45 The end of empire

At the end of the Second World War, nearly all of Africa and much of southern and southeastern Asia were governed by European powers, who also possessed many territories around the Caribbean and in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Within three decades, the vast majority of colonial peoples had gained their independence, sometimes peacefully, sometimes through wars of liberation. By the end of the 20th century, there was barely a vestige of empire left. It was a rapid dismantling of an imperial dream that had taken centuries to realize.

There were a number of factors that brought about this transformation. One of the most significant was the creation within many colonies of Western-educated elites, who were trained up to help the colonial power in local administration and development. These elites absorbed Western values of freedom, equality and democracy, which in turn led to demands for national self-determination—demands that were increasingly backed by liberal and socialist opinion back in the mother countries. A more immediate factor was the Second World War, which left most European countries close to bankruptcy, and unable to afford the huge cost of maintaining an empire. That war had also given greater confidence to colonial peoples, who had seen how an Asian country, Japan, had swept the all-powerful Europeans out of southeast Asia and much of the Pacific.

Paving the way By the early 20th century, Britain had granted independence to its colonies of “white settlement”—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. These precedents encouraged the growth of nationalism in India, by far the most populous—and also the most developed—of Britain’s non-white colonies. The Indian National Congress had been formed in 1885, and from the 1920s, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, it became increasingly militant and well-organized, and largely unsatisfied by the granting by the British of small degrees of self-rule. At the same time, as Congress pressed for independence, the Muslim League demanded the creation of a separate Muslim state—Pakistan—in the sub-continent. Gandhi and his followers pursued a policy of non-violent civil disobedience, culminating in the Quit India campaign launched in 1942, which prompted the British to imprison most of the Congress leadership for the rest of the Second World War.

“The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall … Freedom and slavery are mental states.”

Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War,1949

The Labour government elected in Britain at the end of the war in 1945 was more sympathetic than its predecessors to the spirit of Indian nationalism. It also faced a postwar financial crisis that made it imperative to shed its imperial burden as soon as possible. The result was that independence was granted in 1947, when the sub-continent was hastily partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Although independence had been won by non-violence, terrible atrocities followed its achievement: partition led to massive movements of refugees in both directions, during which hundreds of thousands died in sectarian massacres.

Processes of transition By and large, Britain’s withdrawal from empire was a peaceful affair. There were exceptions, however. Through the 1950s, for example, British forces combated the pro-independence Mau Mau movement in Kenya. In the eyes of the British, the Mau Mau were terrorists, but to many of their fellow Kenyans they were freedom fighters—a dichotomy widely observed throughout the process of decolonization.

The other leading European colonial power, France, had a similarly checkered record. Although most of its extensive African empire had achieved independence peaceably by 1960, after the Second World War the French violently resisted independence movements in Indochina, which had been occupied by the Japanese during the war. In Vietnam, the communist-dominated Viet Minh had declared independence after the defeat of Japan, but were forced to withdraw to safe bases when the French returned to reclaim their right to rule. After years of fighting, the Viet Minh secured victory—and independence—in 1954, but the subsequent partition of Vietnam sowed the seeds of the Vietnam War (see The Vietnam War). The French war in Indochina split opinion at home in France; the struggle for independence in Algeria was to prove even more divisive.

The struggle for Algerian independence

The most intractable of colonial situations tended to arise where large numbers of Europeans had settled in the territory concerned. This was the case in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and South Africa, where white minorities insisted on clinging on to power long after other African countries had achieved black majority rule.

One of the bitterest of such conflicts was the struggle for independence in Algeria. The coastal region had been extensively settled by the French, and was, in law, a part of metropolitan France. A campaign for independence was launched by indigenous Muslims in 1954, and before long a bitter war was underway, with atrocities committed by both sides. Divisions of opinion in France over the war led, in 1958, to the fall of the Fourth Republic. The army and the settlers expected the new president, Charles de Gaulle, to take a hard line against the insurgents, but de Gaulle realized the majority of French voters opposed the war, and announced his backing for Algerian “self-determination.” Elements in the army and extremist settlers formed the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), which mounted a terrorist campaign to try to hinder the process. However, despite attempted military coups and assassinations, de Gaulle successfully negotiated an end to hostilities, and independence was granted in 1962.

Among the other European powers, the Dutch initially fought to regain control of the East Indies after the defeat of Japan, but in 1949 the colony achieved independence as Indonesia. Belgium hastily granted independence to Congo in 1960, but had previously restricted political activity by the Congolese, who were thus poorly prepared for ruling themselves. As a result, the country quickly descended into a bloody civil war. Portugal desperately held on to its African colonies, fighting local independence movements until 1974, when the right-wing dictatorship in Portugal itself was overthrown.

“The wind of change is blowing through this continent …”

Harold Macmillan, British prime minister, speech in Cape Town, South Africa, February 3, 1960

In 1945, there had been some seventy independent sovereign states. Thirty years later, in 1975, there were more than 170. In the decades that followed, most of Europe’s remaining colonies in the Caribbean and Indian and Pacific Oceans also became independent. Although all these countries are now technically sovereign states, many of them still find themselves dominated, both politically and economically, by the West, or by emerging economic superpowers such as China. Some hold that the age of empire has not completely passed.

the condensed idea

A transformation of the map of the world