UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 07 - Capitalism Bridled - 01h 18m 27s

Introduction

[0:00]

We have quite a lot to get through today so I should just get going. Today's lecture will try to give you an overview of the history of decolonization during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

This is not going to be a super analytical lecture. The purpose of is to convey a fair amount of factual information. On Thursday we'll be talking more about the relationship between the Cold War and decolonization. Sort of thinking about how the intersection of these two really big historic themes creates outcomes that might not have been accomplished sort of in the absence of either.

But today's lecture will try to tell the history of decolonization. I'm going to go at a fairly brisk pace. But if there are questions that you have -- points that sort of you think require additional explanation -- please just raise your hand and I'll be glad to address them.

There is time built in for that.

The Colonial World As It Was

[0:55]

Okay, so what we're going to talk about today is how this world, the colonial world, as it existed in the mid-20th century came to an end.

Of course the map that is projected here on the display is not sort of entirely accurate insofar as it doesn't represent the world as it ever existed in stasis.

Here you see the sort of full extent of European sort of colonial aggrandizement in particular territories. What the map displays is empire at its maximum reach.

So you see, for example, the full extent of the French Empire in North America, the full extent of the Spanish Empire in North America, and so on. But of course it was never the case that New Spain and the Louisiana Territory co-existed in time with the colonialization of Africa.

This map displays sort of the maximum reach of empire regardless of when it occurred. So it's not a cross section of the world at any particular moment.

But nonetheless it shows us a remarkable thing which is the extent to which a small handful of West European countries Great Britain, France, the Iberian countries, Spain and Portugal in particular, succeeded in bringing most of the earth's surface under their dominion.

This was the colonial world. How was it created? How did it end? We're going to focus on the question of endings today. But it's important to give some attention to the question of beginnings as well.

The Rise of Empire

[2:32]

And how many of you have had a chance to take a class that has dealt with the history of empire?

Okay, is that History 5? Or some other class?

Okay, good. Oh, with me. Or with somebody else?

Okay, last fall. Okay, great.

See you have some sense of the history of empire but for those who haven't had a chance let me just sort of recapitulate the history of empire in about four sentences, which is less than it deserves but, okay.

The history of European imperialism really begins in the 16th century. The first so called voyages of discovery take place at the end of the 15th century. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and all that. But the 16th century is sort of the period when you could loosely identify Europe as expanding the reach of maritime trade, exploration, discovery and by the century's end also conquest.

During the 17th century European powers, particularly the British and the Dutch create vast trading empires which serve as sort of important generators of wealth. The 18th century will be marked by a sort of turn to territorial aggrandizement.

Of course the history of territorial aggrandizement predates the 18th century. But it's the 18th century that brings the beginning of the sort of consolidation of large landed empires. The British Empire in India will become a sort of substantial proposition from the mid-18th century.

The 19th century brings the further expansion of empires. An expansion that is driven some would argue by the quest for resources and others would say by sort of competition between colonial empires for control of territory.

These are two sort of very different explanations for empire. One emphasizing the in acquisitive instinct -- money -- the other emphasizing geostrategic impulses -- war.

If you want to know more than that about the origins of empire you'll have to take another class because we don't have time for it, but this is more or less how it unfolds, as a sort of escalating process of acquisition and aggrandizement.

The Colonial World

[4:50]

What kind of world does colonialism produce?

It produces something that we might sort of characterize as a colonial world order, a world order in which colonialism is just not a phenomenon that much of the world experiences, but is also a sort of set of principles for the organization of international relations. Colonialism doesn't just have implications for particular territories that are colonialized it has also consequences for the way in which the international system as a whole is organized.

The colonial world order, as it exists say circa 1939, right before the Second World War, is a hierarchical world order. It's a world order in which the Europeans are still paramount.

It's a eurocentric world order. It's a world order in which sort of the major networks of trade and commerce converge on European capitals. So too do Europeans exercise a disproportionate role in the world's political affairs.

It's a world in which many people, peoples of Indian, and Africa, and Southeast Asia, are the colonial subjects of European powers.

Much of the world is literally colonized which is to say that somebody else's flag, the British flag in the case of India, flies over their territory.

But it would be too reductionist to see the history of the colonial order as having to do simply with the experiences of colonized territories. Colonialism involves more than simply acquiring territory, planting sort of a flag on the sand or shading the map pink, whichever metaphor you choose.

There are also a host of extraterritorial, or non-territorial aspects to the colonial order which are really important. Think here about the history of China which is illustrative of this.

In the late 19th century the European colonial powers extract a series of concessions from China. These are concessions that give the Europeans special trading rights, sort of freedom for their citizens from Chinese jurisdiction. So if a British person commits a crime in Shanghai he can't be tried for it by a Chinese court. These kinds of extraterritorial concessions are a vital aspect of the colonial order. But they're harder to indicate on a shaded map of the world. But they're a very important part of the colonial system as it functions.

They reflect the institutionalized hierarchy which situates Europeans above the rest.

How do we justify this system of international political organization in which Europeans reside at the top and everybody else is subject?

What kinds of justifications do Europeans offer say at the end of the 19th century for the existence of a colonial world order? Would anybody hazard an obvious guess?

(Student response)

Yeah, exactly. The idea of sort of civilizational or even racial prerogatives. Now that's a thicket that I don't want to disentangle today. Where does you know civilizational prerogatives as the Europeans see it end and where does racial prerogative begin -- I would suggest that there's a sort of evolution over time. The project of empire becomes more racialized as the 19th century progresses.

But nonetheless by the end of the century, Europeans by the end of the 19th century that is, Europeans are talking quite openly about what Rudyard Kipling characterizes as the white man's burden.

The phrase itself comes from an injunction that Kipling addressed to the United States in 1898 following the Spanish-American War Kipling was one of the people who was urging the United States to seize control of the Philippines and to become a colonial empire itself, and he invoked the so-called white man's burden as a sort of rationalization for this.

Of course by the mid-20th century talking about the white man's burden was no longer so acceptable as it had once been. You know the experience of Nazism makes it harder to talk about the white man's burden and to be taken seriously.

So instead Europeans by the mid-20th century will increasingly sort of justify their imperial claims through the invocation of sort of the benefits that might accrue to colonial subjects. Ideas of shared, progress, empire as a modernizing project will in the mid-20th century displace the old rhetoric about the white man's burden as a rationalization for empire.

