Decolonization

Based on Wikipedia: Decolonization

In November 1975, when Australia's Governor General dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam using powers reserved for the British monarch's representative, it raised an uncomfortable question: what does it mean for a nation to be truly independent? Australia had been governing itself for decades, yet here was the Queen's appointee toppling an elected government. The episode exposed something that decolonization scholars have long understood—ending formal colonial rule is often just the beginning of a much longer, messier process of becoming genuinely free.

Decolonization is, at its simplest, the undoing of colonialism. But that tidy definition obscures an extraordinary complexity. It encompasses armed rebellions and peaceful negotiations, the redrawing of maps and the reclaiming of languages, the departure of foreign administrators and the harder work of dismantling foreign ideas lodged deep in the colonized mind.

The First Wave: Revolution in the Americas

The story begins, surprisingly, with the colonizers themselves.

In 1775, British settlers in North America launched what would become the first successful colonial independence movement. These were not indigenous peoples throwing off foreign rule but transplanted Europeans who had come to see themselves as something new—Americans. They objected to being governed from London without representation, to taxes imposed without consent, to an ocean separating them from the decisions that shaped their lives.

Their victory in 1783 created the United States and established a template that would echo across centuries: colonial subjects could defeat a European empire and build a nation of their own.

Just six years later, the template found a far more radical application. In 1789, the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue—France's immensely profitable Caribbean sugar colony on the island of Hispaniola—began a revolt that would transform into history's only successful slave revolution. By 1804, Haiti had secured its independence, becoming the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere and sending shockwaves through every slaveholding society in the Americas.

The Haitian Revolution terrified plantation owners from Virginia to Brazil. Here was proof that enslaved people could organize, fight, and win. France would eventually demand Haiti pay a crippling "independence debt" as compensation for the lost "property"—meaning the enslaved people themselves. Haiti paid this extortion for over a century, crippling its economic development in ways that persist today.

Napoleon's wars in Europe inadvertently triggered the next cascade of independence. When French forces invaded Spain in 1806, the direct link between Madrid and its American colonies snapped. Spanish colonists faced an impossible choice: remain loyal to a captive king, accept a French puppet, or chart their own course.

Many chose independence.

From La Paz to Buenos Aires to Mexico City, revolutionary movements erupted. The fighting would last fifteen years. By 1824, when Spanish forces fell at the Battle of Ayacucho in Peru, mainland South America was free. Spain clung to Cuba and Puerto Rico until 1898, when the Spanish-American War stripped away those final possessions. Cuba became nominally independent; Puerto Rico remains a United States territory to this day.

Brazil took a different path. When Napoleon's armies threatened Portugal in 1807, the entire Portuguese royal court fled to Rio de Janeiro, transforming a colony into the temporary seat of empire. When the king eventually returned to Lisbon in 1820, his son Pedro remained behind—and in 1822, declared Brazil an independent empire with himself on the throne. It was decolonization by royal family drama.

The Enlightenment's Double Edge

What ideas animated these revolutions? Scholars point overwhelmingly to the Enlightenment—that eighteenth-century European intellectual movement championing reason, individual rights, and government by consent of the governed. The American Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that "all men are created equal," drew directly from Enlightenment philosophy. Latin American revolutionaries like Simón Bolívar were steeped in these ideas.

But here lies a troubling irony that contemporary scholars have emphasized.

The Enlightenment proclaimed universal human dignity while many of its leading thinkers owned enslaved people or justified the "civilizing mission" of colonialism. It championed reason while dismissing indigenous knowledge systems as primitive superstition. It declared liberty and equality while constructing racial hierarchies that placed Europeans at the top.

The newly independent nations of the Americas would grapple with this contradiction. They had used Enlightenment ideas to justify breaking from European rule—but those same ideas often failed to challenge the deeper structures of racial hierarchy, indigenous dispossession, and economic exploitation that colonialism had established. In many cases, creole elites—American-born people of European descent—simply replaced peninsular administrators while maintaining systems of slavery and indigenous subjugation.

This is why some scholars distinguish between "decolonization" in the sense of gaining political independence, and "decoloniality"—the ongoing project of dismantling the deeper colonial structures of knowledge, power, and being that persist long after the colonizers depart.

