ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century Europe’s empires were disassembled. Well over a hundred new nation-states were constituted out of the fragments of the empires, more than tripling the number of nation-states in the United Nations. Were these decolonized nation-states ‘the last wave’ of something? Were they the final stage in the global diffusion of a modular form of national social organization, the globalization of ‘the nation’ as an idea? Were they the completion of the organization of the world into one kind of political culture, one kind of imagined, and now real, community? Or, how else can we imagine, understand, represent decolonization? Was it the end of something, or the beginning? And how has it been imagined, understood, and represented by those who engineered it and those who experienced it?
