Capitalism And Nationalism At The End Of Empire

The two decades that followed World War II witnessed the end of the great European empires in Asia and Africa. Robert Tignor's new study of the decolonization experiences of Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya elucidates the major factors that led to the transfer of power from British to African hands in these three territories. Employing a comparative method in order to explain the different decolonizing narratives in each territory, he argues that the different state policies toward the private business sector and foreign capital were the result of nationalist policies and attitudes and the influence of Cold War pressures on local events. Using business records as well as official government sources, the work highlights the economic aspects of decolonization and weighs the influence of nationalist movements, changes in metropolitan attitudes toward the empire, and shifts in the international balance of power in bringing about the transfer of authority. The author concludes that the business communities did not play decisive roles, adhering instead to their time-honored role of leaving political issues to colonial officials and their nationalist critics. Tignor also finds that the nationalist movements, far from being ineffective, largely realized the primary goals of nationalist leaders that had been articulated for many decades. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What does imperialism mean in the absence of colonial conquest and imperial rule?

Robert Vitalis's empirically rich study challenges the left-nationalist paradigm through which twentieth-century Egyptian history and politics has generally been interpreted. He argues with those who explain Egyptian economic development primarily in terms of class and of power struggles between British and Egyptian entrepreneurs and politicians. Vitalis offers a rare, detailed view of the objectives and political strategies of both international firms and Egypt's own big business rivals. He highlights the career of Muhammad Ahmad 'Abbud, modern Egypt's most successful businessman. Vitalis's argument can be effectively applied to many other developing countries and his book makes a major contribution to ongoing debates regarding class, underdevelopment, and nationalism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country's fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt's emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt's Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed. Aaron Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. He traces the complex ramifications and the contested legacy of colonial economism, the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only a recognition of their own bare economic interests. Even as British officials claimed that "economic development" and the multiplication of new financial institutions would be crucial to the political legitimacy of the occupation, Egypt's early nationalists elaborated their own critical accounts of boom and bust. As Jakes shows, these Egyptian thinkers offered a set of sophisticated and troubling meditations on the deeper contradictions of capitalism and the very meaning of freedom in a capitalist world.

British imperial history can now be seen as a bridge to global history. This study tries to renew the debate on British imperialism by combining Western and Asian historiography and constructing a new global history as an aid to the understanding of globalization in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part One takes a predominantly metropolitan view of the globalizing forces unleashed by British imperialism; Part Two focuses on the international order of East Asia and its connection with gentlemanly capitalism.

In the 1940s, British shipping companies began the large-scale recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. On colonial ships, Nigerian sailors performed menial tasks for low wages and endured discrimination as cheap labor, while countering hardships by nurturing social connections across the black diaspora. Poor employment conditions stirred these seamen to identify with the nationalist sentiment burgeoning in postwar Nigeria, while their travels broadened and invigorated their cultural identities. Working for the Nigerian National Shipping Line, they encountered new forms of injustice and exploitation. When mismanagement, a lack of technical expertise, and pillaging by elites led to the NNSL’s collapse in the early 1990s, seamen found themselves without prospects. Their disillusionment became a broader critique of corruption in postcolonial Nigeria. In Nation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea, Lynn Schler traces the fate of these seamen in the transition from colonialism to independence. In so doing, she renews the case for labor history as a lens for understanding decolonization, and brings a vital transnational perspective to her subject. By placing the working-class experience at the fore, she complicates the dominant view of the decolonization process in Nigeria and elsewhere.

Why did the British empire expand so dramatically in the late 18th and 19th centuries – and why did it then collapse so rapidly after the Second World War? Drawing on the latest scholarship from around the world, British Imperial History provides a clear, critical survey of the major concepts and theories used by historians of the modern British empire. British Imperial History: - Brings together in a single volume the key ideas used by political, economic, social and cultural historians, using a theoretical rather than a narrative approach - Examines debates from the origins of British imperialism to decolonization - Includes a chapter on the recent academic turn towards global history. This informative guide to the historiography of the British empire is essential for all students of the topic, and is equally useful for those studying historical approaches in general.

The Business of Decolonization serves to deepen our understanding of the end of the British empire, too often approached as if it was a process shaped and experienced exclusively by nationalist and imperial politicians and policy-makers. It explores British companies' experience of, and involvement in, developments leading to the transfer of power in Ghana, the former colony of the Gold Coast. The book demonstrates that businessmen developed strategies to cope with political change, reveals the extent of their involvement in nationalist politics, and highlights the contrasting responses of different companies to political and constitutional developments in the colony. Drawing on an extensive range of company, business association, personal, and official papers, the book focuses primarily on company activity. However, it also investigates relations between British firms and the colonial state on the eve of Ghanaian independence, and examines the place of British business interests in British policy.