Between Independence and Decolonisation

John Smail, a historian of Southeast Asia, suggested in 1961 “that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely of the present but also of the past must change. If the change in the contemporary scene is extreme and rapid, we may speak of a crisis in historiography.”Footnote ¹ The special issue focuses exactly on this crisis, or rather challenge of knowledge production in the wake of former colonies becoming independent states. Its chronological scope spans from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. The contributions examine the trajectories of knowledge decolonisation during these pivotal decades across a range of geographical contexts.

We zero in on the interface between political moments of independence and changes in the production of knowledge about the past. When exploring this connection neither the political nor the epistemological can be treated as passive context. In decolonisation processes institutional and epistemological transformations are intimately connected and the papers in this collection analyse how politics and epistemology are reshaped in tandem or are co-produced to borrow Sheila Jasanoff’s term.Footnote ² The wording becoming independent, rather than gaining independence, intends to embrace individuals, schools of thought, and institutions defining their own ground within these processes of institutional and epistemological transformation.

It has become a truism that decolonisation is a process, not a singular event. The formal transition to independence, of colonies becoming states, has been deconstructed to the point of disappearance from the historical lens. At the same time, the political project of decolonising knowledge production has gained traction within the last decade. Fully acknowledging that indeed decolonisation needs to be understood as a process, and that decolonisation of knowledge production is an important and very much on-going project, this special issue demonstrates that nevertheless the end of formal colonial rule impacted the institutions and epistemologies of knowledge production in the field of history. Importantly, the specific moments of becoming independent also shaped the resulting possibilities in terms of knowledge production. The late 1940s and early 1950s were structured by what Sluga has called a “curiously utopian moment,”Footnote ³ as well as managed imperial retreat. On the other hand, the later 1950s and 1960s were more fully embedded in the logic of the Cold War.

The special issue then contributes, as outlined in the rest of this introduction, mainly to two bodies of literature: firstly, decolonial and postcolonial debates about history and epistemology, and secondly, the literature on the decolonisation process with a specific focus on history writing, memory and commemoration. Additionally, it contributes to historicising the category and field of global history.

Postcolonial, Decolonial and the Agenda to Decolonise

By exploring how different types of decolonisation led to different engagements with history writing we historicise processes of epistemic decolonisation. In recent decades discussions around the decolonisation of knowledge have been informed by postcolonial theory and by decolonial thought. Our exploration into how history writing changed during moments of independence is therefore positioned in a complex theoretical landscape. Let us situate it conceptually.

Regarding the concept “postcolonial,” we have encouraged our authors to avoid the term when referring simply to the period after the end of formal colonial rule and instead use “after independence” or similar. The term postcolonial in postcolonial theory implies more than a temporal marker of a before and after independence and has been developed in part to explore how colonialism remains as a structure of dominance that continues to influence peoples, societies, and knowledge making cross the transfer of formal sovereignty.Footnote ⁴ In Wendy Brown’s accurate words, “post” here “denotes a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on the contrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with this past.”Footnote ⁵ Some of the contributions to the special issue employ postcolonial as an analytical term when referring to postcolonial situations, postcolonial societies, or postcolonial ordeals.

The distinction between postcolonial as an (expendable) temporal marker and as (useful) analytical term to engage with the afterlife of empire is important for conceptual clarification. A further conceptual point is that the term postcolonial was rarely used by the historians and in the history writing analysed in this special issue. Postcolonial in the analytical sense is not a central “actor’s category” in the archives explored. The main characters in the different articles grappled with many of the institutional and epistemological issues that spurred the development of postcolonial theory but as theoretical vocabulary it was not a resource for them — in most cases due to the simple fact that postcolonial theory developed and gained wider traction later in time (and partly in response to continued institutional and epistemological entanglements of colonial origin as highlighted in several of the articles).

If postcolonialism was not central to the vocabulary of the historical actors, then this is even more so the case with respect to decolonial thought developed during recent decades by thinkers and practitioners primarily based in Latin America. Key thinkers such as Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo have developed influential concepts such as “coloniality of knowledge,” “decoloniality,” and “delinking” which, like postcolonial theory, place the question of knowledge production and epistemology in the centre of the analysis of colonialism and its lasting effects.Footnote ⁶

There are significant debates about the relations between postcolonialism and decolonial thought.Footnote ⁷ In geographical terms postcolonialism was developed primarily by diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia while decolonial thought originated in Latin America — a difference which partly explains why decolonial thought locates the colonial dynamics further back in time to include Spanish and Portuguese colonial incursions and their role in the establishment of what is termed the coloniality/modernity nexus.Footnote ⁸ Scholars have also pointed out that decolonial thought is more linked to world systems theory and committed to a structuralist binary which underpins an uncompromising stance on the difference and incommensurability of colonial/western epistemologies and indigenous epistemologies.Footnote ⁹ By contrast, postcolonial theory sprung from post-structuralist theories and discourse analysis and developed concepts such as third space, intertwined histories, and mimicry to explore postcolonial situations and entanglements.Footnote ¹⁰

Many argue that the differences between postcolonialism and decolonial thought are easily overstated.Footnote ¹¹ As Bhambra notes, despite differences in time periods and geographical orientation, both postcolonialism and decoloniality are concerned with the politics of knowledge production that “emerge out of political developments contesting the colonial world order established by European empires.”Footnote ¹²

Postcolonial theory and decolonial thought were not foundational to our historians’ vocabularies or in the intellectual spaces they inhabited. By contrast, the term and agenda “to decolonise” and to challenge “eurocentric” or “europocentric” approaches and narratives, was present, and it was also employed in the context of history writing and knowledge production more broadly. This point is worth highlighting as a take-away message in the collection of articles, especially the intensity and complexity of the contestations explicitly around the decolonisation of historical scholarship during this earlier period we focus on. On this point we are in line with Jansen and Osterhammel who remind us that the intellectual history of post-World War II decolonisation was much wider than postcolonial theory — and, we would add, decolonial thought.Footnote ¹³

While the historians, which this special issue engages with, are not following systematically either postcolonial or decolonial theory, their ideas and practices nevertheless sometimes point in the direction which these theories later suggested. Some ideas, such as Walter Rodney’s discussion of world systems theory, point quite directly to decolonial approaches also in their theoretical discussion. Also, some ideas that could be labelled “postcolonial” in the extended analytical sense are present; sometimes in the least expected places, such as in colonial administrator and historian Henry Evans Maude’s discussion of Pacific history, or in some of the volumes of the UNESCO History of Mankind — and sometimes in more expected places such as UNESCO’s General History of Africa.

The specific moment when these historians are writing — be it the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s — of course also directly impacts these questions. Indeed, the articles in the special issue highlight the evolving vocabularies and shifting institutional contexts of knowledge decolonisation throughout these decades. For example, history writing in monarchical Libya in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in post-independence Korea in the 1960s both demonstrated superficially similar alignments with foreign powers, be it the British in the first case or the Americans in the second. However, the context in which this historiographical realignment happened, was very different. In Libya this was part of the managed imperial retreat of Great Britain. In Korea it must be read within the context of the Cold War.

Many of the historians involved were hybrid “postcolonial” figures or go-betweens whose training and approach to history was guided by western scholarly and scientific traditions. At the same time, they were often directly concerned with decolonising institutions and occasionally also historical practices in ways that are closer to contemporary discussions around epistemic decolonisation. Indeed, concerns to break from or challenge epistemologies while effecting institutional change was very much part of the knowledge decolonisation agendas. Here language matters. You cannot really “postcolonise” something, but you can try to decolonise institutions, curricula, methods, and narratives — and this was explicitly part of the mid-century agendas.Footnote ¹⁴

In the intellectual history of mid-century decolonisation, a few examples of the close connection between institutional and epistemological change inform and dominate our contemporary discussions. The arguments in Ngúgí wa Thiongo’s still powerful call “to decolonise the mind” grew out of institutional controversies about curricular reforms in the literature department at the University of Nairobi during the years around Kenyan independence.Footnote ¹⁵ Fanon’s ideas — developed in part during the Algerian war of independence — arguably constituted the most influential intellectual contribution that exploded the decolonisation concept from its origin in European political-juridical discourse into something much more revolutionary that placed epistemology at the core of what it meant “to decolonise.”Footnote ¹⁶ This collection of articles demonstrates that these well-known examples are revolutionary tips of large institutional and conceptual transformations. As such the contributions in the special issue expand the breadth of the intellectual history of decolonisation as it played out among historians and in history writing during specific moments of political transition in the decades after 1945.

In this complex mid-century terrain epistemic decolonisation was obviously neither complete but nor was it a bundle of myths.Footnote ¹⁷ Also at this time decolonisation of knowledge was understood as partial, ongoing, and incomplete, and like today it meant different things to different people. It was also a moment of opportunity. As Andrew Goss has suggested the moment of mid-century independence provided openings for global knowledge decolonisation which later closed again and have all but disappeared in today’s asymmetrical system of knowledge production characterised by scientific extraversion.Footnote ¹⁸ A fuller understanding of the similarities and differences between knowledge decolonisation then and now requires solid historical contextualisation of the mid-century ideas and vocabularies. We therefore approach knowledge decolonisation not as a benchmark against which we are to measure past achievements and failures but as an ongoing agenda or itinerary that can be inspired and informed by engaging with its own history.

Postcolonial and decolonial theory, as well as the decolonisation agenda, are inter- and multi-disciplinary endeavours. The impact of historians in these debates has often been to challenge overly strict dichotomies of coloniser/colonised, the totalising and over-estimation of colonial power, but also complicate the role of agency and motivations by challenging the dichotomy of resistance/collaboration. We see this as well in this special issue where we find former colonial officers who become historians who attempt to write partially decolonised histories, we find local historians whose writing is still impacted by coloniality, and we find that categories like euro/europocentric are themselves historically and geographically contingent. The historical contextualisation of mid-century ideas and vocabularies also helps us to see the antecedents of the current decolonisation agenda in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Epistemic decolonisation is thus not a presentist fad, but has been interlinked with political and economic decolonisation at least since formal independence. Moreover, this interlinkage was not merely the concern of some forlorn postcolonial academics but was recognised by the very leaders of political decolonisation, as demonstrated by the fact that Nkrumah gave one of the opening speeches of the First International Congress of Africanists in 1962.Footnote ¹⁹

Becoming Independent and Decolonisation

Besides, and linked to, the literature engaging decolonisation as a political and philosophical project, this special issue contributes to the literature on decolonisation as a historical event or process. The first such literature discussed nationalist independence movements and their strategies and role, both pre- and post-independence, with a focus on the political and economic dimensions. While early on the literature recognised a lingering of imperial interests and networks, as suggested by Kwame Nkrumah’s notion of neo-colonialism in 1965, eventually authors also explored the continued colonial character of state institutions from the legislative and executive organs of the newly independent states to the use of language and education systems.Footnote ²⁰

At the same time, there was an increased focus on nations and nationalism. The field of historical nation and nationalism studies was jump-started by several grand theoretical contributions in the early 1980s, such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, both published in 1983.Footnote ²¹ The massive growth of the field was maybe best signified by the creation of the dedicated journal Nations and Nationalism in 1995. Part of nation building was about creating symbols, from choosing a name for the newly independent state, to the flag, the anthem, but also the design of money and stamps.Footnote ²² Leaders such as Nkrumah recognised this and were personally involved in the process of creating these symbols.Footnote ²³ Besides relying on newly created symbols, building new national identities also relied on mobilising the past. As the expansive literature on memory politics and commemoration has shown, this could take place by establishing museums, erecting monuments, or with rituals during national days.Footnote ²⁴