The Great Powers Carve Up the World

While the Americas were throwing off European rule, Europe was tightening its grip elsewhere. The nineteenth century saw an unprecedented expansion of colonialism, particularly in Africa and Asia. The infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 saw European powers literally draw lines on maps of Africa, dividing the continent among themselves with no regard for existing political units, ethnic groups, or geographical features.

The justifications shifted. Slavery was increasingly condemned, but a new "civilizing mission" emerged—the supposed duty of Europeans to bring Christianity, commerce, and civilization to "backward" peoples. This was colonialism dressed in humanitarian clothing, and it proved even more difficult to resist.

Ethiopia stood as a remarkable exception. In 1896, Ethiopian forces decisively defeated an Italian invasion at the Battle of Adwa, preserving their independence and providing what one historian called "a beacon of hope to pro-independence activists" throughout Africa. It would take Italy's fascist regime, using poison gas and modern aircraft in the 1930s, to temporarily occupy Ethiopia—and even then, resistance never ceased.

World War One: Empires Fall, Others Rise

The First World War shattered the old European order. Four empires—German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian—collapsed. From their ruins emerged new nations across Europe and the Middle East.

But this was selective decolonization. Germany's African and Pacific colonies didn't become independent; they were transferred to the victorious powers as "mandates" under the new League of Nations. The Ottoman Empire's Arab territories met the same fate, with Britain and France carving up the Middle East in ways that created many of today's conflicts. The British promised Arabs independence in exchange for revolt against the Ottomans, then simultaneously promised Jews a homeland in Palestine, then secretly agreed with France to divide the region between themselves. These incompatible commitments would haunt the region for a century.

Egypt gained nominal independence in 1922, but Britain retained control of the Suez Canal and effective authority over military and foreign affairs. It was independence on paper, sovereignty in practice withheld.

The British Empire made important adjustments. The Balfour Declaration of 1926 declared the self-governing "Dominions"—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State, and Newfoundland—to be equals of Britain within the Empire. The 1931 Statute of Westminster gave them full legislative independence. These were settler colonies populated largely by people of British descent; they would become independent without the prolonged struggles that awaited colonies in Asia and Africa.

India: The Jewel Cracks

India was the crown jewel of the British Empire—a subcontinent of hundreds of millions whose resources and markets had enriched Britain for generations. Its independence movement would become the template for anti-colonial struggles worldwide.

The turning point was Mohandas Gandhi.

Gandhi developed a philosophy of nonviolent resistance that he called satyagraha—roughly translated as "truth-force" or "soul-force." His genius was to make the moral contradictions of empire impossible to ignore. When Indian protesters refused to fight back against police violence, when they quietly accepted imprisonment rather than obey unjust laws, they exposed the brutality required to maintain colonial rule.

The Salt March of 1930 exemplified this approach. The British had made it illegal for Indians to produce or sell salt, maintaining a profitable monopoly on a substance essential to life. Gandhi and his followers walked 240 miles to the sea, where they made their own salt from seawater. The British response—mass arrests, police beatings—was broadcast worldwide, embarrassing the empire.

But the path to independence was neither smooth nor entirely nonviolent. The Amritsar massacre of 1919, when British troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd, killing hundreds, radicalized a generation. The Second World War further weakened British control, as Japan's rapid conquests in Southeast Asia shattered the myth of European invincibility.

When independence came in 1947, it came with partition—the division of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The boundaries were drawn hastily by a British lawyer who had never been to India. The result was catastrophic: somewhere between one and two million people killed in communal violence, perhaps fifteen million displaced in one of history's largest mass migrations. Families who had lived as neighbors for generations turned on each other. Entire villages were massacred.

This was the poisoned gift of decolonization done badly—borders drawn by departing colonizers, communities divided, hatreds inflamed that would fuel conflicts for generations.

Africa: The Fastest Decolonization

Africa had been colonized last and would be decolonized fastest. In 1950, only four African nations were independent: Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa. By 1970, nearly the entire continent had thrown off colonial rule.

What happened?

