A 19th-century American cartoon, representing Great Britain as a colonial monster grabbing up nations around the world.

Imperialism: the formal domination of one nation over another, usually through military conquest. When one nation conquers another, or several others, the resulting multinational unit is referred to as an empire, with the conquering nation acting as ruler over the others.

Colonization: a form of imperialism in which people from the conquering nation move to and live in the conquered nation, enjoying advantages over the indigenous population – or perhaps even relocating them entirely.

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Introduction

The conquest of one kingdom by another is a very old story; the first empire was probably created by Sargon of Akkad in about 2300 BCE. Over the last 500 years, all the dominant empires have been European in origin, leading many to view imperialism as a Caucasian, Christian endeavor. But European imperialism is only the latest iteration of an age-old dream of conquest which persisted until the mid-20th century.

This ancient practice of imperialism and colonization ended after WWII, when the remaining empires – the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese – finally collapsed. The process of this collapse, and the resulting independence of the conquered countries, is known as decolonization. The result of global decolonization was an explosion of new nations, mainly in Africa and Asia, in the twenty years after World War II. Some examples of decolonization were violent in the extreme; others were largely undramatic, at least until independence opened the door to unforeseen conflicts. Between 1945 and 2000, 142 new nations were born, creating a period of instability which has not yet completely settled. It was no less than the collapse of the old world order and the start of a new age in global history.

The individual dramas of these newly-independent nations are covered mainly in chapters 5, 7, and 9. The point of this chapter is to examine why decolonization occurred when it did, and explore the numerous problems involved in the process.

However, to appreciate the importance of decolonization, we need to first review colonization and its effects on both the colonizer and the colonized. Only then can we understand the importance of decolonization and why the process was so complicated and fraught.

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The First Wave of European Colonization

Theodor de Bry, “Negotiating Peace with the Indians,” 1634. Compliments of Virginia Historical Society.

One of the great historical questions of the past five hundred years concerns European dominance of the globe. With few exceptions (for example, the Greek and Roman empires), the European kingdoms and empires were always second-rate; one traditionally looked to the Middle East or Asia for the greatest economies, cultures, arts, and militaries. But after approximately 1500 CE, the Europeans dominated the earth with their empires, capturing entire continents and ruling over them for hundreds of years. How did the Europeans do this? Many researchers (for example, Jared Diamond in his popular work, Guns, Germs, and Steel) have addressed this question.

The first reason for European dominance was a strong economic drive. The Age of Exploration was born of a need to reconnect Europe with the Asian and Middle Eastern spice markets. Silks, spices, and other goods had flowed from India and China to Europe since the Roman Empire, with Middle Eastern businesses acting as the middlemen. After the fall of the Mongol Empire and the rise of the Ottomans, land routes between Europe and Asia were no longer safe enough for trade. The only way for Europeans to re-connect with global trade routes was by sea, and the Europeans had never sailed so far. It would be a long and difficult process to build better ships and sail off the edges of their existing maps, but a great deal of money hung in the balance.

Coupled with this desire for profit was the growing power of European nations, born of constant fighting. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, no power in Europe had been able to dominate all the others, leading to virtually nonstop warfare though the entire mediaeval period. Not only did the Europeans fight each other, but also fended off invasions from Muslims and Mongols and, just before Columbus’ first expedition, destroyed the Muslim caliphate in Spain. One advantage of all this fighting was that European nations had learned to build the powerful, centralized states necessary for winning wars. They developed strong central governments, market economies, and efficient tax collection systems to ensure that the kingdom had the necessary funds. These administrative tools created kingdoms strong enough to survive the constant wars of Europe, and those that failed to adopt them were eliminated.

These two factors – exploration for the sake of trade, and powerful centralized kingdoms – meant that the Europeans were motivated to explore the globe, and toughened by constant fighting to be aggressive and capable conquerors. This did not mean instant success; for example, when the Portuguese first arrived in the Indian Ocean after having successfully navigated around Africa, they were unable to simply dominate the Middle Eastern empires, which were already very powerful. Total domination would have to wait a few more centuries.