Different Views of Empire

[9:28]

What have scholars and theorists of empire had to say about it? How have they explained it? There's a big sort of literature on imperialism as a phenomenon in world history. This literature could in itself by the subject for several lectures. But if we want to get a you know sense for how empire has been discussed and debated we should still sort of pause to think, even if we're not going to go too deep into the substance, about what empire's most influential critics have had to say about it.

So here we'll turn to just three of them.

John Hobson

[10:03]

One of the most sort of influential of the liberal critics of empire of all time was this man pictured in the slide -- John Hobson↗.

Hobson did not see empire as inherent or intrinsic to sort of the liberal capitalist project. And here that's a key distinction between Hobson and the next critic of empire we're going to talk about: Lenin. But Hobson saw empire rather as a sort of irrational or even atavistic impulse within British society.

He argued that Britain's lopsided class structure, a class structure in which the bourgeoisie had not entirely sort of thrown off the influence of the old landed aristocracy, created a peculiar propensity to imperial misadventure.

And for Hobson imperialism represented a diversion of resources, investment resources for example, that could have been much better invested within the British Isles. So Hobson sees empire as a sort of luxury that the British are able to afford in the late 19th century by virtue of their great wealth but which they would have been much better off to have avoided. For Hobson imperialism doesn't pay -- it's a sort of waste of resources on the part of the imperial power.

This is a sort of interpretation of imperialism which sees imperialism as I mentioned not as an integral aspect of liberalism or of capitalism but rather as something wholly different. Something springing from much different wellsprings.

Vladimir Lenin

[11:49]

Lenin's↗ theory of imperialism could not have been more different from Hobson's. The key distinction is that Lenin sees imperialism as being you know absolutely integral to the project of capitalism.

Lenin characterizes imperialism in a book that he wrote during the First World War as a consequence of contradictions that are inherent within the capitalist order. Insofar as the world contains finite resources, capitalists Lenin argues, will ultimately fight among themselves to control them.

[12:27]

Imperialism is no more in the Leninist framework than a struggle among the capitalist powers for the control of the world's finite resources. By securing the product of the developing colonized world the capitalist powers may be able to as Lenin puts it buy off their own working classes for a little bit so as to prolong the existence of the capitalist system.

So Lenin sort of thereby sees colonialism as a sort of international phenomenon as being linked with the effort on the part of the bourgeoisie to prolong and sustain the capitalist order within the sort of nation-states of the industrialized West.

That's one interpretation of imperialism.

Mahatma Gandhi

[13:16]

A third perspective that we should emphasize is the Gandhian perspective on imperialism. You know Gandhi is profoundly influential not only for the content of his thought but you know sort of even more so because of the mass political movement that he in effect creates and leads -- a mass movement that will give birth to Indian Independence in 1947.

Gandhi's indictment of imperialism is really interesting because Gandhi's critique of empire was linked to a much more thorough going critique of Western modernity writ large.

Lenin critiqued the capitalist order but he didn't really critique modernity as such. What Lenin wants to create is an alternative version of modernity -- a version of modernity in which the distribution and vesting of wealth will be very different from what it had been in the bourgeoisie order -- but Lenin does not critique the idea of modernity. On the contrary he proposes and propounds what he sees as a sort of superior or improved version of modern society.

For Gandhi, empire or imperialism is just one facet of a corrupt and materialistic Western modernity -- a vision of modernity that he repudiates wholeheartedly. Of course Gandhi's thought was complex it evolved over time, but his most influential book Hind Swaraj↗, which was published in 1908, which means, the title means, sort of Indian self-rule, powerfully linked colonialism to modernity and anti-colonialism to a repudiation of Western modernity as such.

Conclusion: Different Views of Empire

[14:54]

So this is anti-colonialism in theory. We have sort of three very different perspectives on the colonial order each of which sort of has within it particular implications for how colonialism might be ended.

For Hobson all that is necessary to end colonialism is the colonial powers need to stop pursuing it -- recognizing that it's not in their own best interest to do so.

Lenin doesn't believe that the colonial powers can stop being colonial. He sees it as being in their own interests to so be. Only a social revolution can end the colonial order of things if you're a Leninist.

Of course for Gandhi it takes something even more profound than a social revolution. Something akin to a you know sort of cultural revolution, a revolution of transformed expectations to finally throw off the shackles of the colonial order of things.

Indian Decolonization

[15:49]

Having sort of briefly you know digressed into the theory, let's turn to the history, and ask how did India, to take one prototypical case become independent? Where does the story of the Indian nation-state begin? How do we tell the story of India's decolonization?

Once again there are any number of contestable sort of points of departure. I had to pick one so I thought that the Mutiny Rebellion of 1857-58↗ seemed to be as obvious a candidate as any other.

Mutiny Rebellion of 1857-58

[16:27]

The Mutiny Rebellion was a sort of revolt by Indian soldiers serving within the British Army of India. The British Indian Army was a British managed army staffed by British officers in which the bulk of the fighting force was comprised of Indians.

This was an army on which the British depended to accomplish sort of strategic purposes not only in the Indian subcontinent but also in the larger Indian Ocean world.

What happens in 1857 is that Indian soldiers, they were called sepoys by the British, revolt. The causes are you know complicated but might be understood simply as the accumulation of resentments and discontents.

Historians still sort of debate what the ultimate spark that produced the Mutiny Rebellion was.

What was significant about the Mutiny Rebellion was that it constituted something like a proto-nationalist uprising on the subcontinental scale. For the first time really since the colonialization of India, which began in the mid-18th century, the future of British rule in India was brought into, at least, transient doubt. The Indian Mutiny Rebellion also sort of manifested horrendous brutality perpetrated by both sides.

This was important because it demonstrated the ugly face of colonialism when threatened. The British were prepared to resort to some fairly horrendous tactics in order to suppress and punish rebellious sepoys. On the other hand, the violence, the fury of violence, that revolting sepoys unleashed against the British you know challenged many of the assumptions that British held about the you know sort of ultimately submissive relationship of Indian subjects to British colonial rulers.

[18:25]

The Indian Mutiny Rebellion was a violent event. It ultimately did not prefigure the sort of more political nationalist movement -- that developed later in the 19th century. As you know it turned out nationalism in India came to be sort of represented first and foremost in the last decades of the 19th century by the Indian National Congress -- an organization that was you know far removed from the experience of rebellious, mutinous soldiers in the mid-century.

