On Revolutionary Synthesis and Contradiction in the Short 20th Century

In this presentation, I will explore the history of revolution and the postcolonial transition in the 20^th century, by taking stock of the theoretical contributions of three scholars of post/colonial history: David Scott, Elleni Centime Zeleke, and Manu Goswami. In each of their works, these scholars provide novel methodologies for evaluating the continuities in colonial-postcolonial relations into the post-1945 moment: the tragic literary form, auto-theory, and political economy. As we consider the work of these scholars for our present moment, the perspective of their areas of focus – the Caribbean, the Horn of Africa, and South Asia – renders the history of revolution as both highly fragmented and world historical at once. The state of the field in 2025 emphasizes the contingency and unevenness of the transition of a world of empires to a world of states, as well as the importance of political economy and international law in the history of decolonization. However, since the 1800s, anti-colonial nationalists and postcolonial leaders alike grappled with the unsettled nature of the “break” constituted by national independence and the persistence of economic relations characterized by private ownership, the extraction and export of natural resources, and wage labour. By revisiting the work of Scott, Zeleke, and Goswami and placing them in conversation, I will discuss how the “postcolonial transition” can be inscribed as drama, social movement, or as structural transformation. I ask what happens when we attempt to synthesize the formal, subjective, and structural features of our narrative of decolonization. In this juxtaposition, I also ask what it would mean to collapse the Age of Revolutions (1776-1848) and Decolonization (1945-1975) into one historical moment.