 Furthermore, there is a perception that at the time of decolonization, and perhaps still today, officials have covered up abuses, and secreted or destroyed documents implicating those involved.16 Not surprising, some works have been partisan and polemical, both for and against the allegations. A  tendency to cast individuals as victims or perpetrators, and to see a nation’s record as either villainous or heroic, risks creating spuriously exclusive categories:  the colonial soldier as bravely defending national honour and territory against guerrilla fighters, or as brutally terrorizing an already mercilessly exploited native people. More reasoned discussions bring to light differences of opinion about evidence, the extent and systematic or episodic nature of violence, and the decision-​ making that came into play. As always, history can become politicized in the hands of historians and those who harness research to other purposes. The issue of making amends for the colonial past is fraught with problems even in the way that it is discussed. Psychologists focus on collective trauma, and repression and

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    719 the return of memory, as well as the cathartic and recuperative value of apologies and similar actions. Jurists are preoccupied with the black-​letter aspects of such gestures: the legal processes of demanding and adjudicating satisfaction, the liabilities of a state, group, or individual, the parameters of national and international law, and the accumulation of evidence. These concerns hold particular weight with accusations of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and when there exists legal recourse for conviction of offenders and indemnification of victims. Philosophers, for their part, think through difficult problems of ethics, morality, and responsibility, while theologians evoke the redemptive and conciliatory aspects of confession, contrition, penance, and absolution. Anthropologists consider how reparative approaches fit into cultural paradigms of non-​Western societies and whether such actions remain culturally bounded. Politicians inevitably consider the legal, financial, and electoral repercussions. For all, there remains an underlying question: to what extent ought one generation assume responsibility for actions committed by others in the recent and distant past, and what does such responsibility entail? The remainder of this chapter examines, from an historian’s perspective, how this question manifests itself in three areas: apologies, restitution of artefacts, and monetary compensation.

Saying Sorry On 13 February 2008, in the Australian House of Representatives, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said ‘sorry’ for the country’s ‘past mistreatment’ of its indigenous population. He spoke in particular about the ‘Stolen Generations’, where children were forcibly removed from their homes and communities by government order—​a practice that continued until the 1970s: ‘We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians’. The prime minister thrice intoned: ‘We are sorry’, using a word that his predecessor, John Howard, had steadfastly refused to pronounce. Rudd said that the stories of the Stolen Generation ‘cry out to be heard; they cry out for an apology’, and it was an apology that he offered.17 Less than two years later, on 16 November 2009, Rudd again issued an apology, this time to the ‘Forgotten Australians’, child migrants (often classified as orphans, though in fact many had one or both parents) brought to Australia from the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, with good intentions but no regard for their consent or the effects of being uprooted. Three times again, he uttered ‘sorry’ for the suffering children had experienced and ‘for the absolute tragedy of childhood lost’. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, echoed the sentiments of his Australian counterpart. These statements were not, strictly speaking, apologies for colonialism, but they represented unprecedented official acknowledgements about the ill effects of specific

720   Robert Aldrich policies. They formed part of Australia’s on-​going struggle to work through its complex past, animated in the fractious ‘history wars’ in the 1990s that centred on frontier violence but expanded to the whole history of indigenous-​settler relations.18 The ‘age of apology’ has inspired a shelf of academic works.19 Attention has focussed on the wording of statements, the circumstances in which they are made and by whom, how they are received, and what repercussions they may produce (especially in material amends), and also whether admission of responsibility makes individuals, groups, or the state liable to prosecution. To apologize or not for colonial actions presents an awkward alternative for government authorities and non-​state actors; apologies, when given at all, generally entail carefully worded caveats. Notable among apologies by former colonial powers is one concerning the German military campaign against the Herero. In reprisal for the deaths of approximately one hundred settlers in 1904, German armies mounted an attack that left 60,000–​70,000 dead; more than half of the survivors died in detention after being herded, without provisions, into desert camps. The actions caused considerable consternation in Germany, but resulted in no apology by the Wilhelmine, Weimar, Nazi, or postwar governments. In 2004, the West German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-​Zeul, travelling to Namibia on the centenary of the massacres, stated: ‘We Germans accept our historical, political, moral and ethical responsibility for the wrongs committed by our ancestors. May you, please, in the name of our “common Father”, forgive our deeds’. Reactions proved generally positive, although Leonard Jamfa has pointed out the statement’s limitations. It had been prompted in part by worries about the effects on descendants of Germans in Namibia if its government pursued land reform policies that might dispossess white landowners, as well as by concerns over a court case initiated in the United States by the Herero People’s Reparation Corporation. Jamfa thus judges Germany’s actions opportunistic. Furthermore, he argues that the apology was worded to avoid mention of ‘genocide’, and that the reference to God cast the apology in religious rather that legal or political terms, and intimated absolution for German wrongdoing.20 Statements of remorse take various forms, implicating only the speaker, the government, or the nation as a whole, with the distinction obviously significant. Moreover, wording is crucial; ‘regret’ expresses sadness at suffering, whereas a ‘sorry’ in an apology recognizes culpability and contrition. The improvised or planned nature of a statement, and the extent of support in the general population, also strengthen or undermine a pronouncement. For example, in 2007, a tearful Ken Livingstone spoke at a commemoration marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade: ‘As mayor I offer an apology on behalf of London and its institutions for their role in the trans-​Atlantic slave trade’. He recalled that many Londoners earned great profits from slavery, which he characterized as ‘the racial murder of not just those who were transported, but generations of enslaved African men, women and children’. Livingstone added: ‘We live with the consequences today’. The director-​general of UNESCO, Françoise Rivière, applauded the mayor: ‘You have distinguished yourself as the first high-​visibility elected official to take

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    721 such a historic stand, thereby setting an example’.21 The example has not been widely followed in Europe. There have, nevertheless, been some apologies. In 1998, the Danish prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, responding to pressures from the autonomous government of Greenland (still part of the kingdom of Denmark), apologized for the transfer of inhabitants of Thule in the 1950s to make room for an American airbase.22 In September 2013, the Dutch ambassador to Indonesia, Tjeerd De Zwaan, spoke of the violence that accompanied the Netherlands’ efforts to reimpose colonial control over the East Indies after the Second World War. In the presence of relatives of those summarily executed, he acknowledged the killing by the Dutch colonial army of as many as 1,500 nationalist guerrillas in South Sulawesi: ‘On behalf of the Dutch government, I apologize for these excesses’.23 The Danish and Dutch statements exemplified formal apologies, limited to specific incidents. In other cases, statements appeared more guarded. On 6 February 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar, India, where over 350 Indians died when British troops fired on a crowd in 1919. Cameron was the first British prime minister to visit the site of what Winston Churchill—​hardly a critic of Britain’s colonial mission—​ had branded a ‘deeply shameful event’. Cameron did not apologize: ‘In my view, we are dealing with something here that happened a good 40 years before I was born,’ he remarked, adding that the government of the time had condemned the action of a commander exceeding his authority and violating general policy. ‘So I don’t think the right thing is to reach back into history and to seek out things you can apologise for. I think the right thing is to acknowledge what happened’—​an important distinction between apology and acknowledgement. Cameron articulated his objective: ‘The words I used are right: to pay respect to those who lost their lives, to remember what happened, to learn the lessons, to reflect on the fact that those who were responsible were rightly criticised at the time, to learn from the bad and to cherish the good’.24 The French government has also refused to apologize for specific occurrences or colonial policies in general, despite demands from such figures as the president of Algeria. Indeed, the conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy, in a speech in Dakar, Senegal, in 2007, provoked controversy when he seemed to downplay the deleterious effects of colonial rule. Sarkozy had already promised in his electoral campaign: ‘I will give back to French people a pride . . . I will put an end to the repentance that is a form of self-​hatred and to the “competition of memory” that feeds the hatred of others’. To a group of French veterans, he affirmed: ‘Today we must build the future together, without repentance’. 25 Sarkozy’s policy did not alter under his Socialist successor, François Hollande. In 2012, ten Algerian political parties denounced France’s refusal ‘to recognize, apologise for and compensate’ the country for 132 years of colonial rule. Soon afterwards, visiting Algiers, Hollande told a news conference:  ‘I have not come here . . . to offer repentance or apologies.’ He immediately added, enigmatically, ‘I have come to say what is true’; there must be a ‘willingness not to let the past block us but on the contrary to work for the future. Once it has been recognised, the past must allow us to go [forward] much faster and much further’.26 Officials in

722   Robert Aldrich other countries have been notably silent about colonialism; for example, contemporary Russian leaders hardly address tsarist and Soviet expansion in the Baltic and Asia while pursuing irrendentist actions on the country’s borders. Beijing rejects notions of historic Chinese colonialism, and authorities in the Muslim countries have not offered apologies for Arab slave-​trading, or the ill effects of Arabic and Ottoman expansionism. These examples shade in dramatically different approaches. Another case reveals further complexities: Japan’s stance towards its colonies and territories occupied during the Second World War. Mention has already been made of the ‘rape of Nanking’ and the ‘comfort women’ (or, as many prefer, ‘sex slaves’). China and Korea have long demanded that Japanese officials accept full responsibility for wartime crimes, and in Korea, for the exactions of Japan’s forty-​year colonial rule. Similar calls have been heard in regards to victims of forced labour and Japanese-​run concentration camps and ‘death marches’ in wartime Southeast Asia. The Japanese case has crystallized around the Yasukuni War memorial in Tokyo, in which are enshrined, in Shinto tradition, the souls of 2.5 million Japanese soldiers killed in battle since the 1860s. Over a thousand of these men were convicted as war criminals by Allied tribunals after the Second World War; as recently as 1978, a further 14 men branded by the Allies as ‘Class A’ war criminals were enshrined at Yasukuni. The Chinese and Korean governments regularly damn the episodic and generally brief visits of some Japanese ministers to the shrine. The Yasukuni issue, however, is more complex than it appears. It is bound up with the religious nature of the shrine and the place of Shinto in Japan before 1945. Concurrently, it calls into question the criteria for enshrinement of soldiers, whether ministerial visits are strictly personal or official and willfully political, if foreign governments and groups have a right to interfere in commemoration of the country’s fallen soldiers, and to what extent the military museum standing next to the shrine whitewashes Japanese actions.27 Since 1965, various official statements have expressed Japanese ‘regret’, ‘remorse’, ‘condolences’, ‘sorrow’, ‘feelings of mourning’, and ‘responsibility’, followed by resolve to maintain peace and harmonious relations with Japan’s neighbours. In 2005, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi expressed ‘heartfelt apology’ for actions in the Second World War, repeating the word ‘apology’ later in the same year; in 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke of ‘remorse’, but stopped short of apology. However, no matter the frequency of pronouncements, for many they fell short of a national assumption of responsibility.28 The Japanese attitude towards the war record continues to trouble its foreign relations, and peaceful protests and violent attacks on Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses broke out in mainland Asia in 2005, precipitated by revisions in the Japanese school textbooks regarded as downplaying colonial and wartime misdeeds. In 2012, the South Korean president, Lee Myung-​Bak, cautioned à propos of a possible visit by the Japanese emperor that he ‘may come here if he is willing to apologize from his heart to those who died fighting for [Korean] independence’. However, he ‘doesn’t need to come if he is coming just to offer his “deepest regret” ’, a reference to words used by the emperor at a banquet in Tokyo for a South Korean president.29

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    723 Japan, of course, was a victim in the war, as well as the perpetrator of atrocities. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of Tokyo (which took as many as 100,000 lives in the capital) have remained highly controversial, both in Japan and in the United States. Not surprisingly, Japanese have voiced calls for Washington to apologize for the fire-​bombing of Tokyo, the razing of Japanese cities, the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with its long-​ranging health consequences on survivors), and colonial-​style occupation of Japan for seven years after the war.30 In early 2014, eight anti-​nuclear organizations sent an open letter to US President Barack Obama, inviting him to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial: ‘We also urge you to acknowledge that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was a crime against humanity involving the indiscriminate mass killing of civilians. Accordingly, we urge you to offer an official apology to the victims of these war atrocities. . . . [D]‌oing so will increase pressure on the Japanese government to acknowledge its own war crimes of the 1940s.’31 The Japanese case demonstrates how colonial and wartime actions become intertwined, how misdeeds on one side reflect those on the other, and how sensibilities, decades later, remain raw and painful. For some in countries accused of colonial wrongdoings, apologies are inadmissible; for certain victims, almost no apology would ever suffice. Similar conclusions can be drawn about restitution of heritage objects taken in warfare, pillage, dubious trading, and the amassing of state-​owned and private collections.

Giving Back The question of restitution of artefacts to countries of origin has arisen in many contexts, most famously concerning property seized by the Nazis or their allies and in the dispute over the Elgin/​Parthenon marbles taken from Athens and kept in the British Museum. European collectors immeasurably enriched holdings with objects from societies that Europeans explored and colonized. For colonizers and curators, they presented ethnographic or aesthetic value, or testified to the primitivism, decadence, or heathenism of cultures over which Europeans established suzerainty. The sciences of ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology, and the natural history museums growing up alongside them, were much implicated, though in a complicated way, in the colonial project.32 Plunder was for long tolerated as a collateral benefit for European armies, missionaries avidly souvenired ‘idols’ whose worship they sought to combat, collectors swept up countless objects, not always with full consent from their creators and with slight remuneration to them, and the colonial state captured such symbolic items as the regalia of indigenous rulers. Decolonization did not end irregular acquisition of antique and traditional non-​Western arts and crafts. Indeed, rising prices, increasingly feverish and occasionally unscrupulous trading, and growing appreciation of the cultures of Africa, Asia, and Oceania multiplied conflicts about the selling and buying, and the collecting and exhibiting, of these materials.33 It also gave rise to demands for restitution.34

724   Robert Aldrich From 1970, international conventions aiming to counter illicit trade began to regulate, though not retroactively, the acquisition of cultural property. Twenty-​five years later, the Unidroit convention introduced the concept of ‘due diligence’ expected of museums and dealers in determining the provenance of articles. Only thirty-​five states ratified the agreement, however, while museum directors expressed reservations, and art dealers resisted the measures. A UN resolution in 1987 established the principle that objects of ‘spiritual and cultural value fundamental to their country of origin’ ought to be returned. Then, in 2008, a UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people directed: ‘States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs’. Careful language signalled the complex issues involved, regarding provenance, rightful ownership (and even what ownership meant), the types of claims that could be advanced, and what constituted property liable for return. Restitution of heritage items by European institutions, in fact, antedated these pronouncements, though infrequent and effected on a case-​by-​case basis. For instance, the British returned the crown and throne of the last king of Kandy, taken in 1815, to Sri Lanka in the 1930s, and the throne of the last king of Burma (taken in 1885) on that country’s independence in 1948. Another notable example was the ‘Lombok treasure’, the regalia of the last rajah of the island of Lombok. In consolidating their authority over the East Indies, the Dutch waged war on the sultan of Lombok in 1893–​1894; the sultan was deposed and exiled, and the Dutch made off with 230 kg of gold and 7000 kg of silver. Authorities shipped rings, spearheads, tobacco and betel-​nut boxes, gold opium pipes and an array of other items to Holland, with some objects sold to defray the cost of the war and provide pensions for war widows. Many objects, however, went to the Rijksmuseum and the Museum of Ethnography in Leiden. In a successful and amicable case of restitution, in 1977, 243 gold and silver objects, notably the sultan’s regalia, were repatriated and now take pride of place in the National Museum in Jakarta.35 Yet another object returned, though after much delay, was the Axum column, an obelisk taken by Mussolini’s troops from Ethiopia in 1937 and erected outside the building constructed in Rome as the Fascist Ministry for Italian Africa. For many years after they regained independence following the Second World War, Ethiopians requested its return, though Italian authorities prevaricated, arguing variously that the column was too fragile to move or required restoration beforehand, that Ethiopia must pay the cost (which the impoverished country could not afford), or that conditions in war-​torn Ethiopia would endanger the column if it were repatriated. Only in 2008 was the column finally returned.36 The list of demands for restitution remains long, and stretches back to objects looted in early modern colonialism in the Americas; Mexico, for instance, has asked for the return of a headdress (in the ethnography museum of Vienna) said to have belonged to Moctezuma. Egypt wants back a bust of Nefertiti from Berlin. Nigeria would like the

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    725 remarkable ‘Benin bronzes’, held in the British Museum (and elsewhere), that were removed in 1897.37 A particularly sensitive issue concerns human remains. European scientists energetically collected skulls, skeletons, and other body parts, often from ‘primitive’ people in the context of racialist theories that gained currency in the nineteenth century. There are some 18,000 skulls and 30,000 bones in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris. Some human remains were clearly war trophies, such as the skulls of Atai, leader of a resistance movement in New Caledonia in 1878, and of an African sultan defeated by Germans in 1898. Other remains were those of non-​Western figures brought to Europe during their lifetimes, such as Saartjie Baartman, put on show as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. On her death, Baartman’s body was dissected and her skeleton, preserved genitalia, and brain exhibited in the Paris ethnography museum until 1974. Some curators have argued that it is impossible to repatriate all remains because many remain unidentified or because potential scientific value justifies retention. Indigenous groups, however, have pleaded that morality, law, and cultural practices demand that human remains be repatriated and decently interred. Museums have not been unresponsive to such calls. The skull of the sultan killed by Germans was repatriated as long ago as 1954, Baartman’s remains were returned to South Africa in 2002, and Atai’s skull was sent back to New Caledonia in 2014. Many Aboriginal remains have been returned to Australia from the United Kingdom, Austria, the United States, the Czech Republic, and Germany.38 The New Zealand government and the Te Papa museum in Wellington have overseen the repatriation of 240 Maori ancestral remains since 2010, although remains of 650 other Maori, generally tattooed heads, are still in overseas collections.39 Non-​Western human remains in museums include random bones, other preserved body parts, skeletons, shrunken heads, relics of Catholic martyrs, and, most famously, mummies (which some Egyptians would like returned). There are countless non-​Western objets d’art and ethnographical items in collections outside their countries of origin, with the exact provenance sometimes uncertain, though many clearly were acquired in dubious circumstances. Not surprisingly, museum directors reject large-​scale repatriation, cogently arguing that collections are oftentimes legally inalienable, and that institutions such as the British Museum provide universal repositories for the common treasures of humanity, conserving and making available for study and enjoyment in the best possible conditions masterworks from around the world. Further issues include the difficult question of who has legitimate rights to a particular object: a museum, nation-​state, cultural or ethnic community, descendants of the creator, or traditional users. Determining which objects possess the fundamental spiritual or cultural value specified by the UN, and who makes the decision, is a minefield. Substantial concerns about the security and conservation of returned objects, especially to countries experiencing civil strife or menaced by iconoclastic political movements, are hardly illegitimate. Even inside Europe, of course, centuries of warfare and conquest, and private and public collecting, mean that innumerable artworks and artifacts are kept far from their place of origin. Neither political will nor

726   Robert Aldrich public sentiment strongly supports substantial, or even tokenistic, return of heritage objects from the colonies, though demands are not likely to be silenced.

