Decolonization

Perspectives from Now and Then

Prasenjit Duara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134537075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Decolonization brings together the most cutting-edge thinking by major historians of decolonization, including previously unpublished essays and writings by leaders of decolonizing countries including Ho Chi-Minh and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The chapters in this volume present a move away from Western analysis of decolonizaton and instead move towards the angle of vision of the former colonies. This is a ground-breaking study of a subject central to recent global history.

1
INTRODUCTION
The decolonization of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century¹

Prasenjit Duara

From a historian’s perspective, decolonization was one of the most important political developments of the twentieth century because it turned the world into the stage of history. Until World War I, historical writing had been the work of the European conquerors that, in the words of Oswald Spengler, had made the world appear to ‘revolve around the pole of this little part-world’ that is Europe. With few exceptions, the regions outside Europe were seen to be inhabited by people without the kind of history capable of shaping the world. The process of decolo-nizaton, which began towards the end of World War I, was accompanied by the appearance of national historical consciousness in these regions, that is, the history, not of dynasties or the work of God/gods, but of a people as a whole. To be sure, historical writing continues to be filtered through national preoccupations, but the rapid spread of modern historical writing to most of the world also enabled us to see how happenings in one region – no matter how peripheral or advanced – were often linked to processes and events in other parts. It became possible to grasp, as did the leaders of decolonization, the entire globe as an interconnected entity for understanding and action.

There are remarkably few historical studies of decolonization as a whole, despite the importance of the subject. This is not entirely surprising because it is neither a coherent event such as the Russian Revolution, nor a well defined phenomenon like fascism. The timing and patterns of decolonization were extremely varied, and the goals of the movement in different countries were not always consistent with each other. Indeed, we have had to exclude from our consideration the pre-twentieth century independence movements in the Americas from European powers, as well as the later decolonization of the Pacific islands from powers such as New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the Netherlands starting in the 1960s. In both cases, the circumstances of decolonization were very different from the core period and region of our consideration: Asia and Africa from the early years of the twentieth century until the 1960s.

Within this approximate time and region, decolonization refers to the process whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states. The political search for independence often began during the inter-war years and fructified within fifteen years of the end of World War II in 1945. It should be noted that there were many formally independent countries, such as Iran and China, whose leaders considered themselves to have been informally and quasi-legally subordinated to colonial powers, and who viewed their efforts for autonomy as part of the anti-imperialist movement (see Chapters 2 and 6 by Sun Yat-sen and Jalal Al-i Ahmad respectively). Therefore decoloniza-tion represented not only the transference of legal sovereignty, but a movement for moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism. It thus refers both to the anti-imperialist political movement and to an emancipatory ideology which sought or claimed to liberate the nation and humanity itself.

Even within these specifications, decolonization varied sufficiently from country to country, and often within the same country, to make generalizations quite risky. Take for instance, the case of China. Here was a vigorous anti-imperialist movement directed against the Western powers and Japan, based largely on an ethic of socialist emancipation. Yet there was no felt need to critique the West culturally – to ideologically decolonize in the manner of a Frantz Fanon or Mahatma Gandhi – since it had been only partially and informally colonized, and was occupied by an Asian power, Japan. Additionally, the meaning of decolonization as a process has itself been differently evaluated over time. Our historiographical understanding of decolonization during the period when political independence from imperialist powers was taking place was shaped considerably by the writings of nationalist statesmen and historians, as well as a generation of Western historians who were optimistic or sympathetic to the process. More recently, the debates around post-colonialism have questioned the extent or thoroughness of ‘decolonization’ when independence from colonial powers meant the establishment of nation-states closely modelled upon the very states that undertook imperialism. Here again, the post-colonial critique has found more or less sympathy in different places according to the historical experiences of the people there. The volume will try to represent this variation without losing sight of the core historical character of the process.

