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Why Decolonization?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2020

Cyrus Schayegh  and
Yoav Di-Capua
Cyrus Schayegh
Affiliation:
International History Department, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, e-mail: [email protected]
Yoav Di-Capua
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Texas at Austin, e-mail: [email protected]
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Type
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 137 - 145
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

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2 More recent: Hyam, Ronald, Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

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5 Thomas and Thompson, “Introduction,” 2.

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8 For a focus on European action in a Middle Eastern case, see e.g., Zamir, Meir, The Secret Anglo–French War in the Middle East: Intelligence and Decolonization, 1940–1948 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015)Google Scholar.

9 In the 1950s regarding France, for example, some fought for full equality within the empire: Cooper, Fredrick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Lawrence, Adria, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 See e.g,. Connelly, Matthew, A Diplomatic Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 119–41Google Scholar; Stenner, David, Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 3 and 4; Keller, Fritz, Gelebter Internationalismus. Österreichs Linke und der algerische Widerstand (1958–1963) (Wien: Promedia Verlag, 2010)Google Scholar.

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14 However, see also Maurice M. Labelle, “Tensions of Decolonization: Lebanon, West Africans, and a Color Line within the Global Color Line, May 1945,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 36–57; colonized attempts to draw a white/non-white color line, reach back deep into the colonial period: Rey, Carina, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 78–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 Burke, Roland, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jensen, Steven, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Maul, Daniel, Human Rights, Development, and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–70 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 James Brennan, “Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 1953–64,” in Making a World after Empire, 173–95; Ismael, Tareq, The U.A.R. in Africa: Egypt's Policy under Nasser (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, Jeffrey, “The United States and Egypt: Confrontation and Accommodation in Northeast Africa, 1956–60,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 2 (1993): 321–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Byrne, Jeffrey, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Goebel, Michael, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; George M. Roberts, “Politics, Decolonisation, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam c.1965–72” (PhD diss. University of Warwick, 2016); Zoe LeBlanc is working on a dissertation on Cairo.

19 Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference,” Journal of World History30:1-2 (2019): 157–92.

20 Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connelly, Diplomatic Revolution; O'Malley, Alanna, The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis 1960–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jennifer Foray, “Go Fight Us in New York: The United Nations and the Origins of Postwar Decolonization,” lecture, Graduate Institute Geneva, 14 November 2017.

21 The most prolific proponents of this understanding of decolonization are historians of the British Empire such as William Roger Louis who edits The Oxford History of the British Empire. See also Louis, William Roger, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization: Collected Essays (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)Google Scholar; Smith, Simon, Ending Empire in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar. A fresh look, turning around the concept of (divergent US and British) mental maps, is Husain, Aiyaz, Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. For recent critiques of the political literature on decolonization, see Takriti, Abdel Razzaq, “Colonial Coups and the War on Popular Sovereignty,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (2019): 878–909CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub.” The now classic treatment of the role of decolonizing and postcolonial countries in the Cold War is Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recent interventions include Duara, Prasenjit, “The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive Essay,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011): 457–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McMahon, Robert, ed., The Cold War in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Leslie, James and Leake, Elisabeth, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015)Google Scholar.

22 The standard on the topic is: Dawisha, Adeed, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. For a recent rethinking of this field see: Wien, Peter, Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The bibliography on nationalism is enormous and cannot be cited in full here. See for instance, “Relocating Arab Nationalism: Special Issue,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2, May 2011: 203–312.

24 For instance, Immerman, Richard H. and Goedde, Petra, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For transnational history more generally, see Saunier, Pierre-Yves, Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Iriye, Akira and Saunier, Pierre-Yves, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 The common usage is ma ba‘d al-kulunyaliyya, which is, essentially, post-colonialism or, in its earlier iteration, the period right after colonialism.

26 A point expanded on in Schayegh, Cyrus, “The Mandates and/as Decolonization,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, ed. idem and Arsan, Andrew (London: Routledge, 2015), 412–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Shumsky, Dmitry, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

28 As both had been British ruled, their trajectories may be compared to the five British colonies that were formally separate members of the League of Nations from its start: South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

29 The Pan American Union dates back to 1890, sure, but the imperial United States was central to it. (Then again, as already noted, Britain had a hand in founding the Arab League.)

30 Dietrich, Oil Revolution.

31 For a conceptualization, using British cases, see Takriti, “Colonial Coups.”

32 Brennan, “Radio Cairo.” Related, see Fink, Carole et al. , eds., 1956: European and Global Perspectives (Leipzig: Leipziger Uni-Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar; Laron, Guy, Origins of the Suez Crisis: Postwar Development Diplomacy and the Struggle over Third World Industrialization, 1945–1956 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

33 Byrne, Mecca; Jeffrey Ahlman, “The Algerian Question in Nkrumah's Ghana, 1958–1960: Debating ‘Violence’ and ‘Nonviolence’ in African Decolonization,”Africa Today 57, no. 2 (2010): 66–84.

34 James Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Kalter, Christoph, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France c. 1950–1976 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Imlay, Talbot, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (2013): 1105–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Chamberlin, Thomas, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Khalili, Laleh, “The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgency,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 413–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Thomas and Thompson, “Introduction,” 4–5. There were feedbacks between regionalizing and globalizing effects, too. See e.g. Abou-El-Fadl, Reem, “Neutralism Made Positive: Egyptian Anticolonialism on the Road to Bandung,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 2 (2015): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Sohrabi, Naghmeh, “Remembering the Palestine Group: Friendship, Global Activism, and the Iranian Revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (2019): 281–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “The Origins of Communist Unity: Anti-colonialism and Revolution in Iran's Tri-continental Moment,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 5 (2018): 796–822; Takriti, Abdel Razzaq, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also on the Iranian involvement.

38 Schayegh, Cyrus, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cleveland, William, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati' al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Amit Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Stenner, Globalizing Morocco; Sternfeld, Lior, “Iran Days in Egypt: Mosaddeq's Visit to Cairo in 1951,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 1 (2016): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.