Decolonization or Liberation?

Abstract

The term “decolonization” appears to have been coined in 1932 by M. J. Bonn, a German scholar who later migrated to the London School of Economics; but it did not pass into very general currency until two decades later.¹ During the inter-war period it was in the British Empire in Asia that such a process could most easily be discerned. In India, British governments between the wars were continually engaged in often stormy dialogue with the leaders of the Congress Party and the Muslim League over the manner and the timing of progress towards that Dominion status which as early as 1917 had been acknowledged as the goal of British policy; in 1928 the Donoughmore Commission’s complex proposals set Ceylon well on the road to full responsible government. Increasingly the official historiography of the period taught that it was the purpose and destiny of the British Empire to liquidate itself by creating modernized societies ripe for independence in the modern world.