The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed a global wave of decolonization. During these tumultuous decades, social actors across the Asia–Pacific region, Africa, South America, and the Middle East participated in movements that had as their aim to shake the shackles of colonialism and imperialism and to reimagine new, independent societies free of foreign interference. In recent years, historians and other scholars have returned to this period, asking new questions about the Age of Decolonisation. The transnational turn and the rise of global history have sparked renewed interest in the “Bandung moment” and the horizons for South-South solidarity that it afforded. The complicated legacies of the “Third World” have likewise seen scholars seek to reclaim the lost revolutionary heritage of the period.
One of the more complicated, and less romantic, tasks of inquiry, remains to uncover how ideas about “development” – previously the domain of colonial projects, with their inbuilt paternalism – were articulated by actors within the decolonising countries themselves. While an older literature explored this question through the prism of modernization theory, new scholarship is opening up horizons for asking a different set of questions: around race, class, gender, ecology, resource extraction, worldmaking, and more.
This workshop brings together scholars rethinking the nexus between decolonisation and development in a space of exploration for works-in-progress.
