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European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonization and decolonization processes have had a profound impact on the formation of the majority of sovereign states that exist today. But how exactly have natural resources influenced the creation of formerly colonized states? And would the world map of sovereign states look significantly different if not for these resources? These questions are at the heart of Fueling Sovereignty, which focuses primarily on oil as the most significant natural resource of the modern era. Naosuke Mukoyama provides a compelling analysis of how colonial oil politics contributed to the creation of some of the world's most “unlikely” states. Drawing on extensive archival sources on Brunei, Qatar and Bahrain, he sheds light on how some small colonial entities achieved independence despite their inclusion in a merger project promoted by the metropole and regional powers.

Why countries colonize the lands of indigenous people Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers.Lachlan McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands.Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination.

A presentation of scholarly work that investigates Iran's experiences with colonialism and decolonization from a variety of perspectives. How did Iran's unique position in the world affect and define its treatment of decolonization? During the final decades of Pahlavi rule in the late 1970s, the country sought to establish close relationships with newly independent counterparts in the Global South. Most scholarly work focused on this period is centered around the Cold War and Iran's relations with the United States, Russia, and Europe. Little attention has been paid to how the country interacted with other regions, such as Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Adding to an important and growing body of literature that discusses the profound and lasting impact of decolonization, Iran and Global Decolonisation contributes to the theoretical debates around the re-shaping of the world brought about by the end of an empire. It considers not only the impact of global decolonization on movements and ideas within Iran but also how Iran's own experiences of imperialism shaped how these ideas were received and developed.

The lethality of conflicts between insurgent groups and counter-insurgent security forces has risen markedly since the Second World War just as those of conventional, or inter-state wars have declined. For several decades, conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organised political violence worldwide. Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have fired interest in colonial experiences of rebellion, while current western interventions in sub-Saharan Africa have prompted accusations of'militarist humanitarianism'. Yet, despite mounting interest in counter-insurgency and empire, comparative investigation of colonial responses to insurrection and civil disorder is sparse. Some scholars have written of a'golden age of counter-insurgency', which began with Britain's declaration of a Malayan Emergency in 1948 and ended with the withdrawal of US ground troops from Vietnam in 1973. It is with this period, if not with any presumed'golden age'that this volume is concerned. This Handbook connects ideas about contested decolonization and the insurgencies that inspired it with an analysis of patterns and singularities in the conflicts that precipitated the collapse of overseas empires. It attempts a systematic study of the global effects of organized anti-colonial violence in Asia and Africa. The objective is to reconceptualize late colonial violence in the European overseas empires by exploring its distinctive character and the globalizing processes underpinning it.

This collectively written monograph is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the'Second'and'Third Worlds'. At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first'decolonisation'of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the book, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants -who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process.Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization's mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration.Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.

Déracinés, exilés, rapatriés, ces trois termes sont des marqueurs importants de la mémoire collective dans la France du second vingtième siècle où ils sont particulièrement associés à la fin de l'empire colonial français. Nombre d'images, comme la photographie illustrant ce livre, ont marqué les esprits. Pourtant, pour emblématique qu'il soit, le cas des centaines de milliers de rapatriés d'Algérie de l'été 1962 est loin d'être unique. Cet ouvrage aborde ainsi nombre de migrations consécutives à la fin des empires coloniaux. Privilégiée jusqu'ici, l'échelle nationale – les anciennes métropoles vers lesquelles se sont dirigés les flux formés des «　rapatriés　» d'origine européenne mais aussi, dans une moindre mesure, de populations dites à l'époque «　indigènes　» – n'y est pas la seule prise en compte. Car ces «　déracinés　» ont pu opter pour d'autres pays européens, l'Espagne comme l'Italie, ou gagner les Amériques pour s'installer au Canada ou en Argentine. C'est donc au prisme d'une perspective comparative et transnationale que sont prises en compte les fins d'empire et le sort, fort divers, des populations qu'elles concernent.

