Empire’s Ebb Theo D’haen, KU Leuven This article appears in The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, Ed. B. McHale and L. Platt, Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52-66. When citing please refer to the prinyted version. Eric Hobsbawm famously defined the period 1789 to 1914 as the “long” nineteenth century and 1914-1991 as the “short” twentieth century. From a purely European point of view this makes sense, with 1914 and the beginning of World War I marking the end of a bourgeois or middle-class Europe ushered in by the French Revolution, as well as the culmination and the ruin of the balance of power politics that had followed the Napoleonic era. That war also saw the rise of the first totalitarian regime in Europe with the communist take-over of Russia in 1917, while 1991 marks the end of that same regime and its grip on much of Central and Eastern Europe via satellite regimes, with various fascist regimes ruling significant portions of Europe for shorter periods in between — Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and again parts of Central and Eastern Europe. When we venture to look beyond Europe though, it makes sense to argue for a “very long nineteenth century” stretching from 1776, with Britain after the loss of its “First Empire” following the American Declaration of Independence turning to the East and particularly the Indian subcontinent, thus ushering in the age of imperialism, until the end of World War II and its aftermath of decolonization and Cold War. Beyond doubt, the carnage of World War I in many ways ended the absolute supremacy of the European powers and brought about a major shift from Europe to the United States, in financial and economic power, and what would soon become the Soviet Union, in military power. For the world beyond Europe, though, nothing very much changed in that also after 1918 the European colonial powers continued to rule most of the world beyond Europe itself and the Americas. In terms of culture, too, Europe continued to set the tone and the pace. True, Vienna no longer shone quite as brightly as it had at the fin-de-siècle, but London, Paris and Berlin continued to draw writers, artists and intellectuals from all over Europe and the Americas, as well as from the colonies. Modernism and the successive avant-garde movements all found their origins or inspiration in Europe even if they partially played out elsewhere. And Great Britain and France, followed in the 1920s by Italy and as of the early 1930s Germany, continued to be dominant actors in world affairs, especially militarily, not least because the United States after World War 1 had retreated into isolationism. It was World War II that definitively put an end to European hegemony, militarily, and later politically and economically. In the world of politics and diplomacy, Mark Mazower notes, “the Second World War marked the end of a long period of European ascendency,” which he dates specifically from around 1800, and which he labels “t he age of Eurocentrism”. 1 Cornel West likewise speaks of “the end of the European Age (1492-1945)”. 2 The pre-war European colonial empires quickly disintegrated after 1945. India, the jewel in the crown of the largest ever colonial Empire, gained independence in 1947. Indonesia, formerly known as the Dutch East Indies, officially became independent in 1949, but in practice (and retrospectively now also recognized as such by The Netherlands) had been so since the departure of the Japanese occupying forces in 1945. Most other European colonies followed suit during the 1950s and early 1960s, with most of Africa and South and South-East Asia being independent by the mid-1960s. In many instances this did not happen without prolonged and bloody struggle against the metropolitan colonizer, but often also between different factions in the newly independent, or soon to be, countries. The first was the case in Indonesia, and in what was then still known as French Indochina and the equally French