Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World by Aiyaz Husain (review)

In recent years historians, like geographers, have paid increasing attention to the complexities and dynamism of space in the production of knowledge and power. The way space is framed and conceptualized has meanings and consequences for politics and world affairs.

In Mapping the End of Empire Aiyaz Husain analyzes “perceptions of geography and their value for comparative historical analysis” (7). More specifically, he is interested in the role of geographical perceptions in the formation of both British and American approaches to colonial space at a turning point in global history. The study thus centres on British and American efforts to “map the end of empire.”

Husain juxtaposes Great Britain’s imperial retrenchment with American conceptions of globalism and foreign policy assertiveness in the 1940s. He concludes: “Regionalism and globalism made clear that geography and how it is perceived played a central and largely unexamined role in framing the postwar grand strategies” of Great Britain and the United States (262–63).

Husain’s study reflects in-depth research encompassing a wide range of British and American archives. Over the course of nine chapters Husain examines British and American perceptions of the greater Middle East and South Asia and how those perceptions shaped strategy in Palestine and Kashmir. He argues that divergent strategic visions emerged from the mental maps of Eurasian geography as formulated in London and Washington. Extending the analysis beyond those two capitals, Husain integrates the history of decolonization and pays particular attention to the role of the United Nations in the context of early postwar and Cold War diplomacy.

The essence of Husain’s argument is that the British evolved a coherent vision of regionalism in their approach primarily to the Middle East and South Asia whereas the emerging American conceptualization of these geographic spaces and attendant foreign polices proved less coherent. While Britain willingly transitioned to a realistic new role as a regional power, an ambitious but nonetheless “inchoate American vision of the postwar world” (247) characterized postwar US foreign policy.

In London postwar conceptions of spatiality and power reflected “a British Empire willingly in retreat” (130), whereas the Americans expanded unevenly and less strategically to “fill distant, residual spaces vacated throughout the postwar world by defeated Axis enemies and imploded empires” (2). “What emerges from the historical record of U.S. foreign policy toward the early postwar anti-colonial nationalist movements,” he concludes, “is a lack of any overarching guiding principle beyond rhetorical support for… self-determination during the immediate aftermath of the war” (269).

After focusing in the early chapters on Palestine and Kashmir, the author extends his analysis to French and Dutch responses to decolonization to reinforce his argument that Great Britain handled the transition to the post-colonial era more effectively than its European counterparts. Another chapter homes in on the United Nations and its efforts to balance the sovereignty of new nation states with the great power realism represented by the Security Council. Husain then turns his attention to European conceptions of sovereignty in the context of South Asian and Jewish visions of statehood.

To complement the analysis of mental maps, Husain includes in the centre of the book six actual maps taken from US archives. Overall the book, though sometimes verbose, is competently written and well presented, including the deployment of useful sub-headings within the chapters to guide the reader along.

To his credit Husain does not argue that “the assumptions about lands and peoples bound up in regionalism and globalism always determined policies or shaped outcomes” (262) and indeed many other factors of culture and geopolitics drove the history of the early Cold War and decolonization. Husain acknowledges that more than regionalism or globalism, domestic political considerations (and I would argue cultural affinity for Israeli settler colonialism) best explain President Harry Truman’s decision to overrule his advisers and support the partition of Palestine.

Mapping the End...