PublishedOxford University Press, March 2014 |
ISBN9780199698271 |
FormatHardcover, 560 pages |
Dimensions24.1cm × 15.9cm × 4.3cm |
The first ever comparative account of the dramatic collapse of the British and French colonial empires, explaining the end of both empires as an intertwined, even co-dependent process. Decolonization gathered momentum, not as an empire-specific affair, but as a global one, in which the wider march of twentieth-century history played a vital part: industrial concentration and global depression, World War and Cold War, Communism and other anti-colonial ideologies,
mass consumerism and the allure of American popular culture. Above all, as Martin Thomas shows, the internationalization of colonial affairs made it impossible to contain colonial problems locally,
spelling the end for Europe's two largest colonial empires less than two decades after the end of the Second World War.
