The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires

The collection of essays in this volume offers an overview of scholarly approaches to the ways in which diverse actors, representing the colonised or the colonising nations, or indeed the international community, reacted to colonialism during the lifetime of the modern colonial empires or in their aftermath. The coverage is broad in terms of geographical scope and historical period, with articles on the major colonial empires in Asia and Africa and the imperial centres of Paris, London and Berlin, from the conquests of the late nineteenth century to the period of decolonisation. The selection also reflects recent academic trends by focusing on countries whose colonial past and experience of decolonisation have been studied and debated with particular intensity, such as Algeria, Kenya and India. The volume draws on previously published articles and book chapters by leading international scholars writing in, or translated into, English and includes a critical introduction which situates each essay in relation to recent debates in this dynamic and expanding field of study.

Martin Shipway is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century French Studies, and former Head of the Department of European Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.