This volume presents the first global history of human rights politics in the age of decolonization. The conflict between independence movements and colonial powers shaped the global human rights order that emerged after the Second World War. It was also critical to the genesis of contemporary human rights organizations and humanitarian movements. Anti-colonial forces mobilized human rights and other rights language in their campaigns for self-determination. In response, European empires harnessed the new international politics of human rights for their own ends, claiming that their rule, with its promise of'development,'was the authentic vehicle for realizing them. Ranging from the postwar partitions and the wars of independence to Indigenous rights activism and post-colonial memory, this volume offers new insights into the history and legacies of human rights, self-determination, and empire to the present day.

This monograph addresses mobility and migrations as contributing phenomena in shaping contemporary Europe after 1945, in connection with decolonisation and the creation of the European Community. The disappearing of the colonial empires caused a large movement of people (former colonizers as well as formerly colonized people) from the extra-European countries to the'Old continent'; while the European integration project encouraged the movement of the citizens within the Community. The book retraces how, in both cases, migrations and mobility impacted the way national communities, as well as the European one, have been defining themselves and their real and imaginary boundaries.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the ends of empire in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, with chapters analysing the empires of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China and Japan. The Handbook combines broad, regional treatments of decolonization with chapter contributions constructed around particular themes or social issues. It considers how the history of decolonization is being rethought as a result of the rise of the'new'imperial history, and its emphasis on race, gender, and culture, as well as the more recent growth of interest in histories of globalization, transnational history, and histories of migration and diaspora, humanitarianism and development, and human rights. The Handbook, in other words, seeks to identify the processes and commonalities of experience that make decolonization a unique historical phenomenon with a lasting resonance. In light of decades of historical and social scientific scholarship on modernization, dependency, neo-colonialism,'failed state'architectures and post-colonial conflict, the obvious question that begs itself is'when did empires actually end?'In seeking to unravel this most basic dilemma the Handbook explores the relationship between the study of decolonization and the study of globalization. It connects histories of the late-colonial and post-colonial worlds, and considers the legacies of empire in European and formerly colonised societies.

Erstmals wird aus historischer Perspektive untersucht, wie die Menschenrechte in den globalen Krisen und Konflikten des 20. Jahrhunderts an Geltung gewonnen haben. Die Menschenrechte gehören heute zu den wichtigsten Glaubensartikeln liberaler Demokratien. Wer sie anzweifelt, überschreitet im Zeitalter von Weltinnenpolitik die Grenzen einer universellen Moral. Das'Recht auf Rechte'(Hannah Arendt) erscheint wie eine Selbstverständlichkeit. Die in diesem Band versammelten Autoren verfolgen erstmals historisch, wie die Menschenrechte in den globalen Krisen und Konflikten des vergangenen Jahrhunderts diese Selbstverständlichkeit gewonnen haben. Sie erinnern daran, dass es nicht nur eine - westliche - Sprache der Menschenrechte gab, sondern auch eine sozialistische und eine antikoloniale. Erst das Ringen um die Geltung der Menschenrechte hat sie zu einem Leitbegriff internationaler Politik gemacht - und in unserer Gegenwart zur Legitimationsformel für humanitäre und militärische Interventionen.

Este ensayo explora una relación particular que se extiende constantemente y se reconfigura a escala global: la relación de la hostilidad. Retomando algunos de los temas ya abordados en sus obras previas, el autor diagnostica la presencia de una violencia originaria, de la que las democracias no se pueden deshacer, al tiempo que corrompe el cuerpo de la libertad y la arrastra inexorablemente hacia la descomposición. De este modo, basándose en parte en el trabajo psiquiátrico y político de Frantz Fanon, el autor muestra cómo, a raíz de un conflicto de descolonización del siglo xx, la guerra -bajo la figura de la conquista y la ocupación, del terror y contra la insurrección- se ha convertido en el sacramento de nuestra época. Se trata de un libro de grandísima actualidad, accesible para el lector interesado en temas de política y ciencias sociales, en el que Mbembe nos obliga a interrogarnos sobre las relaciones entre la violencia y la legalidad, el estado de guerra, la seguridad y la libertad.

Partition—the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states—is often presented as a successful political'solution'to ethnic conflict. In the twentieth century, at least three new political entities—the Irish Free State, the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and the State of Israel—emerged as results of partition. This volume offers the first collective history of the concept of partition, tracing its emergence in the aftermath of the First World War and locating its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Making use of the transnational framework of the British Empire, which presided over the three major partitions of the twentieth century, contributors draw out concrete connections among the cases of Ireland, Pakistan, and Israel—the mutual influences, shared personnel, economic justifications, and material interests that propelled the idea of partition forward and resulted in the violent creation of new post-colonial political spaces. In so doing, the volume seeks to move beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon.

