"First Postcolonial?!" Intercontinental debut

Aidelaide, 🇦🇺 Best of Enemies conference. January 1919: Considering the Paris peace conference's opening stage and the first themes of its shuffled agenda, which delegates took centre stage?

The British, err, their Australian colonists in a ready-made delegation, termed the British Imperial Delegation – virtually surpassing the ranking of severely damaged states such a Belgium – acted on a par with the delegations of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. This second British delegation left many others, including Woodrow Wilson and the obviously excluded Germans, stunned.

Until today, I have not seen a conference programme that revealed so many speakers with expertise in our main area of research. While awaiting sponsors to the travel expenses, Aufa100, founded 19 March 2020, is looking forward to its first intercontinental trip and Prof. Fitzpatrick's hosting.

'Best of Enemies? Anglo-German Relations and Empire.'

🇦🇺  abstract  🦘

Decolonisation duel Britain - Germany 1-2

"There could be nothing irregular about a native working for a European,"Nobel Prize 2021 winner Abdulrazak Gurnah has his main character Hamzathink about a British colonial officer patronizing him, roughly a decade afterdisplacing the Germans. From the perspective of the native Asian or Africanunder European rule, the coloniser's nationality apparently made no difference.At the 1919 Paris peace conference, categorical differentiation was proclaimedby the British delegations (!).

Not a lot of primary sources on the colonized peoples' perspective have beensecured since Britain's August 1918 Bluebook, an obvious product ofpropagandists, which the twin delegations availed themselves of half a yearlater in Paris to support their argument on qualified colonialism. Apart fromthe German colonists, their nationality was ostracized.

The first thesis is that British and Imperial Delegation leaders David LloydGeorge and Jan Christiaan Smuts utilized the humanitarian argument as apretext to conceal their sub-imperialist designs. Thus, as a consequence of sub-imperialism and the Versailles colonial diktat, "Weimar" and the Germanswould be barred from the original experience of decolonisation. During theprolonged 1918 Armistice, a kind of decolonisation avant la lettre hit the newestamong the colonial empires. Thus, Germany could be regarded as the firstpostcolonial state. A hundred years later on now, other countries do not seemto approach the postcolonial debate with as much as passion as their formerjunior partner. The second thesis is that Germany took the lead indecolonization and this debate (D.A. Moses, 21 October 2022). The definitionof colonialism's demise did not allow for a defenceless country's colonialdispossession in the fifth and final year of the Great War. Though it can beargued that this one and only "white decolonisation" sped up and spearheadedthis painful process. What can we learn from Germany's unique two-waydecolonization? What does Australian professor Clinton Fernandes' 2022monograph on sub-imperialism add to the scarce sources on imperialism'suniquely British expansion?