Indian National Congress

[19:00]

The Indian National Congress was an organization that represented the interests of Indian elites. Its concern was really with securing some representation, some expansion, of privilege within the British system, for elite, affluent, and well-to-do Indian subjects.

The Indian National Congress emphatically was not a mass movement. It was an elitist movement committed to sort of achieving gains for the Indian economic and social elite.

Gandhi and Indian Independence

[19:30]

Indian nationalism didn't really become a mass movement until the era of the First World War. And the key figure here is Gandhi. Gandhi practiced as a lawyer in South Africa for some time, almost two decades, and returned to India with the advent of the First World War.

He quickly become involved in nationalist politics and in effect transformed the Indian National Congress into a mass political organization. The first you know sort of major demonstration of political nationalism on a subcontinental scale came at the beginning of the 1920s when Gandhi organized what became known as the sort of non-cooperation movement.

This was a mass movement that put specific demands to the British and utilized a boycott of British manufactured goods as a mechanism for sort of coercing the British into concession. Gandhi called this the Satyagraha Campaign -- a campaign for sort of accomplishing political objectives by sort of living in truth, which is how you might sort of loosely translate the term satyagraha.

This mass movement was called off in 1922 by Gandhi following an episode in which Indian nationalists burned to the ground a regional police station in the village of Chauri Chaura. It became a very notorious episode because a number of people were killed inside the police station when it burned to the ground. And Gandhi said that if independence had to be achieved through violent means like this than it wasn't worth having it all, and called off the mass nationalist campaign at least temporarily.

[21:16]

Doesn't take all that long for mass nationalism to revive itself which it did in 1930. Of course the context is important. By 1930 India is suffering like the rest of the sort of non-communist world in the throes of the Great Depression.

As sort of Indian farmers are squeezed by falling incomes and rising prices for non-farm goods, Gandhi in 1930 organized the salt march campaign. This was a campaign which was sort of built around a really simple idea. And the simple idea was that it was unjust for the British to levy a tax on salt.

[21:58]

Which was something that the British taxed in the colonial order. Gandhi said salt is abundant, it is a product of the oceans, it's you know just there for the taking, why can't we make our own salt without paying a tax to the British?

[22:12]

It seemed like a fair question. And Gandhi organized a mass movement to sort of, in which he sort of led a march to the ocean, where he publicly made salt, or dried salt in defiance of a British prohibition, on you know sort of making salt yourself without paying the requisite tax.

This became a sort of major mass movement in terms of the participation. The salt march campaign was the largest of the three major mass movements that Gandhi organized. How did the British in the 1930s respond to the specter of mass nationalism -- nationalism that captivated millions of Indians, that produced massive demonstrations, that seemed to imperil the future of the British Indian empire?

They did not respond because they... um with violence, at least not with excessive violence, rather the British tried to drive a wedge between Gandhi and the leadership of the Indian National Congress, and the rest of the Indian elite.

And the mechanism for doing this was political reform, rather than simply trying to suppress nationalism the British were smarter, they thought that they could you know co-opt some aspect of the nationalist movement while perhaps separating the Gandhian leadership from sort of the larger civil society of British India.

One of the key instruments for doing this was the Government of India Act which was passed in 1935. The Government of India Act established a federal political structure for Indians. More important than that it even established new mechanisms for self-governance. Elections would be held to regional assemblies so that Indians sort of for the first time in the British Era could represent themselves through democratic processes.

This concession was an important one and it did succeed in establishing or in stabilizing to some extent British rule in India. Now it's hard to tell what the long term consequences or implications of political devolution of this kind might have been. The stabilization looks to have been accomplished in the late 1930s. There was no mass movement after 1935 before the Second World War broke out but of course the war came.

[24:44]

And it produced you know substantial tumult in India to which we will turn in just a moment.

The Rest of the Colonial World

[24:51]

Having talked a little bit about India, which is a really important case, I want just to sort of broaden the discussion to talk about the larger colonial world in the interwar period, to what extent was India's experience representative, to what extent was it sort of particular or unique.

I'm not going to talk about other cases rather I'll try to talk about the colonial world writ large.

The end of the First World War produced sort of a upsurge of political nationalism including mass political nationalism in a variety of different contexts. This is a moment that one historian, Erez Manela, has characterized as the Wilsonian Moment. The reason for calling it the Wilsonian Moment is that Manela argues that nationalist moments in multiple national contexts: Egypt, India, Korea and China were sort of influenced by the example of Woodrow Wilson and in particular Woodrow Wilson's effort to promote self-government or government by consent of the governed as a universal principle for the organization of the post First World War order.

Manela argues the Wilson became a sort of lightning rod for nationalism in the colonialized world.

[26:17]

Whether you accept the centralization of Wilson or not, and it's, debatable, I personally think that Manela makes a strong case, but even if you don't accept the centrality of Wilson, then you can still you know see sort of a remarkable upsurge in mass political nationalism coming at the end of the First World War.

It's certainly the case that colonized subject nations experience you know upsurging of political nationalism in a variety of different national contexts at the end of the First World War.

[26:52]

Now this has to do in part with the economic dislocation and disruption that the First World War produces. It also has to do, perhaps, with some of the aspirations for self-government and self-rule that the First World War helps to animate and sustain.

[27:08]

But when we look at the world as a whole, or the colonial world as a whole, then we don't necessarily see this post First World War upsurge in mass nationalism as leading to the consolidation of postcolonial states. On the contrary the 1930s brings something like a stabilization of colonialism in a variety of different contexts.

Empires, the British and the French and the Dutch, and so on succeed in suppressing mass nationalism during the 1920s and during the 1930s the future of empire looks fairly stable.

It does not seem obvious that decolonization is destined to ensue within a decade or so. Colonial empires reach their greatest territorial extent in the 1930s. Moderate political reform, such as the Government of India Act, seems able to satisfy many colonial nationalists. Colonial powers cease talking so much about the white man's burden. They begin to talk more about shared progress and modernization.

These are slogans that are likely to be far more appealing to colonized subject populations. New communications technologies, airliners for example, help to sort of bind colonial empires into more cohesive units. Technological innovation can facilitate the administration of vast political units like empire.

