Empires, over the centuries, have come and gone. What was new in the latter half of the twentieth century was that the very category of empire as a legitimate political organization lost its aura of normality and legitimacy.
How global politics would be reordered was not so clear. The idea of a world of equivalent states each corresponding to a people - however defined - was for many a compelling form of political imagination, but its relationship to the distribution of people in the world as it actually existed, characterized by mixity and mobility, remained complex and contested.
The idea of a unified people governing itself could be the basis for claims to political voice and social justice, but it could also be the basis for ethnic cleansing.1 Even after the demise of colonial empires, power would continue to be exercised across space, but it would go by names other than empire, including liberal democracy and socialist revolution. The unraveling of colonial empires did not bring about equality of resources among states or equality among citizens within them. Myths of national pasts notwithstanding, the trajectories that empires had followed across decades and centuries - and the different trajectories out of empire - continued to shape the way the world evolved toward what it is today.2A mark of how the world was being reimagined in the immediate aftermath of World War II was the decision of the French government to drop the words “empire,” “colony,” and “protectorate” even as it strove to hold together the mix of subordinate units it governed, each in a distinct manner; the new terms would be “French Union,” “overseas territory,” and “associated state.” Algeria would remain an integral part of the French Republic, but its different peoples would be governed differently. Many commentators, in retrospect, consider these changes no more than cover for a stubborn refusal of French leaders to give up their colonial view of the world, a position regarded as increasingly at variance with reality. But in 1945 the nature of reality was not apparent.
French leaders were casting about for a new form of political organization that would retain the authority of a French government over a complex composite of territories and peoples in a form that neither maintained the1 Ther 2014.
2 For a collection of studies of the “ends of empires” see Martin and Thompson 2018, and for a synthesis of decolonization studies, see Jansen and Osterhammel 2017.
Frederick Cooper, Epilogue In: The Oxford World History ofEmpire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel,
Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0045. subordination of colonized peoples as it was, nor dissolved empire into national polities.[2873]
Such a quest was not just a foible of backward-looking French leaders. Most political activists in French West Africa thought that the nation-state form, given the poverty and small size of African colonies, was a recipe for poverty and weakness. They sought to turn empire into some form of federation or confederation, in which Africans could aspire to a measure of autonomy and equality with everyone else in the former empire, remaining both African and French. There were major differences on what post-imperial federalism might mean between French and African leaders, as well as among Africans and among French elites themselves, but there was overlap as well. Much of the political struggle of African political movements over the next 15 years was not to escape from empire but to transform it—to make Africans into French citizens and to make citizenship into a basis for claims to social and economic as well as political equality.[2874]
Nor was reconfiguring postwar empire specific to the French case. Although British visions of empire were less centralizing—more focused on the trajectory of each territory—the Parliament passed in 1948 a Nationalities Act under which anyone designated a national of Canada, New Zealand, or other Dominion was automatically entitled to a second-order British citizenship that, among other features, gave that person the right to enter and settle in the British Isles.
The measure applied to the colonies as well, and while the arrival of black Jamaicans or Nigerians in British ports caused consternation among many Britons, for a time—until the 1970s in fact—the logic of empire trumped the logic of race. For all the inequalities that persisted within the British Empire and Commonwealth, its leaders wanted to demonstrate a form of imperial inclusiveness.[2875]Why were such possibilities available midway through the twentieth century? If the conventional narrative of a global transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states extending from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth is valid, then Africans should have been following in the footpath of European states and claiming their own national states. Yet many Africans were seeking a different kind of political order, and French and British governments were prepared to reconfigure their own polities in order to keep diverse peoples within a unit that remained in some sense French or British.
That, by the end of the twentieth century, the world consisted of nearly 200 states has led many scholars to work backward to assume that the only possible pathway led to this endpoint. Confronted with evidence that political movements in parts of the once-colonized world had other ideas, defenders of this inevitability thesis miss the profound uncertainty of the future of the world at mid-century, not only in the colonies, but in Paris, London, Washington, and Moscow.[2876]
Can a long-term perspective on the history of empires, from ancient times into the twenty-first century, tell us something about the complexity of the trajectories that got us to the world as we know it? What can we make of the fact that today's China retains close to the same borders as that of the Qing dynasty and faces tensions with Tibetans and Muslims characteristic of imperial edges? Or that the USSR retained, from 1917 to 1991, a multinational dimension sufficient for it to break apart into component parts, with the biggest of them retaining a name— Russian Federation—and a structure that continued to reflect its imperial diversity? Might not the patrimonial style of politics in Putin's Russia reflect patterns of rule that have been transmitted and transformed from Mongol empires through the Tsarist and Soviet imperial formations? Can one understand the recent and recurrent crises of the ex-Ottoman Middle East or the ex-colonies of Africa without acknowledging the effects not just of imperial pasts, but of the long and painful process of reconfiguration that accompanied the breakup of empires? And can one comprehend the repertoire of power of the United States—which continues to occupy or interfere in countries but not to colonize them—without tracing the particular ways in which the once-British colonies extended themselves over space?
The take-off point for the transformations of the post-World War II era was the complex forms of incorporation that empires had constructed.
At this point in time, the direction change would take was not yet determined. The twentieth century had witnessed new projects of empire building: Japan had self-consciously sought to play the game that European powers had begun before it, but inflected the project with a pan-Asian dimension; the Nazis had gone to the other extreme, insisting on national domination; the Soviet Union had turned the diversity of the tsarist empire into “national republics” that reified multiple nationalities; and the United States had developed its own form of imperial reach.[2877]The possible pathways toward a future political structure was not simply a matter of political dynamics between colonizer and colonized. France and Britain had been empires among empires, and what was at stake was the transformation of a world of empires. The empire-form was a varied and flexible one, shaped by empires' concerns with each other. It was inter-empire crises leading to a sequence of two world wars that made possible the proliferation of nation-states after 1945, and both the imperial past and the pattern of the crisis itself shaped thinking and possibilities afterward.
To think of the 1940s as a conjuncture in this history of imperial polities rather than a step in a linear trajectory reframes a historical question, but also a
contemporary political one. At stake is not reviving the Roman, British, or Ottoman empires. Nor is the “is it or isn't it?” question posed about the imperious or imperial actions of the United States after 2001 the most revealing. More revealing is the question of the historical trajectory that the United States or any other state has followed through empire, leading to particular forms by which power is exercised across space. A question that remains acute today is about complex forms of sovereignty—the sharing and layering of sovereignty between different kinds of units. The European Union—recognizing as it does the national personality of each member state while devolving sovereign functions to a confederal structure above them—epitomizes the possibilities and problems of this form. One cannot understand how such a possibility came into existence—or variations that might be possible—without examining the trajectories of different sorts of political units that conjugated incorporation and differentiation of territories and peoples. That inquiry takes us into the history of empires.