"A substantial contribution to the literature of imperialism and colonialism."
Kirkus Reviews
"Expansive."
Choice Reviews
A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization
Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration.
The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations.
Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.
“Thomas provides a fundamental rethinking of decolonization, drawing on his encyclopedic mastery of the literature and his own archival work and expertise to produce a global history that is certain to become a classic. The scholarship is nothing short of magisterial.”—Tarak Barkawi, author of Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II
“In insisting on decolonization as a long-term, messy, and still incomplete global phenomenon that cannot be properly understood by focusing on single imperial cases, Martin Thomas’s latest book further consolidates his position at the forefront of innovative developments in imperial, global, and decolonization history. In its breadth, depth, finesse, and clarity, The End of Empires and a World Remade never fails to impress.”—Elizabeth Buettner, University of Amsterdam
“Along with the two world wars and the Cold War, decolonization is one of the key transformative processes of the twentieth century. The term is widely used and ever expanding, so much so that its historical content is often forgotten or even lost. Martin Thomas reminds us of the historical dimension of decolonization and in the process he gets us to rethink it. A compelling account and an essential contribution.”—Stathis Kalyvas, University of Oxford