Paying Up An even greater debate surrounds payment of compensation for sufferings endured by the colonized. As with apologies and restitution of objects, this involves moral, legal, political, and, particularly, financial issues.40 Among other strategies, those seeking compensation have taken recourse to the law courts, attempting to mobilize national and international statutes to their benefit. The notable successful case was the effort by Mau Mau to gain an apology and reparations from the British government. Beginning in 2009, the Mau Mau pursued claims through the British court system, although Whitehall contested both the claims and the legal right to pursue them, and suggested that any liabilities had been transferred to the Kenyan government as successor to the colonial state. In 2011, however, the High Court ruled that four elderly Mau Mau claimants had ‘an arguable case in law’. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office subsequently offered an ‘unreserved apology’ for efforts to hide evidence, although this did not constitute an apology for the actions themselves. There also eventuated an out-​of-​court settlement in which the British government agreed to pay out £19.9 million pounds, to be divided among 5228 surviving Kenyans. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, stated in the House of Commons: ‘I would like to make clear now, and for the first time, on behalf of Her Majesty’s government, that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya’. Hague added: “The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-​ treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. . . . [It] sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.” He also warned: ‘We continue to deny liability on behalf of the Government . . . for the actions of the colonial administration. And we do not believe that this settlement establishes a precedent’. The head of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, Gita wa Kahengeri, responded: ‘This is a beginning of reconciliation between the Mau Mau freedom fighters of Kenya and the British government’. Lawyers foreshadowed initiatives to gain further compensation.41 Although the Mau Mau victory concerned an incident connected to the endgame of empire, most calls for payments have been made, more generically, in connection with slavery. The Caribbean state of St Vincent and the Grenadines has undertaken a campaign to secure reparations and an apology. Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves ambitiously calls the effort ‘the defining matter of our age’, and argues that both historical facts and law justify satisfaction of the claims. Curtis King, a St Vincent historian, states: ‘The idea is not to try to get a big cheque and dish out money to all and sundry. We are looking for the establishment of a developmental fund that will benefit the country.

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    727 We are looking for something mutually agreed upon with the British, to bring closure to a period in history’.42 Caribbean and European commentators, underlining the deleterious long-​term effects of slavery, point out that while slave-​owners received compensation after emancipation, slaves did not. There was no compensation, in the words of Cecile Jones, for ‘the backbreaking toil they endured almost every day . . . for the pernicious brutality exacted against them’, and for ‘the continuing effects of the European genocide against the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, or of the humans forced to work and die on the plantations of the Americas, and the exploitation of the natural resources of the African and Caribbean societies’. Conceding that some apologies have indeed been proffered, Jones concludes: ‘For me, an apology is a start. Not the end’.43 The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda has seconded that sentiment: ‘We have recently seen a number of leaders apologising’, but they should ‘match their words with concrete and material benefits’. The Economist, speculating about what amount might be owed, noted that ‘Figures quoted for the current equivalent of the £20m paid to [British] slave owners vary from £16.5 billion to £76 billion. A widely reported demand in 1999 was for $[US]777 trillion to be paid to Africa over five years. More than ten years on, that would still be around ten times global GDP’. The Economist pertinently judged that should any ‘blood money’ be paid, assistance to the Caribbean region ‘should surely stem from today’s needs, not the wrongs of the past’.44 The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, however, has rejected the idea of financial compensation for slavery, and other governments are unlikely to take a different stand. If payments were ever offered, it remains unclear who would be the beneficiaries—​descendants of the enslaved (since, unlike in the case of the Mau Mau, there are no survivors), African states, the countries where diasporic populations live—​and what the uses of the funds would be.45 Groups demanding financial compensation for colonial misdeeds have ranged widely, including residents of Greenland and the former Danish Virgin Islands (now the United States Virgin Islands).46 In Australia, descendants of Torres Strait Islander indentured labourers recruited as plantation workers in Queensland, sometimes with coercive means, have made representations to recover wages owed to their forebears but never paid.47 One of the most surprising payouts that has been made, however, occurred in 2008, when the Italian government agreed to pay the equivalent of $US 5 billion to the Libyan government for Rome’s thirty-​odd-year colonization of Libya. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the time was courting Libya’s ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, who had once visited Italy with a photo of Italian atrocities in Libya pinned to his uniform. Berlusconi hoped to persuade Gaddafi to crack down on illegal migrants to Italy from sub-​Saharan Africa, who transited via Libya, and to improve opportunities for Italian business in Libya. In the agreement, Italy also ‘apologise[d]‌for its killing, destruction and repression of the Libyan people during the period of colonial rule’. The payment agreement apparently fell into abeyance with the Libyan civil war in 2011.48 As with the other types of reparative policies, compensation raised enormous questions, as well as the potential for unlimited financial burdens if misdeeds going back

728   Robert Aldrich to the time of Columbus and Vasco Da Gama were all to be paid for. The Guardian, in reporting the Mau Mau affair, listed three possible specific claims against the British: ‘hundreds of cases’ of torture in Cyprus in the 1950s Eoka insurgency, torture of prisoners in Aden in the mid-​1960s, and the massacre of twenty-​four rubber plantation workers by British troops in Malaya in 1948.49 Once again, the questions clearly involve who would pay, who would receive payments, how much they would total, whether symbolic payments would provide satisfaction, and what precedents would be set. There are also questions about which countries might be liable or willing to pay ‘colonial’ compensations. Would Arabic nations, for instance, pay reparations for Arab slave-​ trading? Would independent African and Asian nations reciprocate with payments to displaced European and other settlers? Would there be rounds of compensation from Africans to other Africans, and Asians to other Asians? Furthermore, would indentured labourers, transported prisoners, children unwillingly settled in colonies, political exiles, and still others, be eligible for compensation? How could a financial balance-​ sheet be drawn up to calculate costs, but also benefits, of colonialism? Answering such questions would exercise many a lawyer’s, accountant’s, and public servant’s brain, but from a historical perspective, perhaps the key point is the very existence of demands for the former colonial powers to account—​in a literal and metaphorical sense—​for imperialism.

The Limits of Reparative Politics Formidable issues complicate satisfaction of demands for apologies, restitution, or reparation. Many political leaders and citizens of countries that possessed colonies disclaim responsibility for past wrongs and argue that people of today need not feel burdened by ancestors’ deeds. The cultural contexts of the colonial era were different from the present, and actions and attitudes considered reprehensible today represented commonly accepted ones in earlier times. Regrettable though ‘excesses’ might have been, present-​ day governments have no duty to take responsibility, express culpability, or do penance. There is a case to be made, historically, for such views—​can Spaniards of the twentieth-​ first century be held responsible for the conquistadores in the sixteenth? And what about consensus: would the Chinese apologize for the invasion of Tibet, or Indonesia for the occupation of East Timor? To this must be added the facts of political life, and the danger of manipulation of demands for political, sectarian, or propagandistic purposes. Making claims through manifestos, demonstrations, and websites is an easy and even popular undertaking, and, so too, is a wholesale refusal to consider their validity. Such requests trigger emotional and partisan responses, pro and contra. Demands are deeply embedded in and time-​bound by contemporary issues, including questions about migrants and refugees, cultural pluralism, social inequality, global disparities in wealth, nationalism, and geopolitical rivalries. Opponents of reparative politics can use refusal to make apologies,

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    729 pay compensation, or de-​accession museum objects, alongside rhetoric stressing national pride and achievements, to galvanize support among troubled voters. Those who might be more sympathetic to demands are not certain of winning broad electoral support. Unsurprisingly, courts worry about precedents, and treasury departments are concerned about the effects on fragile exchequers. Additionally, some argue that apologies and conjoint actions represent a self-​mortifying attitude towards the national heritage, what John Howard called a ‘black armband’ view of Australian history. Critical re-​ examination of colonial history has provoked a backlash, not just in Australia. In 2005, the French parliament, partly in reaction to debates about torture in French Algeria, passed a resolution requiring schools to teach the ‘positive’ aspects of colonialism; considered a triumph for conservative legislators, veterans of the colonial army, and pieds-​ noirs, the resolution caused such an uproar that President Chirac abrogated the clause concerning teaching, although leaving in place others that paid tribute to the achievements of the French in North Africa. Promoters of reparative politics, however, say that no nation can disavow responsibility for deeds and misdeeds committed under its flag, including colonial exploitation and violence, plunder of heritage, and the detrimental effects of decades or centuries of enslavement and mass killings. They marshal ideas of morality, international law, historical veracity, and the benefits of reconciliation and improved international relations. Difficulties of sorting through international statutes, museum policy, and finances, they maintain, ought not to be impediments to rectifying past injustice. Failure to do so perpetuates colonial evils; domestic and global harmony requires resolution of problems inherited from the colonial era. Colonialism is one of the overarching themes in world history, and from Antiquity down until at least the mid-​twentieth century, it was largely admitted as a legitimate strategy for dynasties and states to secure commercial opportunity, geopolitical advantage, territory for settlement, and terrain for dissemination of culture. However, the very label of colonialism covers a myriad of individual and collective motives, diverse strategies, and varying outcomes. Present-​day historiography largely rejects simple binaries of colonized and colonizing, favouring an understanding of geographical expansion in terms of transnational currents, lived experiences, and hybridization, though not minimising coercion and violence. Some calls for apologies, restitution, and compensation, and certain responses to them, betray a limited appreciation of historical complexities, and tend towards a division of the world into good and bad, victims and perpetrators, impoverishment and profit. Valid as reparative gestures may be from a historical perspective, demands and potential responses must be considered with caution and based on deep understanding of past events. History is littered with misdeeds; precedents exist for expressions of guilt, restitution of treasures, and compensation. The ‘war guilt clauses’ of the Versailles treaty, the loss of Germany’s colonies, and the imposition of punitive reparations after the First World War provide one example, though hardly an edifying one. The post-​Second World War agreement between Germany and Israel proved more auspicious, though Palestinians received no compensation from Israel or Western powers that had sponsored the

730   Robert Aldrich creation of the Jewish state, for occupation of land, expulsion of local populations, and the establishment of migrants—​surely one of the most striking undertakings in modern settler colonialism. Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations, perhaps arguably, stands as a model for a successful explicit and targeted apology to indigenous people. It is hard to disagree with the restitution of such heritage objects as the throne or crown of pre-​colonial rulers, but ambit claims for the countless objects in Western collections are harder to support. Compensation, particularly for generalized colonial exactions extending back over centuries, is unlikely to win endorsement. What Wole Soyinka calls the ‘culture of atonement’ spreading over the past generation represents an interesting intersection between contemporary political and social circumstances, historical scholarship, and public activism.50 The work of professional and non-​academic historians has highlighted many grave misdeeds, counterbalanced long-​lived heroic and self-​justifying narratives of colonialism, and challenged colonial amnesia, nostalgia, or simply a desire to let the past be past. Groups with different constituencies have seized upon historical evidence and present-​day stakes to press demands. Debates have been far from devoid of partisanship, provocation, and political point-​scoring, although the issues they raise defiantly demand consideration. These issues form part of the afterlife of colonialism, and are one of the ways that imperialism posthumously has ‘come home’ to haunt the colonizers.51 When old colonies became new nation-​states, links did not sever between colonizers and the colonized, nor did the metamorphosis efface decades and centuries of colonial domination. Indeed, issues in recent decades have resuscitated unsettled quarrels and reopened unhealed wounds, while also challenging falsehoods about the colonial record and complacency about the colonial experience. Despite the relatively limited success of demands for apologies, restitution, and, especially, compensation, calls for such reparative gestures are likely to persist, forcing states, specific groups, jurists, politicians, and diplomats, as well as the writers of the colonial history, to confront the record of empire and its legacy.

Notes 1. ‘Reparative politics’ and ‘reparations’ are used in a generic sense; ‘compensation’ refers specifically to monetary payments. 2. http://​www.africanconstitution.org/​home/​abuja-​proclamation 3. www.colonialismreparation.org 4. http://​www.justice.gov.za/​trc/​report/​index.htm 5. J.R. Oldfield, ‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2007); Astrid Nonbo Andersen, “ ‘We Have Reconquered the Islands’: Figurations in Public Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Denmark, 1948–​2012”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 26 (2013): 57–​76. 6. Guardian Weekly, October 26, 2012: 28–​29. 7. Robert Aldrich, “The Colonial Past and the Post-​Colonial Present”, in Martin Thomas, ed., The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 334–​356.

Apologies, Restitutions, and Compensation    731 8. Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag:  The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London:  Pimlico, 2005); David Anderson, History of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Orion, 2005). 9. Christopher Hale, Massacre in Malaya:  Exposing Britain’s My Lai (London:  History Press, 2013). 10. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, Genocide in German South-​West Africa:  The Colonial War (1904–​1908) in Namibia and its Aftermath (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2008), and David Olusaga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Genocide: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber & Faber, 2010). 11. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Pan, 1999). 12. Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Rome:  Manifestolibri, 2005), and Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libia:  le atrocità nascoste dell’avventura coloniale italiana (1911–​1931) (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2005). 13. Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 14. See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking:  The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (London:  Basic Books, 1998); Keith Howard, ed., True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (London:  Continuum International Publishing Group 1995), and Chungmoo Choi, The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 15. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010), and A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide:  Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008). 16. Guardian, November 29, 2013. 17. A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn, 2004). 18. Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton, Victoria:  Melbourne University Publishing, 2003). 19. Among other works, Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-​Hassman, Jean-​Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner, eds., The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn, eds., Taking Wrongs Seriously:  Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2006), and Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 20. Leonard Jamfa, “Germany Faces Colonial History in Namibia: A Very Ambiguous ‘I Am Sorry’ ”, in Mark Gibney, et al., The Age of Apology, 202–​215. 21. Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2007. 22. Nonbo Andersen, “Between Patriotism and Regret”, 108. 23. Jakarta Globe, updated September 12, 2013, http://​jakartaglobe.id/​news/​netherlands-​ apologizes-​for-​indonesian-​colonial-​killings​. 24. Guardian, February 20, 2013. 25. Financial Times, May 12–​13, 2007. 26. Agence France-​Press report, December 20, 2012. 27. John W. Dower, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (New York: New Press, 2012); John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for

732   Robert Aldrich Japan’s Past (New York: C Hurst & Co, 2008); Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 28. Excerpts from William Daniel Sturgeon, Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine: Place of Peace or Place of Conflict (Boca Raton, FL: Dissertation.com, 2006), 107–​113. 29. Japan Times, August 15, 2012. 30. Japan Times, February 15, 2014. 31. Ibid. 32. Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–​1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 33. See John M. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire:  Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 34. Jeanette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 35. Wahyu Ernawati, “The Lombok Treasure”, in Endang Sri Hardiarti and Pieter ter Keurs, Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past (Amsterdam: KIT Publishing, 2006), 146–​160. 36. See Krystyna von Henneberg, “Monuments, Public Space, and the Memory of Empire in Modern Italy”, History and Memory, 16, no. 1 (2004): 37–​85. 37. See Saloni Mathur, India by Design:  Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 38. http://​arts.gov.au/​indigenous/​repatriation 39. http://​www.museumsassociation.org/​museums-​journal/​news/​30112013-​te-​papa-​tongarewa​repatriates-​seven-​maori-​heads 40. Rhonda E. Howard-​ Hassmann with Anthony P. Lombardo, Reparations to Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 41. http://​www.bbc.com/​news/​uk-​22790037 42. Observer, November 9, 2013. 43. Cecily Jones, ‘Caribbeans Deserve Reparations’, Guardian Weekly, March 21, 2014, 21. 44. Economist, October 5, 2013. 45. Observer, November 9, 2013. 46. Astrid Nonbo Andersen, “Between Patriotism and Regret:  Public Discourses on Colonial History in Denmark Today”, in Esther Fihl and A.R. Vankatachalapathy, eds., Beyond Tranquebar: Grappling Across Cultural Borders in South India (Telangana: Orient BlackSwan, 2014), 96 [pp. 95–​119]. 47. Clive Moore, “The Pacific Islanders’ Fund and the Misappropriation of the Wages of Deceased Pacific Islanders by the Queensland Government”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 61, no. 1 (2015): 1–​18. 48. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2008/​08/​31/​world/​europe/​31iht-​italy.4.15774385.html?_​r=0 49. Guardian Weekly, October 12, 2012. 50. Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1999). 51. See Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-​Nineteenth Century (Harlow:  Routledge, 2005), and Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Index

Abbas, Ferhat  301, 305 ’Abd al-​Hamid ibn Badis  559 ’Abd Allah al-​Ta’ayishi  557 ’Abd Allah Hasan, Muhammad  558 ’Abd al-​Qadir  478, 558 Abdelkrim 308 ’Abduh, Muhammad  560 Abdülhamid II  48, 49 Abe, Shinzo  722 Abuja Proclamation (1993)  714, 715 Abyssinia 353 Aceh  422, 559 Acheampong, Colonel Ignatius Kutu  648 Achebe, Chinua  707 Things Fall Apart  8, 471 Acheson, Dean  428 Adams, Melinda  524, 529 Aden  75, 377, 464 Adler, Victor  36 Adoula, Cyrille  149 ‘Manifeste de la Conscience Africaine’ 151 Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (1941)  522 Advisory Committee on Social Welfare (1943) 541 Afandi (Javanese artist)  399 Afghanistan 428 Africa  423, 424 African Bureau  459 African National Congress (ANC)  419, 465 anti-​colonialism  446 British presence  67, 69, 71, 73–​4, 77, 79,  485–​6 Cold War and decolonization  488–​9 East Africa  105, 526 Equatorial Africa  462 films  662–​3,  667–​8 French presence  91, 93, 94, 485, 486

gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism  520, 521 German presence  103, 104, 107, 108–​10, 116 humanitarianism and human rights  457 Italian presence  125, 128 see also North Africa; Southwest Africa; sub-​Saharan Africa; tropical Africa; West Africa Africanization 471 African National Congress (ANC)  320, 363, 364, 419, 465 Afro-​Asianism  447 Afro-​Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) 447 Agency for Cooperation and Research Development (ACORD)  471 Ageron, Charles-​Robert  305 Ahmad I ibn Mustaf (Bey of Tunis)  304 Ahmad, Muhammad  557 Ahuja, Ravi  254 Ainu (now Hokkaido)  213, 216 al-​Afghani, Jamal al Din  560 al-​Assad, Bashar  385 al-​Azhari, Ismai’il  562, 564 Albania  51–​2,  355 al-​Banna, Hasan  560–​1 Aldrich, Robert  692, 714–​30 The Last Colonies 694 al-​Fasi, ’Allal  564 Algeria  85–​6, 88–​90, 92, 94–​8, 299–​300, 304, 312, 320, 491 administrative ties to France  305 Algerian People’s Party (PPA)  300, 301, 308, 313 Arid Zone  377 Association of the Reformist ’Ulama  559,  564–​5 centres de regroupement 504