It's much easier in the era of the telephone to administer a far-flung empire than it had been you know in the 18th century when it might have taken six months for messages to be relayed from London to Delhi.

Even the Great Depression of the 1930s facilitates the consolidation of empires as economic units. As the world economy breaks down, as the free trade system breaks down with the depression, empires, here the British are a good example, try to sort of consolidate the imperial zone as an arena of sort of economic exchange.

The British try to create an imperial tariff in 1930. This sort of effort to consolidate the empire as a sort of zone of common progress under the leadership of a more benign European colonial power is typical of the larger experience of empire in the 1930s.

[29:42]

The key point is that decolonization does not seem to be ordained sort of at the end of the 1930s. On the contrary empire looks to have accomplished a certain stabilization of its influence.

The First World War changes all of that. Sorry -- the Second World War changes all of that. The Second World War represents a sort of catastrophe for imperial projects, for European imperial projects, at least.

The Second World War's Effects on Empire

[30:15]

Why is this? Why is the Second World War so destabilizing for the prospects of empire?

The Second World War and Indian Decolonization

[30:22]

I'm going to try to answer that question first by talking in particular about the Indian experience because the Indian experience is usefully reflective of larger trends and it also helps to continue this Indian story that is so central to the history of decolonization at the global scale.

Even the declaration of war, the British declaration of war, against Nazi Germany in 1939 is disruptive and divisive so far as the British Indian Empire is concerned. This is in large part because the British failed to consult Indian political leaders before declaring war on India's behalf and in Indian's name against Nazi Germany.

And for Indian Nationalist politicians, for the leaders of the Indian National Congress in particular, the act of doing this demonstrates very powerfully that Britain does not intend to take Indian political leaders seriously as partners in the governance and administration of India.

In reaction to the declaration of war the Indian National Congress abandons cooperation with the British authorities in India. It sort of pulls out of the regional assemblies and pulls out of government administration. It goes in effect into opposition.

In 1942, really at the height of the Second World War, the Indian National Congress launches a new mass nationalist campaign -- a campaign that becomes known as the Quit India Campaign. It's known as that because of Gandhi's injunction to the British to quit India.

This is perhaps the most effective nationalist insurgency since the Mutiny Rebellion of 1857. British authority in effect collapses in parts of the subcontinent. In retaliation the British throw Gandhi and Nehru and other Indian National Congress leaders in jail. But they're ultimately unable to repress the revolt.

In part that has to do because of the influence of the United States. The Roosevelt administration is no friend to British colonialism and it puts pressure on the Churchill government in London to conciliate and to negotiate with the Indian National Congress.

[32:54]

One of the most catastrophic aspects of India's wartime experience is the famine that occurs in Bengal in 1943 to 1944.

The causes of the famine have to do with wartime inflation which breaks down and disrupts distribution networks for grain. As a consequence of the breakdown of market mechanisms which have previously distributed grain within Bengal a massive famine ensues. This famine was not caused by ecological catastrophe it was a consequence of the wartime economic mobilization and associated dislocation. But its human consequences were no less catastrophic than those that are major ecological famine might have produced.

About 3.5 million people died in the Bengal famine of 1943, 1944. This is a seriously big death toll. It bares comparison to the death toll that Stalin presided over in the Ukrainian Famine in the early 1930s.

[34:00]

It's not quite as many people but it's catastrophic nonetheless. That Britain was unable to prevent the famine of 1943 to 1944 and seemingly reluctant to do a whole lot to ameliorate its consequences was catastrophic for the legitimacy of British rule in India. The colonial state appeared unable to provide its subjects with the most basic of human necessities: food.

[34:29]

And the consequences for the legitimacy of the British Indian Empire would be very serious.

Besides the famine the war also brings the first sort of armed challenge to British rule in India since the Mutiny Rebellion of 1857. The architect of this armed challenge is the man pictured in the slide: Subhas Chandra Bose↗.

A Indian Nationalist leader from an elite Bengali background Bose was one of the most sort of militant of the Indian National Congress leaders, and he embraced the Second World War as an opportunity to end Britain's rule in India for all time.

Bose differed with Gandhi and with Nehru in his willingness to forge a tactical alliance with Germany and Japan to accomplish the purposes of independence. Whereas Gandhi and Nehru believed that there could be no possible cooperation with the Nazis or with Japanese imperialism. Bose was more optimistic about the prospects for striking a temporary tactical alliance with fascism.

To this end he traveled to Germany in 1942 in the hope of organizing German support for an invasion of India that would push out the British and create an independent Indian state. Of course Bose might have paid a little better attention to what Germany did with the countries that it liberated in Eastern Europe. They weren't really liberated. They became sort of colonial vessels of the Nazi state, but he pressed on sort of unperturbed. He even had a meeting with Hitler. It did not secure Bose much substantial support from the Third Reich which was preoccupied with other things at the time. But Bose did manage to persuade the Nazi leadership to transport him to Tokyo where he met with Japanese leaders who proved somewhat more receptive to his message and provided Bose with the support and equipment necessary to sort of organize a nationalist army that would invade British India.

[36:50]

Most of the soldiers who sort of joined this Indian National Army, as Bose called it, were prisoners of war in Japanese POW camps. Indian POWs who had been fighting for the British Indian Army and were taken prisoner by the Japanese. Bose recruited thousands of them to join his Indian National Army which trained with Japanese assistance and was equipped with Japanese arms.

In 1944, I think , Bose invaded British India from Burma.

Burma of course was occupied by Japanese forces during the Second World War and Bose used as a sort of staging base from which to invade British ruled Bengal.

This invasion didn't go very far. It only progressed about twenty miles into British Indian territory before being turned back by the British.

But it nonetheless represented a sort of an important psychological turning point.

What Bose had accomplished was to rally an army of Indians to fight through military means against the British occupation of India. This was a different kind of resistance to that which Gandhi and Nehru and the political leaders of the Indian National Congress put forward.

[38:11]

And the example would serve as a sort of motivating and animating example for Indian Nationalists once the Second World War had been won.

Bose himself did not survive the end of the Second World War. He died in a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific theater towards the war's end.

Japan's Challenge to European Imperialism

[38:28]

Bose's exploits are sort of representative or illustrative of the challenge that Japanese aggrandizement during the Second World War posed to European imperialism in East Asia.

