Awards

• Nominated for Bancroft Prize 2015
• Nominated for Douglas Dillon Award 2014
• Nominated for Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Best Book Award 2015
• Nominated for Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize 2015

Overview

By the end of World War II, strategists in Washington and London looked ahead to a new era in which the United States shouldered global responsibilities and Britain concentrated its regional interests more narrowly. The two powers also viewed the Muslim world through very different lenses. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo-American perceptions of geography shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia. Aiyaz Husain shows that American and British postwar strategy drew on popular notions of geography as well as academic and military knowledge. Once codified in maps and memoranda, these perspectives became foundations of foreign policy. In South Asia, American officials envisioned an independent Pakistan blocking Soviet influence, an objective that outweighed other considerations in the contested Kashmir region. Shoring up Pakistan meshed perfectly with British hopes for a quiescent Indian subcontinent once partition became inevitable. But serious differences with Britain arose over America's support for the new state of Israel. Viewing the Mediterranean as a European lake of sorts, U.S. officials--even in parts of the State Department--linked Palestine with Europe, deeming it a perfectly logical destination for Jewish refugees. But British strategists feared that the installation of a Jewish state in Palestine could incite Muslim ire from one corner of the Islamic world to the other. As Husain makes clear, these perspectives also influenced the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and blueprints for the UN Security Council and shaped French and Dutch colonial fortunes in the Levant and the East Indies.

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9780674728882

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Reviews

Mapping the End of Empire is a valuable contribution to the literature on international history of the post-war period--one that brings out the strategic impact of perceptions of geography and their value for comparative historical analysis.--Suparna Banerjee The Hindu (07/01/2014)

A significant and original history that illuminates the divergences between British and American foreign policy in the early years after the Second World War, when these two powers competitive cooperation was a crucial influence on the emerging world order. Husain makes a powerful and convincing case for integrating the crisis over Kashmir in 1948 and 1949 into our larger examination of Anglo-American policy in the Middle East.--John Darwin, author of Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain

<b>Husain</b> intervenes powerfully in the literature on the European empires' end with a careful and attentive reconstruction of the different American and British mental maps that shaped U.S. and British policies toward the 'Muslim world.' Deeply conceived and beautifully composed, this book is a vital contribution to our understanding of the roots of the modern-day atlas, and of the ways that many of the lines drawn on it after World War II created more vexing and intractable problems than they solved.--Jason C. Parker, author of <i>Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962</i>

Author Information

Aiyaz Husain is a historian in the Policy Studies Division of the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State.

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