However, the Europeans did have a huge advantage over the tribes and empires of the American continents. The indigenous Americans lacked steel weapons and firearms; in only a few instances had they formed large empires that could fight the invading Europeans. Remember that Columbus was not looking for a new continent; he was looking for a passage to China, to access the Asian markets. But after discovering gold and silver in the Americas, the Spanish invaded with legions of mercenary troops, with the intention of plundering the wealth of the continent. With time, this massive robbery developed into colonialism, as Spaniards emigrated to Latin America to run the plantations and mines, using slaves to extract even greater wealth than they had initially stolen. The Northern European kingdoms soon followed, occupying what would later become the United States and Canada. This conquest was backed by the Christian churches of Europe, which viewed imperialism as an opportunity to spread their religion. It is clear, however, that the main drive behind colonization was wealth. Religious conversion was at best a secondary consideration, at worst a mere excuse for aggression.

As the Europeans explored farther afield, still seeking markets in Asia, they eventually located weak societies they could conquer, establishing ports in them for peaceful trade with kingdoms they were unable to conquer, as well as producing spices on their own plantations. The Dutch seized parts of what would eventually be Indonesia; the Spanish conquered the Philippines; the French took Indochina; and the British conquered the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Not only did the Europeans battle the locals for control of their land, but continued their endless wars with each other, and these wars extended to attacking each other’s colonies. Add to this the pirates who constantly stalked the trade routes, and the new colonial world became a very dangerous place.

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The Second Wave of Colonization

The West had succeeded in its goal of reconnecting with the global trade networks. However, by the late 19th century, Europe was a completely different place from when Columbus embarked on his somewhat misguided mission. Starting with Great Britain, Europe had industrialized, converting its agricultural economy to one based on mechanized manufacturing and transportation. This created new economic imperatives. Europeans needed more raw materials to feed their factories, and many of these – such as rubber – were not available in Europe. Furthermore, the European markets were saturated – that is, their factories were producing more goods than their people could buy, limiting economic growth. With foreign markets difficult to penetrate due to economic protectionism, one available option was to force conquered peoples to buy European products by forbidding them from making their own. This could only be done in colonies the Europeans completely controlled. Finally, creating modern militaries required strong economies; if a European nation’s rivals had more colonies, and therefore more wealth, then its rivals could build larger armies. That, European leaders asserted, was unacceptable. These economic and military concerns drove what is called the Second Wave of Colonization, or “New Imperialism,” which lasted from 1880 to the start of World War I in 1914. This new colonization was aided not only by new technologies, but also new justifications for the venture.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this new imperialism was the Scramble for Africa. Prior to the late 19th century, Europeans maintained trading posts on the Sub-Saharan African coasts, mainly to access the African slave trade. These possessions equaled about ten percent of all African territory. Europeans rarely penetrated into the interior, however, due to the threat of tropical diseases against which they had no resistance. The worst of these was malaria. This prevented the Europeans from conquering and colonizing Africa, although it was much closer to Europe than their Asian possessions.

However, large-scale production of the drug quinine after 1850 could protect Europeans from malaria, and suddenly opened all of Africa to colonization. Before the inevitable scramble could occur, however, the European powers foresaw a problem in advance: in their rush to colonize Africa, they might end up fighting each other to capture the most profitable places. To avoid this, leaders met in Berlin from 1884 to 1885 to divide Africa among them in advance, to avoid fighting. This was known at the Berlin Conference and, predictably, no Africans were at the table. With the arrangements made in advance, the Europeans then proceeded to conquer ninety percent of Africa over the next few decades. They also continued to advance in Asia, capturing all of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Indochina. The United States also carried out a more stumbling form of imperialism by taking the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898.

Africa, as divided among the European imperialists at the Berlin Conference. From Wikipedia Commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In this round of colonization, the West easily defeated all other cultures, due to the advanced technology granted by science and industrialization. Western militaries now sported automatic weapons, modern artillery, steam-powered ships, and the telegraph. These developments meant that the West could conquer virtually every other society on earth, with the notable exception of China, which was simply too large to easily conquer. And ease of conquest was important; since the main thrust of colonization was economic gain, conquests had to be carried out cheaply, with a minimum of men and resources, in order to maximize profit.  Colonization was just another business, driven by profit and loss.

The colonizing nations had changed considerably since the First Wave of Colonization; they had become more democratized in the meantime, as well as more secular. This posed a new problem for them during the second wave: how could a democracy justify conquest of a people who had not harmed it? How does society square the “inalienable rights” of man with aggressive imperialism? Since the West was increasingly democratic, it was now even more important that their populations condoned imperialism, as they could stop it simply by voting for anti-imperialist leaders. Religious crusading alone would no longer suffice; a new justification was required. The West found it in two sources: scientific racism and the civilizing mission.

