Abstract Hong Kong’s history remains contested during its decolonisation. The colonial government of Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and historians at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) all attempted to interpret the past in their own right. This article argues that the contest for epistemological territory between the Chinese and British colonial governments led to the fragmented accounts of Hong Kong history in official curricula. Unlike other cases, Hong Kong’s decolonisation did not result in independence. Instead, the United Kingdom transferred the colony’s sovereignty to the PRC in 1997. Both sides attempted to showcase their right and ability to shape the colony’s past. Instead of having an ultimate “winner,” both occupied a share of the epistemological territory regarding historical knowledge, producing fragmented accounts of the past. The article also recovers and examines the agency of locally trained historians. These people of Hong Kong did not have any chance to produce their own “autonomous history” precisely because of the impossibility of independence. This process resulted in the partially decolonised yet censored historical narratives that persist in Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Through this case, this article calls for further discussion of what ‘decolonisation’ meant for actors beyond the state.

Abstract This article considers the ambivalence of late colonial race politics in France and French Africa through the life and work of celebrated ethnographic filmmaker and pioneer of cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch (1917- 2004). Part of a special issue on late colonialism in Africa, this study shifts the focus from the continent itself to the legacies of late colonialism in Africa for race relations in postcolonial Europe.

Abstract This article suggests that the ‘self-destruct’ phase of the late-colonial state was marked by rival projects to construct a durable political settlement in the face of the divisions wrought by development initiatives and security policy. A triangular contest between outgoing colonial administrators, a new generation of educated moderate nationalists, and those the colonial state pejoratively called ‘bush politicians,’ marked the twilight years of colonial rule. As the case of Nyeri District in Central Kenya, still reeling from the Mau Mau Uprising, indicates, these conflicts regularly concerned the meaning of post-conflict justice and the terms on which a community could be reconciled. The work of the Nyeri Democratic Party is illustrative, resisting disempowerment in the transition to independence and demanding that much more be done to heal the breaches wrought by colonial violence. This period laid the groundwork for a competitive post-colonial political arena, albeit underpinned by the sometimes dangerous rhetoric of ethnic unity. Using official documents from Kenyan and British archives, especially those in the previously closed Migrated Archive, this article illustrates the mutual bargaining that formed the political settlement in post-colonial Central Kenya.

Abstract This article looks at the final years of French colonial rule in Dahomey through the lens of development policies concerning the territory’s main resource: the oil palm tree. It examines how the Dahomean leaders dealt with the issue of development once the Loi Cadre allowed them to have a say in the matter. I argue that the Dahomeans were crucial in finding new development strategies even before formal independence. It also tries to assess the extent to which these solutions followed or departed from previous colonial attempts. The article therefore first describes the main features of colonial oil palm development in Dahomey since the end of the Second World War. Second, it depicts how Dahomean leaders rethought the development approach and why they found in the “syndicate association” the institutional tool to implement it. Finally, it argues that this solution, which combined features of Soviet and Israeli cooperatives with approaches specific to African socialism, was different from any other option previously considered by the colonial administration. By analysing late colonialism from a non-French perspective, this article argues that the Africans were no less crucial actors than the Europeans in the making of the late colonial state.

Abstract The idea of a ‘late colonial state’ has been surprisingly durable. It is also the case that the meaning and significance of decolonisation – indeed our understanding of when it took place and how long it lasted – has been widened and deepened. We no longer tend to think of it as a purely political let alone constitutional event, but as a much broader shift in the relations between the ‘colonial world’ and its (former) masters and as having many more dimensions: economic, cultural, demographic among them. Needless to say, we are no closer to an agreed explanation than we were twenty-five or fifty years ago: the primacy of nationalist resistance, or of metropolitan politics or of geopolitical change still have their adherents even if it was the ricochet effect of all three on each other that offers the most plausible analysis. However, regardless of which account is favoured it seems clear that the nature of the ‘end game’ of the colonial state is the best place in which to search for answers. The late colonial state still has work to do.

