Eager to create goodwill towards Britain in its former colonies, the postwar government encouraged students from across the Empire to study in London. Housing them was a problem, as events in the summer of 1951 revealed.
In 1947, as independence loomed, Burma’s prime minister-in-waiting, Aung San, was assassinated. Was it his political rivals, the military, or the British?
As Malaya headed towards independence, the spectre of identity politics loomed. What place for cosmopolitan Penang and its diverse population?
A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda by Derek R. Peterson looks for the ordinary people who kept the regime’s wheels turning.
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French traces the line between civil rights in the US and decolonisation in Africa.
How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.
Ireland’s experience of partition informed the attitudes of people across the island towards British plans for Palestine. Today it informs sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948. As India has changed since his death, so has his place in its history.
The Bandung Conference brought together post-colonial nations from Asia and Africa in the hope of forging a new solidarity. Could such disparate countries overcome their inherent differences?
Puerto Rico’s future might be statehood, independence or more of the status quo, but change is unlikely to be won through voting alone.