734   Index Algeria (cont.) Cold War and decolonization  483–​4 Communist Party (PCA)  301 Compagnie Generale Transsaharienne (CGT) 313 Constantine Plan  310–​11, 542, 547 Constitution of 1963  313 Egyptian support  310 Etoile nord-​africaine (ENA) separatist organization 301 Evian Accords (1962)  296, 303, 311 French Communist Party  491 French presence  85–​6, 88–​9, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96,  97–​8 French Red Cross  460 French settlers  306–​7 gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism  525 General Union of Algerian Muslim Students 308 governance 314 humanitarianism and human rights  461 independence 310 Jonnart Law (1919)  305 labour migration  301 lecons reçues 375 Libyan support  310 literature  702, 703 Manifesto (Ferhat Abbas)  305 Mouvement National Algérien 507 National Liberation Army (ALN)  308, 499 National Liberation Front (FLN)  17, 112, 295–​6, 300, 303, 308–​11, 313, 327, 483–​4, 499–​500, 502, 504, 562, 564–​5, 602–​3,  608–​9 National Movement (MNA)  303 Ordinance (1944)  305–​6 Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS)  303, 499, 603 People’s National Army of Independent Algeria 308 pieds-​noirs  605, 606 post-​colonial migrations to France  301, 602, 607, 608–​9 refugees  583, 587 Regency of Algiers  300 repressive developmentalism  542

resettlement camp system  504 revolution (1954)  478 self-​determination  303,  426 Sétif, seizure of  320, 478–​9, 562 Specialized Administrative Sections  547 Thousand Socialist Villages plan (1973)  547 ulama 301 Young Algerians  300 al-​Hajj ’Umar Tal  558 al-​Hudaybi, Ismai’il  560 Ali, Mohamed  254 All-​African Peoples’ Conference (1958)  155 All-​African Women’s Conference (1972)  527 Alleg, Henri: La Question 702 Allied General Order No. 1  283, 285–​6, 288, 289 All-​India Students’ Federation  15 Allman, Jean  525 al-​Mahdi, ’Abd al-​Rahman  564 Almeida Santos, António de  172 al-​Mukhtar, Omar  127 al-​Qadhdhafi, Muammar  137, 565, 569, 727 al-​Sadr, Muhammad Baqir  568 al-​Sanusi, Muhammad Idris  562, 563 al-​Sharif al-​Sanusi, Ahmad  558 al-​Tha’alibi, ’Abd al-​Aziz  564 Altringham, Lord  376 Ambedkar, B.R.  444 Americas: French presence  91, 93 Amnesty International  114, 455, 459, 462, 466, 467 Anatolia  47, 53–​4, 56, 58–​9 Anderson, Benedict  222, 401 Anderson, David  504, 718 Anderson of Swansea, Lord  681 Anglo-​Egyptian treaty (1936)  67 Angola  170, 326, 328 aldeamentos  504, 548 Bakongo people  165–​6 Communist Party  165 Cuban aid  489, 490, 492 Cuban troops withdrawal  364 development plans  627–​8 model villages  540 National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA)  166, 173–​4, 488–​9, 507

Index   735 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)  166, 173–​4, 488–​9,  507 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)  165–​6, 173–​4, 339, 488–​9, 490, 507 Portuguese presence  162–​6, 169, 173, 175, 486, 488 post-​colonial migrations to Portugal  602–​3 refugees 588 repressive developmentalism  549 SGB 640 South African presence  488 Anguilla: British presence  680, 682, 685 Annam: French presence  95 Ansari, Sarah  266 Antarctic Treaty Area  693 anti-​Bolshevism  36 anti-​colonialism  1, 6, 7, 436–​48 accommodation and self-​rule  437 Africa 446 armed resistance  438 conferences 446 everyday life/​everyday forms of resistance  437–​40 geographic scale  438 intellectual history  440–​4 peasant consciousness  439 radical thought and activism  436 self-​determination  437–​8, 441–​2,  446 as statecraft and diplomacy  444–​8 Subaltern Studies  439–​40 summitry 446 unionization and labour strikes  439 Antigua: Labour Party  338 anti-​Judeo-​bolshevism  36 anti-​Semitism  36, 104, 125, 580, 583, 585, 587 see also Holocaust by Nazi regime Antonescu, Ion  186 apologies, restitutions and compensation  714–​30 act of apology  719–​23 apology and acknowledgement distinction 721 compensation  715,  726–​8 concentration camps  722

confession, contrition, penance and absolution 719 confronting the colonial past  714–​19 crimes against humanity and war crimes  715, 719 cultural property, acquisition of  724 death marches  722 displacement of populations  715 dispossession 714 ethics, morality and responsibility  719 extra-​judicial executions  178, 714, 715 forced labour  722 Fourth World of stateless nomadic and tribal populations  717 frontier wars  715 genocide  718–​19 gulags 718 holocausts 718 human remains, return of  725 land rights  715, 717 legal, financial and electoral repercussions 719 legitimate rights to a particular object  725 museums  724–​5 pillage and plunder  714, 718, 723 racism and social disparity  717 rape of Nanking and comfort women as prostitutes (Japan)  718, 722 removal of children from their families  718, 719 reparative politics  715, 728–​30 restitution of artefacts  714, 723–​6 sexual abuse  718 slavery and slave-​trading  714, 715, 716, 717, 720, 727 social activism and identity politics  716 social, cultural and economic disenfranchisement 717 statements of remorse, varying forms of and wording  720 torture  714, 715, 717, 718, 729 Arab Bureau of the Maghreb  308 Arabia  375, 377, 381 Arab League  308, 383, 502 Arab Red Cross  8, 472 Arendt, Hannah  106 Argentina 667

736   Index Arid Zone  373–​86 Advisory Committee on Arid Zone Research 383 air policing  375 anti-​colonial nationalism  376–​7 Bedouin  375, 381, 383, 385 Central Arid Zone Research Institute (Jodphur) 383 cheap energy provision  382–​3 costs of transformation  380 customary law  381 dam and irrigation projects  378–​9, 386 demographic balance  386 denial: boosting habitability  382 desert administrators  375 desertification/​desertification control  378, 384 detribalization 381 Egyptian Desert Institute  383 emptiness and remoteness as valued assets  379, 382, 383 environmental pollution  384 Karakum Canal project and Aral Sea disaster 378 land access rights  384 mega-​engineering projects  379 military bases/​installations  377, 379–​80,  384 military testing  386 Ministry of the Sahara (Paris)  377 national resource  382 nomadic pastoralism  374, 383 see also Bedouin above nuclear testing  379–​80 Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes (OCRS)  377, 380, 382 Project GROMET -​seeding clouds to break drought 378 safe havens  385 Sahara research station (Algeria)  383 sedentarization  381–​2 self-​determination  381 test facilities and research stations  379, 384 tribal law  381 tribal problems  375 ungoverned spaces  385 weaponized rainfall  378 weather modification experiments  378

Armenian people  53, 55–​6 Arndt, H.W.  622 Aruba 338 Ascension: British presence  680, 681, 684, 686 Ashridge Conference on Social Development (1954) 541 Asia 446 British presence  69, 70, 71 French presence  86, 91, 92–​3 German presence  104 Japanese presence  212, 214, 217, 219, 278–​86 see also East and South-​East Asia Asianization 471 Association of North African Muslim Students (AEMNA)  307–​8 Astrom, Sverker  463 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal  312 Atkinson, Edward  200 Atlantic Charter  562 Attlee, Clement  69, 74, 251, 264 August, Bille: Goodbye Bafana 670 August Revolutions in India and Russia  281 Aussaresses, Paul  717 Australia 729 Aboriginal land rights  717 Arid Zone  379 British presence  67, 78, 81 Department of Foreign Affairs  426 Forgotten Australians (child migrants)  719–​20 Mabo decision (1992)  717 McCulloch Tariff (1865)(Victoria)  203 Nauru 429 Papua New Guinea  429 Stolen Generations  719, 730 Wik decision (1996)  717 Austria 184 Austro-​Hungarian Empire  29–​30 Auxiliary Territorial Services (ATS)  344 Awakening of ’Ulama  561 Azikiwe, Nnamdi  353 Azores 691 Babu Abdulrahman Mohamed  444 Baghdad Pact (1955)  447

Index   737 Bailken, Joanna  530 Baker, Christopher  259 Balafrej, Ahmed  308 Balbo, Italo  127 Balfour, Arthur  482 Balfour Declaration (1917)  30, 482 Balkans  28, 47, 50, 181, 582 Balkan Wars (1912–​13)  45, 50–​3, 585 Balogh, Thomas  354 Baltic States  31, 35, 37 Bamba, Abou B.  632, 633 Bamba, Amadu  558 Bandeira Jerónimo, Miguel  537–​49 Bandele, Biyi: Half of a Yellow Sun 670 Bandung Conference (Asian-​African Conference) (1955)  13–​14, 76, 225, 326, 351, 444–​7, 666 Bandung Declaration  359 Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar  265 Bangladesh Relief Assistance Committee  471 Banjul Charter on Human and People’s Rights 429 Bao Dai  292 Barbados  337, 487 Barelwi, Sayyid Ahmad  559 Barkatullah, Maulana  560 Barre, Siad  565, 569 Bartman, Saartje  725 Ba, Saer Maty  665 Basu, Bipasha  671 Batavophone islands  338 Batra, Ritesh: Lunch Box 672 Baudouin, King  146–​7, 154 Bautis, Marta: Home is the Struggle  668–​9 Bayly, Christopher  261–​2, 279 Bayly, Susan  397 Bay, Muhammad Al Munsif  312 Beg, Ya’qub  239 Bek, Hamza  558 Belarus  183–​4, 185, 186, 189, 190 Belgium  318, 319–​20, 326 Société Générale de Belgique (SGB)  153, 639, 647, 651, 652 see also Congo Belgrade conference of non-​aligned states (1961) 447 Belize see Honduras (Belize)

Ben Bella, Ahmed  309, 311, 563, 566 Benenson, Peter  459, 460–​1 Beneš, Edvard  35 Bengal  258–​60,  262 Ben Messali Hadj, Ahmed  442 Bennett, John  69–​70, 71, 80 Ben Youssef, Salah  309, 312 Berg, C.C.  404 Berlusconi, Silvio  727 Bermuda: British presence  680, 681, 682, 684, 690 Bernard, Paul  644 Bessarabia 186 Bessel, Richard  29 Beti, Mongo: Main basse sur le Cameroun 702 Betts, T.F. (Jimmy)  461–​2 Beuve-​Méry, Hubert  484 Bevin, Ernest  72 Bhashani, Maulana  265 Bhattacharya, Sanjay  259 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali  569 Biafra  114–​15, 328, 457 Bidault, Georges  293 Bieri, Alain  463 Bird, Vere  338 Blackaby, D.H.  343 Blackbourn, David  106–​7 Blackburne, Kenneth  338 Black Power  716 Bloch, Marc  90 Bloembergen, Marieke  391–​407 Blum, Léon  87 Bolshevism 36 Bonaire 333 Dutch presence  690 Bongie, Chris  711 Bongo, Omar  328 Bonneuil, Christophe  624 Bosch, Frederik D.K.  401, 403 Bose, Chandra  281 Boubeker, Ahmed  615 Boumediene, Houari  310, 313, 429, 563, 569 Bourgès-​Maunory, Maurice  484 Bourguiba, Habib  300, 308, 309, 312, 426, 562, 563, 566 Bowman, Andrew  631–​2 Boyer, Jean-​Pierre  340

738   Index Boyle, Danny: Slumdog Millionaire 671 Bradley, Lloyd  346 Bradshaw, Robert  337 Braine, Bernard  687 Brandt, Willy  112, 716 Brazzaville conference (1944)  87, 94, 700 Briggs, Cyril  354 Britain  27, 65–​81, 520, 678–​90, 694 Aden 75 Africa  67, 69, 71, 73–​4, 77, 79, 485–​6 Anglo-​American partnership  66, 69, 70, 72, 77, 79, 81 Anglo-​Egyptian treaty (1936)  67 Anglo-​Japanese Alliance  218 Asia  69, 70, 71 Australia  67, 78, 81 Black People’s Day of Action (1981)  344 Burma 70 Canada  67, 78, 81 Caribbean  69, 71, 74–​5, 337, 340–​1, 343, 347, 487 Chagos islands and dispute with Mauritius  682–​3 China  70–​1, 234, 244 citizenship rights  681 Cold War  477 Colonial Development Act (1929)  541, 624 Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) 626 Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940)  318, 520–​1, 541, 625 Colonial Office see Colonial Office (Britain) Colonial Research Service  545 Commonwealth and Immigration Acts (1962 and 1968)  343, 608 Conservative government  74, 75, 77, 79 Coordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CCARD)  344 Cyprus  75–​6, 77, 79, 678, 679, 681, 684, 686, 689 defence agreements  79 defence and aid  689 Department for International Development (DfID) 689 Dependent Territories  681 Diego Garcia  681, 684, 685, 686

Egypt-Suez Canal Zone and Suez Crisis  67, 69,  76–​7 enforced deskilling and employment inequalities of migrants  343–​4 exceptionalism 66 export earnings  72 film and cinema  661, 663 Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons Human Rights Annual Report (2008) 685 Foreign and Commonwealth Office  421, 726, 727 globalization  65–​6 Gold Coast (Ghana)  71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79 Guiana  487–​8 Honduras (Belize)  487 Hong Kong handover to China (1997)  69, 681 humanitarianism and human rights  457, 461 imperial exceptionalism  65 imperialism  66, 67, 78–​80 imperial reassertion and liberal and illiberal imperialism  71–​6 India  65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 81 Ireland 67 Jamaica  74–​5, 77, 680 and Japan anti-​Russian alliance (1902)  214 Kenya  73,  75–​6 Kuwait 77 Labour government  69, 70, 74 liberal imperialism  65 Malaya  68, 70, 71–​2, 75–​6, 77 Malta 77 Mediterranean 71 Middle East  66, 67, 69, 71–​2, 75, 77, 81 Military Administration  68 national identity  689–​90 Nationality Act (1948)  343, 606–​7 New Zealand  67, 78, 81 Nigeria  71, 72, 77 non-​self-​governing territories  678 North Borneo  77 Northern Rhodesia (Zambia)  74 nuclear missile development  72 Nyasaland (Malawi)  74 Overseas Food Corporation (OFC)  626

Index   739 Overseas Service Aid Scheme  79 Overseas Territories Act (2002)  681 Pakistan  65, 72 Palestine 71 post-​colonial migrations  602, 608, 609–​11 post-​war developmentalism  72 Sarawak 77 Second World War and aftermath  68–​7 1 self-​determination  419–​20, 422, 425, 426 Singapore  68, 77 Solomon Islands  680 South Africa  67, 78, 81 Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)  74 sovereignty disputes and displaced populations  682–​3 Sri Lanka (Ceylon)  70 Tariff Reform movement  203 Trinidad and Tobago  74–​5, 77, 680 tropical Africa  317, 318, 319–​20, 323–​5 West Indies  318 see also United States economic imperialism within British world system; United Kingdom overseas territories (UKOTs) British Antarctic Territory (BAT)  679, 680, 681, 689, 693 British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)  679, 681, 682, 685, 689 British Virgin Islands (BVI)  680, 682, 684 Brown, Gordon  719 Buettner, Elizabeth  601–​15 Bugeaud, General Thomas Robert  98 Buisseret, Auguste  154 Bulgaria  33, 353, 360 Burbank, Jane  124–​5, 139, 437 Burma  70, 281, 479 Burnham, Forbes  488 Burns, Alice  70 Burstall, Dr Sara  522 Burton, Antoinette  525 Bush, Barbara  519–​30 Butler, Smedley Darlington  340 Cabral, Amilcar  166–​7 Caetano, Marcello  162, 167, 169, 627 Cain, Peter  196 Calder, John  461

Cambodia  291, 481 French presence  95 Cameron, David  721 Cameron, James: Avatar 671 Cameroon  323, 326, 523, 702 French presence  90, 95 Campbell X Fem 669 Stud Life 669 Camus, Albert  469 Canada British presence  67, 78, 81 Conservative Party National Policy adoption (1879)  203 Galt Tariff (1859)  203 and United States  199, 203 Canary islands: Spanish presence  690 Cape Verde Carnation Revolution (1974)  603 Portuguese presence  162, 172 post-​colonial migrations to Portugal  613 Carde, Jules  622 Carey, Henry Charles  203 Carey, Mathew  203 Caribbean  333–​47 American presence  195, 197, 202 anti-​colonialism  343–​7 black music and Calypso  345–​6 British presence  69, 71, 74–​5, 337, 340–​1, 343, 347, 487 destruction of indigenous society  334 Dutch presence  333, 338, 690 economics and neo-​colonialism  340–​3 micro-​states  338 migration  343–​7 natural disasters  338 poets and writers and intellectual class  344–​5,  346 repopulation 334 revolutions and constitutional change  335–​9 tourist trade structural inequalities  341–​2 women as political campaigners  344 Carter, Jimmy  488, 489–​90, 492, 493 Casparis, J.G. de  396 Castelo, Cláudia  628 Castro, Fidel  339, 345, 489–​90, 492, 704

740   Index Catherine II, empress  353 Caucasus  187, 188 Cauvin, André  154 Cayman Islands: British presence  680, 681, 682, 684, 685 Ceauşescu, Nicolae  364 Cecil, Lord  353 Central African Federation  156 Central Europe see Eastern and Central Europe Centre for Political and Social Studies of the Overseas Provinces Research Board  545 Césaire, Aimé  89, 340, 346, 443, 701, 704, 707,  708–​9 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 705 Discours sur le colonialisme 705 Tragédie du roi Christophe 709 Ceuta: Spanish presence  690 Ceylon see Sri Lanka (Ceylon) Chad  377, 385 Chadha, Gurinder: Bride and Prejudice  671–​2 Chadwick, Justin: Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom 670 Chagos islands and dispute with Mauritius  682–​3 Chahine, Youssef Cairo Station  669 Destiny 669 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  252, 439 Chakraborty, Abin  14 Chakravarti, N.P.  400 Chamberlain, Joseph  203, 622 Champalimaud group  641 Chandavarkar, Rajinarayan  257 Charles X  340 Chatora, Charles  463 Chatterjee, Bijan Raj  402 Chatterjee, Ramananda  402 Chatterjee, Sunit Kumar  397 Chatterji, Joya  251–​69 Che Guevara  15, 113, 151, 339 Chelmsford, Viceroy Frederic Thesiger  255 Chiang Kai-​shek  242–​5, 263, 278, 282, 284, 285–​6,  288–​9 Chilembwe, John  441 China  231–​45,  277–​8 anti-​imperialist nationalism  241

anti-​Japanese communist forces  282 bilateral relations with Germany and United States  243 Boxer Uprising  236–​7 British presence  70–​1, 234 British retreat (1926)  244 civil service exams  237 Communist Party  241–​2, 245, 282, 284–​5 Communist victory (1949)  277 competition over land and resources  235 Confucianism  232, 234, 235 constitutional reform edict (1906)  237 co-​opted traditional elites  233–​4 demographic growth  235 divide and rule policy  239 dynastic collapse (1911)  244 economic depression  235 Eight-​Nation Alliance  237 examination system  235 extraterritoriality abolition (1943)  244 First Opium War (1839–​42)  234 First World War  241 French defeat of Chinese fleet  236 gunboat diplomacy  242 Han  232, 233 imperialism 240 International Settlement  241–​2 Japanese presence  213–​14, 217–​20, 231, 233–​4, 236, 241, 244–​5, 276, 277, 278, 280 Korean presence  236, 285 Lifanyuan (Court of Frontier Dependencies) 233 local legal systems  233 Long March  278 Manchukuo 243 Manchuria see Qing dynasty (Manchuria) and its demise below Maritime Customs Service  240 massacres 238 May 4th Movement (1919)  241, 243 May 30th Movement (1925)  242 Mongolian presence  233, 240 most favoured nation status  240 Mozambique rebels, aid to  478 multiple kingship  233 Nanjing Treaty (1842)  234

