Martin Thomas, "The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Professor Martin Thomas is a professor of imperial history and the director of the Center for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. Martin, welcome to New Books Network. Thanks very much, Morteza. Pleasure to be here. Thanks.

End of Empires, A Global History. That's a huge book, huge project. I'm interested to know if you could just briefly talk about how the idea of the book came about and what does a global history of decolonization mean to you in this context? Yeah, that's a crucial question, isn't it? The book came about, I suppose, as a result of several things. On the one hand, it

reflection really on a career in teaching imperial history. I'm coming close to retirement, so it's kind of a looking back book really at all that my students and colleagues have taught me.

And mention of other people really is critical because I'm very much of the view that no single person can really attempt a genuinely global history. Nobody that I know has quite the linguistic capabilities and the research time to manage that.

So the book really draws very heavily on the work of others and is indebted to the work of others in lots of fields. What I am trying to do is to pull together that work to bring to it my own interpretations and inject, I hope, a little bit of truth.

some of my own research and thinking, which predominantly has been in the Francophone world and the Francophone empires. But that said, I have always been of the view that there is a value in that change of perspective.

that global history is proposing, which is the idea of working really from the bottom upwards, from the local outwards, from the small to the very, very big. I think there's an awful lot in that.

And I guess recently there has been a lot of books, history books about that history from the bottom, which gives people quite a different perspective of history. And this is what I particularly like about your book as well. Let us start with a definition. I know it's to a historian, like you might be an annoying question because people are usually looking for a clear definition. Decolonization. What does it mean? Because a lot of those colonized countries,

have been decolonized, but have they really been decolonized? So what does decolonization mean in this context to you? Is it an event that takes place over a number of years, it reaches a culmination, or it's an ongoing process? Yeah, thanks again. That's another absolutely fundamental question. And as you know, I devote a lot of the book, actually, to trying to answer those kind of questions.

basic definitional questions and those basic issues of whether or not decolonization has even occurred let alone whether decolonization has really remade the world um

So the first point I would make about the definition is that we have a double problem at the moment insofar as decolonization, I think, in the popular mind, certainly across a large number of countries, is associated much more with the present day world, with

the persistence of colonialism within everything from attitudes to institutions, to institutional practices, to what governments do, to what museums have in their galleries, to what societies do or do not do in acknowledging their own role in

perpetuating the inequalities of the world. So decolonization, to put that much more straightforwardly, I think, to a lot of people is to do with confronting racism within their own societies.

Could be within, for example, the police force, could be within the artistic world and the cultural sector, could be within the stratification and the inequalities of societies or of communities even.

So decolonization for some, I think, has little to do with what imperial historians used to describe, which was much closer to that process that you mentioned. In other words, the idea that decolonization is fundamentally a political process. It's essentially about ending foreign occupations. It's about the effort of

Communities that are struggling to achieve nationhood, to do so by means of struggle very often, but to achieve self-determination, independence, national sovereignty.

So that kind of rather limited political view of decolonization, I think, to be honest, is equally inadequate because decolonization pervades everything. It's as much cultural, certainly as much economic as it is political, I think.

But to move on, the second aspect of your question, I think, is about whether decolonization is event or process. And I am very much of the view that it is an extremely long-term process.

One that can only be understood holistically, if you like. It has as much cultural and economic and social aspects as political ones. And it is very much unachieved. It is not over.

And so I do not like the idea that we can define decolonization according to what the maps tell us, if you like. So we have dates of independence we have.

lines drawn on maps that conventionally tell us when particular countries achieve sovereign independence, etc. That is only very much a small part of the story. Real decolonization, meaningful decolonization, has to encompass the idea that communities are able to interact globally

globally on their own terms. In other words, not on terms dictated by the rich world. And that is where I think we have not yet got.

And I think this is an excellent definition. The reason is that I used to have that only narrow definition of decolonization. And I said, okay, we have achieved it. But then you see in reality, in political or economic interaction between countries, you can still see there's this dominant colonial power exerting its power, political power, economic power.

But again, after I moved to Australia, I realized that even some Australians think that they are a colony of the United States because, well, in foreign policy, yeah, Australia is an independent country. But in foreign policy, there is a saying that Australia is America's lapdog. And I guess they just follow. They're one of the most, let's say, loyal allies to the United States. And more recently with a submarine nuclear deal, which raised a lot of discussion in Australia. Do we even need that?

And I'm guessing even more recently with the election of Donald Trump, a lot of people are still talking about maybe they don't use the word colonization, but they can see how even the idea of colonization is not something that is only associated with developing or underdeveloped countries, but you can see developed countries developing.

