AHR Roundtable
The Archives of Decolonization Introduction FARINA MIR
DECOLONIZATION IS SURELY AMONG the most significant events or processes of the twentieth century. In the span of less than two decades, longstanding European empires in Africa, Asia, and beyond were largely dismantled to create dozens of new nation-states, and with them a new geopolitical landscape. The magnitude of change was immense: in Africa alone, more than fifty new states were created, beginning in the 1950s.1 The United Nations provides another example of the scale of geopolitical transformation that decolonization precipitated. From its inception in 1945 to 2002, membership in the United Nations went from 51 to 191; “most of these new members,” Raymond Betts notes in his study Decolonization, “came from the failed colonial empires.”2 Indeed, one can suggest without hyperbole that decolonization fundamentally shapes the world we live in. While this may be true, such an accounting emphasizes decolonization as a political event, one “whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign nation-states.”3 A focus on this “transfer of power” was once the mainstay of historiography on decolonization, but as more recent scholarship has recognized, such a focus narrows our understanding of decolonization, limiting it to an event, and tying it to a moment. Decolonization in this mode of narration is discrete, delimited, finite; from a nationalist perspective, decolonization becomes a moment of arrival. The formal transfer of power from colonial to national governments is of course crucial to any understanding of decolonization. But decolonization—for all the elegant simplicity of the term—is more complex and difficult to define; the transfer of power is one aspect of a broader historical process, the exact contours of which have thus far defied any historiographical consensus.4 1 James D. Le Sueur, “An Introduction: Reading Decolonization,” in Le Sueur, ed., The Decolonization Reader (New York, 2003), 1–6, here 2. 2 Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004), 2. 3 Prasenjit Duara, “Introduction: The Decolonization of Asia and Africa in the Twentieth Century,” in Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (New York, 2003), 1–18, here 2. 4 Here my reading of the historiography differs from that of Ashley Jackson (and, I imagine, others), who writes, “decolonisation is one of the few fields of historical research where, with the exception of a few polemicists on the fringes, consensus among experts is something of a norm.” Jackson, review of Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires by Martin Shipway, English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (2009): 503–505, here 504.
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