ABSTRACT
The states of the imperial period became the independent nation-states of the post-imperial period. The states had often been initially seen as projections of the imperial states, if not, in some sense, part of them. The British, perhaps more clearly than other Europeans, saw them as a step towards being states in a world of states, though their time-frame was generally vague and sometimes very long. In retrospect, indeed, the states must appear transitional. They possessed some, but not all, the attributes of a modern state, but under colonial rule could not acquire the remainder. It would be ‘counterfactual’ to consider how the relationship might have evolved but for the Japanese invasion. Even before it occurred, the depression and the deterioration in the international situation tended, at least in some of the territories, to encourage status-quo policies. The invasion overthrew the colonial powers. The Europeans sought to return, but in general failed to regain even the measure of control they had acquired in the imperial period. Only the US was ready immediately to relinquish an overt political role. Within the states that the colonial powers had taken over or brought under
their protection, they had indeed come to face a nationalist challenge. As in the metropolises themselves, so in the empires, state-building had capricious outcomes, ‘state formation’ in Jim Schiller’s analysis. The territories had been taken over as part of a generalised attempt to secure guarantees for the future in a phase in which the relative position of the European powers was being changed. The immediate gains were rarely obvious and never quantified. Adam Smithians or not, colonial administrators needed revenue, and they often adopted an interventionist stance in order to attract capital and labour, or to avert the interest of the merely speculative. Their state-building was bound, however, to have capricious outcomes, coupled, as it was, with the impact of economic and social changes brought about by what would now be called globalisation. Among those outcomes was the emergence of new elites that sought to displace the collaborators on whom the colonial regimes had relied from their inception and either put the collaboration on a new basis or bring it to an end. They were strongly influenced by the nationalism that was part of both state-building and state-formation in the West.
