Decolonization and the Transfer of Power: A Systematic Literature Review and Comparative Criticism of India and Other British Colonies

Abstract

Background. The end of British rule in India in 1947 is routinely described through the vocabulary of “transfer of power”, a phrase that implies orderly constitutional hand-over between willing parties. Scholarship on Britain’s other twentieth-century withdrawals, from Ceylon and Burma to Malaya, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Cyprus and Southern Rhodesia, suggests that the language of orderly transfer conceals considerable variation in coercion, contingency and consequence.

Objective. This paper synthesizes and critically appraises the literature on British decolonization, using India as the anchor case and a set of comparator territories, in order to test whether the transfer-of-power narrative survives comparative scrutiny.

Methods. A PRISMA-informed review was conducted. The identification arm comprised a supplied corpus of 117 records and purposive citation-chaining of canonical historiography (71 records). Records were screened against explicit eligibility criteria, thematically coded across six analytical domains (strategy, transition mode, violence, constitutional design, economy, and memory and knowledge), and appraised with a four-criterion qualitative framework. Ten territories were compared on date, route, disruption and early trajectory.

Results. One hundred and eleven records were synthesized. Five interpretive schools were identified: metropolitan-strategic, nationalist, Marxist-economic, subaltern and postcolonial, and institutionalist-quantitative. Comparative evidence shows that transition mode was strongly associated with the character of early postcolonial politics, but not deterministically so. Negotiated, constitutional transfers (Ceylon, Ghana, Jamaica) produced durable electoral institutions in some cases and fragile ones in others. Transfers compressed by metropolitan fatigue (India–Pakistan, Burma) coincided with the gravest violence or earliest state failure. Counter-insurgency-shaped transfers (Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus) bequeathed securitized states.

Conclusions. “Transfer of power” is better understood as a managed retreat whose terms were set by metropolitan capacity, local mobilization and international pressure, not as a gift of sovereignty. Six analytical propositions are advanced for testing. Limitations include dependence on secondary literature and the bibliographic-level appraisal of part of the supplied corpus.