Decolonization and its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires * Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe's Imperial States, 1918-1975

The story of Europe's imperial divestiture is well known, and thus new accounts of decolonisation enter a field replete with high-quality books suitable for general readers and university students alike. Decolonisation is without doubt the feature of European imperialism—particularly British imperialism—best served by scholars of empire. They have been inspired by the phenomenon of the sudden disappearance of enormous imperial estates and their replacement by a forest of new nations as the modern international system took shape. In short, these two books are launched into a crowded marketplace and invite immediate scrutiny. What do they do that is new? How can they be distinguished from the mass of competing material? The answer in the case of both of these volumes is pretty straightforward. They enter the field in the van of a charge towards comparative, broad-based European accounts of decolonisation. Resurgent European power has begun to demand something more than the standard fare of single-nation accounts. If not quite a ‘new’ history of the termination of European rule across the majority of the earth's surface, they reflect contemporary concerns with pan-European history and a vogue for studies that emphasise legacies, peripheries, and the mental aspects of colonialism and decolonisation. These new studies seek to better situate Europe's contemporary interaction with the non-European world and the continued existence of ‘quasi states’ that once were appendages of London or Paris. Their Europe-wide focus, therefore, is what gives these books their edge; it is what justifies their production and obliges reviewers to recommend them heartily. This is not to say that comparative approaches to European decolonisation are new. But these books represent a tangible progression in the migration of European studies towards scholarly heartlands which hitherto had been stubbornly occupied by increasingly outmoded national accounts.