Index   741 Nationalist Party  231, 241, 242–​3, 244, 245,  284–​5 neo-​Confucianism  232 New Policies (Xinzheng)  237–​8, 240 Northern Expedition  242–​3 North Korea, support of  277 nuclear testing at Lop Nor, Taklamakan  379 provincialization  239–​40 Qing dynasty (Manchuria) and its demise  231–​40, 243, 245, 278, 285 Red Army  285–​6 Revolution (1911)  240 revolutionaries 238 Rhodesian rebels, aid to  478 Russian presence  278 self-​determination  424 self-​strengthening initiatives  235 Shanghai and Tianjin International Settlements  234, 285 Shanghai and Tianjin, Japan’s appropriation of  244 Shimonoseki Treaty (1895)  236, 243 Sino-​French conflict (1884)  236 Sino-​Indian War (1962)  447 state/​society gulf  238 state-​sponsored modernization  238 Taiping Rebellion  235 Taiwan  236, 239, 285 territorial leaseholds acquired by Russia, France, Germany and Britain  236 Tibet, occupation of  233–​4, 240, 245 unequal treaties  234, 240, 243 United States involvement  241, 278 Uyghurs 233 Vietnam 285 Vietnam, support of  277, 478 Western techniques, use of  235 Xinjiang  233, 236, 239–​40, 245 Zongli Yamen  237 Chirac, Jacques  716, 729 Chraïbi, Driss: Les Boucs 709 Christian Aid  460, 466 Churchill, Winston  36, 74, 262, 263, 285, 419, 477–​8,  557 Clay, Henry  203 Clerides, John  460 Cleveland, Grover  200, 201, 202

Cobban, Alfred  424 Cobden-​Chevalier Treaty (1860) (Britain and France)  202, 203 Cobden, Richard  200 Coedès, George: The Indianized States of Southeast Asia 406 Cold War  477–​93 Africa (1970s)  488–​9 Algeria  483–​4 first wave  479–​81 globalization of anti-​colonial conflict  5,  11–​15 last round  489–​90 looking back  490–​3 Middle East  481–​3 second wave: sub-​Saharan Africa  484–​7 Western hemisphere  487–​8 Collier, Paul  499 Collins, M.  343 Colombo Powers  13 Colonial Office (Britain)  73, 78, 522, 528–​9 Agricultural Development In Africa Conference (1949)  541 Rural Economic Development Conference (1953) 541 Social Welfare Advisory Committee  520 Commission for the Protection of Individual Rights and Freedoms  509 communism Algeria 301 Angola 165 China  241–​2, 245, 282, 284–​5, 381 Communist International (Comintern) 442 Eastern Europe  352, 354, 356, 359–​60,  362–​4 France  485, 491 India 266 Italy  135, 137 Japan  217, 219 Thailand 282 Vietnam  282, 287, 290, 293 compensation see apologies, restitutions and compensation concentration camps  110 Conference of Women of African and African descent (1960)  526

742   Index Congo  144–​58 ABAKO 152 ANC party  147–​8, 152 anti-​colonialism  150 ASAC 544 BALUBAKAT 152 carte de mérite civique 152 Catholic Church and missions  151, 153–​4 centres indigènes extra-​coutumier 540 CEPSI 543 Charte coloniale (1908)  146 Christian education  154 Cold War  156–​8 colonial administration  153 colonial enterprises  153 colonial issues  153–​5 CONAKAT 152 Congo crisis  144–​5, 146–​9, 156 Congo-​Katanga secession dispute  328 diversity and size of colony  151 Dragon Noir operation  149 Dragon operation  149 Ekafera 542 Fonds du Bien-​Être Indigène (FBEI)  542, 548 Force publique  147, 153, 154, 548 foyer social -​psychodrama and sociodrama 544 FULREAC 543 immatriculé or évolué status and 1953 decree overhauling granting of  152 imprisonment and banishment to agricultural penal colonies  154 independence (1960)  486 INÉAC 543 Institut de Sociologie Solvay  543–​4 inter-​empire issues  155–​6 IRSAC 543 Kimbanguists  151, 154 Kitawala Team  548 Leopoldville riots  152 local developments  149–​53 mining sector  149–​50, 155, 157 MNC/​MNC-​K/​MNC-​L  147,  152 Mobutu coups (1960 and 1965)  148, 149, 158 Morthor operation  149

nationalism 150 ONUC  147, 149, 157 OTRACO 544 paternalistic policies  145 paysannats 627 paysannats agricoles 548 paysannats indigènes  540, 544, 547–​8 plan décennal (1949–​59)  149, 543, 548, 641 political parties, emergence of  152 political rights, denial of  150 politics, marginalization of women from 151 post-​colonial migrations from Congo  602, 611 PSA 152 publications, debates in  151 Queen Elizabeth Fund for Medical Assistance to the Congo (FOREAMI) 540 Rumpunch operation  149 self-​determination  151, 424, 425 Société Générale de Belgique (SGB)  153, 639 state of emergency  149 UMHK 152 United Nations  147–​8 United States involvement  148, 157 voluntary associations and debates  151 Watchtower (Kitawal) movement  151 Connell, John: The Last Colonies 694 continuity thesis  252, 268 ‘contradiction thesis’  88 Cooke, Paul  661–​73 Cooper, Frederick  89, 124–​5, 139, 317–​29, 393, 422, 437, 439, 613, 621, 624, 628–​9, 634 Costa Gomes, Francisco da  168–​9, 171, 173 Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)  328 CFAO 643 Kossou hydro-​electric dam  632 Parti Africain de l’Indépendance  323 RDA  323, 324 SCOA 643 UAC  643–​4 Council of Regency in Warsaw  31 Coupland, Sir Reginald  65, 73, 80 Cowen, Michael  622 Craggs, Ruth  698

Index   743 crimes against humanity and war crimes  57, 715, 719 criminal justice model  505 Cripps, Stafford/​Cripps Mission  263 Croce, Benedetto  123 Cronin, Stephanie  375 Cuba African intervention  347 Algeria and aid for FLN  339 alliance with Angola and MPLA  339 casino culture  342 Eastern bloc support  357 films and cinema  666, 667 PAIGC, assistance for  339 soldiers to Southern Africa  478 Soviet aid  492 Spanish-​American War (1808)  335 United States presence  202 victory over South Africa  490–​1 Cunningham, Kathleen Gallagher  499 Curaçao 333 Dutch presence  690 Curzon, Lord  33, 401, 681 Cyprus British presence  75–​6, 77, 79, 678, 679, 681, 684, 686, 689 National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA)  12, 460–​1, 502 refugees  581, 583, 586, 587, 589, 591 Czechoslovakia  34–​5, 37, 358 German occupation (1938)  353 National Committee  30, 31 Dadié, Bernard Îles du tempête 709 La Ville où nul ne meurt 710 Patron de New York 710 Un nègre á Paris 710 Dakhlia, Jocelyne  312 Damais, Louis Charles  393–​6, 400, 403–​5, 406 Damas, Léon-​Gontran  443 Poètes d’expression française 1900–​1945 705 Retour de Guyane 702 Danquah, J.B.  321–​2 Dar al-​Islam  568 Dar-​es-​Salaam  468

Darwin, John  90, 689 d’Aspremont Lynden, Harold  157 Davis, Diana K.  373 death marches  722 De Casparis  403, 406 Decker, S.  643 decolonization effective  454, 470 formal  454,  470–​1 phases 470 second wave  470–​1, 472 Decolonization Committee  428 Defense of Rights Association  58 de Gaulle, Charles  86, 94, 285–​6, 288, 290, 303, 319, 339, 481, 484, 485, 499, 603 Del Boca, Angelo  138 democratic universalism  19 Denikin, General Anton: ‘Volunteer Army’  35 Denis, Ernest  30 Denmark Faroe Islands  691 Greenland  691, 712 Dennison, Stephanie  665, 666 Depretis, Agostino  123 De, Rohit  267 Dessalines, Jean-​Jacques  333 Devasundaram, Ashvin  672 development  621–​34 before settlement  622 colonial financial self-​sufficiency  623 cooperative mechanization  631–​2 economic crisis (1970s and 80s)  621 Great Depression  621, 623–​4, 634 as guiding principle and administrative practice 8 human side of development -​education and public health  623 ideology 627 infrastructure 626 land settlement schemes  628 land utilization schemes  627 late colonial developmentalist state (1930s-​60s)  623–​8 Lusotropicalism 627 as a means by which progress may be ordered 622 modernization 622

744   Index development (cont.) origins of colonial developmentalism  622–​3 plans 627 post colonial developmentalist state (1960s-​70s)  628–​34 post-​war reconstruction  625–​6 redeployment patterns of former personnel 633 rural modernization schemes  628 second colonial occupation after 1945  626 Second World War  621, 624 state planning and administrative services 625 strikes and riots  624 trusteeship  622–​3 water resource management  629–​30 see also gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism; repressive developmentalism Devji 265 Devlin, Larry  157 Dewey, C.  255 Dexter, Helen  500 De Zwaan, Tjeerd  721 Dia, Mamadou  327 Diego Garcia: British presence  425, 681, 684, 685, 686 Diegus, Carlos: Ganga Zumbas 666 Dietrich, Christopher  428 Dillon Brown, J.  334 Dimier, Veronique  520, 633 Diop, Alioune: Présence Africaine journal  707 Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Law (CDDH)  467,  468–​9 displacement/​forced removal of populations  1, 45, 182–​3, 188, 344, 497, 504, 510, 584 after Lausanne treaty  592 India 587 Nazi regime and Jews  580, 583, 585, 587 Ottoman empire  52, 55 Russia 586 sub-​Saharan Africa  587 see also population exchanges Dixie Mission  282

Djajadiningrat, Hoesein  398 Dmowski, Roman  181 Doctors Without Borders  114 Dodds, Klaus  687 Dominican Republic  335 Dominik, Hans  116 Dovey, Lindiwe  662 Dubois, Laurent  442 Avengers of the New World  335–​6 Dubois, Thomas David  10 Dulles, Allen  157 Dulles, John Foster  478, 480–​1 Durah, Rajinder  665 Durnovo, Peter  179–​80, 185 Dutschke, Rudi  112, 113–​14 Dutt, Utpal: Invincible Vietnam 15 Duvalier, François  342 Dwyer, Rachel  670, 671 Dyer, General Reginald  256 East Africa  526 German presence  105 East-​Central Europe  27, 31–​3, 35, 37 see also Eastern Europe Eastern Europe  351–​65 academic institutions, proliferation  of 356 anti-​imperialism  356,  359–​62 civilizational racism  359–​60 Cold War  362 colonialism  362–​4 Communist regimes  352, 354, 356, 359–​60,  362–​4 connections, creation of  355–​7 Fascism 353 globalization 357 intelligence training and energy products, focus on supply of  358 internationalism in theory  352–​5 military aid  358 professional expertise  356 remaking the global economy  357–​9 self-​determination  356 Soviet control  351 tripartite industrial projects in Africa and Middle East  359

Index   745 East and South-​East Asia  276–​96 Chinese presence  277–​8 Cold War  276–​7,  286–​95 First World War  276 global wars and decolonization  276–​7 Japanese empire, rise of  277–​8 Japanese imperial defeat and contested sovereignties in Asia  282–​6 Japanese presence  219 Japanese wartime surge across Asia  278–​82 Second World War and break up of Asian-​ Pacific imperial states  276, 277–​86 Vietnam  286–​95 East Timor  427 and Indonesia  426 Japanese presence  279 Portuguese presence  162, 163–​4, 174, 175 Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor (FRETILIN)  174 Eboué, Félix  319 Eckel, Jan  418 Eckert, Andreas  102–​16 Eden, Anthony  74–​5, 76, 77, 361, 567 Egypt Anglo-​Egyptian treaty (1936)  67 Arid Zone  375, 381, 382 Aswan Dam  379 British presence  67, 69, 76–​7, 327 Free Officers Group  562, 563 French and Israeli invasion attempts  327 Suez Canal Zone and Suez Crisis  67, 69, 76–​7, 379 Eichmann, Adolf  716 Eight-​Nation Alliance  237 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  156, 157, 310, 478, 480–​1, 484,  491–​2 Eisner, Kurt  36 Ekpo, Margaret  525 Elkins, Caroline  485, 491, 718 Emmanuel II, King (later Emperor) Victor 128 Employment and Conditions of Work of African Women  522 Equatorial Africa  462 Eritrea: Italian presence  125–​6, 128–​9, 131, 133–​4,  137 Erzurum Congress (1919)  57–​8

Estonia  32, 353 Etambala, Zana Aziza  145 Etemad, Bouda  125 Ethiopia: Italian presence  123–​4, 127–​35,  137–​8 Ethiopia-​Eritrea secession dispute  328 Etzdorf, Hasso von  104 Europe  27–​37,  424 Austro-​Hungarian Empire  29–​30 Balkan states  28 Baltic States  31, 35, 37 Britain 27 Bulgaria 33 Czechoslovakia  30, 31, 34–​5, 37 Dual Monarchy  29–​30, 37 East-​Central Europe  27, 31–​3, 35, 37 empires during World War I  28–​31 Estonia 32 Finland 32 France 27 Germany 29 Germany-​Austria  33 Habsburg Empire  27, 29–​30, 35 Hohenzollern Empire  27 Hungary  33, 35 imperial paradox of 1918: dissolution and expansion  31–​7 Lithuania 32 Poland  30, 31–​4, 37 Romania 34 Romanov Empire  27–​8, 32–​3, 35–​6, 37 Ukraine  32, 35 Weimar Republic  33, 37 Western Europe  27 West Galicia  35 Yugoslavia  34, 37 see also East-​Central Europe; Eastern Europe Evans, Martin  483 Evian Accords (1962)  296, 303, 311 exclusive economic zones (EEZs)  682, 686, 693 extended continental shelves (ECSs)  693 failure to decolonize  679–​81 Faisal, Emir  56 Falkland Islands: British presence  488, 680, 681–​2, 683, 685, 687–​8, 689, 690, 693

746   Index Fanon, Frantz  340–​1, 440–​1, 443–​4, 509, 564, 663, 699, 701–​2, 703, 704, 705–​6 The Wretched of the Earth  112–​13 Fascism  220, 353 Italy  123–​8, 130–​1, 133,  138–​9 Fatton, Robert Jr  336 Faulkner, William  472 Fay, Jennifer  663 Fedorovna, Alexandra  184 Ferdinand, Franz, Archduke  53 Fieldhouse, D.  640 film and world cinema  661–​73 African cinema  669 armed guard by revolutionary guerrillas 667 black and queer filmmakers  669 Bollywood  664, 668, 670–​3 Bongowood in Tanzania  670 Brazil’s Cinema Novo  666 cinema of resistance  666 cultural imperialism  662 diversification 672 documentary tradition  666 European auteur film-​making  667 experimental and underground film-​making  666 film festivals  667, 670 film history and colonialism  661–​4 Film Studies programmes of Western universities 668 First Cinema  667–​8 French nouvelle vague 666 ‘Gaekwar incident’  661, 663 government information films  663 historical dramas  670 Hollywood  662, 664 Hollywood and Bollywoodization  671–​2 Hollywood and China link  672–​3 Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’  673 Hollywood independent subsidiaries  672 Indian Indie or hatke 762 Indian Parallel Cinema  668 Italian Neorealism  665, 666 Kanywood in Nigeria  670 makeshift underground cinemas  667 Middle Cinema  671 mobile cinema units with translators  664

mode of exhibition  664 Neorealism 668 new forms of counter-​culture  669–​73 Nollywood from Nigeria  670 Parallel Cinema  671, 672 regional film cultures and modes of production 672 Riverwood in Kenya  670 Second Cinema  667 Slow Cinema in Mexico  665 soft power  662 spectatoral schizophrenia  663 Third Cinema  666–​9, 671 Third World Cinema  666, 668 US Indie films  672 Vendawood in South Africa  670 video-​based high-​volume production industries 670 womens’ film-​making  668–​9 World Cinema  672 Finland 32 Finot, Louis  403 First World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN) 708 Fischer, Joschka  104 Flagler, Henry  342 Flaiano, Ennio  124 Fletcher, Robert S.G.  373–​86 flying geese theory  225 Ford, Gerald  426, 492 Forsdick, Charles  697–​7 11 Foucher, Alfred  401, 403 France  27, 85–​98, 520 Africa  91, 93, 94, 485, 486 Ancien Régime  92–​3 Asia  86, 91, 92–​3 associated states  607 Brazzaville conference (1944)  87, 94 CFAO 640 Chinese fleet, defeat of (1884–​5)  236 citizenship and equality  94, 95, 96 Code de l’indigénat (native code)  94, 98 Cold War  477 collectivités d’outre-​mer á statut particulier 691 colonialism 90 Colonial Loan Acts (1931)  625

Index   747 colonial rule of law  92 Comité central de la France d’Outre-​mer 645 Communist Party  485, 491 conflicting visions  86–​9 constitutions  92–​7,  607 counterinsurgency  88–​9 equality and difference  96–​7 exclusive economic zones  693 FERDES 625 FIDES  625, 626 Fifth Republic  93, 95 films and cinema  662 Foreign Ministry  92 Fourth Republic  92, 93, 94, 95 Françafrique 88 Franco-​Algerian War (1954–​62)  717 Franco-​Vietnamese War (1945–​54)  277 Free French administration  94 French Community  93 French Constitutional Council  97 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)  418, 442 French Muslims/​Islamism  85 French Southern and Antarctic Lands (TAAF) 693 French Union  93, 94 Gaullism 88 globalization 88 High Colonial Council  93 humanitarianism and human rights  457, 461 Iles Éparses (Scattered Islands)  692 imperialism 90 Labour Code (1952)  628 Lamine-​Guèye Law (1946)  94, 96 Les Indigènes de la République  715–​16 literature  700, 707 Loi-​cadre (1956)  95 Mandates 92 Manifesto of the Natives of the Republic  85 Ministry of Colonies  92 Ministry of the Interior  92 Ministry of Overseas France  625 Ministry of War  92 multi-​layered process  90–​1 National Assembly  93, 94 National Front  85, 613

nationalism 88 ‘necessity of history’  86–​8 Négritude 443 neo-​colonialism  86,  88 nuclear testing in Sahara  379 Office de la Recherche Scientifique Coloniale 545 overseas departments  90–​1, 94, 95, 97, 607, 691 overseas peoples  96–​7 overseas states  95 overseas territories  90–​1, 94, 95, 97, 607, 691 paternalism 86 Popular Front  318 Popular Front: Blum-​Viollette plan (1936) 88 post-​colonial migrations to  602, 607, 608–​9, 611, 613 Protectorates 92 regionalism 97 repressive developmentalism  538 SCOA 640 Second World War  93–​4 self-​determination  93, 97, 425, 426 Senatus-​Consulte (1854)  93 special laws and rules  93 special legislation  92–​3 systemic discrimination  92 Third Republic  93 UAC  643–​4 Union Française  92, 94 unity and diversity  92–​6 violence  97–​8 see also Algeria Franz Joseph, Emperor  29 Frederick the Great, king  353 French Polynesia  97, 690, 691, 692 Freyre, Gilberto  162, 627 Frick, Caroline  336–​7 Friendship and Alliance Treaty (China and Russia)  285–​6 Froude, J.A.  203 Fund for Economic and Social Development (FIDES) 542 Fund for Population Activity  461 Furnivall, J.S.  259