If we can pinpoint a particular event to symbolize the beginnings of this movement, it would be the victory of Japan over Czarist Russia in the war of 1905, which was widely hailed as the first victory of the dominated peoples against an imperial power. Sun Yat-sen, the father of Chinese nationalism, reminisced about this event in a speech he made in Japan in 1925. He was on a ship crossing the Suez Canal soon after news of the Japanese victory became known. When the ship was docked in the canal, a group of Arabs mistook him for a Japanese and enthusiastically flocked around him. Even upon discovering their mistake, they continued to celebrate their solidarity with him against the imperialist powers. In the speech, Sun developed the theme of a racial or colour war against the white race for whom ‘blood is thicker than water’ and urged the oppressed Asians of common colour and culture to unify and resist imperialism.

Similarly, the event symbolizing the culmination of this movement was the Bandung Conference, a meeting of the representatives of twenty-nine new nations of Asia and Africa, held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955, fifty years after the Russo-Japanese war. The conference aimed to express solidarity against imperialism and racism and promote economic and cultural cooperation among these nations. China, India and Indonesia were key players in the meeting. The conference finally led to the nonaligned movement in 1961, a wider Third World force in which participants avowed their distance from the two superpowers – aligning themselves neither with the United States or Soviet Union – during the Cold War. However, conflicts developed among these non-aligned nations – for instance between India and China in 1962 – which eroded the solidarity of the Bandung spirit. With the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the end of the Cold War in 1989, the non-aligned movement – this in reality had included both truly neutral countries and those that were aligned with one or the other superpower – became irrelevant.

The imperialism we are concerned with in this volume was the imperialism of Western nation-states and later Japan that spread from roughly the mid-eighteenth century to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and Pacific islands. The brutal and dehumanizing conditions it imposed upon these places have been well documented, most graphically by the independence movements themselves. At the same time, as Karl Marx noted, this imperialism represented an incorporation of these regions into the modern capitalist system. As we shall see in the historiographical survey of imperialism conducted by Patrick Wolfe in Chapter 9 this volume, debates continue about the purposes and nature of this incorporation, but we may make a few general comments about it. First, the colonial projects of capitalist nation-states such as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and later Germany, Italy, the US and Japan, among others, were an integral part of the competition for control of global resources and markets. The ideology accompanying the intensification of competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was Social Darwinism. This was an evolutionary view of the world that applied Darwin’s theory of ‘the survival of the fittest’ to races and nations, and justified imperialist domination in terms of an understanding that a race or nation that did not dominate would instead be dominated. Imperialist competition for a greater share of world resources, particularly on the part of late-comer nation-states such as Germany and Japan, was an important factor behind the two world wars of the twentieth century. Ironically, however, both wars accelerated decolonization considerably.

Second, from the perspective of the colonized, this incorporation inevitably involved the erosion of existing communities as they experienced the deepening impact of capitalism and alien cultural values. The extent to which these communities were able to adapt to the new circumstances depended upon the historical resources they were able to muster, as well as their position and role in the imperialist incorporation process. Thus it was not uncommon to find a dualistic type of society in the colonies: on the one hand, an adaptive and relatively modern, coastal, urban sector, integrated under however unequal terms, with metropolitan society. On the other hand, a vast hinterland where historical forms of social life, economic organization and exploitation continued to exist, but hardly as pristine ‘tradition’. This is the phenomenon known in dependency theory as ‘the articulation of modes of production’, whereby modern capitalism utilizes non-capitalist modes of production and exploitation for the production of capitalist value. Whether responding to global prices or a plantation economy, these regions also serviced the modern capitalist sector of the metropolitan economy, but, typically, they received few of its benefits. In other words, the gap ought not to be seen merely as the difference between a traditional and a modern sector, but as different kinds of incorporation into the capitalist system. The gap between these two sectors and ways of life would often shape and bedevil the decolonization process.

