Decolonisation is often discussed as macro-historical process, with the focus primarily on large scale political conflicts involved in the end of empires and the emergence of independent nation states, the shifts in economies and the complexities of diplomatic and military outcomes. There are as well major biographical studies of key national or independence leaders, like Gandhi, Sukarno, Menzies or Nehru. This paper will ask how working people and rank and file activists - not leaders but the men and women who participated at often-lowly levels in momentous events - saw the shifts of decolonisation. I will argue that attention to small scale histories - whether biographical studies which trace individual lives, or micro-histories, which trace small scale and everyday incidents - can open up histories of entanglements in decolonisation which do not romanticise either independence movements or imperial power, nor fall into the teleological trap of assuming the inevitability of the nation state.