Die out-of-area-Debatte der NATO wurde im untersuchten Zeitraum vom Ausgreifen des Kalten Krieges auf Afrika und Asien sowie von der Kolonialpolitik fünf ihrer Partnerstaaten erfasst. Die Debatte belastete das Bündnis und übte einen maßgeblichen Einfluss auf die Struktur der NATO aus: Artikel 4 des NATO-Vertrags erlangte dabei ebenso eine herausragende Bedeutung wie die Absicht der Kolonialmächte, die USA für ihre Ziele zu instrumentalisieren. Die Analyse der Allianz auf Basis multiarchivalischer Forschung, die Oral History-Projekte und Nachlässe von Politikern einschließt, trägt so zum Verständnis der Organisation bei – zumal der Aufgabenbereich der NATO bis heute zwischen den Polen regionaler Verteidigung und globaler Ordnungsfunktion schwankt.

Dopo la seconda guerra mondiale l'Europa occidentale ha affrontato due processi che ne hanno cambiato volto e natura: la decolonizzazione e la creazione dello spazio comunitario. Nei tre decenni successivi al 1945, tutti gli stati europei che erano giunti al conflitto come potenze coloniali dovettero affrontare la scomparsa degli imperi e ripensare il proprio ruolo nel contesto mondiale. Nello stesso periodo, alcuni di questi stati furono tra i promotori di un processo che spingeva a superare l'idea della sovranità nazionale, per dare vita a un nuovo soggetto sovranazionale. Entrambi i percorsi furono accomunati e caratterizzati dal fenomeno delle migrazioni: la decolonizzazione sollecitò consistenti spostamenti dai contesti extracontinentali verso l'Europa, mentre il processo di unificazione e integrazione europea vide nella libertà di circolazione dei cittadini all'interno del continente uno degli obiettivi e simboli dell'unificazione stessa. Questo volume indaga come la questione migratoria contribuì a definire la storia, le pratiche e le identità nella nuova Europa postbellica, ricostruendo in che modo la questione della mobilità interna sia entrata nelle politiche dei partiti e delle istituzioni europee e affrontando in chiave comparativa la gestione delle “migrazioni di rientro” dalle ex colonie.

In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imagination and a practical political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements, diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments and heterodox visions of the history and future of the world. In this book, leading international scholars explore what the spirit of Bandung has meant to people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. It analyzes Bandung's complicated and pivotal impact on global history, international law and, most of all, justice struggles after the end of formal colonialism.

This is a transnational history of the activist and intellectual network that connected the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. John Munro charts the emergence of an anticolonial front within the postwar Black liberation movement comprising organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture and leading figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O'Dell and C. L. R. James. Drawing on a diverse array of personal papers, organisational records, novels, newspapers and scholarly literatures, the book follows the fortunes of this political formation, recasting the Cold War in light of decolonisation and racial capitalism and the postwar history of the United States in light of global developments.

Nationalism, the state of mind in which the individual's supreme loyalty is owed to the nation-state, remains the strongest of political emotions. As a historical phenomenon, it is always in flux, changing according to no preconceived pattern. In The New Nationalism, Louis L. Snyder sees various forms of nationalism, and categorizes them as a force for unity; a force for the status quo; a force for independence; a force for fraternity; a force for colonial expansion; a force for aggression; a force for economic expansion; and a force for anti-colonialism.In Snyder's opinion, nationalism should be differentiated from Theodore Roosevelt's'New Nationalism,'a phrase he borrowed from Herbert D. Croly's The Promise of American Life. Croly warned that giving too much power to big industry and finance would lead to the degradation of the masses, and that state and federal intervention must be pursued on all economic fronts. Roosevelt expanded upon this concept, and saw the flourishing of democratic government as a means of reviving the old pioneer sense of individualism and opportunity. Snyder, in contrast, extends the work of the two major pioneers in the study of modern nationalism, Carlton J. H. Hayes and Hans Kohn, in exploring this most powerful sentiment of modern times, and showing how it relates to the political, economic, and psychological tendencies of historical development.

