by a rapid and hastily assembled set of political
negotiations in which it is clear that the
metropolitan power wished to hand over
the reins ofpowerwith utmost expedience
(Nigeria). In others, it took awarof liber-
ation, a bloody armed struggle by leftist guer-
illas or nationalist agitators pitted against
white settlers or intransigent colonial states
(as in Laos, Vietnam and Zimbabwe).
One of the problems with analysing decol-
onization, as Fred Cooper notes (1997, p. 6),
is that the story ‘lends itself to be read back-
wards and to privilege the process of ending
colonial rule over anything else that was hap-
pening in those years’. It should also be said
that any account of decolonization presumes
an account, or atheory, of colonialism itself:
top-down interpretations take colonial pro-
jects at face value, whereas the nationalist
account denies any reality to the goal of
modernizationthat the colonialstatepur-
ported to bring. In general, decolonization is
seen as either (i)self-government as an outcome
of negotiated preparation and vision from above
by a colonialstate apparatus, or (ii) as a
nationalist triumph from below, in which power
is wrested (violently or otherwise) from recal-
citrant colonizers. In practice, decolonization
was an enormously complex process involving
something of each, and shaped both by
the peculiarities of colonialism itself and the
particular setting in world time in which the
nationalist drive began.
There are two forms of decolonization that
rest on what one might call nationalist tri-
umph. The first is built upon social mobiliza-
tion in which a patchwork of anti-colonial
resistances and movements (many of which
are synonymous with colonial conquest itself)
are sown together into a unified nationalist
movement by a Western-educated elite
(Malaysia, Ghana or Aden). Mobilization
occurred across a wide and eclectic range of
organizations – trades unions, professional
groups, ethnic associations – bringing them
into political parties and propelled by a lead-
ership focused onracism, on liberation and
the sense of nationalidentityof the colony,
given its own history andculture. The sec-
ond is revolutionary – Franz Fanon (1967
[1952]) is its most powerful and articulate
spokesman – in which the vanguard is not
Western-educated elites or indeed workers, by
thepeasantsand lumpenproletariat. It rested
uponviolenceand rejection of any semblance
ofneo-colonialism. Decolonization rejected
bourgeois nationalism (of the first sort);
rather, as Fanon put it, ‘the last shall be first
and the first last. Decolonization is the putting
into practice of this sentence’ (1967, p. 30).
Both views depict nationalism as subsuming
all other struggles and hence obscures and
misses much history; both posit a True
Cause, as Cooper (1997, p. 7) puts it, in which
there is little truck with opposition. Mamdani’s
(1996) enormously influential book on Africa
makes the important point that decolonization
posed the possibility of breaking with the
traditional of European colonial indirect rule
(what he called ‘decentralized despotism’) in
which African custom granted enormous
powers to local systems of traditional (and
therefore cultural) authority, and developing
instead a sort of civic nationalism in which
cultural politics did not play a key role. Most
African states continued the colonial model in
which African colonial subjects were granted
racial equality andcitizenshiprights, but in
which ‘indigenes’ were simultaneously a sort
of bonus. In the historiography of the period,
the nationalist road to self-government tends
to take for granted the depth and appeal of a
national identity (cf.identity politics). It is
precisely the shallowness of these nationalisms
in the post-colonial period that reveals how
limited is the simple nationalist account of
decolonization itself. In practice, decoloniza-
tion occurred in the context of all manner
of contradictions and tensions between the
national question and other social questions.
There is also a narrative of decolonization
that has a singular vision, but from the side of
the colonial state. It was the colonial bureau-
cracy, long before nationalist parties arose,
that shaped self-government on a calculus
of interest and power derived from an older
conception of colonial rule (New Zealand and
Canada) as a stepping stone to Independence.
In this view, Africa by 1947 had already been
set on the road to decolonization – this is a
classic instant of Whig history – in spite of the
fact that the Colonial Offices typically saw
early African leaders as schoolboys or dem-
agogues (Cooper, 1997). Another version of
the dirigiste theory is rendered through the
cold calculation of money and cost. It was
the decision-making rationale of accountants
estimating costs and gains – and who in par-
ticular gained – against the backdrop of imper-
ial power’s economic performance after the
Second World War that sealed the fate of the
colonies.
In all of these accounts – for India as much
as Indonesia or Iraq – colonialism is as mono-
lithicastheexplanations themselves. There
is a reduction involved in seeing Indians orGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_D Final Proof page 146 1.4.2009 3:15pmDECOLONIZATION