The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, Volume IV Reactions to Colonialism

The collection of essays in this volume offers an overview of scholarly approaches to the ways in which diverse actors, representing the colonised or the colonising nations, or indeed the international community, reacted to colonialism during the lifetime of the modern colonial empires or in their aftermath. The coverage is broad in terms of geographical scope and historical period, with articles on the major colonial empires in Asia and Africa and the imperial centres of Paris, London and Berlin, from the conquests of the late nineteenth century to the period of decolonisation. The selection also reflects recent academic trends by focusing on countries whose colonial past and experience of decolonisation have been studied and debated with particular intensity, such as Algeria, Kenya and India. The volume draws on previously published articles and book chapters by leading international scholars writing in, or translated into, English and includes a critical introduction which situates each essay in relation to recent debates in this dynamic and expanding field of study.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Modes of Resistance: 1857: need for alternative sources, Pankaj Rag; Connexions between 'primary resistance' movements and modern mass nationalism in East and Central Africa, T. O. Ranger; Conclusion, Stephen Ellis. Part II Modes of 'Civilising': Christian critics of empire; missionaries, lantern lectures, and the Congo reform campaign in Britain, Kevin Grant; ’States of injury’: Josephine Butler on slavery, citizenship, and the Boer War, Antoinette Burton; African resistance and Center Party recalcitrance in the Reichstag colonial debates of 1905/06, John S. Lowry. Part III Modes of Imagining: Imperialism and nationalism in India, Anil Seal; Peasant revolt and Indian nationalism: the Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919-22, Gyan Pandey; Cultural transformations, Pierre Brocheux; ’Our strike’: equality, anticolonial politics and the 1947-48 strike in French West Africa, Frederick Cooper; Authority, gender and violence: the war within Mau Mau’s fight for land and freedom, John Lonsdale; People’s war, state formation and revolution in Africa: a comparative analysis of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola, Patrick Chabal. Part IV Modes of Solidarity: Between a moment and an era: the origins and afterlives of Bandung, Christopher J. Lee; Rethinking the Cold War and decolonization: the grand strategy of the Algerian war for independence, Matthew Connelly; Decolonising ’French universalism’: reconsidering the impact of the Algerian war on French intellectuals, James D. Le Sueur; ’Daddy wouldn’t buy me a Mau Mau’: the British popular press and the demoralization of empire, Joanna Lewis. Part V Critical Modes: History and imperialism: a century of theory, from Marx to postcolonialism, Patrick Wolfe; Nationalism and the new humanism, Nigel Gibson; Ngugi’s concept of history and the post-colonial discourses in Kenya, James A. Ogude. Part VI Modes of Remembering: Savage wars? Codes of violence in Algeria, 1830s-1990s, James McD

Martin Shipway is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century French Studies, and former Head of the Department of European Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.