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This article discusses how the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shaped notions of rural life, rural community, and social reform in the context of South and Southeast Asian decolonisation. Building on scholarship analysing rural development either in term of continuities from the colonial era or as the result of specific circumstances after the Second World War, the argument here is that we can understand approaches to rural welfare after 1945 as the historical intersection of three factors: the rural specificities of decolonisation related to violence and mass displacement; FAO seeking relevance and legitimacy in the post-war order; and urban and rural elites objectifying rural life as a cornerstone of post-imperial nation-building. Empirically, the article analyses two (former) British colonies that experienced two different forms of decolonisation: territorial partition and imperial warfare. It relates these modes of decolonisation to the early formations of FAO’s rural expertise and argues that decolonisation was a structuring event for both local rural policy-making and the evolving international (rural) development agenda.
The public who acted as unsolicited citizens during the time of the constitution making continued to expect and insist, moreover, that state authorities and politicians open avenues for their participation. The public ensured that in India, there was no idolized constitutional ’moment’, frozen in time. Instead, they turned the making of the constitution into an enduring momentum for India’s democracy and its democratic politics. The constitution became an open site of struggle, never solely within the purview of judges and legislatures. The multiple acts of assembling beyond the Constituent Assembly during the time of the constitution making took on a life of its own, creating organisations and social movements, which animated local politics and sustained a vibrant constitutional culture.
The idea of a ‘late colonial state’ has been surprisingly durable. It is also the case that the meaning and significance of decolonisation – indeed our understanding of when it took place and how long it lasted – has been widened and deepened. We no longer tend to think of it as a purely political let alone constitutional event, but as a much broader shift in the relations between the ‘colonial world’ and its (former) masters and as having many more dimensions: economic, cultural, demographic among them. Needless to say, we are no closer to an agreed explanation than we were twenty-five or fifty years ago: the primacy of nationalist resistance, or of metropolitan politics or of geopolitical change still have their adherents even if it was the ricochet effect of all three on each other that offers the most plausible analysis. However, regardless of which account is favoured it seems clear that the nature of the ‘end game’ of the colonial state is the best place in which to search for answers. The late colonial state still has work to do.
Historical analysis of Ghana’s late colonial mine communities has been extensive and overwhelmingly dominated by organised and politically active male mineworkers. Questions regarding the linkages between formal and informal mining actors and cultural ideas in the broader mine communities have remained inadequately explored. This article makes a timely investigation by critically analysing a range of governmental and corporate archival documents and situating the discussion within the context of expansive literature on Asante, and complemented by oral histories. It centres on the Asante/Akan term “kankyema”—a sociocultural phenomenon which women transformed towards economic ends to navigate the late colonial political economy’s mining income disruptions. The article argues for the essential need to centre marginalised voices in understanding diverse agencies in African mining history and for a deeper reflection on the potentialities of contextual sociocultural ideas—notably, how marginalised actors invoke and evoke their capacities over different times.
This article examines debates about the future of health coordination between French African colonies in the era of decolonisation. These debates illuminate tensions over the future of French doctors in Africa, the role of international organisations, and the meaning of colonial borders for public health. In the late 1950s, French officials sought to reformulate inter-territorial colonial medical structures in a way that could be sustained with African independence, resulting by the 1960s in the creation of new West and Central African regional health organisations. Newly appointed African health ministers supported these organisations for various reasons, including sharing costs of medical infrastructure and the idea of a French debt that could be addressed through technical assistance. Both French and African health officials in turn naturalised the idea of post-colonial health coordination between former French colonies, regardless of shared borders with other African states. Both French and African health officials used the rhetoric of “disease knows no borders” to engage in a process of health “region-making,” although the outcome was health coordination rooted less in epidemiological realities than colonial histories. Late colonialism catalysed change in public health and medicine that mirrored broader political developments but also produced distinct discourses, agendas, and institutions.
