About this Event
A World Remade by Decolonisation?
with Professor Martin Thomas (Exeter)
Public lecture free to attend, with drinks reception to follow.
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About the lecture
Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganisation of our world. Decolonisation stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history, the largest global process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.
Its struggles became internationalised and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. Exploring these shifts, this lecture also highlights interactions between decolonisation and its intrinsic link to globalisation.
Martin Thomas traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganisation, cultural exchange, and migration. The aim is to show how profoundly decolonisation shaped the process of globalisation in the wake of empire collapse.
About the speaker
Martin Thomas is nearing retirement. For now, he is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. He works on decolonisation and political violence.
A fellow of the Leverhulme Trust and the Independent Social Research Foundation, Martin's recent books include The End of Empires and a World Remade (Princeton, 2024), Violence and Colonial Order (Cambridge, 2012), Fight or Flight: France, Britain and their Roads from Empire (Oxford, 2014), and, with Gareth Curless, The Oxford Handbook on Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies (2023).
This lecture is part of the Royal Historical Society's visit to historians at the University of the West of England on Tuesday 8 December 2026. The day concludes with this public lecture and reception which is open to all.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Station - Creative Youth Network, Silver Street, Bristol, United Kingdom
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