Science was a relatively new and rising power in the West. It had delivered technology and medicine which improved human life. Moreover, science was regarded as an objective mode of thought, based on experimentation and facts, unlike religious faith. Therefore, the imperialists based their new justification on scientific racism, the concept that science proves that one race is inherently superior to another. Through dubious “scientific” experiments, Western racists claimed that white people were proven to be mentally and morally superior to nonwhites. This, they furthermore believed, gave Whites the right to rule over the inferior nonwhites. Charles Darwin’s views of natural selection, or “survival of the fittest,” were becoming popular in the late 19th century. Racists applied this thinking to humans, claiming that Whites were “fittest,” as proven by their superior wealth and power. Therefore, they claimed, it was only natural that Whites should rule the world, as the most powerful predators ruled the animal kingdom.

[Incidentally: scientific racism is fake science, carried out with a bias in order to prove pre-existing racism. Actual science has never proven any mental or moral superiority between races. In fact, within science, there is no such thing as “race.” There is only one human species, homo sapiens. Furthermore, Charles Darwin never meant for natural selection to apply to human culture, but only to explain evolution in the animal world.]

Once one accepted scientific racism, it opened the door to the next justification: the civilizing mission, or what Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poem, called the “White man’s burden”:

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child

In this poem, Kipling tells White people that it is their historic task to raise nonwhite people – “half devil and half child” – out of darkness and into enlightened (i.e., Western) society. Western governments used this “civilizing mission” to justify their conquests, claiming that dominating other cultures was helpful, a gift, bringing them superior civilization. Someday, the Americans and Europeans claimed, these cultures would be sufficiently Western that the colonizers would go home, granting the newly-developed cultures their freedom. In the late 19th century, most White people, though not all, were ready to accept this logic.

European colonization lasted from 1492 to the 1960s – nearly five hundred years. It brought tremendous wealth and power to the West, placing Europe and the United States atop all other world powers. But how did colonization affect the colonized peoples of the world?

The first effect was simply death, especially during the First Wave. The European conquest of the American hemisphere virtually annihilated the indigenous population. Most of these deaths came through diseases the Europeans brought with them, particularly smallpox, against which the native population had no resistance. Other causes were more direct, the result of barbarism against the indigenous. Between disease, wars, slavery, and intentional starvation, the Europeans killed between ninety and ninety-five percent of the indigenous population of the Americas. It is thought that about 145 million Amerindians lived in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans; by 1700, it was only 15 million, a loss of 130 million lives – the single greatest demographic loss in history. This also led to the near-total destruction of indigenous language, culture, and religion. To the indigenous, it was the greatest possible catastrophe, the end of everything, the apocalypse.

A 16th-century print showing the progression of smallpox in a Native American victim of the disease.

Furthermore, this demographic loss led the European colonizers to turn to Africa to find slaves to work the new plantations of the Americas. The Portuguese, with their trading posts on the Sub-Saharan African coasts, were the first to tap into the existing African slave trade, as the Arabs had already done. The Atlantic slave trade eventually transported between twelve and thirteen million Africans into slavery in the Americas, mainly in Brazil and the Caribbean. Besides reducing the African population, this trade also enticed African kingdoms into warring against each other to capture slaves to sell to the Europeans, keeping Africa in a constant state of turmoil long before the Scramble for Africa began.

African slaves on a sugarcane plantation on Antigua. Compliments of the British Library.

The New Imperialism of the 19th century featured less loss of life, which doesn’t say much; also, the slave trade had ended by then. Nevertheless, the effect of African and Asian colonization was devastating for the colonized.

The first major effect was the seizure of the best agricultural lands by the colonizer. By force of arms, and with the collaboration of some of the indigenous, the colonizers kicked the locals off their lands, they turned into plantations for cash crops such as tobacco, sugarcane, cotton, and so on. The colonized now had no source of income or even food; the colonizers further exploited them by hiring them as cheap agricultural laborers on the lands they once owned, working for poverty wages under conditions that would never be permitted in Europe or America. This would keep the colonized permanently poor and dependent on the colonizer, exactly as the colonizer wanted.

The colonizer had not come to the colonized to learn their ways or their language any more than necessary. Native arts and culture declined, replaced by those of the colonizer. The newly-introduced Christianity competed with local religions, sometimes splitting families apart. The colonizers held all their own cultural artifacts as superior to those of the colonized, who were encouraged to abandon their traditional ways in exchange for that of the colonized – except for democracy, which was largely withheld from them.

