Guillaume Blanc, Décolonisations. Histoires situées d’Afrique et d’Asie (XIXe-XXIe siècle)

esearch on the history of Africa in the time when colonial empires were collapsing has in recent years been expanding rapidly, making any synthesis difficult and necessarily provisional. Guillaume Blanc has provided a comprehensive narrative that reflects the current state of scholarship on different regions of the world, and he brings the threads together in an illuminating way. One virtue of his account is the plural in the title–« décolonisations ». He emphasizes that there was not one pathway out of colonial empire but several, and each had its consequences. At the same time, he is aware that these trajectories were not autonomous and that the decolonizations of some places affected those in others, ultimately transforming colonialism from an ordinary part of the global order at the beginning of the twentieth century into an abnormal and unacceptable situation in the second half of the century. A second virtue is that over half the book is devoted to telling the story of what happened after independence in different parts of Asia and Africa. He gets beyond the widespread tendency to treat decolonization either as the slow but inevitable ascendance of nationalism over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or else as a heroic and victorious tale of political mobilization in the mid-twentieth century. He is able to present a complex and nuanced view of what he calls « une double temporalité : celle de la remise en cause d’un ordre colonial et celle de la fabrique d’un ordre national postcolonial (p. 35) ».