Aiyaz Husain, a historian with the Policy Studies Division of the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State and author of the recently published “Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World,” spoke about his book at Georgetown on Thursday afternoon.

The event, sponsored by the Georgetown Institute for Global History, attracted approximately 10 history students and foreign policy experts to the Intercultural Center. Husain described how he came to a revelation while poring over historical documents in the Asian and African Studies room of the British Library in London.

“I realized that these legalistic exchanges belied kind of an internal struggle to define the proper role and geographical scope of the postwar British Empire in the wider world,” Husain said. “Having already read a fair amount about America’s changing role in the wartime world, I was struck by a thunderbolt, and I suddenly knew what my dissertation had to be about.”

The author focused much of his talk on the idea of mental maps, and how it is important not to just examine the results of foreign policy in the late 1940s and 1950s, but to actually infer how American and British policymakers perceived the world at that time.

“We employ mental maps every time we use a term like ‘Middle East,’ ‘AFPak region,’ ‘South Asia’ and so on,” Husain said. “So I argue in the book that a number of key geopolitical principles bound up in national security requirements, academic research, ideas from public discourse, did come to shape such a coherent worldview in America, what I call globalism, to borrow a term employed by [late Scottish geographer] Neil Smith.”

Husain’s mental map idea came to center the rest of his talk, as he built layers of details around that basic concept.

The George Washington University history professor Dane Kennedy, who attended the event, lauded Husain’s technique of examining post World War II policy decisions from the viewpoint of the leaders at the time.

“I think it’s important, as he said, to focus not just on what policy was but, as he puts it, those mental maps of the world that policymakers had, the way in which they don’t all come to these issues with the same understanding of what they’re confronting,” Kennedy said.

Husain also discussed the concepts of American globalism and British regionalism, and how those two ideas intersected globally, in concert and in conflict, over the years directly following World War II.

“In essence, I make the case that postwar British influence receded quasi-willingly, as it came to be displaced by American power, that expanded in accordance with U.S. officials’ increasing sense of a new global role,” Husain said.

Kennedy agreed with Husain’s assessment of the postwar transition of power.

“I particularly like the way in which he juxtaposes American and British visions of the postwar world and how to deal with American increases in power and the diminution of British power, and what that means in terms of their assessments of the world.”

Mental maps and the discussion of American globalism and British regionalism served as just a sampling of many ideas Husain put forward in both his book and his talk.

“I found it really useful, and I liked how it combined the concepts of space and diplomatic history,” attendee and Georgetown middle eastern and north african history Ph.D. student Laura Goffman said. “I was interested in the whole discussion of how diplomats conceived of space through the process of mapmaking.”