The United States and Decolonization Power and Freedom

At the international level the twentieth century was characterized by the rise in national self-determination in the Third World and by the rise of US power. This book analyzes the dynamics of the changing relationships between the United States and states seeking decolonization, within the contexts of the US relationship with the European colonial powers, the Cold War, and the economic system. Its scope is broad in both space and time. This collection of articles brings together leading scholars as well as recently qualified authors on a subject that was confined in the Cold War paradigm, but ultimately needs to transcend it.

Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Foreword; W.Kimball By Way of Introduction: The United States, Decolonization and the World System; D.Ryan The American View of Decolonization, 1776 to 1920: an Ironic Legacy; W.LaFeber The Road to Our America: The United States in Latin America and the Caribbean; L.Johnston Adjusting to a New Period in World History: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism; P.Orders The United States and the International Trusteeship System; V.Pungong The Ironies of History: The United States and the Decolonization of India; D.Merrill How We 'Lost' Vietnam, 1940-1954; L.Gardner The Limits of Ideology: US Foreign Policy and Arab Nationalism in the Early Cold War; S.Lucas The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa, 1945-1963; J.Kent The United States and Britain's Decolonization of Malaya, 1942-57; A.J.Stockwell The Decolonization Puzzle in US Policy: Promise versus Performance; M.Hunt Afterword; C.Fraser Selected Bibliography Index

DAVID RYAN lectures in International History and US foreign relations at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is the author of US-Sandinista Diplomatic Relations (1995) and a co-author of The History Atlas of North America, as well as numerous articles on US foreign relations.

VICTOR PUNGONG is Senior Political Officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. He has published work on the political and diplomatic aspects of decolonization, including 'The Theoretical Basis and Political Feasibility of the Trusteeship-Peacekeeping Connection' in The Cambridge Review of International Studies, VIII, no.2 (1994).