Decolonisation happened because colonialism as a set of nationally orchestrated systems (by the British, French, Dutch, Belgians and Portuguese) ceased to possess the self-sustained virtue of internal equilibrium ... in the post 1939-decades. [1]

At no point did any of the European colonial powers come into untrammelled conflict with the religious institutions and sentiments prevailing in their respective dependencies. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, when the colonizing powers were self-consciously 'Christian nations', they had, in practice, consistently sought to check their own missionary zealots. Nevertheless, during the twentieth century, when Europe had, ironically, shifted far from its own religious certainties and the rhetoric of ‘civilizing mission’, the indigenous faiths of other continents (above all, Islam) became coloured by a generalized, if restrained, anti-westernism. This is not difficult to explain; it was only after the outbreak of the Great War that the western presence became sufficiently diffuse [i.e., widely- spread] in the localities of Asia and Africa to challenge existing patterns of authority in all walks of life. It was this cultural and spiritual alienation between ‘the west and the rest’, engendered by the very intimacy of their economic integration, which, like some miasmic dust, began to clog the machine of European imperial dominance in the twenty years prior to the Second World War. [11]

Govt. of India Act, 1935; Gandhi; Mohammed Ali Jinnah; Lord Linlithgow declares India co-belligerency, 1939; suspension of Act.

Indirect rule was, in its purest form, a product of British West African conditions, where a white settler presence did not exist in any significant extent.

Lord Lugard’s Dual Mandates in the British Tropical Africa (1922). Personal dislike for westernised Africans. Indirect rule concerned with construcitng indigenous agencies through which colonial transformation could be effected with the maximum sensitivity to local mores. [31]

In Africa no mass-based indigenous nationalist parties on Asian model before 1939. [27]

S. Africa racism: Hertzog defeats pro-British Gen. Smuts in 1924; Class Area Act of 1924; Native Representation Act of 1936; Apartheid 1948.

Italian invasion of Ethopia; poss. defeat by Hailie Selassie’s forces.

By the end of the decade ... the more alert members of th British colonial administrations recognised that, while organised political oppostition did not yet exist, the racial conssensus on which colonialism rested had been partially breached. [33]

Global War: Rejuvenation & Liquidation.

Roosevelt’s critical attitude towards Euopean empires, however, only partly arose from the lust for a world role which gripped Washington bureacuracy after 1939 (and especially after 1941). It was also a response towards mainstream American opinion. A profound aversion to ‘British imperialism’ had always run deeply (if unevenly) in American society. [53]

Expansionist, American led future preferablt to sackcloth and ashes of an imperial alliance. [56]

Dismissal of Wavell and appointment of Louis Mountbatten by Attlee, Feb. 1947 [81]

It was the British drive towards improvement in the countryside which ironcially created tensions which led to the invisible meshing of rural and urban protest. [146]

MAU MAU Outbreak of 1952-56: This fermentation of Kikuyu discontents [...] was symbolised by the rash of Mau Mau ‘oathing’ ceremonies. [...] the Mau Mau oath became notorious for its symbolic elements, such as the holding of earth to the navle, the daubing of animal blood, and the (alleged) performance of sexual acts. / A satisfatory explanation for Mau Mauism must begin by focusing on the complex emotions of the individual Kikuyu, particularly those who, by the later 1940s, had recognised that their quintesssentially modern and material aspirations were not going ot be met. The growth of education, townships and cash incomes after the mid-1930s had given rise to a petty consumerism which proceeded to smash itself on the post-war rocks of stagnant employment prospectws and inflationary shortages of goods. The only solution to this impasse was to secure control of the colonial state and gear its operations to the sectional needs of the Kikuyu cadres. But there was an acute dilemma implicit in such anti-colonial revolt: it meant strikgin out against the source of that modernity which was, in itself desireable. Thus the displacement of the white man’s rule was, in an important sense, also a displacement of the African mental world as it had been shaped in recent times. The traditional character of the Mau Mau oath was an attempt at collective distancing from westtern colonial values, and as a means of psychological reintegration fro African individuals, prior to an assault on the established colonial order. In this way unity could be forged and the complexity of motives resolves.

[...] UK intervention became necessary. From this moment on settler power was a broken reed, and the initiative lay with the civil and military representatives of the metropole. Paradoxically, the chief contribution of the Mau Mau to Kenyan decolonisation was not to break British rule, but to reconsolidate the UK’s hold over recalcitrant expatriate communities, just at the point when metropolitan interests were beginning to question the value of the whole colonial enterprise. [147; cf. Kenya; Stabilisation, infra.]

US-British entente arising from Lebanon and Iraq overthrow of Sha; Kennedy (1960) and Macmillan; ‘this formula had a lot to do with British involvement in superpower revialry and very little to do with the vestiges of empire. ... the UK dependencies found themselves husttled towards independence as if the old concerns with ‘viable’ statehood had never existed. [203]

Post Suez (1956) conditions required a more dramatic shift from conventional to nuclear defence spending than had yet been contemplated ... [204]

The prosperity based on rising cocoa prices which set in after 1950 also came just at the right moment to create a popular mood of optimism and to lubricate the institutionalisation of Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP party [Convention People’s Party].

On Kenya in 1959: By then British officials were increasingly prepared to ‘bounce’ hardline settlers into whatever reforms were required to open up new economic and political balances between the racial communities in the colony. [...] Parallel with the reconstruction of African consciousness along economic, rather than racial, lines was the attempt to induct African representatives into ‘national’ political life, but on terms which ensured cooperative behaviour. Late colonial Kenya is a classical example of how the imperial power used ‘constitutional progress’ ruthlessly to bait nationalist leaders into [239] playing the decolonisation game by western rules. (p.238-39)

Cf. KENYA: Struggle for Stabilisation [236ff.] Mau Mau attempt to forge coalition of Kikuyu, Meru and Kamba against Masai and Kalenjin tribes [236]

British army commander-in-chief General Erskine ... loathed white Kenyans ... as selfish parasites, or, to use his own expression, ‘middle-class sluts’. [237]