Decolonization: A Short History - Hardcover

Jansen, Jan C.; Osterhammel, Jürgen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691165211 ISBN 13: 9780691165219

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017

Synopsis

A concise and accessible history of decolonization in the twentieth century

The end of colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was one of the most important and dramatic developments of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, dozens of new states emerged as actors in global politics. Long-established imperial regimes collapsed, some more or less peacefully, others amid mass violence. This book takes an incisive look at decolonization and its long-term consequences, revealing it to be a coherent yet multidimensional process at the heart of modern history.

Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel trace the decline of European, American, and Japanese colonial supremacy from World War I to the 1990s. Providing a comparative perspective on the decolonization process, they shed light on its key aspects while taking into account the unique regional and imperial contexts in which it unfolded. Jansen and Osterhammel show how the seeds of decolonization were sown during the interwar period and argue that the geopolitical restructuring of the world was intrinsically connected to a sea change in the global normative order. They examine the economic repercussions of decolonization and its impact on international power structures, its consequences for envisioning world order, and the long shadow it continues to cast over new states and former colonial powers alike.

Concise and authoritative, Decolonization is the essential introduction to this momentous chapter in history, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today.

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From the Back Cover

"This rigorous yet accessible book is perhaps the finest survey anyone has yet offered in this fast-growing field. Jansen and Osterhammel have seemingly read almost everything important in a vast relevant literature but also go far beyond to provide rich stimulus for much future study and thought."--Stephen Howe, University of Bristol

"Jansen and Osterhammel's Decolonization will quickly establish itself as the most penetrating, thoughtful, balanced, and comprehensive short history of decolonization and its consequences. A major contribution to the existing literature."--John Darwin, University of Oxford

"In this remarkably insightful book, Jansen and Osterhammel place the processes of decolonization within their proper framework of anticolonial resistance, European transformations, and the global Cold War."--O. A. Westad, Harvard University

"For those waiting for a nuanced, comprehensive, yet readable account of decolonization in the twentieth century, Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel provide it here. In six crisp thematic chapters, the authors succeed brilliantly in explaining this complex historical phenomenon for the specialist and general reader alike. A major achievement."--Christopher Goscha, Université du Québec à Montréal

"This accessible synthesis provides an empirically rich and analytically important map of the history and process of decolonization. It is particularly useful in explaining how decolonization intertwined with larger forces of global history across the twentieth century and how decolonization fit within the millennium-old history of empires."--Todd Shepard, author of Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents

"A very systematic and concise introduction to the key aspects and events of decolonization that takes into account many of the current scholarly debates in the field."--Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University of Berlin

"A succinct introduction to the history of decolonization. This book discusses the various phases of the process as well as its core dimensions, and convincingly concludes that decolonization is arguably the most important historical process of the twentieth century."--Kiran Klaus Patel, author of The New Deal: A Global History

About the Author

Jan C. Jansen is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Jürgen Osterhammel is professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Konstanz. He is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany's most prestigious academic award. His books include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton).

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0691165211
• ISBN 13: 9780691165219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272