‘Late colonialism’ is a widely used concept in African, colonial, and imperial history, as well as in neighbouring disciplines. It suggests a new and distinctive phase of governance as European powers tried, and ultimately failed, to reinvent colonial rule in the new contexts of the mid-twentieth century.

Africans who experienced late colonialism first hand often had a keen understanding of its characteristics and tensions. The 1964 novel One Man, One Matchet by the Nigerian author T.M. Aluko (1918-2010), for example, is set in the later 1940s and captures some of the innovations of late colonial Africa. Black Africans are appointed to colonial state posts that had formerly been restricted to white Europeans. When Udo Akpan is appointed as a colonial administrator, many local people are incredulous. ‘But, but – but how can a black man be a District Officer?’, asks one.Footnote ¹ The novel documents as well new and more intrusive forms of colonial governance, including the destruction of diseased cocoa trees. ‘Waves of Government officials, white and black, invaded the town from Headquarters. Some went round the farms and subjected cocoa trees to microscopic scrutiny’, while local farmers warily viewed a black African agricultural assistant, ‘impressive in his khaki outfit – helmet, shirt, shorts and heavy cumbersome boots’.Footnote ² They ‘did not like his looks, nor his abrupt manners. He spoke a tongue different from theirs for he did not belong to their own tribe’.Footnote ³ When the ‘gang of tree-cutters’ arrive at the farm of Chef Momo, his household attacks them, unleashing ‘miniature chaos’.Footnote ⁴

Aluko returned to the years after the Second World War in His Worshipful Majesty of 1973, which addresses a fictional ‘new Local Government Law’ introduced in 1951.Footnote ⁵ After the law is implemented, the municipal council becomes, the narrator explains, ‘the centre of the politics of our town’, which ‘was strange in our own circumstances; here our King had ruled his territory with the assistance of, and through, his senior chiefs, ward chiefs, and district chiefs, and guided by the prognostications about the future by the Ifa Oracle’.Footnote ⁶ Soon a new constitution is introduced ‘in which our own countrymen were Ministers of State and fully responsible for the whole range of Government business in the length and breadth of the land’.Footnote ⁷ ‘The world is changing’, one chief reflects.Footnote ⁸

Historians have long grappled with these changes. In 1962 Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage, for example, posited a ‘third phase’ of European colonialism in Africa that emerged from the 1940s, characterised by colonial states’ more active economic interventions and increased emphasis on the ‘welfare’ of colonised Africans.Footnote ⁹ These new policies produced a ‘new European invasion of Africa’ as development specialists converged on the continent.Footnote ¹⁰ Oliver and Fage considered the political changes of this era as a separate development, though, suggesting the challenges in analysing the interrelationships between different elements of late colonialism.Footnote ¹¹ The concluding volumes of the Cambridge History of Africa, published in 1985, and the UNESCO General History of Africa, published in 1993, also viewed the years around the Second World War as a rupture which saw the emergence of more assertive forms of nationalism, the transformation of Africans’ expectations, and new developmental discourses and methods of colonial governance.Footnote ¹²

During the 1980s, historians started to refer to what Oliver and Fage called the ‘third phase’ of colonialism in Africa as ‘late colonialism’.Footnote ¹³ In a 1980 book review, W.G. Clarence-Smith delineated what he saw as the features of late colonialism in Angola, including the growing reach of the state, the expansion of primary education and health facilities, a rapid influx of white settlers, as well as rural resettlement schemes and counter-insurgency.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1984 Bill Freund suggested that late colonial Africa was distinguished by new approaches to economic development, and an influx of academics and ‘so-called development experts’ who produced new forms of knowledge about the continent.Footnote ¹⁵ The following year, William Beinart wrote about the ‘late colonial technical imagination’ in Malawi, arguing that colonial officials drew on modernist technical and scientific ideas to imagine Africa and its future in new ways, planning authoritarian development projects that side-lined African people’s knowledge.Footnote ¹⁶ Their work suggests an emerging recognition of late colonialism in Africa as a distinct area of enquiry.