After all Japan's military triumphs in 1942 exposed the fiction of white supremacy. It was hard for Europeans after Japan had conquered Dutch Indonesia, French Indochina, the Philippines which were ruled by the US, Singapore which had been occupied by Britain, it was harder for the Europeans to claim that they ruled and predominated because of some inherent racial or civilizational superiority. Japan overthrew European regimes with remarkable ease.

[39:19]

In the wake of European colonialism Japan established its own colonial authority throughout Southeast Asia. Indochina became ruled by Japan so did Indonesia, so did the Philippines, so did Singapore and so on.

Of course Japanese colonial administrators depended upon the collaboration of local political leaders much as the Europeans had done.

The Japanese probably went a little further however in trying to develop a sort of unifying ideological purpose for their empire. By propounding a greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere and talking about sort of Pan-Asianism as a political project the Japanese attempted to co-opt their colonial subjects as you know sort of members of a shared civilizational project -- a project to recast and recreate East Asia as a domain that would be ruled by East Asians for the benefit of East Asians.

[40:22]

Of course the practice turned out to be a little different than the theory. Japan's empire exhibited sort of racialized and civilizational hierarchies of its own. These we've already talked about in the lecture discussion on the Second World War.

But despite the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of Japan's colonizing project in East Asia the defeat of European imperialism during the Second World War had great consequences for what came next.

Japan's rapid overthrew of European imperial projects created an example that colonized nationalist leaders in Indochina, Indonesia and elsewhere might seek to emulate once the war had been won.

Moreover the surrender of Japanese forces at the beginning of September 1945 created a power vacuum throughout Southeast Asia. Insofar as colonial authorities had been overthrown Japan's surrender left a temporary vacuum of authority which nationalists were able to fill.

Vietnam After the Second World War

[41:30]

Here the example of Vietnam is illustrative. So the Japanese surrender at the beginning of September 1945. What happens next? It takes six months, literally six months, for French colonial forces to even try to reoccupy Vietnam, to reestablish the prewar colonial regime. In that time Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Việt Minh Nationalist Front, is able to offer a declaration of independence, claiming to rule Vietnam in the name of the Vietnamese people.

So this gap between the end of the war and the attempted reestablishment of postwar colonial regimes is really important because it provides a window of opportunity in which nationalists are able to stake their own claims.

And the consequences of this will be durable.

[42:20]

One of the interesting things about Ho Chi Minh's Declaration of Independence which he issued in September 1945 is the extent to which it was modeled on Jefferson's Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Ho self-consciously borrowed the language of Thomas Jefferson and he did so in part to appeal to the United States. He supposed that by sort of emulating the example of the American Revolution by presenting himself even as an heir to the Jeffersonian Revolutionary tradition he would be able to secure the support of the United States for his nationalist movement.

[43:00]

Was this a sort of foolish gambit? Was is really plausible for Ho Chi Minh to imagine that the United States might prove to be an ally rather than an adversary in the quest to establish an independent Vietnamese state. What do you think?

It all depends, right, on your perspective? Looking back and knowing what we know now about the origins of the Vietnam War, knowing what we know about the ways in which the United States inherited some of France's colonial responsibilities in Vietnam we might presume that it was really foolish of Ho Chi Minh to have had imagined that the United States could be an ally rather than an adversary. But at the time it was not necessarily so optimistic or utopian even to imagine that the United States could be an ally to anti-colonialist nationalist movements.

After all, Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, was outspoken in his opposition to the colonial order. After visiting Gambia during the Second World War, Roosevelt spoke about how awful colonialism was. He said, you know, publicly, that the British had been exploiting the people of Gambia for two hundred years, which was an exaggeration it had only been about a hundred years, and that their sort of desperate economic situation was a direct consequence of British exploitation.

So Roosevelt was under sort of no illusions as to what he thought about imperialism. He thought that it was revolting and he wanted no part in the sustenance of the colonial order. Roosevelt also spoke out publicly sort of on behalf of Indian Nationalism, you know, appeal to the British to conciliate and cooperate with Gandhi rather than to sort of throw him in jail which is what they did do.

[44:59]

Roosevelt's anti-colonialism was pronounced but it was not unrepresentative of the country that he led. After all, the United States government entered into a series of anti-colonial commitments during the Second World War. At the beginning of the Second World War the United States promised the Philippines immediate independence once the war had been won. And it should be said that the relationship of the Philippines to the United States at the beginning of the war was rather different from the relationship of the European colonies to the colonial metropoles↗. The Filipinos had a great deal more sort of self-determination than Indians did at the end of the 1930s.

[45:40]

Besides sort of leading by example the United States also you know promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 which promised to restore the rights of self-government to those who have been deprived of them. It wasn't clear whether this would apply to the victims of colonialism as well to the victims of Nazi aggression but Roosevelt suggested that he interpreted that part of the Atlantic Charter as applying to all peoples not just to Europeans.

As if to make the point crystal clear the United States in 1943 drafted a declaration of national independence on behalf of the United Nations, the wartime alliance. The declaration on national independence proclaimed colonized peoples to be subjects of the international community not simply subjects of colonial powers.

[46:33]

And it argued that the united nations, as an alliance of great powers, should try to create opportunities for colonized peoples to achieve independence.

[46:45]

So the United States, at least in its sort of formal proclamations, tried to locate itself as being on the side of colonized peoples striving to achieve their national independence.

[46:57]

(Student question)

Yeah.

[47:10]

Well, that's a really great question. And to answer it I think you would first of all say that American anti-colonialism is qualified by some of the factors that you identify, by the need to maintain good working relations with the British during the war. So the issue of colonialism is a source of tension within the Anglo-American alliance. That's not to say it's reconciled one way or the other. It remains a source of tension. But to answer your question directly: Where does it come from?

I would point first of all to you know what you might characterize as political identity. Americans are the heirs to an anti-colonial revolution. The revolution of 1776 is a revolution against empire, right. So insofar as Americans view their own history in terms of opposition to imperialism, opposition in particular to the British Empire, there is a tendency to identify with the struggles of other you know colonized peoples.

There are also political aspects to Roosevelt's anti-colonialism. And Roosevelt was nothing if not an astute retail politician. You know he understood where the votes were. And there are important constituencies in the United States that are unsympathetic to British imperialism in general -- Irish American voters for example -- are staunchly anti-British and staunchly anti-imperialistic. Irish Americans voters also happen to be a really important pillar of Roosevelt's New Deal coalition.