Canada, for example, some countries in Europe, how they're all interrelated with a richer country, let's say the United States in this case. And you can see how that colonial power can still exist and exert its power. And that's one of the things I really enjoyed about the book, because it's not only a political theory, it's an economic phenomenon. And what I particularly like, I studied literature myself, was decolonization as a cultural reality as well.

English department, I love that word and decolonizing the syllabus for all the right reasons and I like that idea but I guess I didn't expect to come across that in a book of history which I did in this book and I really enjoyed that part of the argument that it's a process, it's also a cultural reality, it's a phenomenon that is everywhere. Yeah, thanks Morteza. I mean those are really shrewd remarks. I mean to

build on them, there is a sense in which to cut to the chase, if you like, decolonization achieves much more politically than it does economically or strategically or culturally. In other words, I would not for a moment question that Australia's independence is real, Canada's independence is real, perhaps more pertinently still,

Iran's independence is real, Kenya's independence is real, etc. But all of those countries, many of which are extremely rich and powerful, still have to fit in to an international order that was fundamentally made and sometimes remade, as Donald Trump is trying to do at the moment, but made on rich world terms.

We still live in a world in which the richest nations and the most powerful nations effectively determine the terms on which global interactions, politically at least, take place. Now, one could very well come back at me and say, well, it's naive to think otherwise. Perhaps it is.

But my point is simply that the cards are very much stacked against decolonizing countries because no matter when they achieve formal political independence, they are expected to fit into a pre-existing system.

global order rather than to change it. And that is at the root of why decolonization is so incomplete. And I think we can also see it very visibly in economic relations between different countries. Still, the global South, despite having enormous resources, they're still more or less kept poor.

They have to comply with the rules set by international trade organizations, and they don't have much of a political power to change those rules. And I'm living, like I say, in a developed country, I'm in Australia. I'm benefiting maybe somehow from those unequal relationships, but I can see that it's also exploiting people in the global south economically, which is one of the most important pillars of that decolonization process.

Yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean, if I can take one example, Ghana, the first black African country to achieve formal national sovereignty in October 1957. So the conventional history is tell us if you like. Well, since then, Ghana has had 17 sovereigns.

IMF loans. In other words, Ghana has had to appeal to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for sums of money to enable its economy to function on the terms that are expected of

decolonised states. It's not a Ghanaian decision in that sense, although some Ghanaians within government have profited undoubtedly over the years from those bailouts.

But the wider community, the wider Ghanaian society has been, if you like, at the mercy of what is often called structural adjustment. Sometimes it's described as neoliberal capitalism, but fundamentally Ghana, sorry, Ghana,

achieves political independence, but in the absence of genuine economic independence. And that's not something that was a surprise to its initial rulers. I mean, its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, of course, was the author of that book, Neocolonialism, defined the term in 1959. And I suppose what I am saying fundamentally is that he was right. You know,

political independence is not enough. Can I ask, when you mentioned Ghana, I was reminded of another thing. So former imperial powers, colonial powers, England or America, they make a lot of investment in Latin America, in African countries as well.

But now we have the rise of Eastern powers, such as China and even Russia. And some people say, well, they are the big decolonizing forces. But in a way, even they are also colonizing. I don't know if African countries are getting a better deal from China compared to America. But there is still, I guess there is still, like I said, I'm happy to stand corrected because I haven't done much research. I'm asking you to correct me if I'm wrong. In a way, even countries like China,

who are these rising economic power, they're also a colonizing force. They're colonizing African countries in the more, well, maybe they get there, like I said, they get a better deal from them, but at the end of the day, they're still kept reliant on big money coming from China. Am I right?

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Yeah, it's a really shrewd point. I mean, again, to break that down a bit, you're quite right that there are those who say, and indeed there is a real school of opinion that says the BRICS countries, as they were known, the larger countries that are primarily export producers that got together in the early 2000s in particular,

to try and challenge the primacy of the rich world nations within the G7 and the G20 economic blocs. They have done a good deal, if you like, to...

try and change the terms on which global trade is done. And that built upon the efforts made by decolonizing nations in the 1960s, and more particularly the 1970s, to build what was called the New International Economic Order.

a plan, a process that substantially failed, I'm afraid, and was overtaken by the power, if you like, of international finance and particularly the strength of capitalist globalization.

mention of globalization raises something that is also integral to the book which is the the idea that decolonization and globalization are not just processes that run in parallel but are really co-dependent um all of our discussion so far if you like has been about well how should um

decolonizing societies, decolonizing nations interact with the rest of the world. Well, that interaction is bound to be affected by and indeed determined by the way in which globalization is unfolding at that particular time.

