Did European colonialism truly end in the 20th century, as we often assume? In this episode Anne van Mourik (NIOD) speaks with Martin Thomas (Exeter University) about his book The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton University Press). He argues that decolonization was not just the transfer of power from colonizers to the colonized, but a global, often violent process that forged new alliances, reshaped international connections, and left behind enduring colonial legacies. In this episode we ask: How to rethink decolonization? If empires were so powerful, military, politically, economically, why and how did they collapse? And how is colonial violence different than violence in non-imperial spaces?
The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor (1773) by Nathaniel Currier, 1846. Hand-coloured lithograph, 19.5 cm x 31.75 cm, Springfield, Massachusetts, D’Armour Museum of Fine Arts. Wikimedia Commons.
Adam Nadeau
Among the more poignant observations made during the early days of overhaul of the United States federal government by President Donald Trump, his former senior advisor Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were a series of essays from Mike Brock’s Substack, Notes from the Circus. A former executive at Block Inc. who was involved in, among other things, building Cash App, Brock combines his insight into the world of big tech with his longstanding interest in philosophy to provide commentary on the current state of American democracy.[1] In one particularly illuminating post, Brock traces DOGE’s intellectual origins in part to a school of thought in Silicon Valley which holds that recent innovations in technology have rendered liberal democracy obsolete and that it is inevitable that Western democratic systems of government are to be superseded by digitally mediated, algorithmically optimized, corporatist technocratic autocracies.[2]
One might certainly agree with Brock that the pairing of corporate-technocratic power with the emergence of more advanced artificial intelligence threatens qualitatively unprecedented levels of social control and the attendant erasure of deliberative democratic processes.[3] However, it’s important to note that the blending of corporate entities and American political institutions is hardly a novelty of the twenty-first century. The fusion of private interest and civil governmental structures, particularly executive office, has been an integral part of the American political experiment dating back to the colonial and revolutionary periods, when private ventures backed by civil officeholders were the primary mechanisms for expanding colonial settlement, often with devastating effects on North American Indigenous populations.
Brock is correct to identify colonial opposition to the concentration of corporate power and state authority in the British East India Company (EIC) as one of the causal factors in the American Revolution.[4] However, his analysis misses the critical element that American revolutionary leaders were so strongly opposed to EIC activities in the thirteen colonies specifically because the Company represented a concentration of corporate power and state authority that was external to the colonies: the Tea Act of 1773 enforced a Company monopoly on tea in America that was meant to undersell tea on the colonial black market.[5]
Imperial & Global Forum 
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