Decolonization: the Last Stages

Abstract

W X rHEN I last had the privilege of addressing a Chatham House audience my opening words were on events which had been directed from this House by William Pitt, two hundred years ago. It was under his great administration that Britain became the most formidable and the most widely extended of the empires, a situation which it was to occupy for at least a hundred and fifty years and which was based upon world-wide trade and sea power. Many of us learned our geography at school from maps which showed the principal strategic points of the whole world (all-shall I say-excepting Panama and Istanbul) in British hands and one-fifth of the land surface of the earth 'coloured red'. To be sure, British predominance had long passed its peak but-until some date which you may select for yourselves-the decline was relative not absolute, a question of other nations coming up, not of us going down. For my part, I fix upon one clear-cut event to mark the moment when the British Empire ceased to be the world's leading power: the fall of Singapore in I942, which was the death-blow to colonialism in Asia. From that moment the whole world moved into a phase of social development to which the French have recently given a name, the useful word 'de'colonisation'. If I might be allowed for a moment to assume the mantle of my former colleague, Arnold Toynbee, thus appearing as a dwarf in a giant's robe, I could take a long view of the extraordinary period of Colonization and Decolonization, which has never happened in history before and can never happen again. In a period of 468 years-I can date it very precisely, from the discovery of America in I492 to the European withdrawal from Africa in I960-a group of small and restless Powers in Europe explored, subjugated, exploited, and developed the whole world, giving it for the first time in the history of mankind a common consciousness which infiltrates political and social frontiers and which must destroy the old barriers, not only between the nations but between peasant and townsman, between barbarian and civilized man. The world has at last become one place and the human race must apply itself to the problem of world-government. This unification was achieved by the imperialists from Europe, who explored the unknown lands, settled the unoccupied lands, conquered those nations which were passing through a phase of decadence, assumed the right to administer primitive tribes, and eventually met insuperable obstacles in the Far East. China proved too large a morsel to digest, Japan too hard a nut to crack; and from the Far East, early in this century, the 29