This research proliferated during the 1990s, but exactly what defined late colonialism across Africa often remained implicit. Two of the most influential works of the decade invoked the term. Mahmood Mamdani’s 1996 book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism included little explicit discussion of late colonialism or the later 1940s and 1950s, despite its title, focusing instead on ‘indirect rule’ approaches most associated with earlier forms of colonial governance.Footnote ¹⁷ Fredrick Cooper’s Decolonization and African Society: the Labor Question in French and British Africa, also published in 1996, mentions ‘late colonialism’ without seeking to define the term.Footnote ¹⁸ The whole book was by implication a study of late colonialism in Africa, though, arguing that from the time of the Second World War new approaches to governance enabled Africans to make new claims on colonial states that helped to make European rule untenable.

A conference held at Leiden in October 1999 was a milestone in assessing late colonialism’s historiographical significance.Footnote ¹⁹ By focusing on the ‘late colonial state’, the conference created the opportunity for more comparative analysis of how late colonialism worked at different locations.Footnote ²⁰ A collection of articles from the conference was published in Itinerario soon afterwards.Footnote ²¹ In the present special issue, we return to this theme more than two decades later, following a conference in September 2022.Footnote ²²

Back in 1999, in a now-classic article, John Darwin offered a rich set of arguments that suggested the need to scrutinise the specificities of late colonialism and its distinctive forms of politics.Footnote ²³ The terminal phase of European colonialism during the twentieth century saw European empires, and individual colonial states, encounter new internal and external challenges, while pursuing novel and well-established goals relating to extraction, labour and taxation, maintaining control, managing a ‘politics of difference’, and myriad forms of ‘contingent accommodation’.Footnote ²⁴ Colonial authorities often responded by seeking to expand colonial states’ capacity to intervene in African societies.Footnote ²⁵ Darwin argued that studying the features that defined the late colonial state could help in ‘identifying the circumstances in which colonial authority became unsustainable’.Footnote ²⁶

Darwin proposed six ‘routes to “lateness”’ associated with late colonial states: the ‘proactive or developmental state’ that replaced the ‘nightwatchman state’; a ‘dense state’ that encompassed more parapolitical institutions; a ‘big’ state that aimed to project power into every corner of its territory; a ‘security’ state that developed in response to evolving resistance; a ‘self-destruct’ state, which recognised its coming demise and positioned itself as ‘a self-consciously transitional institution’; and, finally, an ‘open’ state increasingly prone to external influences, from international anticolonial pressures to Cold War rivalries.Footnote ²⁷ Darwin implied that there can be no single late colonialism or late colonial state: ‘lateness’ means the coexistence, in different degrees, of many – or all – of these characteristics. By definition, late colonialism was plural, shaped by diverse contexts and forms of contestation; hence the reference in the title of this special issue to ‘late colonialisms’. In his contribution here, Darwin fruitfully revisits some of these ideas.

Other scholars tested the usefulness of the concepts of late colonialism and the late colonial state in the pages of the 1999 Itinerario special issue. They explored a range of dimensions of late colonialism, across diverse geographical areas from Malawi and Portuguese-controlled Africa to Afrique Occidentale Française and Afrique Équatoriale Française, Indonesia, India, and nomadic societies in the Sahara that found themselves under French rule.Footnote ²⁸ Such arid areas were in theory less susceptible to big schemes of social, economic, or political intervention, and offered the opportunity to test the usefulness of the late colonial concept, as Pierre Boilley argued in his piece.Footnote ²⁹

