Beyond Empire And Nation The Decolonization Of African And Asian Societies 1930s1960s Remco Raben by Remco Raben, Els Bogaerts 9789004260443, 9789067182898, 9004260447, 9067182893 instant download after payment.

Decolonization has become one of the major themes in twentieth-century
historiography. Within the span of three decades, most of the countries that
had been colonized by European powers became independent. Discussions
tend to concentrate on the causes of decolonization, particularly on the
motives and policies of the European powers. As a result, writings on the
history of decolonization have for a long time been primarily about unmak-
ing and about departure. Recently, however, the perspective has shifted, with
more weight being attached to global dynamics on the one hand, and greater
agency being ascribed to local actors on the other.
This volume aims to enhance the debate by moving the analysis away
from the political interpretations of decolonization that have been used by
both the departing powers and the new national leaders, interpretations that
have subsequently dominated our retrospective view of the period. In the
next pages, twelve authors give their views on the meaning of decoloniza-
tion in African and Asian societies. They all view decolonization over a long
span of time in order to assess the convergences and divergences between
major social changes and political decolonization. Most articles concentrate
on social and institutional changes in the middle decades of the twentieth
century, ranging in topic from land titles, urban symbolism, racial and class
segregation, the banking system, plural economies, neighbourhood asso-
ciations, and competing nationalities. The authors uncover the experiences
of peoples and institutions that were part of the history of decolonization
but whose experiences do not easily fit into the temporal dichotomy of a
‘before’ and ‘after’. Avoiding a strictly political interpretation of decoloniza-
tion causes the process of disentanglement from formal colonial relations to
become part of a much wider trend of re-thinking and re-ordering societies.
This concern has been central to the large research programme ‘Indonesia
across Orders; the Reorganization of Indonesian Society, 1930s-1960s’, initi-
ated and coordinated by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in
Amsterdam, which led to the articles in this volume.