The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.9

Decolonization: The Invention of a Hundred and Fifty States

This episode follows the night more than a hundred times between 1945 and the early 1990s when one flag came down and another went up, while the infrastructure underneath stayed exactly as colonial administrations had built it. You get national cases including India and Pakistan's 1947 partition, where British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe drew the border in five weeks using maps and 1941 census data, then destroyed his own papers. The episode traces structural inheritances like the "gatekeeper state," named by historian Frederick Cooper, and tests the Acemoglu-Robinson thesis against counterexamples like South Korea and Botswana. It closes on an irony: the Organization of African Unity's 1964 decision to treat colonial borders as permanently inviolable.