All of this demoralized the colonized. The colonizers did indeed bring modern civilization to the colonies in the form of hospitals, schools, infrastructure, and factories; but all of these primarily benefitted the colonizers, not the locals. And colonization could not be carried out without some assistance from the colonized. The colonizers could not speak the languages of the colonized; they did not understand their customs or religions. They needed collaborators, locals who spoke their language and would work for the colonizers as translators, advisors, bureaucrats, or even local leaders. These collaborators gained access to the Western world and usually tried to assimilate to some degree. They received a relatively good salary (rare for the colonized), could attend Western universities, and had other privileges denied to most indigenous people. Gandhi’s father was one such man, working for the British Raj (see Chapter 7). Of course, locals often viewed these people as traitors, although the collaborators would sometimes work for the locals’ benefit within the system as much as they could. The collaborators lived a complex and often difficult life, with a foot in both worlds of colonizer and colonized, and were usually entirely trusted in neither. For example, the colonized could often serve in the armies of the colonizer – but only under the control of White officers. The colonizers were not about to trust the colonized with that much power.

Over centuries of colonization, it became clear to the colonized, even the collaborators, that the colonizer would never consider them equals, no matter what the colonizers promised. To do so would break down the entire colonial system, which was based from the start on benefitting the mother country, not the colonized people. Without inequality, there could be no colonialism.

Understandably, most colonized would not go along with this unless forced to do so. Colonization was always a military affair, and always used some form of terrorism to maintain control. Even the most restrained of colonizers deployed lethal force when necessary. During the Second Wave of Imperialism, the most violent colony was the Congo Free State, which was the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. Known as “the place where there ain’t no Ten Commandments,” the Congo colony was the scene of some of history’s darkest crimes. The colonizers, utilizing a mercenary army, forced the indigenous population into slavery to exploit the natural resources of this vast region of Africa for Leopold’s benefit. This brutal slavery, and the terrorism that supported it, killed over ten million people.

Forced labor in Congo Free State. Notice that the guards are also African; such people were the “collaborators” needed to make colonialism work.

The great debate in the Global North during the second wave was whether the colonized benefitted from colonization, as Kipling suggested. Imperial governments, of course, claimed that they did, and worked hard to hide all evidence to the contrary. For example, King Leopold insisted that his efforts in the Congo were philanthropic, designed to bring enlightened society to savages. But eventually word of the true situation in the Congo reached the West, spurring an early international human rights movement to end the abuse.

Perhaps the best evidence that colonization did not benefit the colonized was the frequency of revolts against imperial rule. One general rule about people is that they do not like to be ruled by foreigners; they almost invariably prefer one of their own to rule. Even if the Westerners had brought good things to the colonized, why was it necessary for them to rule the country in order to do so? If their cause was philanthropic, couldn’t they have built hospitals and gone home?

Realizing the true nature of the colonial project, the colonized launched numerous uprisings against their occupiers. Sub-Saharan Africa alone saw at least twenty uprisings against European rule prior to World War I. If colonization was benefitting the colonized, this would not have happened. The colonizers, for their part, explained away the revolts as foolishness, jealousy, or as a “psychotic reaction” against modernity.

For all the might of the empires, for all their centuries of domination, their time was rapidly running out by the end of World War II, and the colonized peoples of the world knew it. The entire balance of world power was about to shift, almost at once.

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Decolonization

The British Empire in 1921. From Wikipedia Commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Decolonization is the process by which a colony gains its freedom and becomes an independent nation. The process may be the result of violence (in the case of the United States or Vietnam, for example) or not (India or Canada). The great wave of decolonization which ended European imperialism was largely a consequence of World War II. We need to examine that particular historical moment.

The first reason for the wave of postwar decolonization was the impoverishment of the European nations. The two world wars cost the world approximately 1.5 trillion US dollars (or about 24 trillion US dollars in 2022 currency). Furthermore, the devastation of Europe meant that such wealth as they still retained had to be dedicated to rebuilding – and, as we have already seen, economic assistance from the United States was critical. Therefore, retaining standing armies to maintain control of the colonies was considered prohibitively expensive, especially for a population that was sick of war.

