The opening of colonial archives in recent decades has offered new opportunities for the study of decolonisation and Martin Thomas’ weighty volume is a welcome addition to this burgeoning field. Conscious of more recent trends towards global and transnational histories, Thomas adopts the useful methodology of a comparative study of the British and French empires in the Twentieth Century.
Thomas proceeds from the central question of why some decolonisations were violent and others were not; these are the eponymous “fights” and “flights”. With a masterful command of an almost perplexingly broad subject, Thomas takes pains to demonstrate the complexity underlying imperial withdrawals. Eschewing a stereotypical and reductive interpretation of a French or British model for decolonisation, the book demonstrates the unique nature of each individual imperial episode. All this is grounded in an understanding of a rapidly-changing world, providing an unstable context in which decolonisation took place. This undercurrent to the work, along with a consideration of colonial dynamics driving desire for post-colonial national independence, successfully “globalises” the work and takes it beyond a series of discrete stories in which the nation-state is the primary unit of analysis.
While the history of decolonisation can offer the trap of blinkered histories of “great men”, foreign secretaries and enigmatic nationalist leaders engaged in political sparring over constitutional niceties, Fight or Flight is careful to stress the importance of economic, social and cultural factors in the decolonising process. Inevitably, given the source material and the subject, the work focuses largely on politics and economics at the expense of culture and society. Decades after the event, it would be a welcome if challenging history which focused predominantly on the latter two characteristics. Thomas’ work benefits from the admission that, despite the painstaking manner in which some colonial administrators and officials agonised over matters colonial, metropolitan and colonial populations were simply unmoved or uninterested in their efforts. Vietnamese in the post-WW II period were too busy starving and trying to rebuild lives shattered by Japanese occupation to want to return to the French fold, similarly the British public soon got fed up of Jewish and Arab political violence in Palestine and wanted out as soon as possible, irrespective of how this ignominious retreat would affect Britain’s global standing.
It would have been useful, however, to see a greater focus on bottom-up perspectives at the expense of the same-old, same-old source material of military and diplomatic reports and Prime Ministers’ diaries. In this sense, whilst Thomas’ analysis is very conscious of recent trends in imperial history, the source material used reflects a continuity that continues to privilege certain voices. For example, the focus on colonial conflicts provided an opportunity to make use of soldiers’ memoirs or oral testimonies about these events and although ordinary soldiers are not ignored in the narrative it is usually their commanders that we hear speaking.
The messy nature of decolonisation, which Thomas captures so well, meant that both Britain and France found themselves engaged in “fights” and “flights” across the globe. There were some important differences in the roots which Thomas traces to the two countries’ experiences of the Second World War. Nevertheless, it is clear that, despite official rhetoric, there was never a “French” or “British” model for decolonisation. Colonial and metropolitan officials’ grand schemes for imperial renewal after the Second World War were overtaken by a globalising world in which colonialism was becoming the subject of increasingly harsh international criticism. Officials often found themselves reacting to circumstances that they could barely control in the colonies, even in cases where men and materiel were heavily invested in “fights” against incipient nationalist opponents.
Fight or Flight is, inevitably, a bloody book. Indeed, the balance of Thomas’ narrative seems focused upon the “fights” rather than the “flights” of empire (though Thomas does point out that the two were rarely mutually exclusive). Indeed, there were very few former colonies where such violence was avoided entirely. This is reflected in the fact that Thomas does not shy away from illustrating where “flights” which proved relatively bloodless for the imperial power, often resulted in paroxysms of localised violence. This was particularly the case in India and Palestine, both of which descended into horrendous internecine communal violence after the British scarpered. Consequently, the “big ticket” wars of decolonisation—Algeria, Indochina, Mau Mau—all feature heavily (the former in particular suffuses most of the work), alongside some welcome less-well-trodden additions such as Madagascar.
This focus gives the work a heavy geographical slant towards Asia in its first half and Africa in its second. Readers looking to learn more about decolonisation in the Caribbean, the Pacific and Britain’s changing relationship with its white dominions will have to look elsewhere. Likewise, the stories of the end of empire in a range of African colonies—French Equatorial Africa, Tanzania, the High Commission territories in Southern Africa and Sierra Leone to name a few, are given the briefest of treatments or do not feature at all. Another omission, surprising given the focus of the text, is Britain’s role in Ireland/Northern Ireland, which could potentially have been fruitfully compared with the impact of Algerian conflict upon the French mainland.
Thomas ends with a consideration of the post-colonial impact of decolonisation processes. This is a welcome approach to the periodisation of the phenomenon. The complicated relationship between the colonisers and the colonised rarely ended abruptly when the flag came down and it is impossible to make sense of the world as it is today without an historically-grounded understanding of these post-colonial relationships. His final chapter explores the history wars which have taken place since in Britain, France and the former colonies. As Thomas demonstrates, these subsequent conflicts have been characterised by obfuscation, exclusion and confusion which belie any sort of neat narratives of the end of empire. The book ends with an aptly sobering reflection of neo-colonial exploitation in the globalised context of the Cold War.
In conclusion, Martin Thomas has produced a useful and refreshingly-nuanced portrayal of decolonisation which works well to erode several generally-accepted myths about the way in which the British and French ended their empires. The comparative focus is used effectively to demonstrate the profoundly transnational aspects of late-game imperialism. The book’s predominant focus on Africa and Asia means that some regions and dynamics of decolonisation remain unexplored, but the examples chosen do work well to illustrate the central thread of fight and flight. Thomas writes with sensitivity of the appalling bloodshed and human rights abuses, even in places where colonial withdrawal might be considered a “flight” and perceptively considers the myriad consequences of colonialism.
However, while Thomas brings an intelligent and wide-ranging analytical style to the table, resulting in a fresh look at a well-established historical topic, he misses the opportunity to substantively add new voices to the story of decolonisation. One wonders where are the voices of the conscripts sent to the dusty deserts of Algeria or the forests of Kenya, the guerrilla fighters of Mau Mau and the Viet Minh, the locals who stayed loyal and fought for the colonial regimes and the civilians invariably caught in the middle of it when reading about the same politicians, generals and prominent activists who usually crop up in histories of decolonisation. Nevertheless, Fight or Flight is a worthy addition to the literature and Thomas excels at making an incredibly complicated subject comprehensible to the reader. Furthermore, the book provides a natural starting point for further work on fights and flights—one wonders in particular about comparisons with the African strategies of Belgium and, especially salient in the case of “fights”, Portugal.