It is this literature which our special issue speaks to, by exploring the more academic dimension of constructing useful pasts. Universities and other institutions created the material, which could then be commemorated, and which could be used in school education. Moreover, the very way scholars in these institutions were thinking about the past, contributed to the formation of students who went on to become teachers, civil servants, and the next generation of historians. Writing the history of a newly independent state and situating that history regionally and globally served as a process of place-making, and, to use the concept of Adom Getachew, world-making.Footnote ²⁵ Writing the history of a place inside-out could be an act of historiographical self-determination. But writing autonomous histories did not mean to disconnect places from the world, but from an imperial imagination and ordering of it. Many of these histories embedded their subjects in regional and global narratives, thereby reimagining, reordering, and restructuring these spaces and hierarchies.

This special issue is not the first contribution to literature on history writing in the wake of independence. A small subfield has emerged within African history. Probably the earliest contributions are a monograph by Caroline Neale,Footnote ²⁶ and an edited volume by Bogumił Jewsiewicki and David Newbury, which includes chapters on history writing in Nigeria, Senegal, Zaïre, and Ethiopia.Footnote ²⁷ George Maddox’ article on “The Dar es Salaam School of African History” discussed how the school’s understanding of decolonisation and nationalism impacted the writing of African history more generally.Footnote ²⁸ The two German historians Hartmut Bergenthum and Wolfgang Kaese have presented monographs on history writing in Kenya and Nigeria.Footnote ²⁹ Cassandra Mark-Thiesen promoted the study of early independence journals as institutions and loci of debating and developing new epistemologies.Footnote ³⁰ She has also written on the Legon School of History.Footnote ³¹ Benoît Henriet looked at history writing at the Université Nationale du Zaïre in Lubumbashi to explore intellectual decolonisation and cosmopolitanism in the context of the Zairian policy of Authenticité.Footnote ³² Larissa Schulte Nordholt discussed in her dissertation the Africanising of African history in UNESCO’s General History of Africa.Footnote ³³ In South Africa, the discussion is naturally a more recent one. In their excellent edited volume, Oluwaseun Tella and Shireen Motala demonstrate how economic and institutional perspectives, knowledge transfer and production, and epistemologies are all intricately connected.Footnote ³⁴ And of course, Toyin Falola has engaged with the theme in various of his books.Footnote ³⁵

Outside Africa, the topic is harder to map, as it is often seen as part of specific national historiographies, rather than as a connected body of literature across national borders — a problem which this special issue hopes to tackle, at least partially. Most importantly, and as exception to the rule of not grouping such articles, the excellent Oxford History of Historical Writing includes for example Supriya Mukherjee’s discussion of Indian historiography, where she highlights similar questions as in this special issue with a focus on both building independent institutions and epistemologies to enable “an autonomous Indian perspective.”Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, chapters on Indonesia, Vietnam, and China show how history writing served the state — or in case of the latter two, each of the two parts of the states.Footnote ³⁷ But as Patrick Jory observed in a chapter on Thailand, similar debates around history also mattered to places which “never really experienced a process of colonization and decolonization.”Footnote ³⁸

A couple of examples will help to demonstrate the breadth of the field. Anthony Milner specifically discussed the role of historian in nation-building in a chapter on Malaysia.Footnote ³⁹ Driss Abbassi and Robert Ilbert discussed how national politics and national history writing are co-produced in their monograph on Tunisia.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Dutch, we find H.A.J Klooster’s discussion of Indonesian historians.Footnote ⁴¹ Latin America obviously follows a different timeline, but for Peru there is for example Marc Thurner’s excellent discussion of history writing.Footnote ⁴² There is also a literature on more recent independences such as history writing after Tajik independence, which also engaged with the teaching of history.Footnote ⁴³ This theme on university and more importantly school history curricula is also discussed by other authors, for example in regard to Malaysia and SingaporeFootnote ⁴⁴ or Guinea.Footnote ⁴⁵ Slightly more tangential are works such as Hana Sleiman’s dissertation on history writing in Beirut,Footnote ⁴⁶ Ulrike Freitag’s essay on Syrian history writing which however largely skips the immediate post-independence period,Footnote ⁴⁷ or William Carruthers’ book on UNESCO’s Nubia campaign.Footnote ⁴⁸

