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Review by Eva-Maria Muschik, University of Vienna
Martin Thomas’s The End of Empires is a rich book. Drawing on a wide range of English-language scholarship and a broad base of European archival materials, Thomas puts the issue of violence front and center and reminds us that twentieth-century decolonization was a globally connected process, but not strictly speaking a post-1945 phenomenon. In his understanding, it is also not a finished process. The emphasis throughout the book is on politics, especially individual conflicts, but also transnational networking and international law, economic matters, and the sociology of violence. Readers interested in learning more about the people, ideas, and culture that animated the global history of decolonization may need to turn elsewhere.
Thomas describes decolonization as not a single event, but a “process of ending empire and breaking with colonialism” (2). More specifically, his book is concerned with the end of twentieth-century oceanic empires mostly after 1945. “The story of these collapses,” he writes, “is the history of decolonization” (16). With this focus of the book, as opposed to, say, the break-up of European land empires during and after World War I or empires in the Americas in the preceding centuries, Thomas follows Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel’s argument: that the twentieth-century breakdown of oceanic empires was the most consequential “wave” of decolonization, for it resulted in the “disappearance of empire as a political form” and the “end of racial hierarchy as a widely accepted political ideology and structuring principle of world order” (16).[1] For Thomas, decolonization “stands 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” (16). Indeed, he argues, it represents the “biggest reconfiguration of world politics ever seen” (7).
Thomas maintains that “decolonization was one globally connected process” and that “we cannot understand decolonization’s global impact by examining individual empires or single colonial histories,” with the caveat added later that “decolonization unfolded globally but contingently” (3, 40). Hence, the global history angle. There are, of course, many discussions about what global history actually means.[2] For Thomas, it seems, global history is not primarily concerned with de-centering European perspectives on a given subject.[3](Somewhat indicative of this stance, the book opens and closes with the perspective of British politician Barbara Castle.) Rather, Thomas defines the approach of global history as “rejecting the nation-state as the analytical starting point and focusing instead on…entanglements of peoples, ideas, and discriminations” (15, my emphasis).
As chapter 2 lays out, Thomas is moreover concerned with convergence or “globalization,” which he understands to be “the acceleration of global integration” (27). He suggests that “we need to locate decolonization both chronologically and in relation to” this process (26) and attempts to “unscramble conflicting perspectives on which of these processes—either decolonization or globalization—accelerated or even catalyzed the other” (27).[4] He concludes somewhat defeatedly, however:
Assessing the impact of globalization on the end of empires is difficult in the absence of consensus over which vectors—economic output and trade flows, cultural connections and migratory patterns, or shifts in transregional power—best express its impact (44).
Without weighing in on the matter himself, Thomas cautions against understanding globalization as a one-way traffic (from Europe to the rest of the world) and underestimating the extent to which decolonization reorganized the world (45). He does not explicitly discuss globalization in the rest of the book, but returns to aspects which are associated with it, e.g. economic integration, in the chapters that follow.
According to Thomas, the book seeks, first, to explain “what brought down European overseas empires”—that is, the causes of decolonization, and in particular the global factors that either accelerated or slowed down the process (4, 335)—and, second, to “work out how much changed when [foreign colonial rulers] left or were compelled to go” (3)—that is, the global impact of decolonization. This is arguably a mammoth task.
With regard to the second question of impact, Thomas’ main argument seems to be—as the title indicates—that the world was remade as empire was undone. But he argues that decolonization remains unfinished first, because of unequal power relations rooted in colonial-era hierarchies; second, because of enduring patterns of colonial thought, speech, and behavior; and third, because of lasting economic inequalities rooted in empire (349). Overall, the book is less concerned with what the “world remade” looked like, than with “paths of empire destruction.”
