Oxford Handbooks are always formidable texts, and The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, edited by Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, is no exception: coming in at almost 800 pages, with thirty-seven chapters, the book explores the “ends of empire” with almost exhaustive range. The book is organized into five sections. The first, the introduction, includes a comprehensive account of the existing field (explored in more detail below) and two historical precedents for the topic: the first, a chapter on the end of European land empires in 1918 and the second exploring the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The second section, “National Perspectives,” explores the decolonization period and process from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Russia (via the Romanovs), the United States, Japan, and China. The second, “Regional Perspectives,” examines colonial and postcolonial spaces, at a variety of scales, from sweeping coverage of South, South East, and East Asia, Tropical Africa, and Eastern Europe, to more particular analyses of the “arid world,” the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Indonesia (through the lens of Dutch “Greater India”). The third section, “Thematic Perspectives,” explores self-determination, anticolonialism, humanitarianism, the Cold War, violence, welfare colonialism and development policies, Islamic revolutionary activism, and refugees. The fourth section, “Legacies and Memories,” includes chapters on postcolonial migrations to Europe, global north-global south relationships in a postcolonial world, postcolonial economic diversification, the fourteen remaining United Kingdom Overseas Territories, and a series of chapters exploring the cultures of decolonization: film, literature, and ideas about memory, commemoration, restitution, and apologies. The gender balance among contributors is slightly better than that of many recent Oxford Handbooks, with ten female authors included; this is still not close to half, and the balance of scholars between the global north and global south could also stand to be better, especially given the topic under consideration.

The range of topics covered is impressive and reflects the directions being followed in the existing scholarship. It is particularly good to see that the current lively fields of humanitarianism, development history, colonial violence, and the intersections between Cold War politics and decolonization are well represented. The material on refugees and migration speaks to contemporary political concerns persuasively and deftly. There could have been, however, more coverage of some wider thematic trends: for example, bringing the traditional social history themes of race, gender, and class into this analysis more explicitly would have enriched the book's structure, although many of the chapters deal with these topics in different ways. White settlers, for example, could have been valuably considered in a thematic chapter that addressed these approaches. No book can, of course, be completely comprehensive in its geographical or time period coverage. Nevertheless, I would have liked to see a chapter explicitly considering the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. How can historians approach the “ends of empires” while exploring settler colonies that have never truly decolonized? The structure, while making the handbook useful for readers who want to home in on specific histories of experiences, also reinforces the historiographical separation between colonizer nations and colonized peoples. Could the second and third sections have been rearranged to problematize the idea of the West versus the Rest?

The introduction to the book, written by Thomas and Thompson, sets out the ambitious scope of the project. They present four alternative themes for the book: firstly, historicizing decolonization as something “open-ended, multi-layered, and contingent” that persisted beyond the formal transfer of power; the plural “ends” in the title of the book make this premise clear from the start (5). Secondly, they set decolonization within the Cold War context and argue that the international struggles to bring the European empires to an end had the effect of globalizing the Cold War itself. Thirdly, and relatedly, they set out to analyze the relationship between decolonization and globalization, focusing especially on how the latter meant that the former existed in such a specific historical moment. Finally, they foreground violent revolution as part of the decolonization process—whether as warfare, insurgency, or civil war—as an asymmetric experience that has an impact especially on noncombatants (who, in a noncolonial context, might be considered “civilians”). Thomas and Thompson also argue that decolonization is a process, rather than an event, but that this process has not yet finished—that it is, in fact, “perhaps indefinite” (22). This seems important not only because, as Thomas and Thompson argue, this makes the topic perennially relevant, but because decolonization must therefore still be shaping the world today. Many of the chapters do speak to contemporary political concerns, but again, this could have been drawn out more richly in places before the final section.

The handbook will be an extremely useful text for a variety of different audiences: undergraduates studying comparative decolonizations or national or imperial stories will find individual chapters indispensable for essays; graduate seminars focusing more broadly on decolonization as a field will be able to use the chapters as comparative case studies; researchers in the fields of public imperial memory, imperial culture, and the precise topics covered by the chapters will find much that is new, fresh, and thought-provoking, along with some excellent summaries of contemporary debates. One hopes that it will also be read by researchers in Cold War studies, development studies, international relations, and related fields: the book could contribute much by pushing scholars in other disciplines to take decolonization seriously as a topic, a factor, a moment, a process, and an ideology.