For a brief moment in the late-1950s, British policymakers and key African politicians shared a vison: an East African Federation of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda. For British officials, one of the leading advantages would be transforming the colonial King’s African Rifles into a federal army. This aspect of the plans has rarely been recognised, but this article shows that British planning for the KAR became inextricably intertwined with federal thinking. Late colonialism was a time of alternative federal visions in addition to increased interventionism as British officials foresaw the end of colonial rule and sought to remake African institutions. A federal army was a key aim in such plans. This article argues that although no federation or federal army came into being, planning for them substantively shaped the military inheritance of the region at independence. Uganda and Tanganyika achieved independence with armies that were not fully autonomous, while Kenya took most of the shared colonial facilities. Thus, the article highlights the impact late colonial plans could have even when these did not come to fruition.
This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. Training for the diplomats of soon to be independent states was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challenging the very foundations of imperialism by empowering the diplomats of soon to be independent African states. Drawing on archives in France, the UK, and the US, as well as a newly recorded oral history interview with one of the first cohort of Ghanaian trainees, we focus on the development of diplomatic training from ad hoc responses to requests to a more formalised programmes provided by imperial powers and the United States, and tensions and competition between providers and over the content of the courses. We focus primarily on the Gold Coast/Ghana, contextualised within wider experiences of African colonies in both the British and French empires. We demonstrate that training for diplomats provides novel insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and agency that characterised the late colonial state.
This article investigates the introduction of human rights reforms in late colonial Africa, a period defined by the disintegration of European colonial rule. While existing scholarship often attributes these reforms to European efforts to ensure a smooth transition to independence, foster post-colonial stability, and address post-war geopolitical challenges, such analyses frequently overlook the agency of indigenous nationalist leaders and anti-colonial activists. These groups perceived the reforms as strategically motivated maneuvers by departing colonial powers and engaged with them accordingly. Focusing on the decolonisation era in Africa, this study argues that both colonisers and the colonised approached human rights rhetoric primarily as a tool for pragmatic objectives rather than as an expression of ideological commitment to human rights norms. European powers framed these reforms as altruistic, yet their underlying motivations were rooted in political and economic interests. Conversely, African leaders appropriated human rights discourse to expose colonial hypocrisy and advance their political agendas. This engagement underscores the tension between universal human rights ideals and the pragmatic realities of political strategy (realpolitik) during a transformative period in the development of the international human rights framework. It also highlights how political calculations constrained the realization of universal human rights principles such as dignity, equality, and inalienability.
This paper examines the role of big business as the linchpin of late colonialism in Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) during its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) years between 1966 and 1979. After Rhodesia’s rebellion against Britain in 1965, London and the world, through the United Nations, responded by imposing sanctions against Salisbury, hoping to bring it to legality quickly. However, Rhodesia survived the expected impact of sanctions until its demise in 1979. Scholarship has accounted for this survival in various dimensions, emphasising the role of white solidarity/redoubt in the region, manipulation of the market and sanction busting or breach by friendly states and businesses. Regarding sanction busting, less accounted for are the other major sanction busters, except for well-known governments of Portugal, South Africa, and the USA, as well as British and South African oil firms. Using primary documents from British archives and intelligence work, this paper shows the specific companies that were the raison d’etre of late colonialism and the British government’s response and actions against these firms. The paper argues that by acting as conduits for Rhodesia’s access to international markets, British firms kept its economy going, thereby propping up and propelling the Rhodesian rebellion, paying and sustaining late colonial rule, and delaying the decolonisation of Rhodesia. The paper further shows the duplicity and indecisiveness of the British government in dealing with the Rhodesian problem, thus elongating settler rule. In doing so, the paper thus contributes to the historiography of the politics and economics of late colonialism and the role of business in decolonisation in Southern Africa.
