Decolonization

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

Decolonization did not happen at one moment or in one place; it happened in waves, region by region, in the three decades after the Second World War. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, carved out of British India through a partition that itself displaced millions. The Philippines followed in 1946, and Indonesia secured its independence from the Netherlands in 1949 only after an armed conflict the Dutch could not win. France held on longer and paid more for it: its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ended French rule in Indochina outright. Africa's wave came slightly later and moved faster once it started. Libya was independent by 1951, Morocco and Tunisia by 1956, and Ghana's independence in 1957 opened the door for Nigeria in 1960 and Kenya in 1963; by 1977, colonial rule had ended across the whole of mainland Africa. No single cause explains the timing. Constitutional conferences in London negotiated the terms of transition, colonial insurgencies raised the cost of staying, and international pressure, culminating in the United Nations General Assembly's 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, made continued occupation harder to defend on the world stage than it had ever been before.

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.