So there are you know domestic political self-interests in for American leaders in aligning themselves with anti-imperialism. Imperialism is not popular in the United States, certainly not with the American public.

[48:56]

Of course the relationship of the United States to imperialism will change with the advent of the Cold War. But that hasn't happened yet, and we'll turn to that in due course.

World War II is Catastrophic for Colonial Empires

[49:10]

World War II then we might see as representing a major moment of crisis for the colonial system. The Second World War was a catastrophe for colonial empires. Why was it so catastrophic? The answer has to do in part with the economic exhaustion of the European colonial empires during the war itself.

[49:35]

You know the British end up exhausted and indebted at the war's end. They're not only indebted to the United States which is the major lender to the British during the war. The British are also indebted to India. They've borrowed from their own Indian colony in order to pay for the war and at the end of the war that debt will have to be paid back.

[49:56]

Other colonial powers are even worse off than the British at the end of the war. After all the Netherlands were occupied by Nazi Germany -- turned into a German vessel state. It's hard to reclaim an imperial role in the world when you've just been sort of overrun and occupied by German forces at home. France's situation is very similar. The end of the war brings with it sort of huge challenges simply so far as the reestablishment of political order at home is concerned -- to try to reestablish a global colonial role at the same time is to heap difficulty upon difficulty.

[50:39]

Beside the exhaustion of individual European colonial empires the Second World War represents something like a systemic crisis for the colonial system writ large.

[50:53]

One of the defining attributes of the colonial system had been the centrality of Europe to world politics. Well, that all changes with the Second World War. With the Second World War power in effect shifts to the United States and the Soviet Union. Both countries on the periphery of sort of the European international system.

[51:14]

Europe's eclipse makes a sort of reestablishment of a European centered colonial order you know seemingly unlikely.

[51:26]

There is also the disruption of colonial regimes themselves -- particularly in Southeast Asia where the Japanese succeed in literally overthrowing European colonial administrations.

[51:40]

Besides the sort of economic and political disruption that the Second World War brings we should also think a little bit about the sort of ideological consequences of the Second World War.

[51:52]

After all Nazism was a political project predicated upon a set of claims about the suitedness of some people to rule over and dominate other people. Nazism sort of took the logic of European colonialism, a logic you know, predicated upon hierarchy and division to its extreme but nonetheless logical conclusion.

[52:17]

Thereafter, colonialism would always be tarnished at some level by the analogy of Nazism, what Hitler did, what Hitler had attempted to do, in the verdict of the French, sorry, Francophone, anticolonial theorist, Aimé Césaire↗, was to try to create a sort of colonial empire in Europe.

[52:41]

Nazism in Césaire's famous phrase was no more than colonialism directed against Europeans.

[52:48]

And there was an elemental, you know, fundamental truth to that. After the Second World War it becomes much harder to justify the existence of political and economic systems that are organized hierarchically and in which some people will be exploited and subjugated for the benefit of others.

[53:08]

So how then do the imperial projects conclude? How do we get from a world in which colonialism still prevails as it did at the end of the Second World War to a world in which formally colonized peoples create and inhabit nation-states of their own?

The End of British Colonialism in India

[53:28]

Let's start with the Indian case so we can take this story through to its conclusion. The Second World War left the British Indian Empire in a state of some disarray. Britain in 1945 was really in no position to pay for its Indian Empire. It couldn't pay to maintain a substantial military forces in India. Besides that there were substantial debts to repay.

[54:00]

The decision to leave came subsequent to the elections that took place in Great Britain in the spring of 1945. These elections were really important because they threw out Winston Churchill, the war leader, and ushered in a new Labor government. The Labor Party is Britain's sort of party of the left. Churchill's Conservative Party is the party of the right.

[54:27]

One of the outcomes of the installation of a Labor government was the creation of a government in London that was less committed to the sustenance of a global imperial role than Churchill had been.

[54:38]

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say that the Labor government was in favor of decolonization. It was not.

[54:45]

It wanted to retain an imperial role. But it was more willing to broker compromise with nationalists where it seemed prudent to do so. Churchill by contrast had been a staunch defender of Britain's global imperial presence. Churchill drew a very hard line and was reluctant to countenance any diminution of Britain's imperial responsibilities in the world.

[55:09]

India of course had experienced substantial tumult during the Second World War. The Quit India Campaign had you know sort of brought effective British administration to a halt in some parts of the subcontinent. The Bengal famine of 1943-44 produced sort of widespread catastrophe in Northeast India.

[55:36]

The Labor government that came to power in 1945 was fearful of the consequences of being sort of drawn in to an unpredictable and uncertain crisis in India. One of the consequences, one of the issues, that sort of most concerned the Labor government was the rising sort of conflict between India's Hindu and Muslim populations.

The Indian National Congress construed itself as a sort of non-religious nationalist organization -- an organization that would represent people of a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds. Despite this commitment on the part of the INC the war years in the immediate postwar months bring an upsurge in communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims.

[56:24]

You know in part this has to do with the realization in India that the end of empire is nearing. As Indians perceive that the British might be you know willing to wind down their imperial role, to transfer power to Indians, then the conflict amongst the potential claimants to that power, naturally intensifies. And the fear of destabilization and catastrophe is one of the factors that sort weighs heavily upon British authorities in 1945.

[57:00]

Impoverished by the war and fearful of the future the Labor government in 1945 effectively decides to bring the project of British Empire in India to an end.

[57:13]

Despite having decided to leave a number of questions still remain of course. How fast should the British leave once they've committed to do so? What kind of relationship with independent India might be maintained? And you know perhaps most important to whom should power be ceded?

[57:32]

Should the Indian National Congress become the inheritor of the British Raj in India. That would certainly be one alternative.

But by 1945 the Muslim League, an organization representing the interests of Indian Muslims, have become a powerful sort of rival to the Congress. Of course the Muslim League could not claim to represent anything like a majority of Indians. Because most Indians are not Muslims. But Muslims nonetheless constitute a substantial minority and the Muslim League under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah↗ pictured in this slide claimed a purpose as the political representative of India's Muslim population.