In answer to his first question about causes, or “factors that triggered colonial collapse,” Thomas presents a somewhat eclectic bucket list that includes issues of political economy, anticolonial opposition and rights claims, the two World Wars, territorial partitions, pro- and anti-colonial violence, and the vulnerability of colonial civilians (5). Thomas concedes that the list could be longer and could include, for example, questions of identity and culture, gender and ethnicity, ideology and ethics, geopolitics, international organization, and the global Cold War, and that it is the historian’s task to distinguish between major and minor factors among all of the above. Yet Thomas does not explicitly reveal where he comes down on this question, nor how this sets his book apart from existing literature on the topic.[5] To me, Thomas’s list of causal factors is confusing rather than clarifying. Some of them cannot be neatly separated from one another. For example, “issues of global political economy,” as Thomas discusses in the book, resulted to a large extent from the “transformative aftereffects of two world wars” (5). It is also unclear how partitions were a cause rather than an effect of the end of empire. Is it the case that we cannot determine causal factors for the global process of decolonization as such, but have to look at individual processes of decolonization after all to determine the relative weight of factors?
The organization of the book departs from that of comparative titles:[6] The introductory part I, “Globalizing Decolonization,” Thomas explains, deals with “ideas and concepts” (4) of both scholars and historical actors: chapter 1 discusses the term “decolonization,” chapter 2 focuses on the relationship between globalization and decolonization (thus going beyond “ideas and concepts”), and chapter 3 presents “alternatives” (4) to decolonization, as in historical alternatives to national sovereignty claims, including, for example, empire citizenship reform, pooled sovereignty polities (federations, regional associations), and global governance mechanisms.
The much longer part II, “Paths of Empire Destruction,” proceeds roughly chronologically from the impact of World War One (chapter 4) to that of World War Two (chapter 7), with a mix of more thematic and geographically focused chapters in between and after: chapters 5, 12, and 13 deal with the economic effects of the wars and with interwar and postwar political decisions. In a very welcome addition to the more familiar focus in the literature on development, Thomas discusses global trade, debt, and monetary arrangements here. He also engages the burgeoning scholarship on the push for a New International Economic Order.[7] Chapters 6 and 14 focus on key sites, concerns, and moments of transnational anti-colonial networking and activism, from interwar Communist internationalism, to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, the founding of the Non-Alignment Movement in Belgrade in 1961, and the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana in 1966. Other important milestones and organizations in this regard, such as the 1900 Pan-African Congress, the League against Imperialism, and the Group of 77, are discussed in chapters 4 and 13.
The remaining chapters, in one way or another, discuss the violence of decolonization. Chapter 8 deals with post-World War Two conflicts in South East Asia. Chapter 9 discusses partitions. Chapter 10 focuses on decolonization wars of the 1950s and 1960s in Kenya, Vietnam, and Algeria, which, as Thomas underlines, imperial powers tried to hide from public attention. Chapter 11 shines the spotlight on the civilians who bore the brunt of decolonization violence. The concluding chapter 15 discusses “endgames” of empire in the Portuguese and Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Ocean island territories.
To my mind, the guiding questions or focus are not always comprehensibly explained in the chapter introductions. Many topics and events surface in various chapters, and the chapter conclusions often bring in new aspects and actors rather than summarizing the main points made. Much prior contextual knowledge regarding historical actors and events is required of the reader. Compared to other titles on this topic, Thomas’s book is thus not an easy introductory read, even if it is certainly a worthwhile, thought-provoking one.[8]
A real strength of the book is that, in line with his own earlier research plus other recent publications on imperial history more generally,[9] Thomas convincingly reveals that a panoply of violence is central to the history of decolonization, from psychological to physiological, from economical to ecological, from military to civilian. This is a story of mass displacement, forced labor and migration, hunger, disease, and ecological devastation related to both imperial economic exploitation and mismanagement as well as war efforts, which fueled both resistance against empire and rising tensions among the various groups within colonial societies.
