3 - Anticolonialism, national liberation, and postcolonial nation formation

Summary

No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men . . . It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes.

(Fanon 1968: 314–15)

Though rarely acknowledged as such in European history texts, or even in the critical conceptions of much of the recent work undertaken in the humanities subjects in the West, decolonization must surely signify as one of the key global processes of the second half of the twentieth century. In the two decades after the Second World War, around a hundred new states emerged (some fifty in Africa alone), having won independence from colonial rule. The largest number of these decolonizations occurred in what had been the British Empire, which, at its zenith in 1914, extended to some 12,700,000 square miles of the earth's surface, ranging from the Caribbean, to the Indian sub-continent, Australia, and large sections of Africa and Southeast Asia. The decolonizations, most of which occurred within a matter of years after the SecondWorldWar, involved an enormous loss for Britain, not just economically and politically, but culturally too, for as Edward W. Said, among others, has demonstrated so powerfully in his work, “most cultural formations presumed the permanent primacy of the imperial power” (1993: 199).