J an C. J ansen and J ürgen O sterhammel . Decolonization

As numerous scholars have laid out over the past decade or two, decolonization has proved a tricky subject for historians. The term has often come to represent both a moment in time—the end of colonial rule in most of Africa and the Caribbean and much of Asia—and a process of political, economic, social, and cultural transformation that continues to this day. In many ways, Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel center this tension in their book Decolonization: A Short History. As they explain in the book’s opening pages, decolonization entailed a breakdown of the political legitimacy of one of the most enduring forms of political organization in the international community: empire. As empires waned in both practice and legitimacy, so too did the ideologies of racial and cultural hierarchy that undergirded them as scores of new nation-states emerged on the international scene in the mid- to late twentieth century....

Colonialism · Decolonization · Empire · Hierarchy · Ideology · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies