10.9 — Decolonization

In 1945, European powers governed roughly a third of the world's population.

By 1975 almost all of it was independent. Around a hundred new states came into existence in three decades — the fastest and largest transfer of formal political authority in history.

Nothing comparable had happened before and nothing has since.

Why then

Five causes, and they compound.

The war bankrupted the imperial powers. Britain ended the Second World War with debts exceeding twice its annual output, dependent on American loans, rationing bread in peacetime. France and the Netherlands had been occupied and had to rebuild. Holding colonies by force costs money that none of them had.

The war destroyed the prestige on which the empires rested. Japan's conquest of Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines in a few months in 1941–42 demonstrated that European rule could be beaten by an Asian power. The fall of Singapore in February 1942, with tens of thousands of British and Imperial troops surrendering to a smaller Japanese force, is the standing symbol. Whatever people thought of Japanese rule afterwards — and it was frequently brutal — the demonstration could not be undone.

Colonial troops fought the war and drew conclusions. Around 2.5 million Indians served in the Second World War, and around a million Africans. Men who had fought in Burma, Italy and North Africa for a stated cause of freedom and self-determination returned to colonies that had neither.

The two new superpowers were both, for different reasons, anti-colonial. The United States had itself been a colony, had promised self-determination in the Atlantic Charter, and saw European empires as closed trading blocs. The Soviet Union supported anti-colonial movements as a matter of doctrine and of strategy. The Suez crisis of 1956 made the position unmistakable: when Britain and France attacked Egypt over the canal's nationalisation, American financial pressure forced them to withdraw within weeks. It is the moment the old imperial powers were shown that they could no longer act independently.

And the movements themselves had been organising for decades. Chapter 6.20 covered India's, and India's independence in 1947 was the event that made the rest look inevitable. The largest colony had gone; the argument that colonial rule was permanent was finished.

The two patterns

Where the transfer was negotiated and where it was fought is largely explained by one variable: settlers.

Where there was no large European settler population, transfers were comparatively negotiated. India in 1947, Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960, most of British West Africa, and the great majority of French West Africa in 1960. They were not peaceful — India's was accompanied by Partition (Chapter 6.23) — and the imperial power was not fighting to stay.

Where settlers had made their lives there, the wars were savage.

Algeria, 1954–62. Around a million European settlers, many of them families resident for generations, and France legally regarded Algeria as part of France rather than as a colony. The war involved systematic torture by French forces — documented, admitted decades later by senior participants, and the subject of a formal French acknowledgement in 2018 in one case — and terrorism by the FLN. Estimates of Algerian deaths range from several hundred thousand to over a million. It brought down the French Fourth Republic and returned de Gaulle to power, who then negotiated the withdrawal he had been elected to prevent.

Kenya, 1952–60. The Mau Mau uprising was met with a system of detention camps holding tens of thousands. In 2013 the British government expressed regret and paid compensation to over 5,000 elderly Kenyans, in a settlement following litigation in which documents the Foreign Office had claimed did not exist were produced. The Hanslope Park archive — thousands of files removed from colonies at independence and concealed for decades — was revealed in that case.

Vietnam. France fought from 1946 to 1954, was defeated at Dien Bien Phu, and the country was partitioned — after which the United States took over the war (Chapter 12.4).

Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia all involved extended armed conflict.

And Portugal held on longest, fighting three colonial wars simultaneously until its own government was overthrown in 1974 by officers who had concluded the wars were unwinnable.

What was handed over

This is the part that determined what followed.

The borders. Almost every new state inherited the boundaries drawn by colonial administrators (Chapter 11.1), which cut through ethnic groups and combined peoples with no shared history.

And the new states kept them, by explicit decision. The Organisation of African Unity in 1964 adopted the principle that colonial boundaries were inviolable. The reasoning was that any attempt to redraw them would produce continental war, and the cost is that the borders make little sense — Nigeria alone contains over 250 ethnic groups and three large ones with distinct religions and histories.

The administrative state, at varying depth. India inherited a functioning civil service, a legal system, a railway network and a professional army (Chapter 6.19), which is a large part of why the transfer worked. The Belgian Congo became independent in 1960 with, by frequently cited counts, only a handful of university graduates in a population of over 13 million and almost no Congolese officers in the army. Within weeks the army had mutinied, the mineral-rich province of Katanga had seceded with Belgian backing, and the prime minister Patrice Lumumba had been deposed and, in January 1961, murdered — with Belgian and American involvement now documented, and a Belgian parliamentary inquiry in 2001 acknowledging moral responsibility.

Economies built to export raw materials to the metropole, with transport networks running from mine or plantation to port rather than connecting the country internally (Chapter 6.19).

And very little industry, and in most cases very little education.

What independence delivered

The record should be stated with both columns.

Achievements are real and are frequently understated. Life expectancy across the developing world rose enormously in the decades after independence — in India from about 32 to over 70 (Chapter 6.28). Literacy rose from very low bases nearly everywhere. Famine ended in India. Smallpox was eradicated globally in 1980, a campaign conducted by newly independent states with the World Health Organization. And self-government is a good in itself, which a ledger of economic indicators does not capture.

And the failures are also real.

Single-party states and coups. Between 1960 and 2000, Africa experienced a very large number of successful coups. The pattern was frequently: independence under a nationalist leader, the movement becomes the only legal party, the leader becomes president for life, the army intervenes, and the cycle repeats.

The reasons are structural rather than about the people. A state with weak institutions, a resource-based economy, artificial borders, no tradition of loyal opposition, and a Cold War in which both superpowers would fund a friendly dictator (Chapter 12.4) is a state under enormous pressure.

Neocolonialism. Kwame Nkrumah's term for formal independence with continued economic dependence — foreign ownership of mines and plantations, commodity dependence, debt, and currency arrangements such as the CFA franc, which tied several West African currencies to the French treasury.

And Cold War proxy conflicts. Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Congo and others became arenas in which superpower funding sustained wars far longer than local resources would have permitted.

Why India worked comparatively well

Worth stating because it is the comparison this volume can use.

A mass movement with a nationwide organisation that had been operating for sixty years, so there was a body capable of governing (Chapter 6.20).

An inherited administrative and legal apparatus and a professional army with an established tradition of subordination to civil authority.

Leaders who chose institutions over personal power. Nehru held elections and accepted results (Chapter 6.24). Every neighbouring state's first generation did not.

A federal structure that accommodated diversity rather than suppressing it (Chapter 6.25).

And a decision not to make the state ethnic or religious, which its neighbour did and which cost that neighbour half its territory in 1971 (Chapter 6.26).

None of this was inevitable and all of it was chosen, which is Chapter 16.3's argument.

What was not decolonized

Settler states where the settlers stayed and kept power.

South Africa's apartheid system was constructed after 1948, as the rest of the continent was moving the other way, and it ended only in 1994 after decades of internal resistance, armed struggle, and international sanctions and boycott.

Southern Rhodesia declared independence under white minority rule in 1965 and became Zimbabwe in 1980 after a war.

Palestine remains unresolved. The British Mandate ended in 1948 with a war, and Chapter 12.5 covers it.

And several territories remain non-self-governing on the United Nations list, including Western Sahara.

Where this shows up in your life

The map. The borders of Africa, the Middle East and much of Asia were drawn by European administrators and are still in force.

The Non-Aligned Movement, founded at Belgrade in 1961 with India, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia and Ghana among the leaders, was the newly independent states' attempt to avoid being absorbed into either Cold War bloc (Chapter 6.24). Its practical achievements were limited and it established a diplomatic identity that persists.

And the argument about consequences is live. Debates about reparations, about restitution of objects in European museums (Chapter 7.8), about apologies, and about how colonial history is taught in the former imperial countries are all active political questions in Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany right now.

What Part 10 established

England established that a monarch is subject to law by trying and executing one. America took Locke's principles, wrote them into a constitution with enumerated rights and judicial review, and could not apply them to a fifth of its own population for another eighty-nine years. France stated the principles universally, and its revolution produced both modern citizenship and modern political terror. Haiti took the principles literally, defeated three European armies, and was charged for its freedom until 1947. Latin America won independence with extractive institutions intact and has struggled with the consequences ever since. Nationalism remade the map and carried liberation and exclusion in the same doctrine. Slavery was abolished and its economic and social structure rebuilt under other names. And within thirty years after 1945, a hundred new states appeared, inheriting borders they had not drawn and economies built to serve somebody else.

What the next Part covers

Part 11 is the twentieth century's catastrophe. The imperial world of 1900 and the carving up of Africa. Why the First World War happened, told with the actual mechanics of the alliance system and the mobilisation timetables. What the trenches were and why the war could not be won. The peace that failed. The Russian Revolution. How fascism and Nazism actually worked as political machines. The Second World War in Europe and in Asia. The Holocaust. The bomb. The famines, purges and genocides that were not part of the wars. And an accounting of what the century cost.