[58:19]

During 1945, and into 1946, Jinnah engaged in a series of sustained ultimately fruitless negotiations with the Indian National Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi over the future sort of framework of governance and rule in an independent India.

[58:41]

What Jinnah wanted first and foremost was a political framework in which the parts of India dominated by Muslims would have substantial regional autonomy which they would be free to sort of run their own affairs as they saw fit.

[58:58]

Besides provincial autonomy for the Muslim majority parts of British India Jinnah also wanted sort of strong protections for the religious and social prerogatives of Muslims at the all India scale.

[59:10]

So he wanted something akin to a loose federation with a strong bill of rights. A bill of rights that was particularly protective of religious freedoms. This was not the kind of post-imperial state that Jawaharlal Nehru wanted to create. Nehru was committed above all to the creation of a centralized state.

[59:31]

A state in which the political center, presumably New Delhi, would predominate over provisional authorities. Can anybody think why Nehru might have strongly favored a centralized state?

[59:45]

Recall last week's lecture.

(Student response)

[59:56]

Exactly. Insofar as Nehru's really committed to an agenda of state led modernization it's necessary for Nehru to create a strong state.

[60:07]

So ultimately this, you know, set of rival commitments, Nehru's commitment to a strong state, Jinnah's commitment to provincial autonomy leads in only one direction. It leads towards the acceptance of partition, division, as sort of the principle on which India's postcolonial transition will be made.

[60:33]

The British come gradually to recognize this. At the beginning of 1946 a so-called cabinet mission is dispatched to India to negotiate with the congress and with the Muslim League so as to define the terms of postcolonial succession. It doesn't succeed. A year later Lord Louis Mountbatten↗ who had during the Second World War been the commander of united nations forces in Southeast Asia takes up the task.

Mountbatten goes to India and early in 1947 proclaims that India will become independent in August 1947 whatever the state of agreement between the Indian parties between at that time. So this is a very short time frame -- just eight months -- in which to negotiate the terms of a postcolonial transition -- a transition that will create one of the world's largest nation-states.

Of course the postcolonial transition in India does not create one nation-state. It creates two nation-states. Because division, division between sort of the Hindu majority parts of India and the Muslim majority provinces in the northeast and the northwest ends up being the price that has to be paid for independence.

[61:53]

Freedom comes in August 1947. Accepting sort of the responsibilities of India's first independent Prime Minister Nehru speaks evocatively of freedom at midnight -- because the transfer of power takes place at midnight.

[62:13]

But of course it comes with partition. The Muslim majority parts of British India -- East Bengal pictured here in the slide -- and the Muslim majority provinces of the northwest become a separate country: Pakistan.

The Republic of India inherits the rest of British India which is by far the greater part of its territory. Besides the Hindu majority parts of India which is shaded yellow the portions which is shaded sort of orange on this map which contain large numbers of Muslims become part of the Republic of India.

[62:58]

It's kind of clear from the map as to who gets the better deal out of transition -- out of the division of India. Jinnah speaks publicly of Pakistan as a moth-eaten country. As a country which is divided by about a thousand miles -- more like fifteen hundred miles of Indian territory -- a country that is difficult to administer and which will eventually in 1971 end up dividing itself.

What was East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh in 1971 following a sort of subsequent declaration of independence.

[63:39]

But this is how India is divided into two successor states. The relations between them are not good. And they remain not good through to the present day. The first Indo-Pakistan War breaks out in October 1947. It's fought over disputed territory in the state of Jammu and Kashmir up in the far north.

[63:59]

Since then there have been two more wars between India and Pakistan. Fortunately there has not so far been a fourth. If there is it will probably be the last.

[64:13]

No, there is substantial Muslim involvement in the Indian National Congress during the '30s.

Indeed the president of the INC, the titular president of the INC is a Muslim. So it's a complicated issue and the Indian National Congress does not perceive itself as a Hindu political organization.

And that remains the case through to the present day. Being sort of secular and all encompassing is absolutely at the core of the INC's mission. This is one of the reasons why the INC in recent decades has been challenged by a political party -- the BJP -- that claims to be an authentically Hindu party.

[65:04]

So the INC is committed to sort of non-denominational politics -- to representing all of India's communities. And that's one of the reasons that maintaining control of provinces with a substantial Muslim population was really, really important to Nehru.

Because if you didn't retain control of territory that a substantial number of Muslims inhabited then your sort of foundational ideological claim to be a party representing all Indians regardless of religion or creed begins to look rather hollow.

[65:40]

So that's a good question and the answer is that the INC was sort of not a Hindu party but a sort of multi-devotional party in which Muslims played substantial and important roles.

[65:56]

Okay, so in 1947 India becomes independent. One of the really interesting questions about Indian independence is why it happens so much earlier than say African independence.

Why does it take another fifteen years after India becomes independent for Africa to decolonize? Why will Britain try to sort of sustain an imperial role in the Middle East after 1947 once Britain has already made the decision to grant independence to India which is the most important, the largest, the richest of all British, of all of the British empire's colonial possessions.

Decolonization Elsewhere in the World

[66:45]

Indian independence does not prefigure, at least not in the near term, a larger concession of colonial devolution or decolonization for the rest of the colonized world. And this is really interesting. The Europeans after 1947 will try to retain the residual elements of their non-European empires.

The decision to grant India independence does not indicate a sort of larger strategic -- that a larger strategic choice to decolonize has been made. On the contrary the British will continue to believe for some time that it is in their interests to remain an imperial power.

British political leaders of both parties, the Conservatives and the Laborites, argue that empire is in Britain's interests because it's an economic asset, and because having a big global empire makes Britain a world power of the first rank.

[67:48]

Britain is not the only European country in the late 1940s to conclude that imperialism has a future. That empire should be sustained and perpetuated in some guise or form.

The Netherlands, a very small country in Northwestern Europe, has a pretty big, or did have a pretty big colonial empire in Southeast Asia before you know the Japanese overran it in 1942.

The Dutch East Indies -- what we know today as the Netherlands -- are potentially a really rich territory. Rich in natural materials, particularly tropical products, like rubber as well as oil.

[68:32]

After the Second World War the Dutch do not conclude that the ravages of war have made the Netherlands incapable of sustaining the burdens of empire.

On the contrary, the Dutch conclude that the wealth of empire, will facilitate and even galvanize the postwar recovery of the Netherlands.

