One of the most significant changes of the post-1945 world has been the decline and final dismemberment of European colonial empires in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. In 1939, roughly a third of the world's entire population lived under colonial rule. At the end of the 20th-century, less than one per cent did so. In this study, each major European overseas colony, rather than being subject to chronological or thematic subdivision, receives separate, extensive, and consecutive treatment.

This book compares the school image of the wartime past of the Falange and the Polish Workers' Party (PPR), created during the turbulent first decade of Francoism in Spain and Communism in Poland. Demonstrating the political usefulness of the Party was crucial to the consolidation of both regimes. The legitimisation of the new regime called for emphasising the Party's war effort, not only in defeating the enemy but also in its struggle for social issues. For
school-taught history, the early years of both dictatorships marked a period of breaking with prewar educational concepts and...