ABSTRACT
As the Cold War recedes deeper into the past, it becomes easier to see that the key event in the second half of the twentieth century has been the breakup of colonial rule or semi-colonial domination across vast areas of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific. The confrontation between East and West may have been decisive for the fate of Europe. But in much of the extra-European world, the Cold War had a walk-on part in the larger drama of decolonization, or can be seen realistically as only one element in the struggle to save, seize or share out the domain of the Old Colonial Powers: Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Belgium. As the chapters in this book reveal, the shape of the world by the end of the twentieth century and its astonishing proliferation of nation states, many of almost microscopic size or resources, cannot be explained simply by invoking the rise of the superpowers, the play of ideological conflict, or the irresistible rise of anti-colonial nationalisms. Decolonization was not a pre-ordained path, but a chaotic process on which accidents of timing and the variables of regional or local politics exerted a crucial influence. Explaining it requires (among other things) a careful reconstruction of the diplomacy through which the colonial powers sought, but often failed, to safeguard the substance of their imperial interests against the intrusion of other great power influence (sometimes commercial, sometimes political), the indifference or irritation of opinion at home and the hostility of their more ‘extreme’ opponents in colonial politics. As Jack Gallagher showed more than 20 years ago, we will make little progress in unravelling its causes unless we take seriously the complicated interplay between domestic, colonial and international politics, and view cautiously the claims of any of them to primacy. 1