Despite Fanon’s recent popularity, his work on violence is portrayed as controversial, particularly regarding revolutionary violence. Revolutionary violence in anti-colonial movements is either glorified as a liberating force or vilified as terrorism. However, this portrayal misses one of the main contributions of Fanon’s thought on violence, that is, violence cannot be separated into direct and structural, physical and epistemic, or revolutionary and colonial violence. I theorise what Fanon calls ‘atmospheric violence’ – violence that is, like the air, pervasive within the colonial system and its totality is reflected not only in the apparatus, structure, and meaning, but also in the felt, visceral, and embodied. In this sense, atmospheric violence cannot be compartmentalised but is layered, dynamic, and able, which is particularly useful in investigating the revolutionary violence of the colonised being. This paper theorises atmospheric violence through three points of engagement: first, atmospheric violence shows that colonial violence is violence of abjection rather than of social domination and subordination; second, atmospheric violence indicates that revolutionary violence reveals the complex relationship to agency and postcolonial subjectivity; third, atmospheric violence shows how revolutionary violence poses a potential for and a limitation to decolonisation due to its nature of non-compartmentalisation.
It has long been acknowledged that the past can be a weapon. In Palestine, reports of the targeting of archaeological sites, museums, archives, and other locations of cultural heritage by Tel Aviv have been increasing drastically since 7 October 2023 (although they took place before). This article seeks to contextualise these destructions of heritage within a larger project of controlling history and understands this project to be a cornerstone of European colonialism, comparing it with Britain’s colonial control over how ancient sites are interpreted in what is now Zimbabwe. It asks what the role of the historian is in a time of genocide and revisits what it means to do “decolonial” work while history is being weaponised for colonial occupation. And it requires those of us who are interested in the past (and especially the ancient past) to reckon with our position in the belly of the beast.
Independent Christian Churches were an important aspect of African anticolonial activism, but the political afterlives of these movements in the immediate postcolonial period have been broadly overlooked. This article studies the African Independent Pentecostal Church, focusing on its entanglement with the politics of reconciliation and state-building in a decolonising Kenya. During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, the church lost its entire portfolio of land, churches, and schools. The article explores how church adherents sought to re-establish themselves on these holdings. These contests reveal that churches were political agents engaged in debates about the boundaries of postcolonial political community and the nature of post-conflict reconciliation. Churches’ roles as landowners and education providers meant denominational rivalries masked political struggles over justice for past violations. Embedded in intra-ethnic conflicts, churches negotiated with elites seeking to establish ethnic constituencies. Through this conflict and compromise, the brokered nature of the postcolonial nation-building project is revealed.
These excerpts from Inbetweenness, an upcoming hopepunk novel, intertwine eco-social justice narratives and Indigenous education through climate fiction. Inbetweenness challenges Western-centric paradigms by highlighting diverse voices and posthumanist perspectives, focusing on the tension between contemporary environmental crises and Indigenous knowledge systems. It features characters like Joanne Penderwith, a graduate student navigating social justice, ecological connection, and decolonial praxis, inviting readers to reflect on allyship and positionality within activism. The novel also juxtaposes human-centric actions with the voices of other-than-human entities, using multi-species ethnography to embody ecological storytelling. A pivotal segment details Joanne’s transformative experience at a salmon ceremony led by the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations, showcasing the resilience of Indigenous practices and their potential to guide sustainable futures. Inbetweenness uses fiction-based research methods grounded in 20 years of transdisciplinary research. It critiques performative allyship and advocates for authentic relationships with Indigenous communities, proposing a hopeful approach to environmental education and climate action.
This chapter synthesises the findings and discusses how sociomaterial processes shape languages. Challenging modernist linguistic paradigms, it examines how language categories emerge through diverse cultural, historical, and material practices. The chapter critiques binary linguistic models and universalist, teleological assumptions of standardisation, showing that stable linguistic systems are not ‘natural’, but result from specific sociopolitical and material conditions. In contrast, fluid linguistic practices in postcolonial and globalised contexts exhibit variability, innovation, and complex indexicality. Belize’s multilingual environment exemplifies a setting without a hegemonic linguistic centre, producing liquid linguistic norms. The chapter argues for decolonial approaches to linguistics that embrace heterogeneity and that challenge exclusionary, Eurocentric models. Ultimately, it positions fluid linguistic practices as a cultural avant-garde and understands postcolonial environments as inspiring insights into future global sociolinguistic orders shaped by digitalisation and transnationalism.