Globalization that sometimes might speed up, it might slow down, but it continues and it continues now. It is not an immoral force. It's not a moral force. It just is. And it's something with which I think anybody who studies decolonization has to come to terms.

That's a good point, you mentioned. As I told you, I'm originally from Iran and you know that Iran has been under a lot of sanctions and they have tried previously to make deals with the West and the U.S. never worked.

And now there are people who are saying that, well, Iran should completely, you know, wash its hands off the West and go more towards make alliances with China and Russia. And China has been investing in Iran. And again, there are people who would think, well, yeah, it is an investment, but I don't think we're getting a good deal. It's

Basically, if we were to be economically colonized by the West, now we're being economically colonized by China. And because Iran is under a lot of sanction, it doesn't have much choice. It has to sell its oil for a much cheaper price and get the best deal they can, as bad as it might be with countries like China. I'm not personally optimistic that it will...

economically help the country. I think it will just turn the country into a big sweatshop for products or services, either whether it comes from the West or China or countries like Russia. I'm a bit pessimistic in this regard. I'm wrong. I'm only talking about Iran because it's a very different situation because of the sanctions.

So achieving that, let's say, decolonization, it's really difficult, not to mention anything of the enormous amount of internal corruptions and crony capitalism, whatever it's called, that is going on inside the country as well. One question that I had, and that's a question of violence. And I guess in the past two years, what's been happening in the Middle East, that idea of violence or the question of whether violence is justified or not justified is...

has been discussed a number of times across different publications that I've read. But the question of violence kind of features prominently in your book. And I'm interested to know if this decolonization of violence or violence to achieve decolonization, is it a

Is it a distinct form of violence? Can we have decolonizations without violence? And I guess in your book, you also make the point that once it starts with violence, it's like a vicious cycle. It goes on and on. Yeah. And I guess what's happening in Palestine and Israel is a good example of that.

which is a form of violence for decolonization that's been going on for 75 years. Can you talk about that idea of violence in the book and decolonization? Yeah, absolutely. If I may, just to go back a little to what you were saying first,

You made some excellent points there. And I'm conscious that I didn't really answer your earlier point about China and about, you know, different forms of colonization, if you like. I suppose the way in which I would try and bring all of that together is to say that at the point at which most countries achieved some form of political independence, basically in the 30 years or so after 1945, are

The one alternative, if you like, on offer to simply adjusting to existence within the existing order of a Cold War world was to pursue some form of supranational, in other words, multinational cooperation.

Now, the only major forum on offer at the time to promote that was the United Nations. Now, the United Nations is seen now and was seen since its foundation

by some as an organization whose purpose was to uphold the existing international order to prevent the proliferation of violence, to prevent the proliferation of conflict, but fundamentally not to change the world in and of itself.

For many others, though, the UN was seen as the principal vehicle through which the way in which the world works might be changed.

And so increasingly, those, including the Ghanaians, including the Algerians, the Vietnamese, multiple nations who favored some form of different international order, saw the United Nations as a way to advance their project. The problem that they came up with or they confronted was in part,

that the UN was essentially unwilling or unable to advance the interests of global South nations at the direct expense of rich world nations. But also, and this is where we get to China, Russia, to the contemporary world, that multiple countries

particularly those of the so-called Second World, those of the communist bloc, those that opposed the Western bloc countries within the Cold War. Their argument was and still remains that we fundamentally recognize state sovereignty.

So China is willing to do business with countries in Africa that others say should not be done, should not be done business with, if that makes sense, should not be partners in business arrangements or should not be partners in political arrangements.

That, of course, is very appealing to states like Iran, for example, that find themselves isolated because of their own politics, their own position in the world, whatever it might be.

But it comes with strings attached, as you said, because, of course, Chinese money has the same effect as American money. With money comes influence, and that influence has its own price.

So that's one side of the sort of conflict or its avoidance point. To come to your question about violence directly, is decolonization intrinsically a violent process? That is part of the question. And if so, is that violence unique?

Is there something about decolonization violence that is totally different or fundamentally different to that of other forms of political conflict?

The first part of the question, yes, decolonization is violent. It has to be, I'm afraid, because colonialism, which decolonization, however one defines it, is challenging. Colonialism is predicated on the idea of difference, on the idea that different communities, particularly a foreign colonizing authority,

somehow has the capacity and according to its supporters even the right

to administer, to govern, to dominate others. And at the root of that outlook, if you like, at the root of that worldview is an idea that humanity is not shared to the fullest extent, that we are not all basically the same. Challenging that view requires, I'm afraid,

some sort of violent opposition, because without it, empire would not have been ended. Empire, I'm afraid, was not about to end without the interpolation of political violence. So I'm not defending that violence, but I am saying decolonization is intrinsically a violent process.

