Abstract
The end of European formal empires after 1945 has generated a colossal literature over the last 30 years, but this book will prove to be of unusual significance and for two main reasons. Firstly, it is based on an impressive range of sources: 170 pages, almost a third of the book, is taken up with notes, bibliography, and a comprehensive index. Secondly, and perhaps of greater importance, it is an in-depth study of the two major decolonizing powers, and the comparisons and the contrasts between their activities bring into sharper relief the policies of both.
For example, comparing what the French and the British did dispels the still-powerful myth that the British handled decolonization much more smoothly and skilfully than their neighbours. It is true that, until the early 1960s, the French made more violent efforts to try to preserve their empire than did the British. The conflicts in Indochina and Algeria were savage, and the French committed some appalling crimes in the process of losing both. Two main reasons can be given for this. France came out of the Second World War with its pride in itself dented. Asserting its authority in Indochina after 1946 was one way of trying to restore prestige and a sense of self-worth. In contrast the British emerged as clear winners. As such, they could accept the loss of Palestine and India with more equanimity, and rationalize both instances as skilful pieces of diplomacy that extricated the nation from unwinnable conflicts. France was also drawn more into military conflict because it had a bigger settler problem than had the British, and settlers were always likely to be the most implacable enemies of decolonization. This was particularly true of Algeria, where the problem was especially acute because Algeria was seen by the settlers, and by most of the French military and political elite, as a part of the French nation: hence the extreme bitterness of the conflict which almost spilled over into civil war. Yet, as Thomas insists, the British were responsible for many atrocities during decolonization. They left both Palestine and India with unseemly haste and should have stayed long enough to prevent, or at least mitigate, the appalling ethnic cleansing and displacement that followed independence in both areas. Besides that, Britain used a great deal of force to assert itself in Malaya in the late 1940s because of its crucial economic importance at the time, and in suppressing Mau Mau in Kenya – a settler colony – they often acted with great brutality.
It is also worth noting that, like the French, the British government consistently refused to call these colonial struggles by their proper name – wars – because that would have made them international events inviting closer scrutiny and greater criticism by bodies such as the UN. Instead they resorted to Orwellian euphemisms such as ‘emergencies’ to describe them. Moreover, in moving from fight to flight over time both nations were responding to the same stimuli. Along with the UN, the varying anti-colonialisms of the new great powers, the USA and the USSR, put empire under new pressure. Meanwhile the great boom of 1950–75, and the rapid rise of intra-European trade and of the EEC, made the empire more marginal, both practically and imaginatively. Full employment and welfare systems, and the rise of consumerism, absorbed the attention of the rising generations. In both countries the prestige and importance of empire faded, and it began to seem less and less worth fighting for. Although Thomas does not raise the issue directly, his work underlines the fact that empires also dissolve because the colonized learn to turn the colonizers’ weapons against them. This was particularly evident in the ideational sphere where nationalist forces turned the French and British claims that they were bringing equality and liberty into demands for immediate freedom. Nonetheless, as Thomas argues, in their negotiations with nationalists in their African colonies both countries strove, often successfully, to replace formal with informal empire, ensuring that their major interests, strategically and economically, were preserved as far as possible.
A short review cannot do justice to the richness, the comprehensiveness, and the scholarly depth of Thomas’s work, which will surely serve as a leading text in its area for many years. There are weaknesses. More should have been said about the economic element in decolonization, and, in a book in which fact and analysis are so closely interwoven, perhaps Thomas’s major conclusions could have been spelled out more clearly. Despite concluding sections to each chapter (which tend to add more material), readers are not offered concise summaries of what they have learned, and there is no final short chapter pulling all the strings together. But that does not detract much from the fact that this is a work of unusual merit.