But if colonies were good for the imperial economy, as imperial leaders claimed, why did the impoverished imperial nations withdraw from their colonies? Wouldn’t they have made more money if they had stayed? The truth is that colonization was never beneficial to the imperial nation as a whole. It benefitted the companies who had the royal monopolies to operate in the colonies; it benefitted those who held high positions in the colonial governments. But in the end, the cost of maintaining the colonies was greater than the profit for the nation as a whole. This encouraged the colonizers to abandon the colonies.

The British, realizing that the days of empire were over, decided to withdraw from their empire, albeit in an orderly and (mostly) dignified way, leaving behind local governments which were at least initially pro-Western. The French and Dutch governments, on the other hand, were keen to retain their colonies for one important reason: both nations had been conquered by Nazi Germany during the war, and wanted to rebuild their damaged national pride. Leaders believed that retaining the colonies was critical to this. Therefore, both countries fought to keep their rebellious colonies, specifically Vietnam and Algeria for the French, and Indonesia in the case of the Dutch. Both nations lost their colonies anyway. The tsunami of decolonization left nothing standing in its wake.

There were several other factors involved in this historical moment. Over the decades, the colonized had developed national consciousness, the concept that they were all citizens of a nation, with a set of shared traits. This may seem elementary for citizens of Europe and the United States, but the colonized were not initially members of a nation-state. When the imperialists created their colonies, the new borders they established ignored the cultural reality on the ground; for example, they joined together people of different tribes and religions who had never lived together before, and divided existing tribal lands among different colonizers, so that tribe members could not cross the borders to visit each other as they had since time immemorial. The Berlin Conference was the clearest example of this willful ignorance of colonial cultures. This added to the chaos of the colonized, only further proving that aiding the colonized peoples was not the point of the imperial project.

Over the decades, the colonized people came to identify with each other, primarily because they shared one important trait: they all hated the imperial powers and wanted them to leave. Ironically, it was the colonizers who provided the colonized with the unity they needed to prevail. The colonized were willing to put aside their differences in order to fight the colonizers. Furthermore, after World War II, the colonizers’ veneer of invincibility had been shattered. The Europeans had cultivated the myth that their civilization was superior to all others, but the Japanese, an Asian people, had pushed the British from their Southeast Asian colonies like Malaysia and Singapore. Seeing Asians defeat Westerners in battle encouraged the colonized people to fight the imperialists.

Anti-colonial revolutionaries in Indonesia in 1946. Notice that most are armed with nothing but sharpened bamboo shafts to face the Europeans. From the Tropenmuseum Collection.

Other historic factors came into play. The United States was opposed to European colonization, mainly because it had fought the first modern anti-imperial revolt in 1776. Anti-imperialism is part of the American cultural DNA, which made American domination of Latin America and other countries an uncomfortable arrangement (see Chapter 10). The Americans, for the most part, declined to aid the French and Dutch in maintaining their colonies after the war. They even pressured the Dutch into leaving Indonesia by threatening to cut off postwar economic aid, something the Dutch could not afford to lose. The USSR also opposed colonization, as anti-imperialism is a bedrock of Marxist thought. The Soviets sent aid to anti-colonial revolutionaries, much to the chagrin of the democracies, who saw it as a case of communist infiltration and conquest.

Another factor in decolonization was the opposition of the United Nations. In 1948, the UN signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first global declaration of human rights (see Chapter 12). One of the rights in this document – which the imperialists signed – is that all people have the right to self-determination, meaning that they had the right to rule themselves. This made the imperialists look bad. The fascists, who were just defeated, claimed the right to rule over others; were the imperialists going to act like Nazis after they just defeated them? Again, the colonizers found that the world seemed to be leaving them behind.

Finally, the changing global economy itself was rendering colonization useless. The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 designed the postwar capitalist economic system in order to rebuild the shattered world and strengthen economic development (see Chapter 14). The Bretton Woods system empowered global trade by seeking to remove trade barriers such as tariffs and other protectionism. By enabling free trade, the system removed much of the economic impetus for colonialism, which had been founded, in part, to circumvent international trade barriers.

Taken together, it was clear that the global conditions permitting colonization had faded, a testament to just how great were the changes wrought by World War II.

