Decolonisation

Question 1

What statistic might be used to show that there was an increasing number of independent countries?

Answer 1

There were 51 original members of United Nations in 1945, now there are 193 member states

Question 2

What sort of challenges did colonial powers meet?

Answer 2

Resistance against colonial rule:
- military
-intellectual
-political
Colonies began to seek independence and wanted legal reform. E.g. land rights, colour bar, voting rights

Question 3

What does the term colonisation mean?

Answer 3

It is a term and a concept, constructed by historians and political scientists. It may refer to: the process of colonial collapse, the progress of imperial withdrawal, the end of the empire.

Question 4

Why did the Second World War play a large role in decolonisation?

Answer 4

There was an enormous reliance on colonial support during the war, by France and UK. Not all of the colonies wanted to offer support to the allied forces, but had to anyway. Because of this, following the war, there were a number of colonial conflicts when trying to restore order after 1945. More than 500,000 civilian casualties were sustained

Question 5

Why did India want to be independent from the British Empire?

Answer 5

Pre-War failure of meaningful political reforms, Bengali Famine of 1943 (2million dead), post-war weakness both militarily and economically.

Question 6

When did India get Independence and what problems did this cause?

Answer 6

Indian Independence Act 1947. With this came the partition of India and Pakistan.

Question 7

What was the Year of Africa?

Answer 7

1960- 17 newly independent countries emerged

Question 8

When and how did Kenya gain independence?

Answer 8

Mau Mau uprising (1956-1960), more than 20,000 casualties

Question 9

When and how did Algeria gain independence?

Answer 9

Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), more than 250,000 casualties

Question 10

Which three approaches to decolonisation might historians take?

Answer 10

• National History (looking at a specific colony/state)
• Imperial history (looking at a specific empire)
• World History (look at the global connections:
  + inter-imperialism
  +pan-Africanism
  +socialism)

Question 11

What did 19th Century Liberals and Radicals fear in regard to the Empire?

Answer 11

They were repeatedly worried that the Empire would distract attention and resources from domestic reform, breed habits of autocracy and corruption which would destroy the spirit of liberty at home

Question 12

What impact did external expansion have on Britain’s bourgeois revolution?

Answer 12

It always remained incomplete. Preserving what Anderson and Nairn repeatedly denounced as an anachronistic polity and culture, lacking in a properly modernising industrial bourgeoisie, a suitably class-conscious proletariat, and an intelligentsia with the capacity for self analysis

Question 13

Stuart Ward has suggested that decolonisation has had an impact on the ‘condition of Britain’. What has this impacted?

Answer 13

Comparatively poor economic performance, the widely perceived crisis of confidence among its ruling elites, and self-questioning about national purpose and even identity

Question 14

What does Bill Schwarz suggest about the domestic time of decolonisation?

Answer 14

It suggests it has been radically distinct from that of the transfers of political power in the colonies themselves. It has been a much delayed time, one that is still happening now. The very idea of the post-colonial raises questions of whether Britain is fully post-colonial

Question 15

What are the multiple discourses of crisis that happened in the 1970s according to Stephen Howe?

Answer 15

Conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972-4. Resurgent of nationalist sentiment in Scotland and in Wales. A rise in English nationalism. Accompanied by a series of moral panics- clustered ever more threateningly around issues of race

Question 16

What can ‘Thatcher’s war’ be characterised as?

Answer 16

An imperial war, but may be considered as a hybrid type of war- part a colonial war of defence and also a post colonial war of intervention. It has been suggested that the Falklands war told us something frightening about the character of British patriotism. The phrase jingoistic was put to new use

Question 17

What does Stephen Howe describe as the Imperial hangovers?

Answer 17

Excessive executive power, excessive official secrecy, excessive centralisation, secretive and elitist government. The lack of entrenched citizenship rights, and an unwritten constitution.

Question 18

What statistics may help to show that public opinion does not offer much support for those who argue that colonial legacies remain central to British life?

Answer 18

53% of people surveyed in 1997 said they never knew that the US had been a British colony.

Question 19

What statistics may show that there was a general approval of the empire?

Answer 19

70% felt pride for the fact that Britain once had an empire. 60% felt regret that the Empire no longer existed.

Question 20

What does Errol Lawrence suggest about the links between colonial legacies and how racism has been shaped?

Answer 20

The imperial past does not determine the shape of contemporary racism, but the attitudes of superior/inferior, responsible/irresponsible, mother/children, barbarism/civilisation, provide a reserve of images upon which racists and racism can play. It helps to look at the way specific racist ideas are formed in the British context

Question 21

What is Thomas and Thompson’s overall argument when referring to globalisation in a post colonial world?

Answer 21

They suggest that globalisation did not suddenly disappear during the decades of decolonisation, but began to work differently. They aver that the transnational networks, cross-cultural borrowings, anti-colonial sentiments, insurgency and popular protest were themselves globalising factors.

Question 22

It is sometimes suggested that settler communities were passive markets for the entrepreneur to exploit. Was this the case?

Answer 22

No- settlers carried cultural baggage that influenced their habits of consumption in ways that favoured, even in a free trade world, the metropolitan motherland

Question 23

What were remittances?

Answer 23

Payments made home, exploiting global resources. Britain’s settler colonies still remained British in terms of their identity. The Post office buildings were usually the grandest public edifices, these symbolic forms of authority helped to imbue confidence in sending money across the globe

Question 24

Why did annunciating the allied war aims have a negative impact on the colonial powers?

Answer 24

They claimed they were fighting for liberty. They believed that ethnic self-determination was the best route to territorial cohesion and long term stability, but did not welcome the extension of these ideas on non-European states

Question 25

What does the ‘humanitarian double standard’ refer to?

Answer 25

Cold-war rivalry fostered the militarisation of anti-colonial insurgencies, proxy wars, and massive human rights abuses. In ‘states of emergency’ this double standard became the norm. Western governments, otherwise assiduous in their condemnation of Soviet and other rights abuses, insisted that purely ‘domestic’ colonial problems fell outside the scope of the supposedly global protections of international human-rights law

Question 26

Did decolonisation have any impact on migration?

Answer 26

Yes- Colonial withdrawals, and especially those encompassing partition, also triggered huge population movements and altered long-established economic and cultural relationships within and between countries and communities

Question 27

Why did the ‘weak’ win the battles of decolonisation?

Answer 27

As Chris Goscha has suggested for French Vietnam and Matt Connelly for French Algeria, the ‘weak’ won the battles of decolonisation because they were better than the strong in maintaining transnational networks of support - especially in economic and diplomatic terms

Question 28

In Black Africa, what were the essential differences in the approaches to decolonisation that France and Britain took?

Answer 28

the essential difference between British and French approaches was remarkably simple: London turned against white minority rule sooner. When circumstances demanded, the British, it seems, could disentangle their national identities from that of their erstwhile fellow Britons overseas. For the French and Portuguese, such instrumental selectivity proved harder. Among the most vicious and scarring of any decolonisations, the Franco-Algerian conflict and Angola’s thirty-year war illustrate the appalling consequences when fight and flight were combined in an effort to protect a white-settler
minority

Question 29

Why do Thomas and Thompson believe that recent decolonisation has been uniquely modern?

Answer 29

It was a product of wider twentieth-century events: industrial concentration and global depression, world war, Communism and other anti-colonial ideologies, mass consumerism, and the pull of US popular culture