Empire Decolonization

This course will examine the history of the dismantling of the British Empire as well as the legacies it leaves, which continue to shape the modern world. At its height in the 1920s, the British Empire covered almost a quarter of the earth's area, and yet soon after, by the 1940s and 50s, newly independent nation states were emerging from the end of Britain's empire. Just in Africa, more than fifty new states were created in the 1950s. In this course, we will map the economic, social, political, and cultural histories of this foundational shift in the twentieth century called decolonization.