748   Index Gabon 328 Gabriel, Teshome H.  666, 668 Gairy, Eric  337 Gallagher, John  8, 195 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand  256–​8, 263,  440–​1 Indian Home Rule  443–​4 Gangoly, Ordhendra Coomar  397 Garvey, Amy Ashwood  525 Garvey, Marcus  321 Garvey movement  321 Gasprinski, Ismai’il  560 Gates, Scott  507 Gat, Julien  148 Gatrell, Peter: A Whole Empire Walking 183 Geeraerts, Jef: Gangrene 154 gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism  519–​30 colonial welfare and development policies  520–​1 divide and rule tactics, gendered  525 economic development  524 female education  521–​2, 526 feminist orientalism  520 feminization of international organizations 527 funding issues  524 gender discrimination  524 gender roles and relations  52 international feminism  520 international humanitarianism  520 nationalism  521, 525 patriarchy 523 political consciousness  527 political status  525–​6 post-​independence nation-​building  525 powerful female agency needing to be controlled 524 status of women, raising  523 training for colonial wives  527–​9 Geneva Conventions (1949), revisions of and Additional Protocols  9, 75, 467, 468, 472, 510 genocide  102, 104, 106, 498, 500, 585, 716, 718–​19,  727 George, Edward  339 Georges-​Picot, François  30

Gerlach 504 German Democratic Republic (GDR)  352, 355, 358, 360–​1 Berlin Wall, fall of  363 Germany  29,  102–​16 Africa  103, 104, 107, 108–​10, 116 Africans, status of in post-​colonial Germany  108–​10 Asia 104 Askaris 107 bilateral relations with China  243 Bill of Rights  589 ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’  108 black revolutionaries  108–​9 Cold War  104 colonialism: prefiguring the Third Reich  105–​7 colonial legacy  115–​16 colonial racism  104 colonial revisionism: interwar years  105–​10 concentration camps  110 contract workers from Mozambique and Angola 115 economic exploitation  104 Federal Constitution (1949)  589 Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims  589 films and cinema  662–​3 Foreign Office  108 ‘Generation of the Scholl Siblings’  112 German Africa Show  109–​10 German-​German relations  111 German Society for the Study of Natives 108 ‘guest workers’ from Turkey and Southern Europe 104 Hallstein Doctrine  111 Herero genocide in Southwest Africa  102, 104, 106, 116, 500, 718, 720 Holocaust and anti-​semitism  102, 103–​4,  106 Nama genocide  500 National Socialism  102, 106, 112, 114 nation state  103 Nazi regime  102, 103–​4, 106–​7, 109, 319 Negro Bureau  109 Nuremberg Laws  110

Index   749 payments to Jews after the Holocaust  715 post-​colonialism  102–​3,  116 race anxieties  108 Red Army Faction (RAF)  113 refugees 587 Reich Theatre Chamber  110 reparations agreement to Israel for atrocities committed by Nazi regime  716 and Russian/​Romanov Empire  183–​4, 185, 188 social historical studies  103 Sonderweg  103, 106 student movements  111–​13,  114–​15 Third World  111, 115 Versailles Treaty  105, 108, 110, 116 Weimar National Assembly  105 Weimar Republic  105, 107 Germany-​Austria  33 Gerwarth, Robert  27–​37 Getino, Octavio  668–​9 The Hour of the Furnaces  667 Towards a Third Cinema 667 Ghana see Gold Coast (Ghana) Ghatak, Ritwik A River Called Titas  668 Reason, Debate and a Story  668 Ghosh, Durba  15 Giap, Vo Nguyen  290–​4 Gibraltar: British presence  679, 681–​2, 683–​4, 685, 688, 689, 690, 693 Gide, André  707 Gilroy, Paul  345, 615 Gingeras, Ryan  43–​60 Giolitti, Giovanni  126 Girard, Philippe  336 Gizenga, Antoine  148, 149, 152 Gleijeses, Piero  339, 477–​93 Glissant, Edouard  705 Monsieur Toussaint 708 globalization and decolonization relationship  5, 15–​18 post-​colonial (post-​war)  15 Global South  351, 352, 354–​5, 358, 359, 362, 418 Glubb, Sir John  376–​7 Gmelch, George  341–​2 Gold Coast (Ghana)  318, 321–​2, 325, 328 Ashanti Goldfields Corporation  648

British presence  71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79 Convention People’s Party (CPP)  417 films and cinema  664 National Liberation Movement (NLM) 417 United Gold Coast Convention  321 Goldwyn, Samuel  662 Gonard, Samuel  462 Gonsalves, Ralph  726 Goodwin, Richard  487 Gordimer, Nadine  707 Gordon, April  523 Goscha, Christopher  276–​96 Gould, William  266 Gowon, General Yakubu  328 Gracey, Douglas  288–​9 Gramsci, Antonio  134, 439 Graziani, General Rodolfo  127 Greater East Asia Co-​Prosperity Sphere  220, 223,  279–​80 Greece Greco-​Turkish War (1919–​22)  36, 585 refugees  584, 585–​6, 588–​9, 592 Greene, Graham: The Comedians  342–​3 Greenhill, Sir Dennis  683 Grenada 335 United Labour Party  337 Griaule, Michel  707 Grierson, John  666 Grieveson, Lee  663 Griffiths, D.W.: The Birth of a Nation 662 Grimm, Hans: ‘Nation without Space’  107 Grob-​Fitzgibbons, Benjamin  75 Group of 77  429 Grove, Richard  373 Grzimek, Bernhard No Place for Wild Animals 111 Serengeti Shall Not Die 111 Guadeloupe French presence  91, 94, 97, 691 Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon protestors  338 post-​colonial migrations to France  609 Guam 423 American presence  198, 278, 282, 690, 691 Guantanamo base -​United States/​Cuba treaty 488 Guha, Ranajit  439

750   Index Guiana CIA intervention  487–​8 French presence  91, 94, 97, 691, 692 Kourou Space Centre  692 Guinea-​Bissau  170, 324, 326, 588 African Party for the Liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC)  162, 166–​7, 172 independence (1974)  488 Portuguese presence  162, 166–​8, 169, 175, 486,  548–​9 post-​colonial migrations to Portugal  602–​3 gunboat diplomacy  213–​14, 217, 222, 226–​7, 242, 287 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás: Memories of Underdevelopment 667 Habsburg Empire  27, 29–​30, 35, 352 Hached, Farhat  301, 303 Hadj, Messali  303 Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907)  509, 510 Hague, William  726 Hailey, Lord  541 Haiti  333, 335–​7, 339, 340, 342–​3, 346–​7 French presence  91 literature and intellectuals  343, 697, 702, 704, 705, 708, 709, 710 Revolution (1791–​1804)  442 see also The Black Jacobins under James, C.L.R. Halliday, Jon  213 Hallstein Doctrine  111, 355 Hallstein, Walter  111 Hall, Stuart  116 Hamilton, Alexander  199, 203, 214 Hammarskjöld, Dag  147, 149, 458 Handelsvereniging Amsterdam (HVA)  652 Hani, Chris  364 Harahap, Soetan  399 Harlem Renaissance  708, 716 Harlow, Vincent  73 Harper, Tim  261–​2, 279 Hart, Richard  338 Hasan, Abdullah  569 Hassan II  312 Hatta, Muhammed  394, 406

Hawaii American presence  198, 202, 278 Pearl Harbour attack by Japanese  263, 278 Hazeu, G.A.J.  398 Heath, Edward  678 Heinemann African Writers Series  707 Helsinki Accords  362 Higbee, Will  665 Higman, B.W.  335 Hinds, Donald  345 Hirohito, Emperor  282 Hispaniola  335, 339 historicizing decolonization  5, 6–​11 Hobhouse, Sir John  644 Ho Chi Minh  281, 282, 283, 286–​7, 289–​91, 292, 294–​5, 319, 419, 440, 480 Hochschild, Adam: King Leopold’s Ghost  145, 718 Hodge, Joseph Morgan  8, 520, 621–​34 Hofstedter, Richard  201 Hohenzollern Empire  27 Hollande, François  721 Holocaust by Nazi regime  102, 103–​4, 106 Honduras (Belize): independence (1981)  487 Hong Kong  423 British handover to China (1997)  69, 681 Japanese presence  279 Hopkinson, Henry  679 Hopkins, Tony  3, 15, 196 Horthy, Miklós  31, 186 Houphouët-​Boigny, Félix  324, 328 Hourani, Albert  566 Hove, Chenjerai  8, 472 Howard, John  719, 729 Huggan, Graham  706 Huggins, Molly  528 Hughes, Langston: Masters of Dew 346 Hull, Cordell  205 Hull, Isabel  501 humanitarianism, human rights and decolonization  6, 9, 16–​17, 453–​73 armed conflict  467–​9 citizen activism  455 Cold War  459 decolonization revisited and reframed  469–​73 humanitarian imperialism  455 humanitarian minimalism  466

Index   751 imperial humanitarianism  455, 457 integrating disparate and disconnected historiography  455–​6 intelligence and security agencies, involvement of  459 international aid agencies  461 international humanitarianism  457, 520 judicial activism  459 material support given to fighters  463 moral politics  454 multilateral aid  471 national branches, pressure exerted by  461 national liberation movements and non-​state armed groups  460–​6 new global order  469 non-​governmental organizations (NGOs)  454, 455, 457, 458, 459, 462, 466, 471 non-​state humanitarianism  471 political detainees, protection of  466 post Second World War  456–​9 post-​war international order  454 prisoners, protection of  467 refugee work and greatest need principle 457 self-​determination  458,  459 state humanitarianism/​state aid  471 human rights see humanitarianism, human rights and decolonization Human Rights Covenants  429 Human Rights Year (1968)  361–​2 Humphrey, John  458 Hungary  33, 35 academic institutions  356 Ausgleich (1867)  29 multi-​party democracy  363 Uprising (1956)  361 Hunter, Emma  630 Huntington, Samuel P.  365, 441 Hurgronje, Christiaan Snouck  398, 404 Hussein, Saddam  569 Idriss, King  133 Ighilahriz, Louisette  717–​18 Iléo, Joseph: ‘Manifeste de la Conscience Africaine’ 151

imperial business interests and post-​colonial diversification  639–​53 Americanization 647 capitalisms converged  652–​3 colonial capitalism  639 crony capitalism  649 diversifications  647–​52 geographical diversification  650 indigenization of management  646 indigenization schemes  649 indigenous enterprise  642 insurgencies 641 internationalization of dependence  649 intra-​and inter-​imperial integration  650 Japanization 647 labour indiscipline  642 labour mobilization and national politics, link between  642 manufacturing enterprises  651–​2 Marxist-​inspired regimes  648 mass violence towards expatriate enterprise  641–​2 new imperialisms and second colonial occupations  640–​3 realignment of colonial frontiers  650 socio-​cultural traditions  644 strikes  641–​2 wage hikes  642 imperialism 438 cultural 662 of decolonization  679 humanitarian 455 informal 445 of knowledge  538 professional 538 imperialism of free trade thesis  195 İnan, Afet  59 India  251–​69, 319, 326 Aligarh school  559 anti-​establishment politics  269 anti-​recruitment propaganda  261 army, recruits persuaded or press-​ganged into 261 August revolutionaries  264 Bengal  258–​60 Bengal famine (1942–​3)  262 Bengal Rationing Order (1943)  262

752   Index India (cont.) Black Rowlatt Bill  256 British imperial alliances with collaborators 253 British presence  65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 81 Chauri Chaura  257 civil disobedience  258 Communists 266 Constitution of 1920  258 continuity thesis  252, 268 corruption/​anti-​corruption  266 Cripps Mission  263 death toll  268–​9 Deoband school  559 dominion status and right to withdraw its own constitution  263 film and cinema  668, 671 First World War  254 Foodgrains Control Order (1942)  262 French presence  94 Goa 425 Government of India Acts (1920 and 1935)  258 Great Depression  259–​60 Hindus  258, 265, 269 HMG in London and Government of India, discord between  255 independence  261–​7, 479, 490 Indianization of government-​ dyarchy  258–​9 Indian States Committee  260 inter-​war years -​ deceleration  258–​60 Jama’at-​i Islami  565 Khilafat movement  254, 256 Krishak Praja party  259 Lahore Resolution (1940)  262–​3 Limited Denial policy  262 loyalty/​disloyalty  266 mass migration/​refugees  265–​6,  268–​9 Muslim League  262–​4,  267–​8 Muslims 265 National Army  264, 280 National Congress  67, 256–​7, 258–​60, 263, 264–​5, 268, 563 nationwide campaign (hartaal) or strike  256 non-​cooperation movement (1921–​2)  257 nuclear testing in Thar desert  379

and Pakistan partition  251–​3, 261–​7, 268, 351, 479, 490 population exchanges with Pakistan  581, 584, 585–​6, 587, 588–​9, 591, 592 post-​colonialism  268 post-​colonial migrations from  602 princes/​princely states  260, 267 Punjab  255, 256, 258–​9, 261 Quit India movement  251 Quit India speech (Gandhi)  263–​4 Raj  253,  258–​60 refugees 583 relationships based on extraction of labour 253 religious fundamentalism  268 road building  261 Second World War  261–​4 self-​determination  422, 423, 424 sepoys recruited for wartime duty outside India  254–​5 Sikhs 267 Tamils 259 tariffs 255 taxation 257 tripartite negotiations  264 United Province  258 universal adult suffrage  266–​7 war work  262 Indian Ocean  423 Indochina  281, 423 American presence  205, 480–​1 French presence  87, 90, 92, 94, 97 Japanese presence  279 relinquished by France  277, 319 Indonesia  281, 391–​407 academic culture  392 Act of Free Choice  425 All-​India Orientalist conferences  397 American presence  480 Archaeological Commission  401 Archaeological Service  395, 397, 399 Banten Uprising (1888)  559 Batavian Society  397 closed doors and open ends of colonial heritage networks  405–​6 Colonial Archaeological Service of the Netherlands Indies  395, 398

Index   753 and East Timor  426 EFEO installation in French Indo China  401, 405 Greater India  392, 395, 396–​400, 405,  406–​7 Greater India Movement  402–​3 Greater India Society  397 heritage and heritage networks  392, 394–​6 Hindus-​Buddhists  392, 395, 397, 399 intellectual elites  397–​9 Islamic Union  561 Japanese presence  395, 404 Japanese surrender  480 Java Bank  640, 644 Java Institute (Surakarta)  399 journals 399 Kern institute at Leiden  400–​3 knowledge exchange  392 local colonial restrictions  396–​400 Madiun affair  293 moral geographies  392 Muhammadiyya movement  568 Muslims 394 Nahdat al-​’Ulama  565, 568 Netherland’s loss to Japan  319 New Imperial approaches  392 Operation Produce  640 Padri War (1803–​37)  559 post-​colonial migrations to Netherlands  603–​4 re-​Indianization  400–​3 scholars, scholarly institutions and scholarly debates  397–​8 self-​determination  422, 423, 428 Shell 648 Siva temple  394–​6, 400, 404 and West Papua  425–​6 youth groups  281 integrated territories  690–​3 interdependence, declarations of  17 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)  459, 461, 467 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)  462–​3, 464, 467, 468 Code of Conduct for non-​state armed groups 463 Executive and Assembly  462

International Court of Justice  34 International Labor Organization (ILO)  219, 383, 522 International League for Human Rights  423, 459 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  340 International Red Cross  457 International Women’s Day Committee (1950): ‘Struggle of the Women in Africa and Asia for Freedom and Happiness’ 527 Iqbal, Muhammad  444 Iran Anglo-​Iranian (Persian) Oil Company  75, 380, 428, 641 Arid Zone  377 Khuzistan lowlands  378–​9 Tobacco Protest (1891)  560 Iraq Arid Zone  375 British presence  481 nominal independence (1930)  482 petroleum nationalization  429 Shi’a Islamic Call Party  568 Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party  567 Ireland 67 Isaacman, Allen  439, 630 Isaacman, Barbara  630 Islamic revolutionaries  555–​7 1, 615 colonialism and the rise of resistance  556–​61 confrontation 557 emigration 557 guerrilla insurgency  570 internationalism 568 Islamization 568 Mahdist movements  557, 570 marginalization of resistance  561–​5 mass organizations  560 Messianic movements  557–​8 modernists/​modernization  559,  565 Mohammedanism 557 Nasserism 565 nationalism 565 nationalization 568 open revolt  570 pan-​Islamism  560,  567

754   Index Islamic revolutionaries (cont.) political activism  560 political forces  556 political mass associations and parties  568 post-​colonial states and Islamic resurgence  565–​70 radicalization 568 reformism  557, 558, 559, 570 religious forces  556 revivalism  557, 558–​9, 567–​8, 570 secularization 565 shari’a law  558, 567 social welfare activities  560 socioeconomic forces  556 submission 557 Sufism 570 suppression 565 territorialization 568 ’ulama  557, 559–​60,  566–​7 violent opposition  556 westernization 565 Islamic Society  560–​1 Islamization 568 Israel  448, 586, 587 Italiander, Rolf  111 Italy  123–​39 Africa  125, 128 anti-​Semitic legislation  125 colonialism  123,  129–​30 Colonialism Reparation  715 colonial sentiments  129–​30 Communist party  135, 137 decolonization as a passive revolution  134–​5 economics and budgets  128–​9 Eritrea  125–​6, 128–​9, 131, 133–​4, 137 Ethiopia  123–​4, 127–​35,  137–​8 exceptionalism  123–​5 exclusionary principle  131 Fascism  123–​8, 130–​1, 133,  138–​9 Left  135, 137 Liberalism  124, 127, 129, 133 Libya  124, 126–​34, 137 local brokers  130–​2 Ministry of Foreign Affairs  135 Policy of the Statutes  133 racial segregation  124–​5, 131

Republicanism 129 Risorgimento 134 social actors  136–​8 Socialism  129, 137 Somalia  126, 128–​9, 131, 133–​4, 135–​6, 139 termination of empire  138–​9 treaty settlement (1947)  139 uncertain settlers  132 Ivory Coast see Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Jackson, Richard  500 Jacobs, Justin  381 Jadidism 559 Jagan, Cheddi  487 Jama’at-​i Islami  567, 568 Jamaica  338, 340, 487 British presence  74–​5, 77, 680 James, C.L.R.  336, 338, 344–​5 The Black Jacobins  334–​5, 337, 442, 702, 704, 705, 708 Jamfa, Leonard  720 Janssen, Émile  153 Japan  212–​27,  277–​8 Ainu (now Hokkaido)  213, 216 Allied Siberian Expedition (1918)  218 American nuclear bombs and surrender 276 Andaman and Nicobar Islands  279 Anglo-​Japanese Alliance  218 anti-​Russian alliance with England (1902) 214 Asia  212, 214, 217, 219, 278–​86 assimilation and separation projects  216 Bonin (now Ogasawara)  213 Burma taken from the British  279 client state/​client empire  222–​7 Cold War  212, 222, 223, 225, 227 Communist Party  217, 219 crypto-​imperialism  226 defensive modernization/​defensive imperialism  213–​17 demilitarization 223 democratization 223 in Dutch Indonesia  279 Fascism 220 First World War  212

Index   755 Germany’s Asia-​Pacific empire, takeover of  218 Great Britain, rivalry with in China  218 Great War  217 Guam taken from United States and Britain 279 gunboat diplomacy  213–​14, 217, 222, 226–​7 historical revisionism  226 imperial defeat and contested sovereignties in Asia (1945–​7)  282–​6 imperialists against imperialism  217–​22 Imperial Rule Assistance Association  220 and Indian National Army  280 international ‘law of the jungle’  215–​16 ‘iron triangle’  223 Korea  212, 213–​14, 216, 217, 219–​20, 222, 224–​5,  278 Kurile 213 Liberal Democratic Party  223 ‘little Japan’  216–​17 Macau 279 Malaya from the British  279 Manchukuo  220–​2 Manchuria  212, 214, 218, 219, 220, 225, 278 Mariane, Midway and Solomon Islands  279 Meiji foreign policy  215 Micronesia 218 militarism 226 new imperialism  226 Pacific Islands  225 pan-​Asianism  221,  226 Papua New Guinea  279 Pearl Harbour attack (Hawaii)  278 Philippines taken from the United States 279 puppet-​state colonialism  212 racial equality clause (League of Nations) 219 rape of Nanking and comfort women as prostitutes  718, 722 Russo-​Japanese War  214, 216 Ryukyu Kingdom (now Okinawa)  213, 216, 219 Self Defense Forces under US command 223 Shanghai International Settlements  279

Singapore taken from the British  279 Sino-​centric tribute system  226 Sino-​Japanese War  216 Socialist Party  217, 219 socio-​economic crisis (1930s)  220 Southeast Asia  219, 222, 223–​6 Taiwan  212, 213–​14, 219–​20, 222, 224–​5, 236, 278 Tokugawa Shogunate  213, 215 Tokyo Imperial University  217 treaty ports  226–​7 ultra-​nationalism  221 unequal treaties  213–​14 United States bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki  282, 723 United States-​Japan alliance system  221–​2 United States-​Japan Mutual Security Treaty 225 United States occupation of home islands 284 United States and permanent military occupations  222–​3,  224 war responsibility  226 Yamato race  216 Yasukuni War memorial  722 Yen bloc  220, 223–​4, 226 Jarrett-​Macauley, Delia  344 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali  262–​3, 265, 268, 563, 564 Joeden-​Forgey, Elisa von  110 Joffé, Roland: The Lovers 671 Johann, A.E.  110 Johar, Karan My Name is Khan 671 Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness  664, 671 Johnson, Chalmers  222 Johnson, Lyndon  378, 486 Joint East and Central Africa Board  645 Jones, Cecile  727 Jones, Claudia  344–​5 Jones, Matthew  13 Jones, Violet Creech  528 Jordan, Jenna  507–​8 Juara, Prasenjit  217 Julien, Charles-​André  303 just war theory  510

756   Index Kaldor, Nicholas  354 Kalecki, Michał  354 Kalonji, Albert  148, 150, 152 Kalyvas, Stathis  506 Kang Youwei  236 Kapoor, Anil  671 Kapur, Shekhar  671 Karl I, Emperor  29 ‘Peoples’ Manifesto’  31 Karpelès, Suzanne  403 Kasavubu, Joseph  147, 148, 152 Kashani, Ayatollah Abu al-​Qasim  567 Katanga  147–​8,  425 Kathrada, Ahmad  363 Kaunda, Kenneth  631 Kazakh-​Xinjiang borderland  375 Keïta, Modibo  383 Kemal, Mustafa  43–​4,  58–​9 Kempers, A.J. Bernet  396, 403 Kennedy, John F.  425, 486, 487–​8, 493 Kent, J.  647 Kenya  318, 338, 490, 524 African National Union  325 British presence  73, 75–​6, 491 East African Women’s League (EAWL): Convention of Women’s Societies in East Africa  529 East African Women’s League (EAWL): Inter-​Racial Group  529 female circumcision, efforts to eradicate practice of  523 forced resettlement programme  546 Frangipani Club  529 Homemakers (Naivasha) 529 humanitarianism and human rights  460, 461 independence (1963)  325 Lancaster House conference (1960)  644 Mau Mau rebellion  75–​6, 320, 324, 325, 485, 500, 502, 718, 726 Million Acre Settlement Scheme  633 repressive developmentalism  547 Special Emergency Assize Courts  76 Swynnerton Plan for the Intensification of African Agriculture  633 Kenyatta, Jomo  325 Kern, J.H.C.  401 K Groups  114

Khan, Kabir: Once There was a Tiger  664 Khan, Mehboob: Mother India 670 Khilafat movement  560 Khmer Issarak/​Free Khmer  290 Khomeini, Ayatolla  569 Khrishna Acharya, Vijay: Blast 3 671 Khrushchev, Nikita  148, 157–​8, 354–​5 Kimbangu, Simon  151 Kim Il-​sung  286 King, Curtis  726 King, Martin Luther  716 Kipling, Rudyard  707 ‘White Man’s Burden’  198 Kirkley, Leslie  457 Kissinger, Henry  488–​9, 492 Kitchener, Herbert  557 Kitchener, Lord (musician)  345–​6 Koizumi, Junichiro  722 Korda, Zoltan Sanders of the River 661 The Drum 662 The Four Feathers  662, 671 Korea Japanese presence  212–​14, 216–​17, 219–​20, 222, 224–​5, 236, 278 Russian presence  284 Kornilov, Lavr  185–​6 Kothari, Uma  633–​4 Kourouma, Ahmadou: Les Soleils des Indépendances 706 Kramer, Paul  198, 509–​10 Kriger, Norma  508 Krishna Menon, V.K.  447 Krom, N.J.  398, 401, 402 Kudjoe, Hannah  525 Kun, Béla  36 Kuti, Funmilayo Ransome  525 Kuwait: British presence  77 Laak, Dirk van  107 Labanca, Nicola  123–​39 Labouisse, Henry  464 Lacey, Janet  460 Lacoste, Robert  484 Lai Tek  282 Lamming, George: The Emigrants 709

Index   757 Lamour, Philippe  632 Lange, Oskar  354 Langer, William  217 Laos 291 French presence  95 independence 481 Lao Issara/​Free Lao  290 Laroui, Abdallah  305 Latin America  104, 428, 439, 457, 666 Latvia 352 Lausanne Treaty (1923)  36, 584, 585, 592 Laye, Camara: Enfant noir 711 League Against Imperialism (World Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism) 442 League Council  34 League of Nations  218, 220, 244, 590 Covenant (1919)  623 Eastern Europe  353 Japan 219 Mandates  34, 95 Mandates Commission  423, 501 Mandate Territories  419 Office for Refugees  586 Permanent Mandates Commission  623 tropical Africa  318 Lebanon Amel Association  471 French presence  85, 92 French withdrawal  482 Lee, Christopher J.  7, 436–​48 Lee Myung-​Bak  722 Leipzig option  364 Leiris, Michel  707 Lejeune, Max  484 Lemos Pires, Mário  174 Leninism 488 Lenin, Vladimir  27, 37, 181, 185, 188, 217, 355 Leopold II, King  145, 147 Lettow-​Vorbeck, General Paul Emil von  105 Levene, Mark  585 Lévi, Paul Mus  403 Lévi, Sylvain  397, 401 Lewis, Bernard  564 Liberalism  65, 86, 124, 127, 129, 133, 268, 646 Libya Arid Zone  375, 377

Italian presence  124, 126–​34, 137 Ottoman Empire presence  45, 50–​3 Lieber, Francis: General Orders 100 509 Linlithgow, Lord (Viceroy)  262–​4 List, Friedrich  203, 214 literature  697–​7 11 anticipatory devices  704 anti-​colonial humanism  705 as archive and agent of decolonization  701–​3 censorship  702, 706 conscience of the people  698 cultures  698–​700 genres and creation of new literary cultures  705–​7 history and geography  708–​10 ideological monolingualism  699 language policy, language use and processes of linguistic decolonization  698–​700, 702, 706 Négritude  701, 705 novel, poetry, theatre  697 publishing apparatus  706–​7 theatre  705–​6 transnational circulation  702 vocalization and valorization of struggle  703 Lithuania  32, 352 Liulevicius, Vejas  184 Livingstone, Ken  720–​1 Lloyd George  30 Lluuillier, Hugues  632 Lodge, Henry Cabot  201–​2 Loizos, Peter  591 lost opportunities thesis  306 Louisiana Purchase (1803)  91 Louis, William Roger  66, 79, 650, 679 Louverture 708 Luce, Lord Richard Napier  685 Ludendorff-​ Erich  184 Lugard, Sir (later Lord) Frederick  623 Lumley, Joanna  717 Lumumba, Patrice  112, 144, 147–​8, 152–​3, 155, 158, 440 murder  144, 146, 148–​9, 156–​7, 344, 360 Lundestad, Geir  222 Lusotropicalism  545, 627 Luxemburg, Rosa  36 Lyautey, Hubert  306–​7, 311, 314

758   Index MacArthur, Douglas  284 Macau: Japanese presence  279 Macaulay, Thomas  65 McCarthy, Justin  584 McClintock, Anne  711 MacDonagh, Oliver  200 Macedonia: Ottoman Empire presence  51, 52 Machado, Gerardo  342 Machel, Samora  168 Mackay, Peter  465–​6 Mackinder, Halford  374 McKinley, William  198, 200 McMahon, Robert  480 Macmillan, Harold  77–​8, 338, 344, 647 MacQueen, Norrie  162–​75, 326 Madagascar 490 French presence  95, 97, 484–​5, 491 rebellion revolt (1947)  320 Madeira: Portuguese presence  691 Maghreb Arabic language and devotion to Islam  300 Arid Zone  385 Cairo-​based organizations  308 development policies  310 forms of colonization experienced  314 national differences  314 nationalist movements  300 Second World War  301–​2 social and legal configurations  307 student diaspora  307–​8 transnational organizations  307 Young Turks’ movement  300 see also Algeria; Morocco; Tunisia Mahdist militants  567 Mahmud II, Sultan  47 Mair, Lucy P.  520, 541 Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra  397, 400–​1,  402–​3 Makarios, Archbishop  76 Makhno, Nestor  187 Malawi see Nyasaland (Malawi) Malaya  281, 490 anti-​Japanese communist forces  282 British presence  68, 70, 71–​2, 75–​6, 77 Cold War -​first wave  479 Communist fighters  507 Communist Party  282, 290–​1

Hizb al-​Muslimin  565 Kaum Muda (Young Faction)  559 Malaya Peoples’ Anti-​Japanese Army  68, 281 Muslim Party  561 My Lai  718 New Villages  504 Pan-​Malaysian Islamic Party  565, 568 repressive developmentalism  547 Maldoror, Sarah Monangambé 668 Sambizanga 668 Malgudi, R.K. Narayan  266 Mali  380, 382, 383, 385 Malin, James  374 Malta: British presence  77 Mamdani, Mahmood  591 Manchukuo  220–​2,  243 Concordia Association  221 Manchuria  212, 214, 218, 219, 220, 225, 243, 284 Mandela, Nelson  440, 490 Manela, Erez  442 Mangkunagara VII, Prince  399 Manila Pact (1954)  447 Manley, Michael  340, 345 Manley, Norman  338–​9 Mannerheim, Karl  186 Mannoni, Octave: Psychologie de la colonisation 704 Mantra, Ida Bagus  399 Maoism 447 Mao Zedong  114, 245, 278, 282, 284, 286, 291 Maran, René: Batouala 706 Marchall, Henri  403 Maria Theresa, empress  353 Mark, James  351–​65 Marques, Silvino Silvério  173 Marrakesh, Pasha of  302 Marseille, Jacques  625 Marshall Aid  626 Marshall Plan  542 Marson, Una  525 Marti, José  339 Martinique 341 French presence  91, 94, 691 post-​colonial migrations to France  609

Index   759 Martin, Terry  190 Marxism  442, 447, 488, 648 Marx, Karl  436 Masaryk, Tomáš  30, 35 Maspero, François  707 Matheson, Jardine  651 Mauritania  377, 426 Mawby, Spencer  333–​47 Mawdudi, Abu al-​A’la  560, 561, 568 Mayer, Louis B.  662 Mayotte 97 French presence  691, 692 Mazower, Mark  268 Mbeki, Thabo  363 Mbita, Hashim  468 Mboya, Tom  325 Mediterranean  71, 127, 135, 283, 438,  681–​2 Meigs, Peveril  383 Melilla: Spanish presence  690 Memmi, Albert  444, 705 Mendès France, Pierre  302, 309 Merrell, D.  334 Messianic movements  557–​8 Micronesia 218 Middle East American Point Four programme  378 Arid Zone  375, 376, 381 British presence  66, 67, 69, 71–​2, 75,  77, 81 Cold War and decolonization  481–​3 Middleton, Nick  384 Mignolo, Walter  700 Mikhail, Alan  11 Miller, Alexey  179–​91 Millward, James  240 Milner, James  587 Mindanao (Philippines)  422 Minghetti, Marco  123 minimal impact thesis  80 Minorities Treaties  34–​5 Mitchell, Nancy  489, 491 Mobley, Christopher  299–​314 Mobutu coups (1960 and 1965)  148, 149, 158 Mobutu, Joseph-​Désiré  146, 148, 158, 173, 648 Mobutu Sese Seko  166 Mohammedanism 557

Mohammed V, Sultan  302, 304–​5, 309, 312 Mollet, Guy  484, 567 Mondlane, Eduardo  168 Mongolia: Chinese presence  233, 240 Moniz, Botelho  170 Monroe Doctrine for Asia (1934)  220 Montagu, Edwin Samuel  256 Montserrat: British presence  680, 685, 686–​7,  689 Moreillon, Jacques  462–​3, 467 Morel, E.D.  145 Moreno, Jacob L.  544 Morocco  299, 300, 305, 306–​7, 309 Action Committee  300, 304 Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN)  303 Association of North African Muslim Students (AEMNA)  308 Berber dahir 301 Casablanca riots (1952)  303 civil service  311 Democratic Independence Party (PDI)  300, 302, 312 Fez Treaty (1912)  301, 304 French presence  90, 92, 95 independence (1956)  302, 303–​4 Istiqlal Party  300, 302, 304, 308, 312, 562, 564 lecons reçues 375 Organisation Politico-​Administrative (OPA) networks 303 post-​colonial migrations to France  602 Quranic schools  312 Rif War (1921–​6)  301 school system  311 Sharifian Empire  300 Spanish Sahara  426 state-​building  311 UN resolution for self-​government  310 Young Moroccans  300 Morrell, R.  530 Mossadegh, Mohammed  75, 428 most-​favored nation  202, 240 Motadel, David  555–​7 1 Mountbatten, Lord Louis  72, 265, 268 Mountbatten Plan  585, 586 Movement for Colonial Freedom  423 Moyn, Samuel  455

760   Index Mozambique 326 aldeamentos 548 Cahora Bassa dam project  115, 629–​30 Champalimaud group  170 development plans  627–​8 Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO)  162, 168–​9, 172, 173, 465, 630 independence (1974) MFA  168–​9 Portuguese presence  162, 163–​4, 168–​9, 173, 175, 486 post-​colonial migrations to Portugal  602–​3 refugees 588 RENAMO forces  630 Mpolo, Maurice  144, 148 MSiri 148 Mudimbe, V.Y.  438 Mugabe, Robert  328, 463 Muhammad, Ghazi  558 Muhammadiyya movement  561 Mukherjee, Qaushiq: Asshole  672 Mulele, Pierre  149, 151 Munongo, Godefroid  148, 153 Muridiyya 558 Murphy, David  700 Musaddiq, Muhammad  567 Muslim Brotherhood  560, 564, 567, 568–​9 Muslim Brothers  563 Muslim League  68, 262–​4, 267–​8, 561, 563, 564 Muslim World League  569 Mussolini, Benito  123, 127–​8, 131, 133 Nagib, Lúcia  665 Nag, Kalidas  397 Nainİar, Syed Mohamed Hoessain  405 Naipaul, V.S.  341 An Area of Darkness 710 The Middle Passage 710 Najib, Muhammad  562 Namibia  364, 488, 489 Nanjing Treaty (1842)  234 Naqshbandi brotherhood  558 Naquin, Susan  233 Nassau 342

Nasser, Gamal Abdel  76, 77, 327, 445, 446–​7, 483, 562, 563, 566–​7, 568 Nasserism 565 Nath, Sukhendu Bikash  15, 30 National Council of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 31 nationalism  6, 28, 36, 73–​5 anti-​colonial  527 methodological 10 and mobilization  6 patriarchal 525 peripheral  180, 181, 182, 187, 189 see also gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism National Liberation Movement Trust Fund 464 Ndaywel è Nziem, Isidore  145 Négritude movement  701, 705, 716 Nehru, Jawaharlal  76, 262–​3, 268, 289, 291, 354, 361, 400, 442–​3, 445, 447 The Discovery of India 444 neo-​colonialism  9, 86, 88, 445 Caribbean  340–​3 Neogy (archaeologist)  400 Netherlands Antilles  333, 338 Aruba 690 Bonaire 690 Caribbean  333, 338, 690 Charter (Statuut) of the Kingdom of the Netherlands  607,  611–​12 Curaçao 690 humanitarianism and human rights  461 Indisch Dutch  604–​5, 606, 615 post-​colonial migrations from Indonesia  603–​4 post-​colonial migrations from Suriname  611–​13 Saba 690 Saint Maarten  690 Sint Eustatius  690 Neto, Agostinho  165 New Caledonia French presence  91, 95, 97, 690, 691, 692, 693, 694 Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front 91

Index   761 New Hebrides: French presence  95 New Imperialism  622 New International Economic Order (NIEO)  18, 427, 429 new international order  285, 327 new-​new imperialism  217 New Order  280 New Order for East Asia (1938)  220 New Zealand British presence  67, 78, 81 protective tariffs  203 Tokelau  690, 691 Ngalulu, Joseph: ‘Manifeste de la Conscience Africaine’ 151 Ngo Dinh Diem  293, 481 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo  702, 706, 707 Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature  698–​9 Grain of Wheat, A 704 ‘On the abolition of the English Department’ 699 Nguyen Son  282 Niccol, Andrew Lord of War 670 Safe House 670 Nicholas II, Tsar  179–​80, 184 Nicolson, Harold  261 Niger  377, 540, 626 Nigeria  321, 324–​5, 328, 424 Action Group  324 Biafran War  114–​15, 457 -​Biafra secession dispute  328 British presence  71, 72, 77 Department of Commerce and Industries 642 gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism  524, 525 Government Colliery in Enugu: Lady Welfare Officer  521 Hausa-​Fulani  324 Igbo 324 National Congress of Nigeria and the Cameroons 324 National Rehabilitation Committee  471 Northern People’s Congress  324 Yoruba 324 Nimayri, Ja’far  565, 569