The 1999 articles also considered how the concepts of late colonialism and the late colonial state can elucidate our understanding of post-colonial societies and polities. Analysis of late colonial processes can contribute towards a sharper appreciation of the continuities and ruptures entailed by ‘transfers of power’. The changes that restructured governance in the last decades of European colonialism, and their many intended and unintended consequences, shaped the trajectories of decolonisation.Footnote ³⁰ The political activities of anticolonial and postcolonial actors could represent an engagement with late colonial policies and practices that involved new forms of interaction with local societies, and implied new patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Among the legacies of late colonialism, Florence Bernault argued in her 1999 Itinerario piece, was a particular ‘culture of politics’ (culture du politique) that fostered ‘effects of continuity’ after the ‘transfer of power’. These could range from forms of political expression and legitimation – some with spiritual and religious dimensions – to the use of violence. Bernault concluded that late colonialism facilitated, and strongly shaped, the ‘emergence of contemporary forms of politics’ in Equatorial Africa. Especially in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, postcolonial societies and politics can hardly be understood without proper scrutiny of late colonialism.Footnote ³¹ Postcolonial African nations have had, in different ways, to contend with late colonialism’s political, economic, social, and cultural legacies for decades after formal ‘transfers of power’.Footnote ³²

Since 1999, the term ‘late colonialism’ has become well established, used by scholars to refer to a distinct, transformative phase of colonial governance, from around the time of the Second World War through to ‘transfers of power’ in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.Footnote ³³ It has been used to interrogate different trajectories of late colonial governance and decolonisation,Footnote ³⁴ addressing distinct chronologies and specific, but comparable, historical dynamics associated with the disintegration of European colonial empires. As Darwin noted, ‘“lateness” was a moveable feast in colonial politics’.Footnote ³⁵

The concept of late colonialism has, however, been deployed with varying degrees of focus and precision,Footnote ³⁶ and can usefully be seen as having dimensions extending beyond the late colonial state. What we might call the late colonial ‘shift’ involved many other dynamics, not least momentous changes in the ways that the colonial situation was understood.Footnote ³⁷ The concept has been mobilised to capture diverse historical processes and experiences – the plural trajectories of decolonisation – while enabling comparative study. This last aspect was already noted by Malyn Newitt’s 1999 Itinerario article, which focused on the ‘uneven development’ of the late colonial state in Portuguese colonies.Footnote ³⁸ Here we see late colonialism not as a form of periodisation, but as a multifaceted concatenation of political, economic, social, and cultural processes. It assumed diverse forms and was manifested in different ways at different locations with different effects (not all of which can be considered in this introduction).Footnote ³⁹

The two great harbingers of late colonialism were the Great Depression and Second World War, which profoundly destabilised older approaches to colonial governance, destroyed the world order in which the European empires had grown, and transformed the expectations of colonised peoples. Disorders in the wake of the Depression, including strikes and protests in the British-controlled West Indies and the 1937 cocoa hold-ups in Ghana, pointed to the necessity of new approaches to colonial economic development and social welfare.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Allies’ war against Nazism raised pressing questions, including at an international level, about the legitimacy of the racialised hierarchies that had long underpinned colonial rule.Footnote ⁴¹ The old European colonial powers emerged from the war weakened and more vulnerable in the emerging new era of Cold War superpower competition. The end of colonial rule in India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, together with the formation of the United Nations, which promised a new arena for emerging Third Worldist activism, offered new forms of inspiration to many people that still experienced colonial rule.

Furthermore, this transformed international context made efforts to reinvigorate European colonialism more challenging. Many late colonial initiatives sought to respond to this new global environment, in order to reconstruct, re-legitimise, and modernise empire. Contemporaries may have been surprised by historians later labelling these diverse programmes and processes as late colonial. But projects to re-energise colonialism often generated new tensions and contradictions that further undermined the basis of colonial rule.Footnote ⁴² At the same time, the outcome of processes that may now be seen in hindsight as late colonial was not at the time predictable, and did not necessarily weaken colonial power or help to produce independent nation states.Footnote ⁴³ That late colonialism was indeed ‘late’ was only completely clear in retrospect.Footnote ⁴⁴