A concise and accessible history of decolonization in the twentieth centuryThe end of colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was one of the most important and dramatic developments of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, dozens of new states emerged as actors in global politics. Long-established imperial regimes collapsed, some more or less peacefully, others amid mass violence. This book takes an incisive look at decolonization and its long-term consequences, revealing it to be a coherent yet multidimensional process at the heart of modern history.Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel trace the decline of European, American, and Japanese colonial supremacy from World War I to the 1990s. Providing a comparative perspective on the decolonization process, they shed light on its key aspects while taking into account the unique regional and imperial contexts in which it unfolded. Jansen and Osterhammel show how the seeds of decolonization were sown during the interwar period and argue that the geopolitical restructuring of the world was intrinsically connected to a sea change in the global normative order. They examine the economic repercussions of decolonization and its impact on international power structures, its consequences for envisioning world order, and the long shadow it continues to cast over new states and former colonial powers alike.Concise and authoritative, Decolonization is the essential introduction to this momentous chapter in history, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today.

Concerns about rights in the United States have a long history, but the articulation of global human rights in the twentieth century was something altogether different. Global human rights offered individuals unprecedented guarantees beyond the nation for the protection of political, economic, social and cultural freedoms. The World Reimagined explores how these revolutionary developments first became believable to Americans in the 1940s and the 1970s through everyday vernaculars as they emerged in political and legal thought, photography, film, novels, memoirs and soundscapes. Together, they offered fundamentally novel ways for Americans to understand what it means to feel free, culminating in today's ubiquitous moral language of human rights. Set against a sweeping transnational canvas, the book presents a new history of how Americans thought and acted in the twentieth-century world.

This collection brings together twenty-one key articles that explore the nature and impact of colonial withdrawal. Ranging across all the European colonial powers, the articles discuss various aspects of decolonization, including the role of political violence, changing popular attitudes to empire and the inter-actions between colonial conflict and Cold War.

This book fundamentally reinterprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was for their breakthrough. In stark contrast to other contemporary human rights historians who have focused almost exclusively on the 1940s and the 1970s - heavily privileging Western agency - Steven L. B. Jensen convincingly argues that it was in the 1960s that universal human rights had their breakthrough. This is a ground-breaking work that places race and religion at the center of these developments and focuses on a core group of states who led the human rights breakthrough, namely Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines. They transformed the norms upon which the international community today is built. Their efforts in the 1960s post-colonial moment laid the foundation - in profound and surprising ways - for the so-called human rights revolution in the 1970s, when Western activists and states began to embrace human rights.

Today it is widely recognised that the'long 1970s'was a decisive international transition period during which traditional, collective-oriented socio-economic interest and welfare policies were increasingly replaced by the more individually and neo-liberally oriented value policies of the post-industrial epoch. Seen from a distance of three decades, it is increasingly clear that these socio-economic and socio-cultural processes also found their expression at the level of national and international political power. The contributors to this volume explore these processes of political-cultural realignment and their social impetus in Western Europe and the Euro-Atlantic area in and around the 1970s in the context of three agenda-setting topics of international history of this period: human rights, including the impact of decolonisation; East-West détente in Europe; and transnational relations and discourses. Going beyond the so-called Americanisation processes of the immediate postwar period, this volume reclaims Europe's place – and particularly that of smaller European nations – in contemporary Western history, demonstrating Europe's contribution to transatlantic transformation processes in political culture, discourse, and power during this period.

The Cold War and decolonization transformed the twentieth century world. This volume brings together an international line-up of experts to explore how these transformations took place and expand on some of the latest threads of analysis to help inform our understanding of the links between the two phenomena.The book begins by exploring ideas of modernity, development, and economics as Cold War and postcolonial projects and goes on to look at the era's intellectual history and investigate how emerging forms of identity fought for supremacy. Finally, the contributors question ideas of sovereignty and state control that move beyond traditional Cold War narratives.Decolonization and the Cold War emphasizes new approaches by drawing on various methodologies, regions, themes, and interdisciplinary work, to shed new light on two topics that are increasingly important to historians of the twentieth century.