Abstract This article examines debates about the future of health coordination between French African colonies in the era of decolonisation. These debates illuminate tensions over the future of French doctors in Africa, the role of international organisations, and the meaning of colonial borders for public health. In the late 1950s, French officials sought to reformulate inter-territorial colonial medical structures in a way that could be sustained with African independence, resulting by the 1960s in the creation of new West and Central African regional health organisations. Newly appointed African health ministers supported these organisations for various reasons, including sharing costs of medical infrastructure and the idea of a French debt that could be addressed through technical assistance. Both French and African health officials in turn naturalised the idea of post-colonial health coordination between former French colonies, regardless of shared borders with other African states. Both French and African health officials used the rhetoric of “disease knows no borders” to engage in a process of health “region-making,” although the outcome was health coordination rooted less in epidemiological realities than colonial histories. Late colonialism catalysed change in public health and medicine that mirrored broader political developments but also produced distinct discourses, agendas, and institutions.

Abstract Community development represents the synthesis of post-war British colonial development policy. Officially used for the first time in 1948, in Arthur Creech Jones’ definition community development was a movement based on the active participation and cooperation of local community members promoting a better life for the community, encompassing all forms of improvement in the areas of agriculture, public health and sanitation, infant and maternal welfare, and the spread of literacy. The main purpose of this article is not to delve into the community development projects themselves but to discuss the ways this concept was implemented, used, and promoted by Britain in two different spaces: the colonies and the United Nations. These two contexts are pivotal for the promotion of the post-war British colonial rhetoric. In the colonies, British colonial discourse pursued two intertwined goals: on the one hand, the relegitimisation of the colonial empire and, on the other, the preparation of the transition to independence in order to maintain an influence that would replace political rule and physical presence. The United Nations were used instead by the British as an arena to internationalise their colonial policy and establish their legitimisation.

Abstract For a brief moment in the late-1950s, British policymakers and key African politicians shared a vison: an East African Federation of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda. For British officials, one of the leading advantages would be transforming the colonial King’s African Rifles into a federal army. This aspect of the plans has rarely been recognised, but this article shows that British planning for the KAR became inextricably intertwined with federal thinking. Late colonialism was a time of alternative federal visions in addition to increased interventionism as British officials foresaw the end of colonial rule and sought to remake African institutions. A federal army was a key aim in such plans. This article argues that although no federation or federal army came into being, planning for them substantively shaped the military inheritance of the region at independence. Uganda and Tanganyika achieved independence with armies that were not fully autonomous, while Kenya took most of the shared colonial facilities. Thus, the article highlights the impact late colonial plans could have even when these did not come to fruition.

Abstract This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. Training for the diplomats of soon to be independent states was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challenging the very foundations of imperialism by empowering the diplomats of soon to be independent African states. Drawing on archives in France, the UK, and the US, as well as a newly recorded oral history interview with one of the first cohort of Ghanaian trainees, we focus on the development of diplomatic training from ad hoc responses to requests to a more formalised programmes provided by imperial powers and the United States, and tensions and competition between providers and over the content of the courses. We focus primarily on the Gold Coast/Ghana, contextualised within wider experiences of African colonies in both the British and French empires. We demonstrate that training for diplomats provides novel insights into the temporalities, spatialities, and agency that characterised the late colonial state.

Abstract Between 1847 and 1876, the textile factory Todos os Santos operated in Bahia. During these almost three decades, it was the largest textile factory in Brazil and came to employ more than four hundred workers. Until recently, many aspects of the factory’s labour force were hidden. There was a hegemonic narrative that all of these workers were free and waged individuals and that their living and working conditions were extremely progressive for the period. Meanwhile, there was a silence about the employment of enslaved people in the institution as well as a lack of in-depth analysis concerning the legally free workers. This article analyses labour at the Todos os Santos factory. On the one hand, it provides evidence on why the myth about the exclusive use of free and waged workers in the factory was formulated and the interests behind this narrative. On the other, through analysis of data from newspapers, philanthropic institutions, and legal and government documents, it reveals the profiles of the supposedly different classes of free and enslaved workers employed at Todos os Santos—men, women, and children of different colours—showing how complex, and often how similar, their living and working conditions were.