Between Global History and Global Histories of Historiography

Besides these more concrete contributions to the literature on postcolonial/decolonial thought and decolonisation, the special issue makes several smaller interventions in the field of global history. Firstly, the special issue aims to contribute to the establishment of the sub-field of global histories of historiography. History of historiography and theoretical history are a well-established field of historical research when it comes to Europe. However, the study of history writing by historians outside of Europe — what we call global histories of historiography — is still neglected. In global histories of historiography, in the first instance, global is understood as a broadening of cases by including the history writing in the global south. But that does not foreclose an eye towards globalising dynamics. First and foremost, the historians which are at the centre of this special issue were embedded in the same processes of global history: decolonisation and the emerging Cold War. Moreover, history departments like those in Singapore or Dar es Salaam became regionally influential and the history writing projects by UNESCO provided platforms for international exchange. At least in one case, two historians discussed in the special issue, met in person. As mentioned in our article on the UNESCO History of Mankind, Caroline Ware, the editor of the twentieth century volume, met Cyril Parkinson in Singapore to speak about the role of Asia in the modern world.

Secondly, the articles are an invitation to think about comparison as method in global history. Arguably, comparison has been neglected as a method in contrast to concerns of connection and circulation.Footnote ⁴⁹ The best-known recent examples of comparison are likely in global economic history, first and foremost Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, it is not just economic history which uses the method, as demonstrated by Alan Strathern in his discussion of the conversion of rulers,Footnote ⁵¹ John Elliott’s comparison of the early-modern British and Spanish empires,Footnote ⁵² or Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s even broader explorations of empires in world history and their ideological afterlives.Footnote ⁵³ While the individual articles of this special issue are not comparative, the collection is carefully designed as a coherent whole, inviting the reader to draw comparisons across national and regional divides. While the direct connections between the different cases are limited, taken together through comparison, they are grounding a globalising trajectory in terms of debates about decolonising knowledge production in the present.

Finally, the special issue helps to surface the longer and more global roots of world and global history. Global history as discipline has reached another inflection point,Footnote ⁵⁴ asking where global history is going in the future, as signified by recent debates in the field, including the conference “Worlds Apart? Futures of Global History” which took place in Vienna in May 2023. Here, the special issue suggests that for a constructive debate on how to move global history forward, we need to understand the history of global and world historiography. How has the writing of world and global history changed in the past and what were the limitations of these changes? And it is this history which the special issue contributes one puzzle piece towards.

Partially Decolonised Histories for Partially Decolonised Spaces

Calls to decolonise current academic practice in history writing form an important context for this special issue.Footnote ⁵⁵ We contribute to these debates with thoroughly researched historical studies of how decolonisation agendas have influenced history writing with diverse effects. Decolonising history also concerns our individual and collective practices as academic historians. How did this special issue come about? It started with conversations between the two editors during a visit to the UNESCO archives in Paris in 2022. We then circulated a CfP on H-net, social media, and our networks. Based on the response we selected scholars to submit papers for a workshop held in Cambridge in June 2023. A small grant from the Trevelyan Fund of the Cambridge History Faculty covered accommodation and travel costs of participants as far as possible. We wanted the event to be hybrid for those who were not able to travel, be it for practical or financial reasons — or indeed caused by visa regimes which particularly disadvantage scholars from Africa.

Based on the workshop we made a further selection of papers for inclusion in a special issue that would fit Itinerario which by then had become our first choice. In the selection of papers, we prioritised how they would fit into a coherent thematic volume, the geographical spread of cases, and we also aimed to have diverse group of scholars in terms of language skills, gender, and academic age. Importantly, the selected papers include papers of in-person and online participants. In the ensuing process we provided feedback to the authors, also to connect themes and concepts across the special issue.