Several forces converged. The Second World War had delegitimized ideas of racial superiority—the Nazis, after all, had taken European racial thinking to its logical conclusion. African soldiers had fought for the Allied powers and returned home unwilling to accept subordination. Pan-Africanism, the idea that people of African descent worldwide shared common interests and should unite, gained strength. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, deeply influenced by the writings of Jamaican journalist Marcus Garvey, became the symbol of African independence when Ghana became the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve freedom in 1957.

The Cold War accelerated the process. The United States and Soviet Union both opposed European colonialism—the Americans out of their own anti-colonial heritage and strategic interest in winning allies, the Soviets because Marxist ideology viewed colonialism as a particularly brutal form of capitalist exploitation. The old imperial powers found themselves increasingly isolated.

Maintaining colonies had also become economically questionable. The cost of administration, the expense of fighting insurgencies, the diplomatic embarrassment—all this for diminishing returns. Some historians argue that European empires gave up their colonies not primarily because they were forced to, but because they calculated that empire no longer paid.

Not all imperial powers departed gracefully. France fought brutal wars in Indochina and Algeria, the latter a conflict that killed hundreds of thousands and nearly destroyed French democracy. Portugal, under fascist dictatorship, clung to its African colonies until a 1974 revolution in Lisbon itself—exhaustion from colonial wars was a major cause. Belgium's departure from Congo was so precipitous that it triggered immediate chaos, assassination, and civil war.

Britain's record was mixed. Some transitions were relatively peaceful; others, like Kenya's Mau Mau uprising, involved widespread violence and British atrocities that would only be acknowledged decades later.

The Cold War's Shadow

Newly independent nations faced an immediate challenge: the Cold War offered freedom from colonialism but a new form of subordination. The United States and Soviet Union competed for allies, often supporting dictators who aligned with them regardless of how they treated their own people. Many countries became battlegrounds for proxy wars, their internal conflicts fueled by superpower arms and money.

The concept of the "Third World" emerged to describe nations seeking an alternative to alignment with either bloc. Leaders like India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Indonesia's Sukarno championed the Non-Aligned Movement, attempting to chart an independent course. But genuine non-alignment proved difficult when superpowers offered aid, weapons, and protection.

Colonial boundaries, drawn with little regard for ethnic or linguistic reality, created persistent problems. Many African states contained dozens of ethnic groups who had never asked to be bundled together, while other groups found themselves divided across international borders. These borders were nonetheless preserved, in part because African leaders feared that allowing any changes would trigger endless competing claims.

The Last Waves

The final major wave of decolonization came with the Soviet collapse. The Soviet Union had always rejected the label "empire," claiming instead to be a voluntary union of socialist republics. But to the Baltic states, to Ukraine, to the Central Asian republics, Soviet rule had been imposed and maintained by force. When the center weakened, they seized their chance.

Fifteen new nations emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991. The satellite states of Eastern Europe had already broken free in 1989-1990. Yugoslavia, itself a patchwork of unwilling nationalities, disintegrated into bloody civil war.

Smaller transitions continued. Hong Kong returned to China in 1997 after 156 years of British rule; Macau followed in 1999, ending nearly 450 years of Portuguese administration. Palau, the last United Nations trust territory, became independent in 1994.

Yet seventeen territories remain classified by the United Nations as non-self-governing—places like New Caledonia, Western Sahara, and Gibraltar whose final status remains unresolved.

Decolonizing the Mind

Perhaps the most influential post-independence thinker on colonialism was Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria during its war of independence. His 1961 book "The Wretched of the Earth" argued that colonialism's damage went far beyond political and economic exploitation. It deformed the psychology of colonized peoples, instilling feelings of inferiority that persisted long after the colonizers departed.

Fanon was controversial—he argued that violence was not merely justified but psychologically necessary for colonized peoples to reclaim their humanity. But his core insight, that colonialism lived on in minds shaped by colonial education and culture, proved enormously influential.

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o extended this analysis in his 1986 book "Decolonising the Mind." He focused on language, arguing that African writers who continued to write in English or French were perpetuating colonial domination even as they criticized it. He himself stopped writing in English and began writing in his native Gikuyu, later translating his works for international audiences.

