Conceptual Origins
The earliest use of “decolonization” dates back to the early nineteenth-century upheavals in Latin America, where it appeared in the polemical writings of Jose Faustino Sanchez Carrion, a provincial intellectual from the Andean highlands.
To talk of Peruvian independence, he averred, was not merely to assert the material separation from the metropole, but to affect a more thoroughgoing transformation that would allow Peruvians to ‘increase population a hundredfold, decolonize customs, and maximize enlightenment' - all for the higher purpose of ‘shedding the humiliating colonial costume'.[2598] Sanchez Carrion's thinking was geared towards a self-conscious release from the mental - as much as political - constraints imposed by a demeaning colonial status. The term also appeared sporadically in French on the eve of the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s, and made a brief appearance in English in the 1850s with the steady rollback of the Spanish-Mexican Empire in the American West. Subsequently, however, it fell into disuse.[2599]It was not until the interwar years that it was taken up again in a 1927 lecture in The Hague by Belgian professor Henri Rolin, predicting a future when “the period of colonization would be followed by that of decolonization.”[2600] The aftermath of the Great War had generated widespread debate and reflection on the portents of Europe's imminent decline—raising hopes and fueling anxieties in equal measure.[2601] Even before the war, anti-colonial reformers like Aurobindo Ghose had predicted that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” awaited “annihilation,” while in 1919 Liang Qichao meditated on the flawed omnipotence of Western science.[2602] Into the 1930s, an intellectual ferment among African and West Indian anti-colonial groups such as the League of Coloured Peoples and the International African Service Bureau produced books and journals agitating for the dismantling of Europe's colonial empires.[2603] George Padmore's How Britain Rules Africa (1936) achieved particular prominence as a challenge to the colonial status quo: “Today the coloured races do not intend to allow the white imperialist nations to trample over them as in the past.”[2604]
It was the German emigre scholar and broadcaster Moritz J.
Bonn who provided the first sustained impetus for the idea of “decolonization” in works spanning more than a decade. He first aired his notion of a Zeitalter der Gegenkolonisation in 1926, arguing that the effects of the war, the Versailles settlement, and a new political and cultural assertiveness among colonized peoples had brought “the era of welding large areas into empires” to an end.[2605] But his precise meaning and purpose were starkly at odds with the enlightenment vision of colonial emancipation espoused by Sanchez Carrion a hundred years earlier. Bonn's perspective was that of a dispirited European intellectual in search of renewed purpose in the wake of wartime defeat, asserting that Germany had a “privileged position” in the world (by virtue of having been divested of its colonies) as the “natural leader” in the historical transition beyond the age of empire.[2606] Following his flight from the Nazis to Britain in April 1933, he began translating his term into English variously as an “age of countercolonization” or “decolonization.”[2607] From his new base at the London School of Economics, he elaborated on his theme in a series of articles that culminated in his 1938 book, The Crumbling of Empire, where he roundly proclaimed: “A decolonization movement is sweeping over the continents. An age of empire-breaking is following an age of empire-making.”[2608] The concept was taken up by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in a major 1937 study of The Colonial Problem, which drew directly on Bonn's insights to describe a “continuous tendency towards decolonization” with its origins in the self-governing Dominions in the nineteenth century.[2609] Yet this belied the sheer novelty of the word itself—decried in a review by The Observer as a “needless disfigurement of the English language.”[2610]That “decolonization” should have come to English via German (and not French, as is normally supposed) is less surprising than it first seems.
As the first of the European maritime colonial powers to be disinherited—suddenly and absolutely— in 1919, here was a perspective that could more readily register the historical fact of decolonization, rather than its mere future projection.[2611] Yet there were also mounting pressures for reform in the other major maritime empires throughout the 1930s. In December 1929, the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, hoisted the tricolor flag of India over Lahore and issued a formal “Declaration of Independence.” This ushered in the first major civil disobedience campaign of the decade, symbolized by M. K. Gandhi's celebrated “salt march” of 1930. While these activities exacted no immediate political concessions, they drew worldwide attention to nationalist demands and played a key role in transforming Congress from an elitist organization to a mass movement. That same year, Vietnamese soldiers in the French colonial army combined with members of the anti-colonial Vietnamese Nationalist Party in an attempt to overthrow the French garrison at Yen Bay. The uprising failed to spark any wider popular revolt and was effectively repressed, but it served to alert French authorities to the need to reform their military, intelligence, and administrative practices.[2612] More significant was the Arab revolt in British Mandated Palestine, which erupted in 1936 when Izz ad-Din al Qassam, the leader of the militant anti-colonial “Black Hand” movement, was killed by British forces. There ensued three years of strikes, instability, and violent unrest, resulting in thousands of deaths and brutal reprisals on the part of the British that would presage the dilemmas of postwar colonial administrations.[2613]