Nkrumah, Kwame  8, 10, 71, 76, 146–​7, 321–​2, 325, 328, 346, 417, 423, 429, 447, 470–​1, 526, 642 Nnamdi, Azikiwe  525 Nogueira, Franco  645 Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM)  3, 299, 310, 351, 355, 361, 421, 426, 447, 484, 502 non-​governmental organizations (NGOs)  17, 454, 455, 457, 458, 459, 462, 466, 471, 520 non-​incorporated territories  690–​3 non-​self-​governing territories  690–​3 North Africa Arid Zone  375, 376 French presence  86, 87 North African Liberation Committee  308 North Borneo  77 Northern Rhodesia (Zambia)  74, 325, 338, 464 British presence  74 Department of Agriculture  631–​2 International Refugee Council of Zambia (IRCOZ)  465–​6 United National Independence Party (UNIP)  631–​2 Novak, William  201 Nuremberg Laws  110 Nyasaland (Malawi)  325, 338, 461 British presence  74 Chilembwe Uprising (1915)  441 Nyerere, Julius  429, 447, 461, 527, 631 Obama, Barack  723 Obote, Milton  328 Ocean Group  652 Oceania: French presence  94, 95 O’Hanlon, Rosaline  519 Ohnesorg, Benno  113 Okito, Joseph  144, 148 Organization of African Unity (OAU)  326, 424, 426, 447, 464, 467, 468, 502, 715 Bureau for Placement and Education of African Refugees  465 Charter  424–​5 Summit Conference (1963)  424 Organization of the Islamic Conference 569

762   Index Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD)  344 Osterhammel, Jurgen  231 Ottawa Conference (1932)  203 Ottoman Empire  43–​60 Albania  51–​2 Anatolia  47, 53–​4, 56, 58–​9 Arab Revolt  56 Armenian people  53, 55–​6 Austrian defeat  46 Bab-​i Ali coup  52 Balkans/​Balkan Wars  45, 47, 50–​3 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)  44–​6, 49–​57,  59–​60 constitution of 1876, restoration  of 49 Erzurum Congress (1919)  57–​8 Grand National Assembly  43–​4 Great War  45, 53–​7 Islamic/​Muslim character  48–​9 Jewish and Christian allies  49 Levant 47 Libya  45,  50–​3 local language, disputes concerning  50 Macedonia  51, 52 Musa Dagh uprising  56 National Assembly  43–​4,  58–​9 National Movement  57, 59 relocation/​resettlement, forced  52, 55 Russian defeat  46 Sarikamiş campaign  54 Tanzimat (reordering) reforms  47–​9 Turkish War of Independence  45 Unionist regime  49–​50, 51, 52–​4, 56 Western European models/​influence of Western representatives  47–​8 Yemen 51 Young Turks  44–​6, 49–​50, 56–​7, 60 Young Turks Revolution (1908)  44, 48–​9 Overseas Countries and Territories Association (OCTA))(European Union) 689 Overseas Development Plan  627 Owen, Nicholas  73 Oxfam  457, 466 Oyono, Ferdinand: Le Vieux Négre et la médaille 711

Pacific islands  423, 425 American presence  195, 197 French presence  92, 94 German presence  103 Japanese presence  225 Padmore, George  108–​9,  353–​4 Pakistan  251–​2, 262–​3, 265–​6, 267, 268, 422 British presence  65, 72 independence 479 nuclear testing in Ras Koh Hills  379 partition  251–​3, 262–​3, 265–​6, 267, 268 population exchange  581, 584, 585–​6, 587, 588–​9, 591, 592 Palen, Marc-​William  195–​205 Palestine  424, 493 Arid Zone  375 British presence  71 refugees  587, 589, 590, 591, 593 UN General Assembly  482–​3 Pan-​African Conference on Reparations for African Enslavement, Colonisation and Neo-​Colonisation  714–​15 Pan-​Africanism  3, 14, 109, 321, 326, 419, 447, 708 Panama: Canal Zone  488 Pan-​Arabism  3,  447 Pan-​Asianism  221, 226, 419 Panayi, Panikos  580–​93 Panda Farnana, Paul  151 Pandey, Gyanendra  439 Pane, Sanusi: Timobel 399 Pan-​Islamism  560,  567 Pan-​Sahel Initiative  385 Paris Peace Conference (1919)  27, 34, 37, 218, 419, 442 Parker, Jason  14 Parmentier, Henri  403 Parsons, Michael J.  678–​94 Pascal, Pierre  189 Pasha, Enver  54, 56–​7 Pasha, Hayreddin (Grand Vizier)  304, 311 Pasha, Talat  55–​7 Patel 268 Paterson, Sheila  610 Pearl Harbour attack (Hawaii)  278 Pedro de Andrade, Joaquim: Macunaima 666 Penvenne, Jeanne Marie  627

Index   763 Perham, Margery  73 Periera dos Santos, Nelson: Barren Lives  666 Perriam, Chris  665 Pétillon, Léon  152 Pétion, Alexandre  337 Phalke, Dadasaheb Lanka Dahan 662 Raja Harishchandra 662 Philippines 422 American presence  198, 202, 278 anti-​Japanese communist forces  282 Huks -​People’s Army Against the Japanese 282 independence 284 Rehabilitation Act (1946)  427 retaken from Japan  282 United States departure  479 Philliou, Christine M.  11 Pictet, Jean  467 Piłsudski, Josef  32, 186 Pines, Jim  668 Pirlot, Yvette  544 Pitcairn Island: British presence  681, 685, 688, 689 Plaza Accords  224 Pocock, J.G.A.  78 Poerbatjaraka, Ngabehi  398, 401, 405 Poespokoesoemo, Raden Roro Soejatoen  398, 404 Poland  30, 31–​4, 37, 355, 356, 358, 587 Maritime and Colonial League  353 Solidarity movement  363, 365 Pontecorvo, Gillo: The Battle of Algiers 483 population exchanges  581, 584, 585–​6, 587, 588–​9, 591, 592 Portugal  162–​75 African Wars  164–​9 Angola  162, 163–​4, 165–​6, 169, 173, 175, 486, 488 Armed Forces Movement (MFA)  167, 171, 172, 173 Azores 691 Cape Verde  162, 172 ‘Captain’s Movement’  171 Colonial Act (1930)  164 Communist Party  171 East Timor  162, 163–​4, 174, 175

Espírito Santo group  644–​5 Estado Novo (New State)  163–​4, 167, 169–​7 1,  627 Europeanization 170 exceptionalism  163–​4 guerrilla campaigns  164 Guinea-​Bissau  162, 166–​8, 169, 175, 486 Lisbon coup  164, 166–​7, 169 Madeira 691 Mozambique  162, 163–​4, 168–​9, 173, 175 overseas provinces  163 Planos do fomento  544–​5 post-​colonial migrations to Portugal  602–​3, 605, 607, 613 Programme of the Armed Forces Movement 169 São Tomé e Príncipe  162, 173 self-​determination law 7/​74  172 Socialist party  172 state protection to oligopolies  170 sub-​Saharan Africa  164 transfers of power (1974–​75)  171–​4 tropical Africa  319–​20, 326 United Nations  175 post-​colonial migrations to Europe  601–​15 citizenship and disputed belonging  606–​14 colonials 602 exclusionary agendas  611 expatriates 602 family reunification  609 going ’home’  601–​6 ’guest workers’  611 housing discrimination  610 inability to adjust to decolonization transitions 605 inassimilability  609–​11 integration of former colonials  605–​6 integration, lack of  611 Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism 615 legitimacy of citizenship, refusals to accept 611 mixed-​race relationships, stigmatization of  610 racial and cultural difference  609 self-​distancing from migrants  611 settlers 602

764   Index post-​colonial migrations to Europe (cont.) sexual threat  610 shantytowns and slums, living in  610 social cohesiveness  609 social problems  611 super-​diversity  614 workplace discrimination  610 Potsdam Treaty  584, 585, 592 Powell, Enoch  688 Powell, Joe  373 Prain, Ronald  646 Prashad, Vijay  442 Prebisch, Raul  358 Présence Africaine imprint  707 Prijono, R.  398, 403, 405 ‘Prisoners of Conscience’  459, 462 Protocols of the Elders of Zion  36 Puerto Rico: American presence  198, 202, 691 Punjab  255, 256, 258–​9, 261 Putnam, L.  334 Qadiri order  558 Qaid-​i-​Azam  268 Qasim, ’Abd al-​Karim  565, 568 quasi-​colonial influences  9 Quayson, Ato  711 Qutb, Sayyid  568 Rabe, Stephen  487 Radcliffe, Cyril  265 Radcliffe Line  584, 586 Raimi, Sam: Spiderman 3 671 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish  671 Ramadan, Sa’id  568 Ramadier, Paul  485 Ramgoolam, Sir Seewoosagar  683 Ramnath, Maia  254 Ramusack, Barbara  260 Ranger, Terence  508 Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 438 Rao, Kiran: Mumbai Diaries  672 Rasmussen, Poul Nyrup  721 Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) 321 Rawski, Evelyn  233

Ray, Satyajit  665, 671 Adversary, The  668 Pather Panchali 668 Reagan, Ronald  362 re-​colonization  7, 470,  471–​2 resistance to  8, 10 Red Crescent Societies  8, 472 refugees  580–​93 Austro-​Hungarian Empire demise  586 British Empire demise  581 Cold War  581 creation of refugees and making of the nation state  586–​8,  592–​3 cultural activities  591 displaced persons  587 dormant conflicts rekindled following independence 588 economic wellbeing  590 ethnically based state nationalism  591 ethnic cleansing  585, 587, 592 ethnicity  581–​2 French Empire demise  581 genocide 585 German Empire demise  586 hostility from long-​established populations 590 housing and housing conditions  590–​1 individual and collective refugee experience and trauma  589–​91 integration into surroundings  591 mass population expulsion  584 nationalism  582–​4, 591, 592 Nazi Empire collapse  580, 585–​6 Nazis, anti-​semitism and displacement of Jews  580, 583, 585, 587 Nazism  582–​3 Ottoman Empire demise  580, 584–​5, 586 Ottoman imperialism  582 population exchanges  584, 585–​6 post-​imperial states, rise of  588–​9 refugee consciousness in land of settlement 591 Russian Empire demise  581, 586, 588 shelter 590 tit-​for-​tat expulsions  585–​6 unemployment 591 Wilhelmine Empire demise  586

Index   765 Reitman, Jason: Juno 672 reparations 116 see also apologies, restitutions and compensation repressive developmentalism  537–​49 accelerated economic growth  539 assimilation to association  539 collective violence  541 colonial humanism  540 community development  546–​7 developing control, controlling development  537–​9 developmentalisation of idioms and repertoires of security  537 developmental plans  544–​5 equality claims  545–​9 forced removal and resettlement  546–​9 government planning  541 imperial legitimization  541 inequality in late colonial shift  539–​45 militarization of society  547 modernizing trusteeship  541 night-​watchman state  539–​40 planning development  537 planning of politics  537 political, economic and socio-​cultural change 546 political securitarian dimensions  548 punishment 546 racialized developmental paternalism  541 racialized preservative paternalism  541 rehabilitation 546 repression and violence  547 second wave of experts, advisers and settlers 539 securitization of idioms and repertoires of development 537 securitization strategies  546 security force repression  541 social development and social services (education and healthcare)  541–​2 social and economic interventions  540–​1 social engineering  546, 549 social and moral re-​education  546 social promotion  548–​9 socio-​economic development  537–​8

strategic villages  546 welfarism 538 Republicanism 129 Reşat, Mehmet V  52 restitution see apologies, restitutions and compensation Retamar, Fernandez: ‘Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’ 704 Reunion: French presence  91, 94, 691, 692 Reybrouck, David Van  152 Congo: Een geschiedenis 145 Reygadas, Carlos  665 Reza Shah  375, 380 Rhodes, Cecil  203 Rice, Tom  664 Richards, Audrey  523, 524, 526 Richman, Kathie  346 Rida, Rashid  560 Riga Treaty (1921)  33 Rivet, Daniel  305 Rivière, Françoise  720 Roberto, Holden  166 Roberts, Sophie  505 Robeson, Paul  705, 708 Robiliart, Herman  154 Robinson, Ronald  66, 73, 78–​9, 195, 650, 679 Rocard, Michel  504 Rochast, Andre  464 Rodney, Walter  340 Roesli (Sumatran artist)  399 Rogers, William  422 Romania  34, 353 G-​77 nations, joining  355 Romanov Empire see Russian/​ Romanov Empire Romondt, Vincent van  395–​6 Ronkel, Philippus Samuel van  404 Roosevelt, Eleanor  527 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano  244, 263, 282, 285, 419 Roseberry, William  439 Rosenstein-​Rodan, Paul  354 Rothermund, Dieter  519 Roth, Joseph: Radetzy March 35 Roumain, Jacques: Gouverneurs de la Rosée  346–​7

766   Index Round Table Conference in London (1930) 260 Roxas, Manuel  427 Royle, Stephen  690 Roy, M.N.  444 Ruck, Christian  104 Rudd, Kevin  719, 730 Rupp, Leila  520, 526–​7 Rural and Economic Social Development Fund (FERDES)  542 Russia  356, 587 nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk on Kazakh steppe 379 petro-​barter  357 see also Russian/​Romanov Empire Russian/​Romanov Empire  27–​8, 32–​3, 35–​6, 37, 179–​91, 352, 362 agricultural migrations  182 Austria 184 Belarus  183–​4, 185, 186, 189, 190 Bessarabia 186 Bolshevik coup (1917)  187 Bolshevik Revolution (1917)  442 Bolsheviks  179, 185, 187, 190 Caucasus  187, 188 Cold War  478 collapse 364 Cossacks 190 displacement, discrimination and refugees  182, 183 education funding and reforms  182, 190 Entente 188 First World War  179 German concept of education-​ Bildung 184 German occupational administration (Ober Ost)  183–​4 Germany 185 Germany, collapse of  188 Great Russians  181, 190 Great War  182–​8, 189 industrial strikes  181 korenizatsia campaigns (1920s)  190 Little Russians  181, 190 Malorussians 189 martial law  183 municipal structures, collapse of  186–​7

nationality issues and policies  180 national units, creation of  186 peasant commune reform  180–​1 peripheral nationalisms  180, 181, 182, 187, 189 Provisional Government  185 racism 359 refugees  583–​4 Russian officers and soldiers as prisoners of war 183 self-​determination  191, 424, 426 socialism 185 socialist revolution  180 South Africa  363 summer campaign (1915)  183 Ukraine  184–​5, 186, 188, 190 Ukrainization and Belarusization of army corps  185–​6 Union of Russian People  181 urban growth and industrialization  181–​2 warlordism 186 White Russians  181 Ryckman, Pierre  542 Saada, Emmanuelle  85–​98,  477–​8 Saba 333 Dutch presence  690 Sadat, Anwar  569 Sadji, Abdoulaye  707 Sahel  380, 382, 385 Said, Edward  440, 448, 698, 699 Culture and Imperialism 705 Saint Barthélémy: French presence  691 Saint-​Domingue  333–​6 French presence  91 Saint Helena: British presence  680, 689–​90 Saint Maarten: Dutch presence  690 Saint Martin: French presence  691 Saint-​Pierre-​et-​Miquelon: French presence  94, 691, 693 Sakhalin Island: Russian presence  284 Salafi movement  560, 567, 568, 569 Salafiyya 564 Salazar, António de Oliveira  162, 170–​1, 627 Salihiyya 558 Salim, Agus  404

Index   767 Samoa: American presence  198, 690 Sanborn, Joshua  182 São Tomé e Príncipe  464 Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé e Príncipe (MLSTP)  173 Portuguese presence  162, 173 Sarawak 77 Sarkar, Himansu Bhusan  397 Sarkozy, Nicolas  721 Sarrault, Albert  622 Sartre, Jean-​Paul  112, 706, 707 ‘Colonialism is a System’  699 Saudi Arabia  428 Agricultural Bank  381 animal subsidy programme  381 Arid Zone  375 Pasture Improvement Project  381 Real Estate Development Fund  381 Wadi Sirhan Settlement Scheme  381 Savimbi, Jonas  166, 175 Sayad, Abdelmalek  610 Scherler Mayer, Daisy von: The Guru 671 Schicho, Walter  521–​2 Schlesinger, Isadore William  662 Schmokel, Wolf  107 Schnapper, Dominique  87 Schwartz, R.  342 Schwarz, B.  344–​5 Schwarz, Bill: White Man’s World 688 Schweitzer, Albert  111 Scott Brown, Timothy  112 Scott, David  436, 704–​5 Scott, James  439 Scott, Michael  459 second wave decolonization  7, 8 Second World bilateralism  358 Seeley, J.R.  203 Seers, Dudley  631 Selassi, Haile  133 self-​determination  6, 27, 34, 68, 417–​30, 682 Africa  485, 492 American Declaration of Independence 418 anti-​colonialism  437–​8, 441–​2,  446 Atlantic Charter and covenants  419–​22 economic self-​determination  427–​30 forms of  422–​3

French Declaration of the Rights of Man  418 human rights  417–​18, 421, 428 institutionalization  418–​19 limits of  425–​6 meaning of  420, 428 origins  418–​19 political self-​determination  428 scope of  420, 428 secession  424–​5 UN General Assembly for self-​determination  420 Selim III, Sultan  47 Sellers, William  663–​4 Selvon, Samuel: The Lonely Londoners 709 Sembène, Ousmane  665 Black Girl  667–​8 Le Docker noir  709–​10 Sen, Dheer Ramian  15 Sendwe, Jason  152 Senegal 321 Thiaroye demonstration  320 Senghor, Léopold Sédar  89, 322, 324, 327–​8, 443, 447, 701, 707 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française  699, 705 Liberté 705 Sen, Uditi  590 Senussi brotherhood  127, 131, 558 Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein  336 Seton-​Watson, Robert  30 Seward, William  199 Sewell, William  227 Sexton, Jay  199 Shakespeare, William: The Tempest  703–​4 Shallit, Emil  346 Shamil 558 Shani 267 shari’a law  558, 567 Shaw, Harold M.: De Voortrekkers 662 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Ozymandias 373 Shenton, Robert  622 Shepard, Todd  81, 89 Sherman, Taylor  263–​4, 266 Shi’a Islamic Call (Al-​Da’wa al-​Islamiyya) Party 568 Shilliam, R.  340 Shimonoseki Treaty (1895)(China)  236, 243

768   Index Shipway, M.  251 Shohat, Ella  663, 665, 668–​9 Siem, Tjan Tjoe  398 Simon, Lord John  258 Simpson, Brad  6, 417–​30, 498 Sinai 385 Singapore 423 British presence  68, 77 Japanese defeat of British  477 Singh, Santa  254 Singh, Sib  255 Sint Eustatius  333 Dutch presence  690 Sioyuan Liu  379 Sivaramamurti, C.  399 Skoropadskyi, Pavlo  186 slavery and slave-​trading  714, 715, 716, 717, 720, 727 Slobodian, Quinn  112, 351–​65 Smith, Adam  622 Smith, Anthony  582 Smith, Ferdinand  344–​5 Smith, Haynes  342 Smith, Ian  503 Smith, M.L.R.  505 Smith, Mona: Honored by the Moon 668 Smith, William Gardner: The Stone Face 703 Smuts, Jan  353 Soares, Mário  162, 172, 175 Socialism Africa 447 Germany  102, 106, 112, 114 Italy  129, 137 Japan  217, 219 New Caledonia  91 Portugal 172 Russia  180, 185 Society for Threatened Peoples  114 Soekmono, R.  396 Guide to the Cultural History of Indonesia 406 Soeroto, Noto  399 Soete, Gérard  144, 148, 158 Soetomo, Raden  399 Solanas, Fernando  668–​9 The Hour of the Furnaces  667 Towards a Third Cinema 667 Solás, Humberto: Lucía 667