It was linked with the growth, expansion, and transformation of state institutions, and envisioned the creation of new societies, new women and men, and new political cultures and frameworks. In some – but not all – cases, this meant the so-called ‘Africanisation’ or ‘indigenisation’ of colonial bureaucracies, which could involve co-opting potential adversaries, and efforts to reduce late colonial states’ wage bills, as well as the implementation of new developmental and welfarist policies.Footnote ⁴⁵ (Beyond the colonial state, similar late colonial ‘Africanisation’, with variations across time and space, took place in church and missionary organisations.)Footnote ⁴⁶ The growth of late colonial bureaucracies often involved the relative decline of ‘indirect rule’ alliances with African chiefs, the expansion of electoral politics, and sometimes saw African ministers taking up roles within late colonial states.Footnote ⁴⁷ These late colonial projects of electoral reform fascinated contemporaries, contributed to reshaping political imaginaries and possibilities, and deserve more intensive research today.Footnote ⁴⁸ In other cases, though, including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese-controlled Africa – under an authoritarian regime that prevented free elections at home – ‘traditional’ authorities persisted, and were indeed fostered, as part of projects to enhance social and political control. Older forms of politics and rights attribution did not disappear, and often coexisted with self-consciously modern political structures and forms of citizenship, to produce new, hybrid forms of politics.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even in territories where African ministers were elected, white European officials worked hard to retain overall control of late colonial states for as long as they could, for example by retaining privileged access to the most sensitive state papers.Footnote ⁵⁰

The impacts of late colonialism were, moreover, not uniform or constant. The spatialisation of ‘lateness’, including the ways in which it enabled the persistence of segregationist logics, varied across and within colonised territories.Footnote ⁵¹ Many late colonial health and education projects, including hospitals and universities, disproportionately focused on urban areas and contributed to rapid urbanisation in Africa.Footnote ⁵² At the same time, other late colonial projects sought to transform agriculture and rural life.Footnote ⁵³ Geographies of lateness were shaped by local patterns of engagement with – and resistance to – late colonial projects, as well as by late colonial states’ varying levels of interventionist capacity and infrastructure.

A proliferation of ‘experts’ and the intensified mobilisation of expertise in state-building and governance has long been seen as a distinctive feature of late colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁴ Often misinterpreting the complexities of local societies,Footnote ⁵⁵ western experts nevertheless assumed a key role in late colonial projects.Footnote ⁵⁶ They were central to new educational policies, including at universities in colonised territories and European ‘metropoles’ alike.Footnote ⁵⁷ Universities ‘exemplified the central paradox of decolonisation’, and of late colonialism, we might add: they were simultaneously bound up with projects to deepen and contest colonial intervention.Footnote ⁵⁸ New forms of late colonial state intervention entailed new circulations of knowledge, and brought new kinds of foreign expert to Africa. The late colonial state’s growing interventionism also mobilised growing numbers of African scientists, technicians, and administrators, but often in subordinate roles, and frequently facing – and fighting – discriminatory practices. These African experts could be trained in imperial capitals, but also in Africa, the United States, and the socialist world. They acquired new skills, new expectations,Footnote ⁵⁹ and new strategies of resistance, and put them to work making new claims for social and economic status in profoundly unequal late colonial societies.Footnote ⁶⁰ The roles assumed by Africans within late colonialism, and the consequences of these engagements, need further exploration.

Moreover, as the recent historiography of transimperial history shows, there are good reasons to approach late colonialism as inter-imperial: as the product of intensified circulations of ideas and repertoires of colonial governance between empires.Footnote ⁶¹ The multiple meanings and effects of the internationalisation of colonialism,Footnote ⁶² which arose from diverse interactions between groups and networks – from imperial states to international and inter-imperial bodies, from non-governmental organisations to anticolonial networks – is crucial in capturing the distinctiveness of late colonialism. Like other manifestations of late colonialism, in education,Footnote ⁶³ or health,Footnote ⁶⁴ or development and social policies,Footnote ⁶⁵ late colonial statecraft was a product of exchanges of knowledge rooted in multiple, disputed, dynamics of internationalisation, not merely national or imperial politics (although the limits to inter-imperial cooperation in practice should also not be overlooked).Footnote ⁶⁶ The growing accountability of imperial and colonial governments as a result of evolving international scrutiny helped to stimulate these inter-imperial dynamics.

