“For a global history of the ends of empires”

Interview with Professor Martin Thomas

Abstract

Professor of History at the University of Exeter (UK), Martin Thomas is one of the most important historians of his generation, a leading and widely recognized figure in historical studies of decolonization. His research is based on a comparative and global analytical framework, with a fruitful and informed dialogue with the social sciences. He has published regularly and with remarkable quality on many topics associated with the study of imperial and colonial formations, their functioning, the contestation they generated, and their disintegration. These include aspects such as the economic, military or police dimensions, security policies and the various forms of colonial violence recorded in the history of empires, as well as the varied forms of economic extraction that characterized European colonialism. Here are some examples of his outstanding works in the historiographical field: in 2007, he published Empires of Intelligence. Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (University of California Press); in 2012, he published Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers, and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-40(Cambridge University Press); in 2017, he organized, with Gareth Curless, Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (Bloomsbury Academic) and, in 2019, with Andrew Thompson, The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford University Press). More recently, in 2023, he organized, with Gareth Curless, The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies (Oxford University Press). He is also the author of a series of articles of recognized importance (for more, see: https://arch-history.exeter.ac.uk/history/profile/index.php?web_id=thomas ).

On 22 November 2023, the University of Coimbra and the Centre for the History of Society and Culture hosted Professor Martin Thomas for a well-attended presentation of his latest work, The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton University Press, 2024). As part of the international seminar Histories of the Present. The Formation of the Contemporary World, Professor Martin Thomas' paper sought to underline the importance of interrogating the dynamics of decolonization in a multidimensional way, resisting various methodological and analytical closures and also forms of exceptionalism, national or otherwise, which continue to mark some of the narratives about this historical process. In this interview, we tried to engage further with some of the main arguments that Professor Martin Thomas has developed over the years, with a special focus on his latest reference work, which will certainly mark this field of study in a consistent and lasting way.