A book launch and conversation with Professor Martin Thomas, author of The End of Empires and a World Remade, also featuring Tarak Barkawi & Natalya Benkhaled-Vince.
Was the twentieth-century collapse of European colonialism as definitive as it is often portrayed? How can we do justice to the historical complexity of decolonization while maintaining a broad global perspective?
Professor Thomas argues that decolonization was less a transition of sovereignty from colonizer to colonized than a global, often violent process that saw the emergence of new international coalitions, triggered partitions and wars, and reshaped North-South dynamics. It energized different ideas of belonging and transnational connection, of sovereignty and independence, and of the struggles necessary to achieve them. Late colonial conflicts spurred other connections as the colonized ‘weak’ built transnational networks of support to overcome the military and economic advantages of ‘strong’ imperial overseers. The counterinsurgencies that followed left empires shamed and morally disarmed, while, at the same time, decolonization and its violence reshaped globalization just as globalization conditioned decolonization.
