The British and French "Late Colonial State" in Comparative Perspective: A Historiographical Overview

The dominant paradigm for understanding the end of the colonial empires remains that of an ‘inevitable’ decolonisation following the Second World War, from which the colonial powers emerged fatally weakened and ideologically undermined. The problem for historians is then to account for the vigour and dynamism of the post-1945 ‘late colonial state’. Drawing on recent studies relating to the British and French empires, this chapter considers the late colonial state, not simply as a locus for resisting or deferring decolonisation, but as precursor to an eventual post-colonial state. It highlights three themes in the literature on decolonisation: (1) Development, understood as the modernisation of colonial state structures, making them economically productive and efficient, and gearing them to internal and metropolitan rationales; (2) Political and constitutional reform, understood as anchoring social and economic development within viable, cohesive and progressively representative political institutions; and as a potential response to the challenge of national self-determination; (3) The countervailing impulse to innovate also in the violent response to internal threats, as seen in late colonial doctrines and methods of counter-insurgency, deployed in an effort to destroy or co-opt opponents of the colonial enterprise variously seen as nationalist, communist or ‘atavistic’.

The chapter addresses the paradoxical element of ‘make believe’ in late colonialism, acknowledging (as officials arguably sensed all along) that this was probably a doomed enterprise; in the end, it proved easier and less costly simply to abandon the late colonial state and to retreat from empire. The late colonial state was therefore not simply a source of counter-factual ‘imagined futures’, but decisively shaped post-colonial realities, whether through the traumatic impact of late colonial violence, the legacy of late colonial state structures, or the shaping of ‘North-South’ relations.