The political economy of these states forms the subject of Chapter 4. As many of the smaller Caribbean states transitioned to independence in the 1970s, the small size and perceived economic viability of places like Cayman have been used to explain away their non-sovereign status. However, this simplified reasoning obscures the full picture. Recent scholarship has highlighted how the current system of tax havens developed as European empires began to fracture. The British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands are crucial parts of this global network of offshore tax, and their development as non-sovereign states must be understood within this wider context. Meanwhile, the departmentalisation of Martinique and Guadeloupe led to increasing economic dependency on France, where higher GDP and living standards than neighbouring islands mask the high levels of unemployment and inequality. In both cases, local elites managed to cement their economic power as the economies of the islands changed during decolonisation. This chapter demonstrates that it was in the economic interests of powerful groups and systems to keep these islands from becoming independent.
The last chapter offers a comparison of protest movements in the territories: some appeared to be less politically motivated and more concerned with land rights and economic grievances; other movements, such as the march in 1949 in the BVI, openly called for greater political rights and autonomy. Yet, none of the campaigns by local pro-autonomy activists managed to achieve widespread public support or electoral success. This final chapter assesses local independence groups and their political discourse. It explores their interactions with the local population, existing political structures, and regional anticolonial movements. It is inaccurate to suggest that the non-sovereign status of these territories was a result of a lack of popular protest or a total absence of nationalism. Rather, through the relationship between popular protest movements, local politics, clandestine independence activists and the response of the colonial state, no widespread call for independence emerged.
Chapter 2 explores the impact of the global Cold War on decolonisation in these Caribbean territories. Three factors relating to the Cold War are explored: Americanisation in the Caribbean region; the significance of the Cuban Revolution; and anticolonial and Third World solidarity movements. As a newer colonial power in the Caribbean, the US played an important role as a cultural and ideological counterpoint to the metropolitan governments of Britain and France. The French State was greatly concerned about the popularity of the Communist Party in the French Antilles and took extensive measures to monitor and suppress members. The Cuban Revolution was a key moment for the region, inspiring activists across the Caribbean, including in the four territories in question. Fear of the spread of communism affected local politics and was used to discredit pro-autonomy politicians and activists. Chapter 2 argues that the Cold War in the Caribbean was, at times, a backdrop to political developments and, at other times, a crucial part of the political situation.
Chapter 3 addresses British and French involvement in the decolonisation of the case study territories. It assesses the differing approaches of colonial representatives towards the political status of the territories. This includes measures taken to repress anticolonial protests and activists, the Gallicisation of Guadeloupe and Martinique after departmentalisation and the impact of years of chronic underfunding. This chapter places these territories within the wider context of the decolonisation of the British and French Empires. It argues that colonial pressures prevented a fair and open debate on the question of independence in these territories.
Chapter 1 looks at the key factors behind post-war changes in political status, the motivations of local politicians involved in these negotiations and the impact of these changes on future steps to decolonise. In 1946, Martinique and Guadeloupe gained overseas department status to integrate them fully into the French Republic. Meanwhile, the West Indies Federation negotiations gave the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands the opportunity to reconsider their position within the British Empire. Both chose to become crown colonies with a more direct link to Britain. This chapter argues that these changes to political status were crucial to later attempts to negotiate greater autonomy. These changes were particularly significant for the French Antilles, as they would halt debates about independence for the following ten to fifteen years. In the British territories, crown colony status stabilised British rule and shifted the focus towards economic development.
Chapter 6 analyses and compares the development of political parties in the territories. Many of the local political parties in the French Antilles, like the Communist and Socialist parties, were associated with their metropolitan counterparts. As a result, their position towards French colonialism and local autonomy was compromised. This made for a striking blend of political discourse that was vehemently anticolonial yet also pro-French and anti-independence. Attempts to establish political parties in the Cayman Islands caused heated debate and much opposition from the Caymanian oligarchy and ultimately failed. This coincided with the failure of the most significant pro-autonomy politician. In the British Virgin Islands, personal battles between political parties and politicians often pushed issues of autonomy to the background. Chapter 6 contends that the development of political parties in each of the territories was closely tied to the ways nationalism and decolonisation evolved.