This represented a profound challenge. Colonial education had taught generations that European languages, literature, history, and knowledge were universal and valuable while indigenous equivalents were local and inferior. Even independent nations often retained colonial languages for administration and education—a practical necessity, perhaps, but also a continued subordination of indigenous ways of knowing.

Settler Colonialism: A Different Beast

Not all colonialism worked the same way. In places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and South Africa, Europeans didn't just extract resources—they settled permanently, displaced or killed indigenous populations, and made the land their own. This "settler colonialism" created a distinctive pattern that standard decolonization couldn't address.

When Kenya or India became independent, the British administrators went home. But in Australia or the United States, the settlers were home. The indigenous peoples couldn't simply demand that the colonizers leave.

This is why, in these countries, decolonization takes a different form: struggles for land rights, for recognition of sovereignty, for the preservation and revival of languages and cultures, for acknowledgment of historical wrongs. When Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was dismissed in 1975 by the Queen's representative, it highlighted how even settler colonial nations retained symbolic ties to imperial power. But the deeper issue of indigenous dispossession—the original colonialism—remained largely unaddressed.

In recent decades, movements for indigenous rights in settler colonial nations have grown stronger. Australia's debates over constitutional recognition and a "Voice to Parliament," Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools, New Zealand's treaty settlement process—all represent attempts to address what cannot be solved by simple independence.

Why Empires Gave Way

Historians have proposed various explanations for why colonialism ended when it did. Marxist analyses emphasize economic changes—as colonies developed wage labor and educated middle classes, these groups demanded political power commensurate with their economic importance. Institutionalist scholars point to colonial education itself, which spread ideas of self-determination even as it tried to create loyal subjects.

Some emphasize the changing international environment. In the nineteenth century, colonial powers faced little resistance from their own populations or from other powers when seizing territories. By the mid-twentieth century, apathetic publics at home questioned the cost in blood and treasure, hostile superpowers threatened intervention, local collaborators had vanished, and the options available to colonial powers had narrowed dramatically.

Others focus on diffusion: revolutionary success in one place inspired movements elsewhere. Haiti's revolution terrified slaveholders throughout the Americas because it demonstrated the possible. India's independence energized African nationalists. Each wave of decolonization made the next more likely.

Perhaps the honest answer is that all these factors combined, in different proportions in different places. Colonialism was a complex system sustained by military power, economic exploitation, racial ideology, and cultural domination. It ended through an equally complex combination of armed resistance, peaceful protest, changing economics, shifting ideologies, and transformed international politics.

The Unfinished Business

Has decolonization succeeded? The answer depends on how you define success.

Political independence is nearly universal. The era when European powers could simply claim sovereignty over non-European territories is definitively over. The United Nations recognizes the right to self-determination as fundamental, and General Assembly resolutions have characterized colonial rule as a violation of human rights.

But economic disparities persist. Many former colonies remain dependent on exports of raw materials to former colonial powers, their development stunted by structures established during the colonial era. The international economic order, some argue, perpetuates colonial patterns of exploitation in new forms—what scholars call "neo-colonialism."

Cultural and psychological decolonization continues. Indigenous languages remain endangered; colonial languages dominate education and government. Historical narratives still often center European perspectives. The knowledge systems of colonized peoples are only beginning to receive the recognition they deserve.

And in settler colonial nations, the original dispossession remains unresolved. Indigenous peoples continue to demand recognition, rights, and return of land. Their struggles remind us that decolonization is not a historical event that happened once and concluded, but an ongoing process—perhaps one that can never be fully complete.

When Gough Whitlam stood on the steps of Parliament House in 1975, dismissed by the representative of a distant Queen, he was experiencing a particular form of this incompleteness. Australia governed itself but remained symbolically bound to its colonizer. The deeper question—what of the Aboriginal peoples whose sovereignty had never been ceded?—would take decades more to even begin addressing.

Decolonization, in this fuller sense, remains the great unfinished project of our age. It asks not just who rules, but whose knowledge counts, whose history is told, whose humanity is recognized. Two hundred years after the first colonies won independence, we are still working out what it truly means to be free.