Anti-imperialist nationalism emerged historically from the urban, coastal sector where modern, capitalist forms of knowledge, technology, capital and organization had spread more widely. Although there had been several major expressions of resistance to colonial powers organized around older, indigenous political patterns – such as the mid-nineteenth century Taiping Rebellion or the late-nineteenth century Boxer Uprising in China, the 1857 Rebellion in India, and the Senussi Uprising in Tunisia – as discussed by Geoffrey Barraclough in Part II, the successful movements of decolonization were almost invariably led by Westernized leaders from the modernized sectors of society. These were the would-be administrators and entrepreneurs who felt a very concrete ceiling over their heads, and educated Chinese who bristled at the signs declaring ‘Dogs and Chinese not allowed’ posted in public places in the foreign settlements in Shanghai and elsewhere. These were people who experienced constant denial and humiliation because of their colour or origins, but they were also people who, like Mahatma Gandhi, clearly recognized the contradictions these actions presented to the Western doctrines of humanism and rationality. Finally, they were the people who understood the modern world well enough to know how to mobilize the resources to topple colonial domination.

How did these modern nationalists and reformers mobilize the hinterlands and the lower classes of their society which were negatively affected by the modern incorporation and barely touched by modern ideas? For many in these communities, loyalty to the nation-state was an abstraction quite removed from their everyday consciousness, and modern programmes of secular society, national education or the nuclear family were quite inimical to their conceptions of a good society – which involved regional, linguistic, religious, caste, tribal and lineage solidarity – and religious life. On the other side, for the modernizing elites, the peasants and the ‘people’ lived in a world that was increasingly alien and distasteful to them, and the new language of modernity, historical progress, citizenship and the like increased the gap between the two still further.

To be sure, the process of transforming the hinterlands of Western nation-states in the nineteenth century was no less a forceful project of state-and nation-building. In the case of France, Eugen Weber has dubbed the process as the conversion of ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. But there were also significant differences between the two areas. The process in Europe grew out of historical conditions within those regions, and was not so sharp and wrenching as the process in the colonies. Second, colonies were disadvantaged by the unfavourable circumstances of imperialist domination absent in the European case; and finally, the prior development of capitalism in Western societies led to accelerated rates of growth and development that made it harder and harder for the disadvantaged societies to catch up and extend growth to the hinterlands.

The great challenge faced by the decolonizers was not simply to bridge the gap between these rapidly diverging worlds, but to re-make hinterland society in their own image. This image derived both from their conception of humanistic reform as well as the need to create a sleek national body capable of surviving and succeeding in a world of competitive capitalism. The decolonization movement was thus always faced with two tasks which were often in tension with each other: to fulfil the promise of its humanistic ideals and modern citizenship and to create the conditions for international competitiveness. To the extent that these conditions required the production of a homogenized people, there was also often a violent transformation of the lives and world-views of people who were forced to adapt to a world in which the benefits to them were not always clear. The various nationalist movements combined different strategies or methods of force and violence with education and peaceful mobilization to achieve their goals. Thus leaders like Nkrumah and Gandhi were able to achieve rural mass mobilization relatively peacefully, but in the absence of significant land reform or economic integration, the gap persisted. Revolutionary nationalists like Mao Zedong or Ho Chi Minh succeeded in restructuring the inequities of rural society, but often at the cost of massive violence. Other nationalist movements, like that led by Sukarno in Indonesia, were prevented by the structure of Dutch colonial control from achieving any significant rural mobilization.

Nationalists in the colonies – as in earlier nationalisms of the West – often justified the process of mobilization and transformation of the people by narratives of national belonging, or belonging to what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘imagined community of the nation’. The imagined community refers to the sense that people who are differentiated by distance, language, class and culture are enabled by modern means of communication (from print to screen) to imagine themselves as part of a single community or family. These nationalists posited an ancient, even primordial unity of the nation that had gone into a long era of forgetfulness or slumber during the middle period between the ancient and the modern. The alleged ancient unity of the nation granted nationalists and the nation-state the right to make these transformations, and they described the nationalism they were seeking to foster as a national ‘awakening’.

