This volume looks at the impact on the wider world of the end of the European empires and their replacement by a new international order dominated by East-West rivalries. After surveying the decolonization process, the book looks successively at the different patterns of experience in Southern Africa, South East Asia and India, East Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and the Americas. It concludes with a sustained analysis of the International System -- the functioning of international organizations and the global role of money and trade.
Preface. Part One: Decolonization. 1. General considerations. 2. Indonesia, Indochina, India. 3. The end of Empire. 4. Southern Africa. Part Two: East Asia and the Pacific. 5. The Chinese Civil War. 6. The Indochinese Wars. 7. Japan. 8. The Pacific Rim. Part Three: The Middle East. 9. The setting, Britain's post-war pursuit of bases, Cyprus. 10. Palestine to the establishment of the state of Israel. 11. The Middle East in the 1950s. 12. The 1967 `Six Day' War and its aftermath: the Lebanese Civil War (1975 -90). 13. Arab-Israeli relations since 1970.
14. Oil. 15. Arabia and the Gulf. Part Four: The Americans. 16. The inter-American political system, and attempts to exclude communism. 17. The Americas in, and since, the 1980s. Appendix: The Falklands, and the Antarctic.
Part Five: The International System. 18. The nature of, and leadership in, the international system; attempts at collective action through the United Nations. 19. Money and trade in the Western World. Index.