There were many groups among the colonized prepared to resist the colonizers – and that was part of their problem. Various groups had different goals and methods, as well as different visions for the new nation. Some groups were nativist, who wanted to return the colony to the tribal or monarchical state that existed before the colonizers conquered them. Some were religious nationalists who wanted a new government based on their religion. Some, especially collaborationists who had been educated in the West, wanted a democratic government like Western Europe or the United States. Still others were socialists who wanted to establish a Marxist government. Furthermore, some leaders, like Gandhi, wanted independence through nonviolent means; others, like Ho Chi Minh, believed only violence would achieve victory. Each group saw the others as hindrances to independence. Therefore, a major problem for these groups was to build coalitions that could work together for the common goal of independence, despite their differences. The colonizers, for their part, were more than happy to play one group off against another, emphasizing the differences between the revolutionaries to keep them at odds with each other.

It is important to remember that decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War. The Americans and Europeans would go to great lengths to prevent socialists from taking power in any former colony, although they often failed to do so (see Vietnam and Algeria, Chapters 7 and 11 respectively). The Westerners viewed all socialists as agents of the USSR although, as we have seen, that was clearly not the case. For the US in particular, any socialist country was a threat to its existence (see the case of the Belgian Congo in Chapter 9). This led to US covert actions and military aid in many decolonizing countries to prevent socialist victories. The British, who wanted to exit their colonies, would not do so without leaving behind democratic, pro-Western governments. They did all they could to suppress socialists, or even just leftist groups with socialist leanings, before leaving (see the example of Singapore in Chapter 5).

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New Nations, New Challenges

Once the colonizers were gone by one method or another, the formerly colonized were free to create their own nations. This began a tug-of-war between two social forces: the commonalities binding the new nations together, and the differences pulling them apart.

During colonization, the various religious, tribal, ethnic, and political groups among the colonized usually put aside their differences and worked together for independence. What had brought them together was their common hatred of the colonizer. But when the colonizer left, that commonality was gone as well, and the differences came to the fore. What kind of government would be established? Democracy? Socialist? Theocracy? Would any particular ethnic or tribal group rule? Could different regions have their own laws, according to their original precolonial societies? What would be the national language? These were differences which the Americans and Europeans had centuries to settle, often with great violence (consider the European Thirty Years War, or the American Civil War, for example). Now the new nations, full of internal contradictions which the colonizers had created from the start by ignoring social realities in creating the colonies, had to go through the same process. Opportunistic leaders could take advantage of the conflicts and fashion themselves into dictators (see Chapter 9), only making the situation worse. The intervention of both the US and the USSR to influence the new nations complicated things even further. This was why the period of decolonization was one of the most chaotic in history, although also one of the most hopeful.

The African Renaissance Monument, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Senegal’s independence from France.

There were also the practical problems of administering a new country. The colonized, having been subjugated for centuries, had no experience in national-level self-rule. Those who had collaborated with the colonizers and educated in the West had some experience in governing the colony, and often sought to become the new national leaders, but many others considered them to be traitors for having collaborated with the colonizers. The nativists, in particular, were loath to follow them. Economic problems abounded. The entire economy had been run by the colonizer, and for his own purposes. Native industries had been forbidden to prevent competition for the Europeans. Now, a new economy had to be built from scratch, and quickly, as poverty would produce even more chaos.

And the new nations were not entering a level playing field; they were going to compete with older and much more established nations. Some of these nations, particularly the powerful ones, could be downright predatorial in their international relations. Not only did the US and USSR strive to counter each other’s efforts in the new nations, but international corporations sought new business opportunities in them, often on terms not to the new nation’s advantage. The newly decolonized nation, in dire need of money, might need to accept any available deal, even bad ones. Financial assistance from the global North can also be used to gain leverage over a poor country, if that country becomes dependent on the money. All of this led to a new theory in international relations in the late 1960s known as dependency theory – the idea that the developed world wants the developing world to remain weak and dependent, the better to control its resources and markets.

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Conclusion

Decolonization was one of the most important moments in world history, granting hundreds of millions of people their political sovereignty. Although this was a necessary first step, it was far from the last. These nations had to create national consciousness, provide political stability, and build their economies. Certain new nations – for example, Singapore and Malaysia – have done a notably good job at this monumental task. Other nations, particularly in Africa, have had a much more difficult time of it, with revolts, poverty, and chaos. We should bear in mind that these nations are only sixty or seventy years old, very young as countries go. They became independent in a world full of powerful nations which wanted to influence their politics or control their economies. There is no reason to believe that these new nations could go through this process without a long struggle to establish their economic and social stability and independence.

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