Chapter 23

I. Beginning 

A. Nelson Mandela of South Africa spent 27 years in prison for treason, sabotage, and conspiracy.
1. in 1994, he became South Africa’s first black president

B. Decolonization was vastly important in the second half of the twentieth century.
1. the newly independent states experimented politically, economically, and culturally
2. these states were labeled as the third world during the cold war
a. now are often called developing countries or the Global South
b. they include a large majority of the world’s population
c. suffer from enormous challenges

II. Toward Freedom: Struggles for Independence

A. The End of Empire in World History
1. India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel won independence in the late 1940s
2. African independence came between mid-1950s and mid-1970s
a. more than 50 colonies won freedom
3. imperial breakup wasn’t new; the novelty was mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology and creation of a large number of new nation-states
a. some comparison to the first decolonization of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
b. but in the Americas, most colonized people were of European origin, holding a common culture with their colonial rulers
4. fall of many empires in the twentieth century
a. Austrian and Ottoman empires collapsed in the wake of World War I
b. Russian Empire collapsed but was soon recreated as the USSR
c. German and Japanese empires ended with World War II
d. African and Asian independence movements shared with other “end of empire” stories the ideal of national self-determination
e. nonterritorial empires (e.g., where United States wielded powerful influence) came under attack
i. U.S. intrusion helped stimulate the Mexican Revolution(1910)
ii. as in Mexico, Cuban revolution (1959–1960) included nationalization of assets dominated by foreign investors
f. disintegration of the USSR (1991) was propelled by national self-determination (creation of 15 new states)

B. Explaining African and Asian Independence
1. few people would have predicted imperial collapse in 1900
2. several explanations for decolonization have emerged:
a. emphasis on the fundamental contradictions in the colonial enterprise
i. rhetoric of Christianity and material progress didn’t fit the reality of racism, exploitation, and poverty
ii. Europeans’ increasingly democratic values were in conflict with colonial dictatorship
iii. ideal of national self-determination was at odds with repression of the same in colonies
b. historians use the idea of “conjuncture” to explain timing of decolonization
i. the world wars had weakened Europe and undermined a sense of European superiority
ii. the United States and USSR opposed older European colonial empires
iii. the UN provided a platform for anticolonial moves
iv. these factors helped create a moral climate in which imperialism was viewed as wrong
v. by the early to mid-twentieth century, the colonies had multiple generations of Western-educated elites