There is much more in the book about whether or not that violence is fundamentally unique. One could object, for instance, that there are plenty of regimes that are not ostensibly colonial, that are equally, if not more violent than colonial powers, colonial authorities.

One could talk about global conflicts, world wars, that I must admit I see fundamentally as inter-imperial struggles, as conflicts between empires, but that nonetheless others would say are not really about colonialism first and foremost, but are about clashes of ideology, etc., etc.,

And the argument being put there is that, well, there's plenty of violence outside the colonial world. There's plenty of violence that is not anything to do really with decolonization. Okay. But what distinguishes colonial violence, I think, are...

three or four aspects. One is the level of asymmetry involved. It is often said that the greatest difficulty in explaining decolonization is that one is trying to explain fundamentally how the weak defeat the strong. Well, the weak defeat the strong, not just through violent confrontation, but through the fact that these are existential conflicts.

for communities living under colonialism. And they simply are not existential conflicts or imperialist nations. There's an asymmetry there. There's also an obvious asymmetry in power in terms of military capacity, etc. And in many respects, one is opposing the power of people against the power of military technology and technology.

If there's an optimistic story to decolonization, it's that people ultimately triumph.

But, to take that argument just a little bit further, it could be said that one of the reasons that people triumph is because the wider global community, including people within imperialist states, object to what is being done in their name. Responding to your question about decolonization violence,

I suppose there are three or four ways in which I would say decolonization is intrinsically violent. First is to argue that colonialism, by definition, is built on a violent interaction because it denies the rights typically of an indigenous majority and privileges the rights of

a non-indigenous governing and sometimes settling minority. That difference is itself what creates the everyday violence of colonialism, the worker day discriminations, the labor interactions that are unfair, the denial of equal opportunities to everything from education to healthcare to food.

that make colonialism so very, very unjust. But also, it is that difference that promotes violent opposition to empire. And that brings us to the second definition or the second dimension to the decolonization violence problem.

which is one of that asymmetry really, I suppose, in so far as decolonization struggles

for those who are seeking freedom from colonialism are, to a greater or lesser extent, but always existential. They are about their fundamental access to issues of basic need: food, shelter, the capacity to pass on wealth between generations,

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Those struggles are simply not as important for imperialist societies. They may direct enormous wealth, enormous military resource to win them, but ultimately they are simply not matters of existence or not in the way that they are for those seeking to decolonize.

That existential dimension helps explain why the weak so often defeat the strong. It helps explain so often why decolonization does progress through violence.

But this raises the third dimension to decolonization violence, which is that a lot of analysts would say, well, there are multiple other conflicts that are as violent, if not more violent, than decolonization struggles and which purport to be about competing ideologies or competing strategic interests.

are really not seen, at least by those who direct them, as being primarily colonial conflicts.

Well, I think that view itself can be challenged. I think, for instance, the world wars are in many respects inter-imperial conflicts. But even so, decolonization violence is rendered, I think, different because of that existential dimension to it, because it is so much a matter of conflict.

literally achieving the fundamentals of life, the stuff of life for those who are denied it through colonialism.

And then, of course, moving from the political to the, if you like, the cultural and social side, there are those particularly within the decolonizing world who say, well, violence is not just necessary, but violence should actively be embraced because, and this isn't a very difficult problem to confront, but because violence is necessary in order to not just frustrate

free ourselves as a community from foreign domination but to free our minds to attain a genuine kind of cultural renaissance which is a kind of fanonian a franz fanon type view of violence is very familiar to those in the field and very familiar of course to people working in literary studies as well um

It's not a view I buy. I'm not a Fanonian, but I do recognize, A, the degree to which Fanon exerted real influence over anti-colonialists and anti-colonial movements. Mm.

And B, that in a sense, Fanon's fundamental point is that at what point does resistance to an oppressive power become the only option available? In other words, at what point, if any, does it become legitimate to use violence to attain freedom? Hmm.

