The End of Empires and a World Remade – A Global History of Decolonisation

This is a magisterial study with nearly 300 pages of notes and references, making it the definitive history of decolonisation of European empires. The author argues that ‘it stands alongside the 20th century’s world wars, the Cold War, and the longer arc of globalisation as one of the four great determinants of geopolitical change in living memory.’ Late colonial conflicts led to insurgencies and counter insurgencies triggering ‘rights abuses whose global exposure left empires shamed and morally disarmed.’ The process ‘changed profiling ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, and collective and individual rights.’ The book covers cultural, economic and political factors and their relationship to globalisation, and the fact that its new liberal variant has in fact reinforced economic inequalities and dependencies. In discussing the difference between empire as imposition of foreign imperial control and cosmopolis as shared recognition of a single humanity, the book does not engage with the extent of US military and economic imperialism driven by neo-conservative ideology. Nor does it discuss the decisive role and influence of elite and interlinked networks such as the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum in their quest for single, centralised world government under the auspices of the UN. This seems to me a new form of imperial control – a long game dating back at least as far as the 1920s.