This volume provides a multidimensional assessment of the diverse ends of the European colonial empires, addressing different geographies, taking into account diverse chronologies of decolonization, and evaluating the specificities of each imperial configuration under appreciation (Portuguese, Belgian, French, British, Dutch).

A Global History of the Developing World takes a sweeping look at the historical foundations of the problems of developing world society. Encompassing Asia, Latin America and Africa, the book centralizes the struggle for self-determination in an attempt to understand how the current nation-states have been formed and what their future may hold. Although concentrating on the modern era, its scope is broad: it covers geography, ancient and modern history, economics, politics and recent events.The book features twelve chapters, organized into 4 thematic units, each containing one chapter on each of the three continents. These units cover different commonly-experienced phenomena among the peoples of the Developing World: imperialism, nationalism, globalization, and development. The first three are chronological, while the last surveys and analyzes the scholarly debates over the causes of development and underdevelopment. Through these chapters Christopher M. White presents a wide-ranging study of the major themes in studies of the developing world, including slavery, imperialism, religion, free and fair trade, democratization and economic development. Including detailed profiles of key figures as well as maps and illustrations, A Global History of the Developing World vividly illustrates the culture, personalities and histories of a key subject area. A perfect introduction for all students interested in the developing world in a historical context.

« Tout empire périra », Jean-Baptiste Duroselle La guerre est à l'origine des empires, elle est également la cause principale de leur chute. La défaite de 1914-1918 a fait disparaître les empires « monarchiques » (austro-hongrois, russe, ottoman). Les empires coloniaux ont été effacés de la carte du globe à partir de 1945 : les uns à cause de leur défaite (Japon, Italie), les autres en dépit de leur victoire (Royaume- Uni de Grande-Bretagne et d'Irlande, France, Pays-Bas). Ce livre illustre une autre remarque de J.-B. Duroselle, « il n'y a pas d'histoire sans événements » ; il est un récit d'événements où les auteurs essaient d'en cerner les causes, de lier les facteurs et acteurs en faisceaux dynamiques et en établissant des liens voire des interactions entre eux. La déconstruction des grands empires coloniaux édifiés outre-mer en plus d'un siècle s'est achevée en une trentaine d'années, le temps d'une génération d'hommes et de femmes. Cette histoire est déployée dans quatre théâtres géostratégiques : l'Asie orientale et méridionale, le monde méditerranéen méridional et oriental, l'Afrique subsaharienne et orientale et le monde du Pacifique. Aux quatre aires ainsi délimitées correspondent, grosso modo, quatre temporalités qui se succèdent de 1945 à 1990. Pierre BROCHEUX a enseigné l'histoire et la géographie au lycée français de Saïgon de 1960 à 1968. Puis, l'histoire du XXe siècle à l'Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot de 1970 à 1997. Il consacre ses recherches à l'histoire contemporaine de l'Asie du Sud- Est tout en focalisant l'histoire de la péninsule indochinoise. Il a publié des livres (voir liste des co-auteurs) et de très nombreux articles dans les revues d'histoire générale, d'histoire coloniale et d'histoire asiatique, en français et en anglais.

Decolonization changed the spatial order of the globe, the imagination of men and women around the world and established images of the globe. Both individuals and social groups shaped decolonization itself: this volume puts agency squarely at the centre of debate by looking at elites and leaders who changed the course of history across the world.

Entre 1500 et 1950, beaucoup d'Européens s'en sont allés peupler les nouveaux mondes. Après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, la décolonisation politique des anciens empires coloniaux causa un mouvement inverse et entraîna l'exode des populations d'origine européenne associées au pouvoir colonial. Le phénomène, important par son ampleur et ses effets indirects, par ses conséquences sur les pays d'accueil comme sur les territoires de départ, offre des caractères généraux mais présente aussi des spécificités nationales. Contrairement à l'immigration de fortes minorités d'étrangers enregistrée par tous les grands pays industriels européens, les mouvements massifs du rapatriement et de ses effets demeurent peu étudiés et mal connus. Des chercheurs européens dont les Etats furent concernés par ce phénomène migratoire, ont essayé de remédier à cette lacune.