Solomon Islands: British presence  680 Somalia: Italian presence  126, 128–​9, 131, 133–​4, 135–​6,  139 Song Hwee Lim  665, 666 Sörgel, Hermann  107 Soulbury Commission  70 South Africa  318, 321, 338 African National Congress (ANC)  320, 363, 364 anti-​colonialism  448 apartheid  320, 351, 422 Bantustans 320 British presence  67, 78, 81 films and cinema  664 gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism  530 protective tariffs  203 tropical Africa  318, 319–​20, 321, 327, 329 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 715 Youth League  320 Southeast Asia  423 Japanese presence  219, 222, 223–​6 post-​colonial migrations to France  602 South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) 13 Southern Africa  363–​4, 365, 492 UN multilateral programmes  465 Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)  74, 338 African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) 463 African National Union (ZANU)  465 African People’s Union (ZAPU)  465 First Chimurenga (Second Matabele) War between Shona and Ndebele  438 gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism  530 independence 490 Security Forces  463 Selection Trust  646 Soviet Union and China, guerrillas armed by  489 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (1965)  325, 488 South Georgia: British presence  679, 680, 681, 689, 693 South Sandwich Islands: British presence  680, 689, 693

Index   769 Southwest Africa  423 German presence  106 Herero genocide by Germany  102, 104, 106, 116, 500 Nama genocide  104 Soviet Union see Russia; Russian/​Romanov Empire Soyinka, Wole  730 Spain 426 Canary islands  690 Ceuta 690 Melilla 690 tropical Africa  326 Special Committee on Decolonization  458 Special Committee of Seventeen  463 Speyer, Jan  401 Spínola, António de  167, 171–​2, 173 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  439, 448 Sri Lanka (Ceylon) British presence  70 independence 479 Srinivasan, K.R.  399 Stalin, Joseph  179, 284–​5, 286, 291, 482 Stam, Robert  663, 665 Stanard, Matthew G.  144–​58 Stanley, Oliver  73 Starkey, Heather  524 states of emergency  70, 75, 89, 149, 468, 549 Steed, Henry Wickham  30 Steiner, Zara  34 Stengers, Jean  145 Stockwell, Sarah Elizabeth  65–​81 Stolypin, Petr  180, 189 Stora, Benjamin  717 Strong, Josiah  198 Stutterheim, Willem F.  396, 403, 404 Subaltern Studies  439–​40 sub-​Saharan Africa  439, 484–​7, 587 French presence  86, 87, 88, 92, 94, 95 Portuguese presence  164 Sudan Arid Zone  377 Kathmiyya order  564 Mahdi movement (now Umma Party)  564 Mahdist uprising  557 -​South Sudan secession dispute  328 Suez Canal Company  652

Suez Canal Zone and Suez Crisis  67, 69, 76–​7, 351, 379, 447, 567 Sufi brotherhoods  557, 558, 566, 567 Sufism 570 Suharto 426 Suharto coup in Indonesia  565 Sukarno  281, 283, 287, 319, 394, 445, 447, 563, 564, 566, 568, 648 Suleiman, Satyawati  406 Sumner, William Graham  200 Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party  567 Sun Yat-​sen  238–​9,  241–​2 Suriname: post-​colonial migrations to Netherlands  611–​13 Suzuki, Shugo  245 Swaby, Nydia  344 Swart, S.  530 Sweden Guinea-​Bissau liberation movements, assistance to  478, 486–​7 International Development Authority (SIDA) 465 Swynnerton Plan  546 Sykes, Mark  30 Sykes-​Picot agreement  30 Syria 355 Arid Zone  377, 381, 385 Contrôle Bédouin organization  375 French presence  85, 92, 481 French withdrawal  482 Tagore, Rabindranath  354 The Home and the World 399 Taiwan 423 Chinese presence  239 Japanese presence  212, 213–​14, 219–​20, 222, 224–​5, 236, 278 Tanganyika  318, 326 independence (1961)  325 Tanzania 464 African National Union (TANU)  631 East Africa Groundnut Scheme  631 Maji Maji revolt  500 ujamaa (family-​hood)  447 Women’s Organisation  527 Tcheuyap, Alexie  669 Tehran Conference on Human Rights  467

770   Index Tehyun Ma  231–​45 Templer, General  75 Terfve, Jean  151 Thailand: Communist Party  282 Thatcher, Margaret  693 Thénault, Sylvie  299–​314, 562 Thomas, David  384 Thomas, Martin  1–​22, 497–​511, 520, 627, 644, 652 Thompson, Andrew  1–​22, 453–​73, 498, 520, 652, 661 Thompson, E.P.  439 Thussu, Daya Kishan  672 Tibet: Chinese presence  233–​4, 240, 245 Tièche, André  463 Tijaniyya 558 Tito, Josip Broz  447 Tjan (Indologist)  403 Tjibaou, Jean-​Marie  692 Tocqueville, Alexis de  98, 441 Togo: French presence  95 Togore, Rabindranath  397 Tonkin: French presence  95 Toosey, Philip  640, 642–​3 Touré, Sékou  324, 563, 644 Toussaint L’Ouverture  333, 335–​6, 442, 704, 705, 708 Trans-​Jordan  375,  381 nominal independence (1946)  482 Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership 385 treaty ports  226–​7 Trinidad and Tobago  337, 339, 487 British presence  74–​5, 77, 680 Commonwealth Development Loan, proposed 341 Tristan da Cunha: British presence  680, 688 Trivedi, Harish  700 tropical Africa  317–​29 American presence  319 British presence  317, 318, 319–​20, 323–​5, 326 empire challenged  318–​20 First World War  317–​18 French presence  317, 318, 319–​20, 321–​5 German presence  318 Great Depression  318 mobilization and African society  321–​7

Portuguese presence  319–​20, 326 regionalism (tribalism)  328 resource curse  328 Second World War  318 South African presence  318, 319–​20, 321, 327, 329 Spanish presence  326 Trotsky, Leon  181 Trouillot, Michel-​Rolph  336 Truman, Harry  70, 283, 480, 485, 493 Trusteeship Council  423, 458–​9 Trust Territories  458 Tshombé, Moïse  112, 147–​8, 149, 425 Tuareg  380, 382 Tucker, R.P.  378 Tuffnell, Steve  198 Tunisia  299, 305, 306–​7 Arabic and Islam as language and religion 313 Beylicate  300, 314 civil service  311 Destour party  300 fellagas 302 French presence  90, 92, 95 General Labour Union (UGTT)  301, 302 General Union of Tunisian Students 308 independence (1956)  302, 303–​4 Italy, affiliations with  309 lecons reçues 375 Libya, affiliations with  309 nationalism  301, 312 Neo Destour  300, 302, 308, 312, 562, 563–​4 post-​colonial migrations to France  602 Sadiki College  311 state-​building  311 Tangiers Conference (1958)  309 The Red Hand  302 UN resolution for self-​government  310 Young Tunisians  300 Turgot: Memoir to the King on the American War 86 Turkey Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)  584–​5 elimination or expulsion of Armenian and Greek populations  581

Index   771 Greco-​Turkish War (1919–​22)  36, 585 refugees  584,  585–​6 War of Independence  45 Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI): British presence  680, 682, 684, 685 Turner, Frederick Jackson  374 Uganda 587 independence (1962)  325 Ukraine  32, 35 Russian/​Romanov Empire presence  184–​5, 186, 188, 190 ul-​Haq, Muhammad Zia  569 Ulyanov, Aleksandr  185 ’Umar al-​Mukhtar  558 unequal treaties  213–​14, 234, 240, 243 United Arab Republic (1958–​61)  447 United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC)  321, 322 United Kingdom overseas territories (UKOTs)  678–​90 Anguilla  680, 682, 685 Ascension  680, 681, 684, 686 Bermuda  680, 681, 682, 684, 690 British Antarctic Territory (BAT)  679, 680, 681, 689, 693 British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)  679, 681, 682, 685, 689 British Virgin Islands (BVI)  680, 682, 684 Cayman Islands  680, 681, 682, 684, 685 exclusive economic zones (EEZs)  682, 686, 693 failure to decolonize  679–​81 Falkland Islands  488, 680, 681–​2, 683, 685, 687–​8, 689, 690, 693 financial services/​considerations  682, 684, 685, 686 Gibraltar  679, 681–​2, 683–​4, 685, 688, 689, 690, 693 legal challenge, risk of  685 liabilities  684–​7 Montserrat  680, 685, 686–​7, 689 and natural disasters  684 opting to remain British  689–​90 Pitcairn Island  681, 685, 688, 689 reasons for non-​independence  686–​8

reluctance to adopt modern European approaches to personal matters eg sexual orientation 685 reputational risk  684, 685 Saint Helena  680, 689–​90 South Georgia  679, 680, 681, 689, 693 South Sandwich Islands  680, 689, 693 sovereign base areas  678–​9, 681, 684 sovereignty disputes  685 strategic (military) importance  681–​2, 684, 686 tourist industry  682 trade interests  685 Tristan da Cunha  680, 688 Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI)  680, 682, 684, 685 United Nations  17, 69, 77, 136, 326, 445, 502, 520, 678 Belgian Congo  147–​8 Cameroon 323 Charter  95, 421–​2, 458 Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States (CERDS)  429 Children’s Fund (UNICEF)  457, 464 Commission for Human Rights (CHR)  420, 428, 458–​9, 527 Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS)  693 Committee on Information from the Non-​Governing Territories  520 Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)  358–​9,  648 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination  359, 421, 458 Convention on the Law of the Sea  682 Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 421 Decade for Deserts and the Fight Against Desertification (2010–​20)  385 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples  164,  463–​4 Declaration of the Principles of International Law Concerning the Friendly Relations and Co-​operation among States  421–​2

772   Index United Nations (cont.) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People  717, 724 decolonization committee  426, 464 Development Programme (UNDP)  464, 466 Disaster Relief Co-​ordinator  457 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Committee 428 Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)  383 Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance 633 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)  383, 631–​2, 633 General Assembly  268, 428, 464 General Assembly Fourth (Special Political and Decolonization) Committee  420, 459 General Assembly resolution 1514  76 General Assembly resolution 1514 on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples  76, 421 General Assembly resolution 1803 on the right of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources  428–​9 General Assembly resolution 2444 regarding Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts  467 General Assembly resolution in favour of Libyan independence  309 General Assembly Third (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) Committee  420, 459 High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)  428, 458, 466, 586, 590 humanitarianism and human rights  428, 468 International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination  363 International Refugees Organization  586 member states  424 Portugal 175 Relief and Rehabilitation Administration  586, 590 Security Council  268

sixth special session on economic issues (1974) 429 Special Committee Against Apartheid  463–​4,  465 Specialized Agencies  632 Trusteeship System  422, 426 Trust Territories  423 United States African-​American Communists  419 American Committee on Africa  423 American Declaration of Independence 418 Anglo-​American partnership  66, 69, 70, 72, 77, 79, 81 and the Belgian Congo  148, 157 and China  241, 243 civil rights legislation (1964–​5)  486 civil rights movement  716 Cold War  478 compensation to Japanese Americans interned during Second World War  715 Cuba (taken from the Spanish)  278 Economic Cooperation Administration 542 films and cinema  662 French aid for Algeria  493 Guam  198, 278, 282, 690, 691 Hawaii  198, 202, 278 Herero People’s Reparation Corporation 720 humanitarianism and human rights  457 Immigration Act (1924) and Japanese Exclusion 219 Indochina  205,  480–​1 Indonesia 480 -​Japan alliance system  221–​2 -​Japan Mutual Security Treaty  225 Midway retaken from Japan  282 Navy’s Seventh Fleet  284 Philippines, departure from  479 Philippines (taken from the Spanish)  278 Puerto Rico  198, 202, 691 Samoa  198, 690 segregation 486 self-​determination  419–​20, 421, 422, 424,  425–​6 semi-​sovereignty  422–​3

Index   773 tropical Africa  319 Virgin Islands  690 see also United States economic imperialism within British world system United States economic imperialism within British world system  195–​205 American System  199–​200, 203 Anglo-​American Great Rapprochement 195 Anglophiles  199–​200 Anglophobia  197, 198–​200, 201–​2, 204 Anglo-​Saxonism  198,  200 anti-​imperialism  200 Anti-​Imperialist League  200 boom-​and-​bust cycles  197 Bretton Woods  205 Canada  199, 203 Caribbean  195, 197, 202 Civil War Era  198–​9 closed-​door policy  202 Cobdenism  200, 202, 203 colonialism 197 Cuba 202 Democrats 201 economic imperialism  197 economic nationalism  197, 203, 204 Foreign Relations Committee majority report (1888)  201 free-​trade imperialism  195–​6 French Indochina  205 Great Depression  197 Guam 198 Hawaii  198, 202 imperial expansion  197, 199, 203 imperialism  198, 204 imperialism of free trade vs imperialism of economic nationalism  200–​2 imperial policies  200 imperial trade preference  203 international trade liberalization  203 laissez-​faire  201,  203 McKinley Tariff (1890)  202–​3 militarism 197 Mills Bill, proposed (1888)  201 neoliberal globalization  205 Open Door Empire/​Policy  195–​6, 201, 204, 205

Pacific  195, 197 Philippines  198, 202 protectionism  197, 202, 203, 204 Puerto Rico  198, 202 Republicans  197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204 Samoa 198 situating US empire within British world system  202–​4 Spanish Empire, defeat of  195, 197 ‘Wisconsin School’  196, 201 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)  420, 455 Uruguay 428 Utrecht treaty  679, 682 Vahiddedin, Sultan Mehmet VI  45, 57–​9 Vallières, Pierre: Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique 702 Vanthemsche, Guy  145 Vellut, Jean-​Luc  145, 149 Venizelos, Eleftherios  585 Versailles Treaty  34, 105, 108, 110, 116, 243, 442, 729 Verscheure, Frans  148 Vertovec, Steven  614 Victoria League Club for Colonial Girls (London) 526 Vietnam  286–​95,  327 agrovilles 504 American intervention  287 anti-​Japanese communist forces  282 Associated State of Vietnam  292 Associate State of Vietnam’s Army  292 Battle for Hanoi  290 China 286 Chinese Advisory Group  291 Cold War -​first wave  480 Communist Party  282, 287, 290, 293 contested sovereignties (1945–​9)  287–​91 conventional warfare  293 Democratic Republic (DRV)  287, 289–​90, 291, 292–​4, 295 Dien Bien Phu Battle  294–​5, 481 divide and rule  290 division of  481

774   Index Vietnam (cont.) February accord (1946)  289 female participation in the army  294 Franco-​Vietnamese war  289 French Communist Party  491 general mobilization  293 German presence  113–​15 guerrilla tactics  293 gunboat diplomacy  287 independence  287, 481 International Vietnam Congress  113–​14 Japanese presence  286 land reform  293–​5 Liberation Army  282 limits of decolonization  291–​5 March accord (1946)  289 Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) 292 military service, mandatory  293 nationalism 288 People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN)  291–​4 social mobilization  294 trench warfare  295 Vietminh  281, 480, 490, 491 Vilsen, Jef Van: A Thirty-​Year Plan for the Political Emancipation of the Belgian Congo 154 violence and insurgency  497–​511 aerial bombardments  501–​3 assassinations, targeted  510 coercive violence  507 collective punishments/​violence  498, 499–​500, 503, 505, 510 collusion, broader definitions of  506 combatants  508–​11 conflict entrepreneurs -​leaders and followers 500 counter-​terror tactics  503 criminal justice model  505 demographic impact of forced population removal 504 demonstrative acts/​violence  505–​6 detentions, mass and arbitrary  503, 505 dispossession 497 double effect  510 emergency powers -​curfews and media restrictions 506

environmental spoliation  504 ethical dilemmas  498 ethnic frictions  507 exterminist warfare  510 forced removal of populations  497, 504, 510 freedom of movement, curtailing  504 free-​fire zones  506 genocidal violence  500 group identity -​ethnic distance  507 hierarchies of acceptability  510 high-​commitment groups  507 human rights abuses  502 ideological frictions  507 infant mortality rates  504 insurgency and counter-​insurgency  497,  503–​4 just war theory  510 laws of war  508–​11 massacre 505 mass disappearances  505 military or martial law  505 military violence  503 nationalist movements: fragmentation or factionalism 499 non-​combatants, explicit targeting of and mass killings  497, 502, 508–​11 partitions 497 permitting violence: dirty wars and violence actors  505–​8 political violence  499, 502 population control and purpose-​built settlements  503, 504 post-​war turns  501–​2 rape 505 reasons for violence: actors and motives  498–​501 religious frictions  507 restrictions and rights abuses  497 rule by law  505–​6 safe and contaminated areas, spatial dichotomization between  503 secret prisons  505 self-​determination  498–​9,  502 shoot on sight policies  506 social control  510 starvation 504 statehood, pressure for  498

Index   775 state violence  505 summary killing  503 terror attacks  502 torture 505 violent contestation integral to decolonization process  5,  18–​21 Virgin Islands: American presence  690 Vogel, Jean-​Philippe  401, 402, 403, 404 Vo Nguuyen Giap  281–​2 Waberi, Abdourahman: Aux Etats-​Unis d’Afrique 704 wa Kahengeri, Gita  726 Walcott, Derek Drums and Colours 709 Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes 709 Wallis and Futuna: French presence  691, 692 Ward, Stuart  78 Warsaw Pact  358 Watts, Richard  706 Wavell, Viceroy of India  264 Wayne, Mike  668 Weimar Republic  33, 37 Weinstein, Jeremy  507 Welensky, Roy  646 welfare colonialism see gender: nationalism, development and welfare colonialism Wells, David Ames  200 Wensinck, A.J.  404 West Africa  457, 525–​6, 602 French presence  90, 98 West Galicia  35 West Indies  423 British presence  318 West, Nicholas  625 West Papua  279, 422, 427 and Australia  429 and Indonesia  425–​6 White, Nicholas J.  639–​53 Wieczorek-​Zeul, Heidemarie  104, 720 Wiesen, Gavin: The Art of Getting By 672 Wigny, Pierre  543 Wijk, Nicolas van  404 Wilder, Gary  10–​11, 89 Williams, Eric  341

Williams, William Appleman: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy  195–​6,  201 Wilson, Harold  683 Wilson, Woodrow  27, 45, 188, 202 Fourteen Points speech  30, 31, 57, 442 self-​determination concept  34, 37, 217, 242,  418–​19 Wintle, Claire  698 Wissmann, Hermann von  116 Witte, Ludo de  157 De moord op Lumumba 145 Women’s Corona Club  528 Women’s Corona Society (WCS)  528–​9 Women’s International Democratic Federation  526–​7 World Bank  520, 633 World Council of Churches (WCC) Programme to Combat Racism  466 World Health Organization (WHO)  383, 457 Worrall, Richard  376 Xi Jinping  672 Xinjiang  233, 239–​40, 245, 381 Russian presence  236 Yacine, Kateb  705 Le Polygone étoilé 703 Nedjima 703 Yamin, Muhammad  395, 398, 399 Year of Africa (1960)  361 Yemen  51, 464 Young, Louise Conrad  212–​27 Young Turks  44–​6, 49–​50, 56–​7, 60 Yuan Shikai  239 Yugoslavia  34, 37, 353, 356, 360, 361 Soviet Union, break from  355 Zambia see Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) Zarrow, Peter  238 Zehfuss, Maja  510 Zhou Enlai  445 Zimbabwe see Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Zimmerer, Jürgen  106, 501