This is — we think — standard academic practice in historical scholarship today and most readers would be familiar with it (and with the unexpected twists and turns we have left out). But none of these practices are self-evident, apolitical, or free of problems. These procedures both unite us and divide us as scholars working on these topics. Certainly, we do not think that our own practices are perfect, and like those of the historians we study, they remain at best partially decolonised.

One challenge which we have also failed to address fully, is the broader inclusion of scholars from the global south and based in the global south. While the special issue has contributions from scholars from Nigeria, Singapore, and Hong Kong — all in the global south according to the UNCTAD definition — they were at the time of the workshop all based in the US or the UK. The importance of where one writes from is also discussed in Larissa Schulte Nordholt’s and our articles on UNESCO’s history writing projects. The other challenge which we have failed to tackle is the hegemonic position of English and the anglosphere in academia, which is particularly ironic since we are both not native English speakers.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most contributors of the special issue were based at institutions in English speaking countries; the exception being two authors in Korea, one in Italy, and one in Denmark. There are no easy solutions for these issues, but they are central if one takes the question of decolonisation seriously.

We believe an important part of any decolonising agenda — and this is even more true considering the theme of the special issue — is to be transparent about our procedures and recognise that they are not neutral, apolitical, or self-evident, but rather, they are — to use Donna Haraway’s influential term — situated.Footnote ⁵⁷ We hope that this contribution to the intellectual history of decolonisation will be read in this light.

The special issue includes eight articles and the afterword by Toyin Falola. First Adrian Young explores the contribution of Henry Maude, a former colonial administrator, to Pacific history, with Maude’s past in interesting, and not always expected, ways shaping his writing. Next, Benjamin Goh analyses the founding of the history department at the University of Malaya and its first two chairs, who both remained limited in their attempts to write autonomous histories due to their inability to speak local languages, but who made important contributions on institutional levels. Third, Andrew Ivaska explores the debates in Dar es Salaam between two schools of history writing and their impact on local institution building. Next, Carlotta Marchi discusses history writing in monarchical Libya, which tried to legitimise the new king through his religious role and unexpectedly, his close relationship to Great Britain. Similarly, the Korean authors writing for Sasanggye Magazine, studied by Ria Chae and Mincheol Park, constituted Korean independence partially by relying epistemologically on a new external power — in their case the United States. In Hong Kong, as discussed by Allan Pang, history writing was determined by the absence and in fact impossibility of decolonisation. The last two chapters engage with large-scale history projects by UNESCO. First, in our own chapter, we — the special issue editors — discuss how the production of the UNESCO’s History of Mankind was impacted by formerly colonised states joining the international organisation. And last, Larissa Schulte Nordholt explores how institutional limitations and epistemological questions were co-determined in the writing of the UNESCO General History of Africa. The two UNESCO history projects were initiated by the same organisation but twenty years apart. While both projects aimed to overcome Eurocentrism, their differences also reflect changes in the meaning of knowledge decolonisation during these decades. The special issue is concluded by an afterword by Toyin Falola, which we believe is more than fitting, considering his pioneering and seminal contributions to the intellectual history of decolonisation and its connections to historiography, which were indeed a central inspiration for this special issue.

This situatedness of knowledge is at the core of the articles in the special issue, in that political and epistemological orders are understood to be connected or co-produced.Footnote ⁵⁸ To explore this co-production, the articles focus on the hinges that connect politics and epistemology. In some cases, the hinges are institutions, as the history department in Dar es Salaam, individuals such as former colonial administrators and academic historians, such as Maude, or long-running publications undertakings, as UNESCO’s General History of Africa.