Chapter 7, which focuses on World War Two, serves as something of a hinge chapter for Thomas’s second major intervention: “The logic of the Second World War as decolonization’s catalytic agent is flawed because the disintegrative process had begun decades earlier,” Thomas writes, and the preceding chapters serve his point. But his argument is also forward-looking: Decolonization “would play out for decades more” (124). Building on Robert Gerwarth’s work on World War I,[10] Thomas’s “proposition is that wartime cataclysm did not—indeed, could not—‘cause’ decolonization after 1945 because there was no clear division between war and postwar.” Notions of “empires at peace” or “peacetime colonialism” are thus misleading (125). As he writes, “the war itself persisted, mutating into other violent anti-colonial struggles” (132). The chapters that follow amply prove his point that the transition-of-power narrative sanitizes the history of decolonization, which “was anything but transitory or clean” (171).
Throughout the book, Thomas raises and discusses several important questions that are related to the extent to which international law, humanitarian actors, and international organizations served to shape (if not mitigate) decolonization violence and vice versa and what role anti-colonial violence played in bringing down empire. A key section comes in chapter 13, where Thomas rejects the narrative of a “managed” decolonization in the sense of a process being set in motion and directed by imperial authorities (263). Empire was brought down by its opponents, Thomas notes. But he also allows for a correlation between European economic decline and retrenchment overseas (263). Frederick Cooper has argued that by the late 1950s, imperial authorities began to consider the developmental colonialism of the post-1945 period too expensive to maintain.[11]Thomas’s account adds to this analysis the fact that decolonization violence also “punched big deficits into imperial balance sheets,” whether they are “measured in money or reputation” (266). This is also where factors such as transnational activism, global public fora like the ones affiliated with the United Nations, and international law, come in. Because of this mix of factors, Thomas suggests, “finding partners to show the way out [became] more advantageous than trying to stay in” from the metropolitan perspective (267).[12]
Because Thomas’s narrative is largely concerned with the “paths of empire destruction,” I was left wondering about the impact or legacies of the violence of decolonization in the post-independence era in terms of authoritarian regimes, civil wars, social and economic disruptions, foreign interventionism, etc. This question is especially pertinent in view of the unfinished “decolonial” pursuit of achieving economic sovereignty and prosperity, be it through national projects, federal or regional arrangements, or changing the institutions of global governance. Thomas’s book thus raises several crucial questions about the global history of decolonization that—building on his important work—may be further tackled down the line.
Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022), the special issue introduction “Towards a Global History of International Organizations and Decolonization,” published in the Journal of Global History in 2022, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume International Organizations and the Cold War: Competition, Cooperation and Convergence(Bloomsbury, 2025).
[1] Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2017), 1.
[2] For a most recent discussion, see Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Rethinking Global History(Cambridge University Press, 2024).
[3] For a contrasting understanding of global history, see, for example, Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History?(Princeton University Press, 2016), 67.
[4] An engagement with another book that is co-authored by Jürgen Osterhammel might have been insightful here: Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400824328.
[5] See, for example,Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (Blackwell, 2004); Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (Rewriting Histories) (Routledge, 2004); Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (Routledge, 2006); Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Blackwell, 2008) as well as recent introductory books cited in footnote 9.
[6] See footnotes 6 and 9.
[7] Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South 1957–1986 (Oxford University Press, 2012); Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Re-Introduction,” Humanity: An International Journal for Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6:1 (2015): 1-16; Christopher Dietrich, “Oil Power and Economic Theologies: The United States and the Third World in the Wake of the Energy Crisis,” Diplomatic History 40:3 (2016): 500-529; Jonas Kreienbaum, Das Öl und der Kampf um eine Neue Weltwirtschaftsordnung – Die Bedeutung der Ölkrisen der 1970er Jahre für die Nord-Süd-Beziehungen (De Gruyter, 2022); Michael Franczak, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2022).
[8] Dane Kennedy, Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016); Jansen and Osterhammel, Decolonization.
[9] See, for example, Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014); Thomas and Gareth Curless, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies (Oxford University Press, 2023); Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (The Bodley Head, 2022); Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024).
[10] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End: 1917–1923 (Allen Lane, 2016).
[11] Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History 8:1 (2010): 5-23, here 15.
[12] For a similar argument on the interwar period, see Susan Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq—in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood,” The American Historical Review 115:4 (2010): 975-1000, here 975.
