Decolonisation and Independence - TCE Modern History (Tasmania)

What this dot point is asking

Decolonisation describes the process by which colonised peoples won independence from European empires, mostly in the three decades after the Second World War. Before 1945 Britain, France and other powers ruled vast territories across Asia and Africa. The war shattered the prestige and resources that had sustained these empires. Japan's rapid conquest of British, French and Dutch colonies in Asia destroyed the myth of European invincibility, while the war left Britain and France economically exhausted and dependent on the United States. At the same time the war was fought in the name of freedom and self-determination, ideals enshrined in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the new United Nations, which colonised peoples used to demand their own rights.

Several forces drove decolonisation. Nationalist movements with mass support and charismatic leaders pressed their claims, sometimes through negotiation and sometimes through armed struggle. The two new superpowers were broadly anti-colonial: the United States distrusted European empire and the Soviet Union actively supported anti-colonial movements, so the Cold War both encouraged and complicated independence. Changing opinion within the imperial powers themselves, and the rising cost of holding restless colonies, made empire harder to justify.

The pattern of decolonisation varied. Some transfers of power were relatively peaceful and negotiated, such as Ghana, which under Kwame Nkrumah in 1957 became the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence and a beacon for the continent. Others involved long and brutal wars. France fought to keep Indochina but was defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, then waged a savage and ultimately unsuccessful war in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. Britain faced violent insurgencies, including the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. In white-settler colonies, resistance to majority rule prolonged conflict, as in Southern Rhodesia and, in a different form, South Africa under apartheid.

The year 1960 is often called the Year of Africa, because seventeen African states became independent in that single year, many of them former French colonies. The United Nations General Assembly that year passed a declaration calling for an end to colonialism. Within little more than a decade most of the continent was independent, and former colonies became a powerful bloc in the United Nations.

Independence rarely solved the deeper problems left by colonial rule. Colonial borders, often drawn for European convenience, grouped together rival peoples or split communities, helping to cause later conflicts and secession attempts such as the Biafran war in Nigeria from 1967. Many new states inherited economies geared to exporting raw materials and lacked trained administrators, leaving them dependent on former rulers, a relationship critics called neo-colonialism. Cold War rivalry drew new nations into proxy conflicts, while some independence leaders turned to one-party rule or military government. Many of these states sought a path between the superpowers through the Non-Aligned Movement, formed at the Belgrade Conference in 1961 and inspired by the earlier Bandung Conference of 1955.

The legacy of decolonisation is mixed and still debated. It ended formal European rule over hundreds of millions of people and reshaped the international order, multiplying the number of sovereign states. Yet it also left enduring economic inequalities, contested borders and political instability. Mass migration from former colonies transformed the societies of the former imperial powers themselves.

Historians disagree about why empires ended and who deserves the credit. A metropolitan interpretation stresses decisions made in London or Paris, arguing that imperial powers chose to withdraw as the costs of empire outweighed the benefits. A peripheral interpretation emphasises the agency of colonised peoples, whose nationalist movements and resistance forced the issue. Other historians highlight the international context, especially the Second World War and the Cold War superpowers, as the decisive factor. Most accounts now combine these, seeing decolonisation as the result of pressure from below meeting weakness and changing calculations at the centre, within a transformed global setting.