Finally, late colonialism and late colonial states were frequently characterised by securitisation, military repression, and extreme forms of violence and social control. Again, these deserve further study as international and transnational, not only national or imperial, dynamics.Footnote ⁶⁷ Responding to new challenges, especially anticolonialism and nationalism, late colonial violence was often fused with developmental and welfarist projects and vocabularies, creating new forms of ‘repressive developmentalism’, with their own experts and objectives.Footnote ⁶⁸

For these reasons, examining the multiple historical trajectories of late colonialism(s) is fundamental for a critical, comparative revisiting of decolonisation, its contexts, motivations, and dynamics.Footnote ⁶⁹

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Despite widespread recognition of the importance of late colonial processes in African history, and frequent use of the term ‘late colonialism’, there have been few recent attempts to advance its conceptualisation. Scholarship on the topic is scattered across multiple geographical and thematic sub-disciplines. We need to know more about fundamental questions. What – if anything – characterised late colonialism across Africa? What were the roots and genealogies of late colonial ideas and practices? And what were the connections and variations between late colonialism within, and across, African territories and regions? How can we think about late colonialism, and its relationships with decolonisation, in a more comparative way? We need to know more, too, about Africans’ role in making, adapting, and contesting late colonialism, and about the ways in which late colonial dynamics simultaneously opened and circumscribed the options available to postcolonial nations.

This special issue seeks to interrogate and elucidate late colonialism. Engaging with varying chronologies, geographies, themes, and case studies, it explores the plurality of idioms and repertoires that shaped late colonialism in Africa.Footnote ⁷⁰ In his contribution, John Darwin revisits his 1999 Itinerario article, adding some noteworthy arguments to the debate. Neils Boender’s article considers district-level late colonial politics in Kenya; Ruth Craggs, Jonathan Harris, and Fiona McConnell focus on diplomatic training; and Poppy Cullen addresses visions of federation by studying plans for an East African army. Victor M. Gwande considers sanctions-busting in the very late colonial case of UDI-era Rhodesia; while Bonny Ibhawoh addresses the place of bills of rights in constitution-making. Naïma Maggetti’s article scrutinises British rhetoric around community development, Emily Marker studies imaginaries of racial difference in the films of Jean Rouch, while Sarah Runcie analyses health development in French-controlled Africa, and Giovanni Tonolo considers the economic development of palm oil in late colonial Dahomey. Read together, these articles particularly illuminate three key aspects of late colonialism: the issue of agency and the ‘lateness’ of late colonialism; the scales of late colonialism; and its relationship with the idea of development.

First, agency. Many experienced late colonialism as a euphoric moment of possibility, as an epochal opportunity for creative thought and transformation. After empire, what? Late colonial changes did broaden arenas for African action, in some ways, while narrowing the options open to declining colonial powers. And yet the concept of African agency is best deployed with caution, not least because of the dangers of exaggerating the options open to African actors.Footnote ⁷¹ By the late colonial era, most Africans operated in environments that had been structured by European colonialism over a long period, lasting decades in some places and centuries in others. A few years of late colonial reforms did not fundamentally change this. Giovanni Tonolo’s article on the palm oil industry in late colonial Dahomey shows how creative new approaches to palm oil cultivation came up against well-established political and economic structures that had been largely created by Europeans for their own purposes. As a result, the postcolonial palm oil industry had much in common with its late colonial and colonial-era predecessors. Even when late colonial reforms were more transformative, they were often directed by white westerners. Many of these projects sought to co-opt Africans’ agency, or reconstruct constraints on Africans’ initiative, minimising opposition and preserving western actors’ freedom of action in ways suited to the demands of a new era. Naïma Maggetti, in her work on community development programmes, captures some of the contradictions of agency and late colonialism, by exploring how projects directed by the British were intended to promote and guide African initiatives; while Poppy Cullen’s article on the King’s African Rifles in East Africa explores British authorities’ determination to retain control of the commanding heights of the colonial state for as long as possible. At the same time, African agency could mean African elites appropriating late colonial ideas, methods, and structures for their own purposes. Neils Boender’s account of politics in the Nyeri district of late colonial Kenya shows, for example, how elite nationalists inherited British officials’ suspicion of mid-level ‘bush’ politicians. This reflects what Ruth Craggs, Jonathan Harris, and Fiona McConnell, in their article on late colonial diplomatic training, call the ‘(restricted) agency’ of the late colonial moment.

