The Cost of Staying

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An empire does not let go of a colony because it decides to; it lets go because holding on stops paying. Decolonization worked through several mechanisms at once, and none of them alone would have been enough. Constitutional conferences, usually held in London, gave local politicians a forum to negotiate the terms of transition rather than fight for them, which mattered enormously in colonies where an organized nationalist leadership already existed to send delegates. Where negotiation failed, sustained insurgency raised the price of staying: the First Indochina War ran from 1946 to 1954 and ended in French defeat, and the Algerian War of Independence, fought from 1954 to 1962, extracted a toll in French lives and French politics that no colonial administration could indefinitely absorb. And running beneath both was a shift in the international climate itself. By 1960, the United Nations General Assembly had passed its Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, putting the weight of a global body behind the principle that colonial rule needed no further justification. An empire fighting an insurgency, negotiating at a conference table, and losing the argument at the United Nations all at once had very little room left to simply hold its ground.