Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War Annual Lecture 2024 - Decolonization Across Empires: Political Economy and the Violence Continuum

Violent opposition to European Empire - from colonized peoples, from their external backers, and from revisionist powers determined to seize territory and assets - spurred two waves of decolonization. The first engulfed South, Southeast, and Western Asia in the late 1940s as part of the Greater Second World War. That first wave affected colonial Africa and the Caribbean as well but, in these regions, second surges of protest catalyzed colonial withdrawals over roughly twenty years between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. Neither wave was strong enough to bring down empire immediately. But they fractured empires’ three foundational pillars – of politics and administration, of social and economic structure, and of the cultural norms intrinsic to racial hierarchy.


In this year’s Sir Michael Howard Annual Lecture, Professor Martin Thomas will argue that violence was fundamental to decolonization outcomes, but rarely so in simple military terms. His lecture will explore conflicts whose local complexities and transnational reverberations shaped the forms that decolonization took. In the imperial rhetoric of decolonization’s wars, restoring order was increasingly tied to ideas of political economy, to the resumption of whatever socio-political plans, economic projects, or other modernization schemes were interrupted by conflict. The logic of ‘order before reform’ was trotted out as stock justification for late colonial counterinsurgency until global audiences refused to believe it. But imperial powers felt less need to defend the legal arrangements and security apparatus intrinsic to colonies’ violent liminal condition at other times. Instead, the everyday violence of colonialism was just that – a normative standard that excused relentless civilian maltreatment.