To be sure, this is not to say that there are no indigenous foundations of modernity. Nationalist historians and others have discovered the ‘sprouts of capitalism’ and ‘alternative modernities’ not only in China, but in India, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Research on the Indian Ocean and East Asia from various different perspectives – Japan, India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Arabian peninsula – reveals a dynamic and cosmopolitan world of commerce and cultural flows that long preceded the Western arrival. However, the problem with the nationalist understanding is not that the research findings are wrong, but that these findings are located within an evolutionary paradigm containing the implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument that these developments would have ultimately led to modern capitalism and nationalism. This is an instance of how nationalists adopted the basic assumptions of the evolutionism of their colonial masters. One of the challenges of thinking historically about the problem of decolonization is to evaluate the importance of these historical developments without subscribing to the misguided evolutionary framework.

These long-term, often no longer extant, conditions must be separated from the more immediate conditions and circumstances which permitted decolonization or situated a society to quickly build a modern nation-state. Different societies were differently advantaged and disadvantaged with regard to this latter problem. Thus Japan’s ability to rapidly build a modern nation-state in the Meiji Restoration (1868) had much to do with the presence of strong political and merchant elites. But it was also lucky in being relatively neglected by the imperialist powers; to be the last country to suffer the unequal treaties, and to be threatened by America, an emergent power with a rather different imperialist vision of the world. Indeed, after World War I, the circumstances for decolonization were generated as much from the international situation as any other. First, the Soviet Union and the United States of America emerged as new powers with little stake in the old international order based upon the European balance of power, and were indeed, opposed to formal imperialism. Then there was the intensification of imperialist rivalries occasioned by the nose-thumbing, new imperialism of Germany and Japan, which often caused the colonizers to grant concessions in their colonies or promote opposition in others. These circumstances did much to undermine the facade of unity so critical to colonial control and superiority.

World War II made conditions still more unfavourable for colonialism. The spectacle of the old colonial powers being overrun by the Axis forces in North Africa and particularly by Japan in Southeast Asia (and threatening British India), the establishment of formally independent states in Southeast Asia under the rhetoric of pan-Asianism, the prominence of leaders like Sukarno and the Burmese leader U Nu who would lead nationalist movements against the returning colonial powers in the Japanese-dominated wartime governments, and the further rise of the United States and Soviet Union, made eventual decolonization a matter of time in most parts of the world. Thus while the chapters in this volume focus on the domestic or regional factors behind decolonization, this larger international perspective has to be borne in mind.

The leadership of the modernizing nationalists implied as well that independence would not involve a return to the pre-modern ideals of the dynastic, imperial, religious, feudal or tribal systems. To be sure, as Frederick Cooper suggests in Chapter 16, national independence was not always the goal of the decolonizing movement. In the Japanese and French empires, there were efforts on the part of both colonizers and colonized to create ideals of ‘imperial citizenship’ where equality would prevail in a multinational community (of the ex-empire), but ingrained colonial attitudes and escalating demands for autonomy (and defeat in the Japanese case) nullified these political experiments. Thus it turned out that the decolonizing movements sought to fashion themselves in certain basic ways as modern nation-states in the manner of their imperialist oppressors. To what extent this would involve taking on some characteristics of the imperialist states themselves – acquiring neighbouring territories, exploiting the resources of peripheral regions within the nation – especially as they joined the competitive system of global capitalism, was yet to become clear. But what was clear to the nationalists is that they denounced imperialism and were determined to launch a new era of justice and equality both within their nations and in the world.

As we shall see in the essays by the decolonizing leaders in Part I, the ideals of decolonization and the anti-imperialist movement were built upon two pillars: socialism and the discourse of alternative civilizations, or what I call the new discourse of civilization. These two aspects were much more closely and deeply intertwined in the twentieth century than we have customarily believed. By socialism, I refer specifically to the Leninist programme of anti-imperialism and socialist equality, as well as state and party command over society. Some societies like China, Vietnam, North Korea and Tanzania adopted the socialist programme more completely, but most other decolonizing societies also reflected more or less the socialist ideals of equality, market restrictions and state re-distribution programmes as the alternative to the imperialist capitali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors to Parts II and III
• 1: Introduction: The decolonization of Asia and Africa in the Twentieth Century
• Part I: In Their Own Words
• Part II: Imperialism and Nationalism
• Part III: Regions and Themes