Until recently, the processes of imperial decline and decolonization received comparably less attention than imperial expansion and colonial rule. The first generations of African historians of Africa tended to focus on the precolonial era in search of usable pasts to help meet the challenges of the present. Since the 1970s, we have seen the emergence of variants of postcolonial theory and postcolonial studies that distanced themselves from both nationalist projects and nationalist historiographies in reaction to the limits of political independence, the spasmodic violence or collapse of many postcolonial states, and the persistence, even deepening, of global inequalities. In Britain and North America, the popularity of imperial history waned with the dissolution of the empire before the rise of the “new” imperial history that highlighted the intertwined histories of colonial and metropolitan cultures and contexts. Through it all, a teleological narrative of nationalisms and nation-states emerging from the twilight of empire remained unquestioned.

The situation has begun to change. In a 2008 essay in Past & Present, A. G. Hopkins called on historians to “rethink” decolonization on a global scale, and in the few years since then, there has been a dramatic growth in studies of decolonization's effects on everything from film, popular culture, and racism to international law and the development of the postwar welfare states, multinational corporations, and transnational nongovernmental institutions. This collection of essays, The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization, is a notable addition to an expanding body of work, featuring contributions from well-established scholars based in the United Kingdom. The contributors variously situate the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan's famous address to the South African Parliament in Cape Town on 3 February 1960, henceforth known as the “Wind of Change” speech, in a number of overlapping contexts, including Macmillan's career and historic African tour; “a Tory generational drama” or shift in Britain (Ball); apartheid and politics in South Africa (Dubow); and the rift between Britain and the white settler communities of the “British World” (Ward), which led to the “unholy alliance” between de Oliveira Salazar's autocratic regime in Portugal and settler-dominated states in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (Onslow). Others reconsider it in terms of African nationalisms (Lewis), metropolitan anti-imperialism (Owen), Britain's changing relationships to the United States (Kent), the Commonwealth ideal and the new European Economic Community (Toye), and the French empire (Thomas and Shipway) during the Cold War. Not surprisingly, we find that, viewed from these perspectives, the event was not as it is remembered, and several authors note that the ubiquitous phrase itself has little connection to the speech, the fiftieth anniversary of which passed with little fanfare in public memory today. The substance of Macmillan's remarks appear far less “visionary” and novel—for one, they largely glossed remarks he made a month earlier in Accra—than often assumed. In terms of its immediate objects, impressing upon South Africans the foolhardiness of apartheid while keeping South Africa within the Commonwealth, the address was also a failure.

The editors of the volume, L. J. Butler and Sarah Stockwell, supply an informative introduction to the historical setting of Macmillan's tour as well as recent historiographical debates on decolonization. As two of the foremost historians of the impact of British and international business interests on decolonization in Africa, their expertise informs their rendering of the current state of the literature, which centers on the relative importance of economic and political considerations in shaping the process. Although their own work provides some revealing exceptions, as they note here, there seems to be wide agreement “that economic considerations were not critical, . . . in contrast to the cosy relationship imagined in the neo-colonial style critiques of the 1960s and 1970s” (8). However, framing the conversation thus occludes large areas of study, analysis, and debate. On the whole, the collection offers an account of decolonization in which high politics and “British World,” Anglo-American, and Anglo-European relations predominate. The nonalignment movement and spirit of Bandung, Nkrumah's brand of pan-Africanism, and the All African People's Conferences—in short, the multiplicity of extra-national(-ist) roads not taken and scholarship on them—remain largely offstage.

There are several important exceptions to this tendency, and for this reader, they form the most suggestive aspects of the volume. Simon C. Smith underscores the limits of the wind of change by looking at Britain's commitment to maintaining political influence in the protected states of the Persian Gulf for another decade. Joanna Lewis offers “an alternative take” on the moment (72) and restores a sense of its messiness on the ground through an exploration of four contending groups and perspectives—African nationalists, trade unionists, mining companies, and the white community—within the still understudied case of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. Nicholas Owen's essay straddles the metropolitan and African currents and contexts of anti-imperialism, examining points of convergence and divergence, through contextualized readings of four “texts” or “straws in the wind” produced concomitantly to Macmillan's African tour. He reveals the anxieties that imperial decline sparked not only on the Right but also on the Left in Britain, and unearths the African and “anti-colonial origins” of methods taken up by new social movements and student protesters during the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, closing the collection, Stephen Howe, who twenty years ago drew attention to the dearth of attention to the topic of decolonization in Anticolonialism in British Politics (1993), offers a brief assessment of the state of the field today. The volume addresses some of the trends and areas for further research that he identifies—the histories of the white dominions, the “Europeanisation of decolonization,” and “internal decolonizations” within Europe (262), for example—while neglecting others, such as the need for more discussion among imperial historians and Africanists (and other area studies specialists) who have also returned to the period of decolonization in different and illuminating ways.

The Wind of Change makes a significant contribution to the growing field of decolonization studies, but one hopes that historians will explore some of the more neglected avenues outlined by Howe in the near future. In many cases, junior scholars and graduate students are already doing so, suggesting that we are only in the beginning stage of a fuller reckoning with decolonization, the legacies of late imperialism and its contradictory ends, in the making of the contemporary world.