In This Review
The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization

The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization

By Martin Thomas

Princeton University Press, 2024, 672 pp.

In this ambitious and sweeping study, Thomas tells the grand story of the end of European empires and the struggle for decolonization. This drama played out in different times and places across Africa, Asia, and Latin America between World War I and the 1970s. Thomas argues that decolonization was pushed forward by the forces of globalization. As the world wars dealt a deathblow to the old imperial order, new and dynamic forms of economic, cultural, and political exchange took hold, creating transnational movements and opportunities for the reordering of relations between what came to be termed the First, Second, and Third Worlds. The “rival globalizations” of Western capitalism and Soviet communism gave postcolonial nationalist movements more room for maneuver. Decolonization reshaped the world’s political geography, giving birth across the globe to novel political alignments and projects for self-determination. In this new work of history, the peoples and countries of the postcolonial world appear to have had more voice and agency than was evident in older accounts, even as they remained trapped in the lower reaches of capitalist and geopolitical hierarchies.