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The Last Colonies. Edited by ROBERT ALDRICH and JOHN CONNELL. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 335 $55.95 (cloth).
Studies of the processes of decolonization, analyses of the "end of empires," have multiplied in recent years. Scholarly and popular accounts of the collapse of the European colonial empires in the second half of the twentieth century are now readily found in bookshops and libraries. One consequence of this increased knowledge has been the emergence of a conventional wisdom as to the main features of the disappearance of the colonial world. The old imperial powers-for instance Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands-gradually succumbed to a variety of pressures that made the practical difficulties and financial costs of continuing their colonial rule insupportable. For example, metropolitan electorates demanded welfare and lost the will to dominate overseas as the necessary money and manpower seemed ever harder to find. Sufficient and effective local collaborators in the colonial territories began to melt away as nationalist movements, skillfully deploying violence and electoral politics, steadily undermined the value and security of colonial regimes. International politics, driven by the great-power rivalries of the Cold War and increasingly influenced by "Third World" governments, encouraged the development of a prevalent mood of "anti-colonialism" in international affairs. Increasingly costly and disreputable, colonies were jettisoned and sovereign independence was claimed, with as much face-saving grace as possible or with rancor, force, and bloodshed if necessary.
In this valuable and wide-ranging work, Richard Aldrich and John Connell have done much to explore the emerging limitations of this general outlook on one of the great global transformations of the twentieth century. They start with...