This limited broadening of African people’s late colonial possibilities poses significant questions about the very lateness of what Sarah Runcie, in her article about health regions in late colonial French-controlled Africa, cautiously calls ‘“late” colonialism’. These articles suggest the limits of mid-twentieth-century African liberation, and the tenacity with which western actors used the resources available to them to shape late colonialism in ways that continued to suit their own interests. This is seen in Victor M. Gwande’s work on the role of western businesses evading sanctions on UDI-era Rhodesia, protecting their profits and propping up Ian Smith’s regime, and in Runcie’s work on the active role of France in the West African regional health organisation known as the Organisation de Coordination et de Coopération pour la Lutte Contre Les Grandes Endémies. The articles suggest that late colonialism is better thought of not so much as a decisive historical ending, but as a bundle of processes which often involved remaking colonial-era structures to meet the demands of an ostensibly postcolonial era, with western actors seeking to preserve asymmetric relations between Africa and other parts of the world across formal ‘transfers of power’.

‘Race’ offers an important example of this late colonial tension between possibility and constraint. During late colonialism, European authorities often proclaimed a shift towards ‘non-racial’ policies, but at the same time sought to reconstruct racialised understandings in new forms that pervaded late colonial initiatives across the continent, and particularly in areas with large numbers of European settlers.Footnote ⁷² Cullen reminds us that racialised ideas about development were used to assess African territories’ suitability for independence, while Bonny Ibhawoh’s article on late colonial bills of rights shows how they often served to protect colonial-era racial privilege. Craggs, Harris, and McConnell highlight the use of tacitly racialised western models for postcolonial diplomacy and statehood, while Emily Marker’s article on the French film-maker Jean Rouch suggests that Europeans’ reluctance to focus on the structures that underpinned racialised ideas helped to facilitate the reproduction of racialised forms of knowledge in a supposedly postcolonial world. Late colonialism was often about efforts to manage social change, reinvigorate unequal power relations, and reconstruct established hierarchies: about changing in an effort to remain the same.

Second, the articles sketch the variety of scales of late colonial dynamics, from localities to the individual colonised territory, regional and putative federal groupings, through to international institutions, and concepts like human rights that claimed universal relevance. The articles make a particular contribution to understanding the workings of late colonialism at an international level, where action – especially at the United NationsFootnote ⁷³ – narrowed late colonial states’ room for manoeuvre, rubbished their renewed claims to legitimacy, and played a significant role in making the continuation of old-style European colonialism impossible. At the same time, the articles capture some of the ambiguities of this international-level activity, reminding us that it was not inherently liberatory. Maggetti’s research on British late colonial rhetoric shows how waning European powers sought use the concept of ‘community development’ to re-legitimise colonial rule at the UN, albeit unsuccessfully; while Gwande considers the ineffectiveness of UN-backed sanctions on Rhodesia. Craggs, Harris, and McConnell, together with Cullen and Darwin, explore different aspects of the ways that the global Cold War structured international relations, elucidating how Cold War rivalries motivated new forms of intervention by western powers in late colonial Africa.Footnote ⁷⁴ Even concepts of human rights, as Ibhawoh shows, could be deployed in efforts to restrict postcolonial African states’ freedom of action.Footnote ⁷⁵ Read together, the articles show that as colonial powers faced increasing late colonial challenges at scales ranging from the local to the global, they nevertheless sought, often with some success, to retain enough freedom of action to protect what they saw as vital interests in late colonial and postcolonial territories.