And this is a very, very important strategic choice that the Europeans make, and for the most part the Europeans colonial powers make the same choice, which is to embrace empire as a vehicle for sustaining their own postwar recoveries.

The British do decide to let India go. But the Indian case was in some key respects anomalous. Elsewhere the Europeans commit to sort of reconsolidate and sustain their own imperial responsibilities in the non-European world.

Dutch Decolonization in Indonesia

[69:30]

The Dutch, for example, talk about the need to sort of reestablish their colonial rule in the Dutch East Indies, in Indonesia, as an economic imperative. One of the sort of phrases that is kind of widely spoken in Dutch politics in 1946, 1947 is: Indie verloren, rampspoed geboren. What this translates as loosely is: if the Indies are lost disaster will follow. Disaster will be created.

[70:08]

So sort of clear linkage is drawn in Dutch politics between the retention of the empire and the postwar recovery and prosperity of the Netherlands.

Given this Dutch commitment to retaining empire the eventual accomplishment of Indonesian independence which comes in 1950 will be a bloodier affair that the achievement of Indian independence had been. The colonial power in this case is much less willing to...oh...

[70:42]

So how does it happen? How does it come about that Indonesia wins its independence not because the Netherlands choose to grant it but because Indonesian nationalists are able to sort of raise the costs of retention such that the Dutch decide that they have no other choice but to let go.

[71:03]

The Second World War ends. Just to recapitulate -- with Japanese forces still in situ↗ what had been the Dutch East Indies. A power vacuum is created. Into it steps Sukarno↗, a Indonesian political leader who had been a nationalist before the Second World War, but who decided to cooperate with the Japanese during the war itself.

[71:31]

Mountbatten, who's the theater commander for United Nations, urges the Dutch who want to reestablish their colonial rule to negotiate with Sukarno, to try to reach some kind of compromise solution that might preserve a facade of Dutch sovereignty but which will grant effective governing responsibility to Sukarno.

[71:53]

One attempt to do this is made in 1946. The Dutch you know sort of reluctantly concede to create a federal sort of Indonesia state.

[72:04]

A state in which they will retain some influence and substantial economic interests. This agreement breaks down. The Dutch and the Indonesian nationalists led by Sukarno you know will engage in actual fighting.

Of course this is asymmetric warfare which puts the military resources of a European state against what you might characterize as an insurgent or guerilla movement. The Dutch argue that sort of sustaining their imperial role in Indonesia is in the best interests not only of the Dutch but also of the Indonesians.

[72:41]

One of the arguments that they make is that the nationalist movement is really dominated by Javanese. Indonesia is a big territory that comprises a variety of ethnic and linguistic group -- the dominant linguistic group -- or the dominant group are the Javanese -- who inhabit the island of Java -- Sukarno is a Javanese. And the Dutch argue that independence under Sukarno might be all very well and good for the sort of Javanese inhabitants of their Indonesian Empire but it will not be so palatable to inhabitants of the outlying islands. This is not an argument that gains a whole lot of traction with the international community.

[73:21]

In the United Nations the Netherlands will be condemned for trying to wage a bloody anti-insurgent war in the Dutch East Indies. The role of the United States ends up being really important.

[73:37]

The United States urges the Dutch to negotiate and ultimately to concede independence to Sukarno's nationalists.

[73:45]

Indeed the United States threatens to withhold Marshall Aid from the Netherlands should the Dutch you know refuse to make the necessary and appropriate concessions to the Indonesian Nationalist Movement. Coerced by the United States the Dutch ultimately do agree to decolonize their empire and in 1950 the Republic of Indonesia is created.

[74:12]

You know subsequent to a series of negotiations in The Hague during 1949.

Decolonization in Vietnam

[74:18]

In Indochina, what we know today, as Vietnam, the story is a little bit different. It's similar in many respects but the outcome is a little bit different.

[74:28]

As in Indonesia, a legacy of war is contested, political succession, at the end of war, Chinese nationalists and British forces, occupy Indochina -- temporarily.

The French don't come back until early 1946. This provides a sort of moment of opportunity for Ho Chi Minh to stake his claim.

Of course Ho Chi Minh's claim is not accepted by all inhabitants of Indochina. Indochina is a complicated territory. While Ho enjoys strong support in the north, he's based out of Hanoi, he has less support in the southern parts of French Indochina, particularly in Saigon.

The Catholic population of Vietnam which is about 15% is particularly resistant to Ho Chi Minh's claim to be able to speak on behalf of Vietnamese people in general.

[75:26]

The French come back in 1946. At first there is an uneasy sort of truce between Ho Chi Minh and the French colonial authorities. But in 1946 war breaks out when the French attack Hanoi sort of eager to purge Ho Chi Minh's sort of political presence in French Indochina.

A long guerilla war ensues. In 1949 the French try to create a successor state of their own so that they can argue to be fighting on behalf of sort a Vietnamese ally not on behalf of their own colonial empire.

[76:08]

The state of Vietnam is created under Bảo Đại↗ who is the titular emperor of Indochina even under sort of the French colonial regime.

[76:18]

The state of Vietnam that Bảo Đại rules is a sort of obvious inheritor of France's colonial mission. It's not really sort of an independent state. It's still a state in which the Europeans would you know exercise substantial influence. It's Vietnamese in name but you know substantially dependent upon European support.

[76:49]

The Vietnamese situation is most different from the Indonesian situation insofar as the role of the United States is concerned.

[77:02]

In Indonesia the United States ultimately came down on the side of the nationalists. In Indochina, in Vietnam, the United States does the reverse.

[77:13]

Because of rising concerns with the Cold War, because of Ho Chi Minh's affiliation with the International Communist Movement, because of the you know psychic shock that the loss of China in 1949 represents, the United States decides in Vietnam to align itself with France's effort to sustain imperial mechanisms of control through an anointed postcolonial successor, namely, Bảo Đại. The United States from the late 1940s will begin to supply resources and money to sustain France's counter insurgency war in French Indochina, the state of Vietnam.

[77:58]

This is ultimately where we have to go back to if we want to identify the origins of the Vietnam War -- in a contested postcolonial transition. Vietnam then is an appropriate point to conclude the history of decolonization as it was before the Cold War and to begin thinking about the relationship of decolonization to the world's Cold War division which is what we're going to do on Thursday.