The articles share a focus on analysing the territorial or spatial categories that historical actors employ to make sense of the world during these moments of political and epistemological change: the nation, the region, the civilisation, the “area” (as in area studies), or the colony in cases where independence was regarded as partial, unfinished, non-existing, or in other ways contested. Benjamin Goh shows how historians at the University of Malaya in Singapore were constructing an identity for Malaya and Singapore, while simultaneously constituting a wider notion of South-East Asia connected globally through trade, ideas, and politics. Similarly, some of Andrew Ivaska’s historians in Dar es Salaam explored Tanzanian history as embedded within a broader world system. Ria Chae and Mincheol Park’s authors in the Sasanggye magazine construct Korean history as developing through the same historical stages as — but separate from — Europe and the United States. Each of these examples can be understood as different attempts of world-making by embedding the national in new ways in global history, and newly framing world history as a whole. Allan Pang’s Hong Kong was a space in limbo, not yet decolonised from the British empire, and eventually integrated into China rather than independent. As such part of the question was to what Hong Kong history belonged: was it imperial history, Chinese history, or its own field? Carlotta Marchi on the other hand explores historians in Libya who were more inward looking, with a task to legitimate a specific ruler and giving Libya an identity through that ruler’s religious position as head of the Sanusiyya Sufi order. Similarly, Terrence Ranger, another historian discussed by Andrew Ivaska, was more concerned with unearthing a “usable past” for the Tanzanian nationalist project, than embedding that past in a global history. The special issue understands spatial designations as being geographical as well as political and epistemological. We provide thickness to the spatial concepts by exploring how and why they have been used at various times and shed new light on their role in historiography during and beyond the specific moments of independence.

As observed, many of the discussed spaces, were at best partially decolonised — but the same was true for institutions and actors. When speaking of partially decolonised histories, places or historians, we do not have a checklist in mind which would complete the decolonisation — rather decolonisation remains by its very nature always incomplete. These partially decolonised histories are the product of limitations which their own authors in many cases make explicit. In analysing the production of historiography, the articles share a focus on the authors, many of whom came from the colonial metropole and started their positions in late-colonial universities, such Benjamin Goh’s protagonist Cyril Parkinson or Adrian Young’s Maude. Others, like the Korean authors studied by Ria Chae and Mincheol Park, while being born in the regions about which they wrote, were still in many cases educated abroad — mostly in Japan, and to a lesser degree later in the United States. These partially decolonised authors produced partially decolonised histories for partially decolonised spaces. Beyond what they wrote, the different articles explore how they wrote and how they engaged with their field, through university practices, organisation of conferences, travel, etc. The focus on the individuals and their biographies foregrounds their subjectivity, sharply contrasted by mostly positivist practices and claims to objectivity in their history writing.

Another shared focus is on what we call epistemological sovereignty, by which we understand the interplay of telling one’s own story to claim and reinforce one’s self-determination and the self-determination to be able to tell one’s own story. Across the articles the historical agents call for the formulation of autonomous histories — a term specifically used in Singapore, Korea, and the Pacific, but conceptually also applicable for the African case studies — which is nothing less than the attempt to regain epistemological sovereignty. But regaining sovereignty (also economic or political) is a process caught in the tension between independence and decolonisation with the moment of independence being an important moment for decolonisation, but neither its beginning nor its end. Independence means change — in certain ways a rupture. In other ways, it is also marked by continuities, in terms of people, institutions, and epistemologies. However, as the articles show all three can also become drivers for change. The projects by the discussed historians are first and foremost about writing history; but always with an eye to the making of futures. The articles thus explore not only the historicity of the historians and historiographies in question, but also their futurity. If historicity is the way how we locate the present to the past based on a specific notion of temporality, the futurity is not merely the future, but similarly how we relate to the present in the shadow of an imagined, wished for, or (seemingly) inevitable future.Footnote ⁵⁹

Discussing these different historians, departments and history writing projects, the authors of this special issue are therefore not just highlighting these individual people and specific works of history writing. By exploring changes to the “vision of the past” this special issue is also a lens on the “great changes in the contemporary scene” and the therein embedded hopes and visions for the future.