Now, even those within imperialist nations, particularly those within republics that are founded on the idea of some sort of common citizenship community,

recognize that there comes a point at which oppression, particularly occupation, can be so onerous that the only means to end it is through the use of organized violence. Now, whether or not one thinks that is acceptable, there is a logic to that. I do not myself condone it,

but I can recognize the logic. And in that sense, I think Funnel had a point. When you were talking about violence and also in the book, one aspect I really enjoyed reading about was, I don't enjoy violence, by the way, I enjoyed reading about it, was the biopolitics. And it reminded me of, I actually was trying to find a quote from,

Paulo Freer quotes in his famous work, I think it's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that with the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Because a lot of people might tend to associate violence only with physical violence, but inequality is a form of violence. That's biopolitics that you talked about earlier.

denying somebody the right to move between different countries, having a military occupation, that's a form of violence even if you don't shoot them or kill them. Homelessness is a form of violence. Yeah, and I also enjoyed the point that you mentioned about recognizing the logic of

You and I don't agree with it. We don't condone it, but we understand why that unequal relationship of power starts violence. But another thing that I enjoyed in the book was, and again, we can see that going on around the world even these days, is that inter, you call it transnational connections and solidarity. So all this decolonization has created new forms of connection among people from different parts of the world, right?

Iranian women, for example, than there were American women or women in Syria who expressed their solidarities with one another. It seems that the oppressor of the world or the people who are at the bottom of the power relations form these connections or solidarities. Can you talk about

how decolonization brings about these new forms of solidarity? Yeah, I think they are absolutely pivotal. And it's one of the reasons why I genuinely think that only a global history approach, a global approach to decolonization makes any sense, because the process itself is intrinsically holistic.

taking place as much across colonies, across communities, across empires as it is within them.

And it is that recognition, as you've just said, among individuals and groups within particular locales, that their condition, that their claims, that their causes are essentially the same as those of others elsewhere that helps generate those connections. Mm-hmm.

To give you two obvious examples, multiple decolonization movements effectively persist and sometimes begin as exile networks. They are strongest among groups of individuals who are compelled by their own politics to live outside the places that they come from. Yeah.

And very often they organize in so-called frontline states, meaning that as decolonization itself progresses, so in a sense there is a snowball effect. So there become more frontline states. So, for example, the organizers of the Mozambican independence movement for Limo largely operate from the frontline state of Tanzania.

Their Lucifer, their Portuguese speaking companions in Angola very much operate from outside Angola, sometimes within Africa.

Congo, Zaire, sometimes within the communist world, elsewhere as well. And as you said yourself, there are multiple examples within the Arab and Western Asian world that show those same levels of solidarity and connection.

Paying attention to transnationalism also is a means, of course, to make plain the role of women. Women are so often written out of or minimized within the conventional history of decolonization.

And tracing transnational connection, and that is the second example, I suppose, is one means to highlight the role not just of organized women's movements, but of colonized women in general who are experiencing similar problems of access to those biopolitical needs.

Primary health care, education for children, the opportunity to raise families in safety, awareness of those commonalities, those shared experiences of discrimination is critical in building those transnational connection blocks. And they themselves then become crucial means by which the course of decolonization is advanced.

And I guess I'm just paying a tribute here. When you talk about the Royal Women, I was reminded of a picture I saw on the internet

which absolutely amazed me. It was a picture of women in Sudan, I guess from 1970s, who were holding up the picture of Angela Davis, I think after she was cleared of those fabricated charges. And to me, it was amazing how, I'm absolutely sure most of those women were not even educated, but how they spoke the same language, they experienced the same level of oppression, maybe, that they identified and they formed these forms of transnational connections.

And I have one final question. Whenever people write a book about decolonization, there are usually other scholars who write back, let's say, and they

There has been, I guess, this new trend of some more right-wing politicians or scholars defending their legacy of colonization, saying that it created, it was a civil, yeah, there was a dark side to it. They tend not to talk about it, but defend it in terms of leaving a positive legacy, maybe the infrastructure, elements of modernization, bringing elements of Western culture back.

What is your response to or what do you think of these kind of claims or arguments about the positive legacy of colonialism?

Yes, thanks, Montez. Well, I suppose the clue is in your question, isn't it? Positive legacies of modernization and westernization. That's the point. Those who defend empire very typically describe it as a means to transmit modernity, by which is meant...

Western standards, Western expectations, Western forms of capitalist organization. I don't think that is intrinsically legitimate.

Why should other societies be expected to follow a model externally imposed, which they have no say in determining themselves? That basic injustice seems to me sufficient to delegitimize those arguments.

Dr. Martin Thomas, thank you very much for your time. I really wish we had more time to talk. And I do want to reiterate to our listeners that this is such a fascinating book. There's a lot in the book to read and think about. The End of Empires and the World Remade, a Global History of Decolonization, published by Princeton University Press. Thank you very much for your time to speak about your book with us. Thanks, Marteza. A pleasure. Nice to see you.

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