ABSTRACT
Colonial societies experienced a number of economic, sociocultural and political changes in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which laid the basis for mass nationalisms after 1945. The British faced intense violence in territories such as Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden and, virtually everywhere, colonial rule crumbled far quicker than expected and decolonised states took forms unforeseen by British planners. Decolonisation should perhaps be seen as a 'struggle for who should rule after colonial rule' rather than a 'struggle against colonial rule'. Historians of decolonisation have not necessarily underestimated the role of nationalism. Radical anti-colonialism across the empire in the 1940s and 1950s, it is claimed, scuppered Colonial Office (CO) and Cabinet agendas for gradual devolution. Studies of the tropical empire after 1945 find echoes in the battles fought out in Indian historiography. Britain's resort to colonial war in Malaya is indicative of a post-war 'crisis of empire' induced by the growth of radical, populist anti-colonial nationalism.