Third, the articles offer new perspectives on the relationship between the concept of ‘development’ and late colonialism. Development was undoubtedly a late colonial keyword, not in spite of, but rather because of its flexible meaning and content.Footnote ⁷⁶ Its progressive associations made development a useful concept for late colonial authorities. As Maggetti’s article shows, development formed a significant element of late colonialism’s propaganda armoury, and Darwin reminds us that it was often deployed as part of efforts to legitimise unprecedentedly intense intrusions into colonised territories. Boender shows how the uneven impact of late colonial economic development could produce new forms of difference that would complicate postcolonial politics, while Tonolo’s study highlights certain similarities between the late colonial palm oil industry in Dahomey and earlier forms of colonial-era extraction. Projects presented by late colonial states as developmental could be motivated by ‘ruling compassions’Footnote ⁷⁷ rather than by Africans’ welfare, and could feature securitised elements, as noted by Cullen in her assessment of British plans for East African armed forces. Even development projects focused on health, as Runcie shows, could open doors to continuing European influence in postcolonial Africa. Late colonial development produced some genuine improvements in the fields of medical care and education, often the product of colonial authorities’ increased focus on colonial ‘welfare’, African politicians’ growing influence within late colonial states, and terms of trade that favoured exporters of primary products.Footnote ⁷⁸ At the same time, declining colonial powers did their best to make late colonial development work in their own interests as well.

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These articles testify to the formative significance of late colonialism, but at the same time serve to remind us that there is much that we still do not know about Africa and late colonialism. They suggest several areas for future research. We need to see more connected and comparative study of late colonialism, to deepen our understanding of late colonial processes as transnational, transimperial, international, and global. Most work on late colonialism focuses on individual case studies, of specific colonised territories or European colonial powers. This will remain a useful approach, but more attention is needed to the global topographies of late colonialism, to the networks that enabled and constrained late colonial projects across time and space, and to explaining the similarities and differences between late colonial dynamics at different locations within and beyond Africa. Over two decades of research on transnational, transimperial, and global history will offer valuable methodological and conceptual tools here.Footnote ⁷⁹

There is an urgent need, too, for research about how late colonialism was understood by African contemporaries. As Tonolo notes in his article, late colonialism is still most often understood from European perspectives. Knowing more about how Africans thought about late colonialism implies drawing on a distinct set of sources. Wale Adebanwi has argued that the works of African writers can offer sources for the analysis of social thought, suggesting the value of novels as sources for African understandings of the changes of late colonialism, and indeed for the conceptualisation of late colonialism itself.Footnote ⁸⁰ African newspapers too can offer important perspectives on how Africans thought about and debated the changes of late colonialism, and for thinking about how late colonialism intersected with and reshaped public spheres in Africa.Footnote ⁸¹ Petitions too offer a route to considering African perspectives on late colonialism that may otherwise have now been lost.Footnote ⁸² Fundamentally, a deeper understanding of late colonialism in Africa is impossible without much more engagement with the ways in which Africans themselves understood, conceptualised, debated, channelled, and contested late colonial processes.

Finally, the articles suggest the value of further empirical, historical study of how late colonialism shaped postcolonial successor states. Such questions have often been considered from the perspective of social science, but in the light of recent reappraisals of ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, historians have a vital role to play in deepening our understanding of how late colonial institutions, concepts, and practices were put to work in different ways to shape postcolonial Africa.Footnote ⁸³ Considering the ways in which late colonialism was – and was not – formative for Africa offers a route towards rethinking the fundamental chronologies of African history, including by considering exactly when – and indeed if – late colonialism can be said to have ended.

Above all, this special issue is presented in the spirit of further opening up the study of late colonialism, in the recognition that the scope for further research remains enormous.