Uncertain Dimensions: Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth CenturyU of Minnesota Press, 1985 - 263 ページ Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. World War I battered the Western imperial systems and destroyed one, that of Germany, but it did not sound the death knell of an empire. The "scramble" for overseas territory ha reached a virtual conclusion shortly before the war; afterwards, the main business of empire was to ensure a pax colonia: the often contradictory goals of a stable government and economic development. It is with the years between world wars—the brief age of administrative empire — that Raymond Betts is chiefly concerned in this book. An unsettled time, when individuals coped with empire of uncertain dimensions, the interwar years nonetheless left a material legacy—railroads, motor roads, public buildings — and an ideological one—the voices of protest that led to independence after World War II. Preeminently a cultural history of the era rather than a political narrative, Uncertain Dimensions centers upon the regions we now call the Third World—Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia—and the major colonial powers, Great Britain and France. Betts has structured this book as a group of closely linked interpretive essays, each devoted to a specific aspect of the late colonial experience: World War I and the postwar mandates, colonial administration, the European economic imperative and "technology transfer," urbanization, anti-imperial protest, and decolonization. Throughout, he draws upon the work of novelists, poets, and theoreticians—Aime Cesaire, Claude McKay, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and many others—and recognizes the deep irony at the heart of modern imperialism: that contact between Western and Third worlds was mostly confined to two minorities, the alien European and the socially uprooted African or Asian. |
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... cultures and civilizations already had long inhabited most of the huge areas to which Euro- peans sailed and over which they came to exercise their power and influence . Nevertheless , the political , economic , and social expansion ...
... cultural developments . The build- ing of cities , more than the rise of nationalistic parties , has held my attention . Such an emphasis is justified by two conditions : first , the frequency with which the political history has been ...
... cultural fact , primarily with reference to India . One person has stated that interwar India was a " fragment of the Vic- torian world — stranded in time , like a lost world . " 14 A new arrival wrote in 1921 that " in some ways life ...
... culturally . It played a special part in the maintenance of the pax colonia , because it shook the traditional base on which that pax was based . Indigenous people were uprooted to work in mines or on roadbed construction or as ...
... cultural — altered to suit European needs . Yet there were no neat lines of historical development . Empire in the twentieth century was as confused as it had been previously , a varying com- bination of good intentions and hesitant ...