Decolonization: A Short History

Citation

Jansen, J. C., & Osterhammel, J. (2019). Decolonization: A Short History (J. Riemer, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original English edition 2017; German original 2013.)

Chapter Summary

The book has a preface and seven chapters, the last beginning on page 171, followed by notes, select readings and an index (272 pages in the paperback). It is a revised and expanded version of a German book first published in 2013, translated by Jeremiah Riemer; the authors call it part introductory survey, part historical essay. Its subject is the decline of European, American and Japanese colonial rule from the First World War to the 1990s. Rather than proceeding region by region or empire by empire, the chapters take analytical themes within a broadly chronological frame: the first three ask what decolonization was, when it began and how it happened, and the last four turn to its economic, political, intellectual and long-term consequences.

Chapter 1: Decolonization as Moment and Process

The chapter defines decolonization both as the transfer of power in individual territories and as a broader shift in international norms: the disappearance of empire as a political form and the end of racial hierarchy as an accepted principle of world order. H-France reviewer Jessica Lynne Pearson highlights two "toolkits" here: a set of questions about the late colonial era, external conditions, the course of decolonization and its consequences, and five possible explanations for why it happened in a given territory, from a deliberate transfer of power to the pressures of the Cold War.

Chapter 2: Nationalism, Late Colonialism, World Wars

The question of when: the origins of anticolonial nationalism around the First World War, the internationalization of colonial questions after Wilson's Fourteen Points and through the League of Nations and the United Nations, and the reforms attempted by colonial powers between and after the wars. Michael Collins (EuropeNow) notes that it compares European experiments in decentralization and integration but finds the coverage dense for its length.

Chapter 3: Paths to Sovereignty

The longest chapter (pp. 71–118) covers the intensive phase after 1945, from the end of empire in South Asia to the last strongholds in Portuguese and Spanish Africa and the settler states of Rhodesia and South Africa. Collins singles out its treatment of Indian independence, the Algerian War, the Congo crisis and, above all, the Suez crisis as the clearest comparative analysis in the book.

Chapter 4: Economy

The chapter examines how colonial rule reshaped economies, through infrastructure, trade, migration, labour and money, and argues that new states did little to reverse these changes, so that economic decolonization was often a matter of degree.

Chapter 5: World Politics

Decolonization is placed at the intersection of the East–West conflict and the North–South divide, with attention to how the Cold War and new international forums shaped the end of empire and the position of new states.

Chapter 6: Ideas and Programs

An overview of the intellectual history of decolonization, from figures such as Gandhi, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta, Ho Chi Minh and Frantz Fanon to Edward Said, and of how anticolonial thinkers imagined independent statehood and a shared "Third World" identity. It ends by distinguishing postcolonial theory from ideas that came more directly out of decolonization.

Chapter 7: Legacies and Memories

A short closing chapter (from p. 171) reflects on the meaning of the end of empire and the long shadow it casts over new states and former colonial powers alike.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: Defining and narrating decolonization

• Moment and process: decolonization as both a dated transfer of sovereignty and a longer transformation of norms and institutions.
• Delegitimation of empire: the global shift after which rule experienced as subjugation lost acceptance.
• Late colonialism: the reforms and new forms of control that colonial powers tried between the wars and after 1945.
• Paths to sovereignty: the different routes, negotiated or violent, by which territories became states.

Chapters 4–7: Consequences

• Economic decolonization as a matter of degree: the persistence of economic structures created under colonial rule.
• East–West and North–South: the two axes of conflict that the book uses to place decolonization in world politics.
• Anticolonial thought: the ideas and programmes that made independence imaginable and shaped new states.
• Legacies and memories: the continuing effects of empire's end on former colonies and metropoles.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Analytical, comparative design. Organising by problem rather than by empire lets the book compare cases from different empires within each theme. Pearson calls its scope impressive and its navigation between individual stories and scholarly debates adroit; Krishan Kumar in the Times Literary Supplement recommends it as the place to start for a compact and lucid account.
• Tools for students' own work. The questions and explanatory models in Chapter 1 give students a framework they can apply to any case, which Pearson sees as especially useful for advanced undergraduates and graduate students beginning research.
• Breadth beyond politics. Chapters on the economy, world politics and ideas take decolonization beyond the moment of independence. John M. MacKenzie in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History praises the thoughtfulness of the approach and the wealth of ideas compressed into it.
• Up-to-date framing. Collins notes that the book incorporates recent scholarly debates that place decolonization in the contexts of the world wars and the global Cold War; Choice calls it a succinct, highly accessible survey.

Limitations

• Dense for beginners in places. Collins finds that Chapter 2 covers many developments and historiographical debates in too few pages, which may confuse a general audience.
• Uneven treatment of dimensions. Collins also notes that the narrative chapters concentrate on institutional political change, leaving economic and cultural aspects mainly to the later thematic chapters, and that some findings there (such as the limited economic break) sit uneasily with the book's argument about the rejection of colonial ideologies.
• Little narrative of individual cases. Because the book is analytical rather than regional, readers who need the story of a particular colony or empire must look elsewhere.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the course's concise introduction to the end of empire specifically. Stephen Howe's Empire: A Very Short Introduction is a shorter, broader introduction to what empires are and how they rose and fell; read Howe first for the general concept and Jansen and Osterhammel for the twentieth-century endings. Pearson compares the book's role for decolonization with that of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empires in World History for empires; Burbank and Cooper, also in this course, is the long comparative history that sets the twentieth-century collapse against two millennia of empire.

For depth on particular cases, John Darwin's The Empire Project is a large-scale study of the British world-system and its unravelling after 1945, Frederick Cooper's Africa since 1940 follows decolonization and the postcolonial state in Africa, and Barbara and Thomas Metcalf's A Concise History of Modern India gives the South Asian story with which Chapter 3 begins.

How to Use This Book

The book suits students with some knowledge of twentieth-century history, though it can be read without it. A practical plan:

• Core: Chapters 1–3 (about 120 pages) give the definition, chronology and main paths to independence; read Chapter 1 carefully and keep its list of questions at hand.
• Thematic chapters: Chapters 4–6 can be read in any order or assigned to different seminar groups; Chapter 7 is a short conclusion.
• Case studies: apply Chapter 1's questions and five explanations to one territory (India, Algeria and the Congo, all discussed in Chapter 3, work well) and write a short comparative essay.
• Alongside it: Pearson suggests pairing it with a primary-source reader such as Todd Shepard's Voices of Decolonization; use the select readings to choose a regional study.