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Despite the horrors of the Holocaust and the faltering of Europe’s empires under the pressures of war, colonialism was reinstated after the war just as returning veterans were forced back to their subordinate place in southern society. Ideas of race were made and remade during the war, but the practice of racism continued. The postwar extension of American power depended on the social production of new forms of racial thinking as well as the unthinking “common-sense” employment of previously held assumptions. By considering race, civil rights and colonialism from a global perspective, this chapter suggests the war be de-centered from the story of twentieth century struggle for racial freedom, instead situated within the longer context of colonial conquest and anti-colonial struggle.

This chapter explores the post-Mutiny rehabilitation of the Raj and the relatively small adjustments to it during the late nineteenth century. On the whole, the government in London and India, as well as the military reconstruction, administrative arrangements, and financial organization, endured remarkably well, sufficiently satisfying Indian demand for participation in the regime. It also investigates the transformation that Victoria's last Viceroy, the authoritarian Lord Curzon, sought to effect in order to regenerate and remotivate an Imperial order that he found tired and complacent. Another follows the counter-revolution that, under Liberal governments from 1905 to 1914, was intended to re-establish stable relations between the Raj and Indians whom Curzon had alienated, and between Britain and rival European empires with interests in India's neighbours whom Curzon had sought to dominate. Finally, it evaluates India's importance for the British Empire, and the consequences of Empire for India.

Decolonization of the European empires in the twentieth century was spurred by the colonized based on two purposes: the desire for independence, and the desire to build a sovereign political identity. The most obvious feature of the first intention was the formation of anti-imperialist movements, organised under the banner ‘they must leave’. The latter was characterized by the establishment of constitutional government, which highlighted the identity of a novice country in a political and unified form and which featured a central source of power. These two purposes share a complex relationship. For power to be sovereign, independence must be gained first. Power cannot be obligated to the wishes of another power or constrained by the laws of another regime. The struggle for independence of European empires did not readily create the conditions for the exercise of a sovereign power. It was elusive at the moment of independence. This chapter discusses some of the implications of these two purposes, with emphasis on the second purpose and the Indian experience. It addresses questions such as: what is the meaning of collective identity to those newly independent countries in the context of politics; what were the pressures on the claims to political identity and unity; how did these pressures encourage a revolutionary mindset in the conceptualization of constitutional provisions and political power; and how does the struggle for political identity relate to the history of nation and its struggle for independence?

This introductory chapter argues that European expansion was carried out by treaty making as much as by conquest and occupation. Europeans concluded treaties with indigenous peoples to advance their commercial and political interests but also to legitimize their activities overseas. Treaty making, they believed, allowed them to reconcile expansion with moral and juridical legitimacy. This chapter reconsiders the practice of treaty making in international relations and colonial history. It examines European motivations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in attempting to extinguish indigenous title through treaties, the reasons why indigenous peoples engaged or not with Europeans, the way various colonial contexts influenced the idea and practice of treaty making, and the vexed but crucial issue of indigenous consent.

This chapter surveys the impacts of Western European empire on the Middle East and North Africa. It suggests that the significance of the European empires for the nature of post-colonial sovereignty in the Arab world is to be found in the patterns of colonial state formation that emerged from the local dynamics of territorially bounded polities, rather than in French and British grand strategy and their frustrating effects on Arab unity. Sovereignty, however qualified, has not simply been the attribute of successor states to empires — throughout the Arab world, some form of sovereignty pre-existed European overrule. In most cases, it persisted under colonialism, being reshaped in the interactions between imperial and local forces, interest and constraints, before emerging from decolonization. In the independent ‘new states’, sovereignty took forms whose particular constitutional, institutional and territorial shapes varied considerably. Throughout the region, however, and more broadly, basic features of colonial state-formation durably influenced the nature of post-colonial sovereignty.

This chapter demonstrates how ornithologists reconciled their racial awareness and their dependence on African vernacular birders. With the establishment of the European empire over Africa, the number of ornithologists who held day jobs as colonial officials expanded, and their presence spread throughout the continent. With the expansion of colonial society, recreational birdwatching, a leisure activity of urban bourgeois classes, entered the constellation of birding practices in Africa. Living with Africans, Europeans became “whites,” with all the benefits and anxieties that racial definition brought them. While working in Africa, they needed to lay boundaries to protect their status. The history of European birders in Africa shows that the politics of race were powerful, but also that they were a realm for individual negotiations.

This chapter studies the status of the overseas territories seized by the French during the early modern period. The attempts made by the Crown to establish settlements in America or elsewhere are matched with the enlargements of the kingdom of France made in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This chapter also examines how the Crown asserted its sovereignty over its distant possessions and which powers it gave to its agents, in effect showing that these overseas territories could have been politically considered as a part of the kingdom. It demonstrates that the economic subordination, which characterised the French overseas territories, was progressively superimposed on them from the middle of the seventeenth century, representing a trend which ultimately constituted these territories as colonies.

This chapter looks at other parts of the world that were mainly absorbed into European empires and what this meant for their experience of policing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonists tended to see native peoples as primitive and without any of their own ‘civilized’ ideas and institutions like police. As a result, and where possible, they increasingly re-created versions of the police in their homelands when they arrived in the virgin lands which they intended either to exploit or to make their new homes. A re-creation of the police deployed in the metropole was claimed to be something towards which the empires were moving, especially during the nineteenth century. It was assumed to be another aspect of the white Europeans’ civilizing process. Yet a police similar to that at home was most often to be found in the colonial towns and cities where white men made the city their own and were seen as requiring the same kind of police protection and order maintenance. The indigenous peoples, especially those living nomadic lifestyles, were thought to require something different, and, while some of the white men deployed to deal with them might be called ‘police’, their organization and behaviour were often far away from Europeans’ behaviour in their lands of origin.

Chapter 1 investigates Lebanese Armenians’ triangulations and balancing acts vis-à-vis the Lebanese state, its wider Arab environment, and the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) around the time of Lebanon’s independence in the mid 1940s. I pursue this inquiry by closely analyzing Armenian language newspapers published in Beirut. These often ideologically opposed newspapers, the leftist Ararad, the communist Joghovourti Tzain, the capitalist yet supporter of the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) Zartonk, and the firmly right-wing nationalist Dashnak Aztag reflected the issues of interest of the day. I explore four themes. The first is Armenians’ position in and vis-à-vis the Lebanese polity as well as vis-à-vis Syria. A second concerns language, and specifically the multiple roles of Arabic and its relationship with Armenian. The next one has to do with the ambiguities of spaces relevant for Armenians in and beyond Lebanon, including the ASSR. And a last one concerns the fascinating political positioning of the church that, although conservative, felt forced to support communist Armenia and the USSR as the ASSR’s protector.