Abstract
The end of the First World War may appear as a somewhat premature point at which to begin an outline history of European decolonization. Indeed, the territorial zenith of modern colonialism was attained only in 1919 with the completion of the Treaty of Versailles, bringing new areas (such as Palestine) within the ambit of European rule.l Even more telling is the fact that it was only during the Great War and in its immediate aftermath that westernizing processes began to impinge upon the broad front of non-European societies, and so created the conditions for mass nationalist responses. With this in mind, it might be argued that while the inter-war years were of clear relevance to certain later decolonizations (with one obvious example being the emergence of Gandhian populism in India during the early 1920s), in the main their continuities lay backwards to the age of classical European expansion, not forwards to the era of imperial dissolution. Nonetheless, the sense that processes of decolonization, even in their broadest connotations, only take shape after 1939 is dictated by a falsely based preoccupation with the outward form of political nationalisms among colonial populations. The latter, indeed, were the exception rather than the rule before the Second World War.
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1 The European Empires in a Transforming World
Colin Cross, The Fall of the British Empire (London, 1968) pp. 15–34.
John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982) p. 74.
There is no comprehensive account of the impact of the 1930s depression on the colonial world. See, however, A. J. Latham, The Depression and the Developing World, 1914–39 (London, 1981).
A. M. Carr-Saunders, World Populations: Past Growth and Present Trends (London, 1936) pp. 269, 280.
A spate of books dilating on the problems of Asian agricultures appeared in the 19205 and 1930s. A classic example of this literature was Sir Malcolm Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (Oxford, 1925).
This treatment of Indo-Chinese affairs is largely based on material in Charles Robequain, The Economic Development of French Indo-China (Oxford, 1944).
For a contemporary survey of this region during the later 1930s see Virginia Thompson, French Indo-China (London, 1937).
B. B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times (Oxford, 1961) pp. 213–307.
Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920–41 (Princeton, 1983).
The fullest account of this subject is Rajat K. Ray, Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector, 1914–47 (Delhi, 1979).
See Victor Purcell, The Chinese in South-East Asia (Oxford, 1965).
For a sensitive study of ‘independent Christianity’ in an African setting see B. G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Oxford, 1961).
A cruder political coverage of the same theme. may be found in Robert I. Rotberg and Ali A. Mazrui, Protest and Power in Black Africa (Oxford, 1970) pp. 377–426.
Thomas D. Williams, Malawi: The Politics of Despair (London, 1978) pp. 110–18 and Rotberg and Mazrui, Protest and Power in Black Africa, pp. 337–76.
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For a general political survey of the Dutch East Indies in this period see G. M. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (New York, 1952) pp. 1–101.
A good overview of the causes and course of the Depression is Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (London, 1973).
This point comes out well, if somewhat obliquely, in P. J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and his Generation (London, 1978) pp. 47–64.
R. F. Holland, ‘The End of an Imperial Economy: Anglo-Canadian Disengagement in the 1930s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xi (January, 1983).
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D. K. Fieldhouse, Unilever Overseas: The Anatomy of a Multinational (London, 1978) pp. 148–69, 558–60.
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For comments on smallholder production in south-east Asia see P. T. Bauer, The Rubber Industry: a study in competition and monopoly (London, 1948) pp. 56–73.
The regulation of rubber production was perhaps the most interesting of the commodity control experiments which characterized the post-1929 Depression. See Sir A. McFadyean, The History of Rubber Regulation, 1934–1943 (London, 1944).
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See B. R. Tomlinson, ‘Colonial Firms and the Decline of Colonialism in Eastern India, 1914–47’, Modern Asian Studies, 15, No. 3 (1981). This business cooperation across the racial divide was not, in itself, an especially novel phenomenon, but had been distinctive of an earlier phase of British rule in India.
See C. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983).
This treatment of Egyptian developments during the early post-war years is largely based on John Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918–22 (London, 1981) pp. 49–137.
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There is no major scholarly survey of the impact of the First World War on India. Some information may be gleaned from De Witt C. Ellinwood and S. D. Pradhan (eds), India and World War One (New Delhi, 1978).
A recent study of this subject is Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York, 1982).
Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–22 (Cambridge, 1972).
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For the flavour of contemporary British discussion on India’s internal political condition see George Schuster and Guy Wint, India and Democracy (London, 1941) pp. 133–210.
R. F. Holland, Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 1918–39 (London, 1981) pp. 164–6.
For analyses of Irish Free State developments as they impinged on British Commonwealth affairs prior to the Second World War see David Harkness, The Restless Dominion: the Irish Free State and the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1921–31 (London, 1969); Holland, Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance pp. 152–66.
Ged Martin, ‘The Irish Free State and the evolution of the Commonwealth, 1921–49’ in Ged Martin and Ronald Hyam, Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London, 1975).
Intra-Commonwealth diplomatic dealings during the run-up to the Second World War are exhaustively covered in R. Ovendale, ‘Appeasement’ and the English-speaking World: Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the policy of ‘appeasement’, 1937–9 (London, 1975).
Surprisingly, there are few textbook treatments of South African affairs in the twentieth century. For political developments T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History (London, 1977) provides a broad outline.
Those interested in economics may refer to D. Hobart Houghton, The South African Economy (Cape Town, 1964).
and Jill Nattrass, The South African Economy: its growth and change (Cape Town, 1981).
Two recent studies which touch on this issue are Dan O’Meara, Volkscapitalisme: Class, capital and ideology in the development of Afrikaner nationalism (Cambridge, 1983).
and David Yudelman, The Emergence of Modern South Africa: State, Capital, and the Consolidation of Organized Labour on the South African Gold Fields, 1902–1939 (Westport, Connecticut, 1983).
For a description of migrant labouring in African social experience see Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London, 1976).
Clement Kadalie, My Life and the ICU: The Autobiography of a Black Trade Unionist in South Africa (London, 1970).
L. H. Gann, A History of Southern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1934 (London, 1965) p. 247.
Anglo-South African relations in this period are covered in R. Hyam, The Failure of South African Expansion, 1908–48 (London, 1972).
Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Rule (London, 1968) pp. 198–233.
John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979).
The standard account of ‘trusteeship’ thinking is Kenneth Robinson, The Dilemma of Trusteeship: Aspects of British Colonial Policy Between the Wars (London, 1965).
Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire (Oxford, 1971) pp. 177–265.
It was particularly important, for example, in promoting pan-African ideals. See J. Ayodele, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–45 (Oxford, 1973) pp. 327–37.
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© 1985 R. F. Holland
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Holland, R.F. (1985). The European Empires in a Transforming World. In: European Decolonization 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17773-8_1
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