Empire and Imperialism

One striking aspect of the European empires was how quickly they disappeared. In 1947 the British withdrew from India, and after 1956, from their African colonies; in 1962, the French left Algeria. With the Portuguese withdrawal from their African colonies in 1975, the colonial empires were virtually over. The reasons for this withdrawal are manifold. The increasing criticism from nationalists was undoubtedly significant; the pressure exerted by the Indian National Congress, skillfully shaped by Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) in a series of major civil disobedience campaigns between the 1920s and 1940s, for example, succeeded in forcing major concessions from the British. After 1945, nationalist unrest throughout the colonial empires showed colonial rulers just how costly maintaining colonial rule would be.

Yet colonial powers had successfully resisted nationalist pressure before, and by itself nationalism was not enough to end European imperial rule. Of major significance was the weakening of European powers consequent to the two world wars. Not only did these wars drain European economies, they also fatally undermined the very bases of colonial rule, empire's myth of impregnability, and its claim to protect colonial peoples. The defeat of several of the colonial powers by Germany in World War II and the loss of European colonies in Southeast Asia to the Japanese were clearly critical to this process. Even where colonial rule had survived, as in Africa, the promises made to nationalists in return for help for the war effort had changed things fundamentally.

Perhaps the key consequence of the world wars, however, was the emergence of new world powers, namely the United States and the Soviet Union. These two, in the shape of the Cold War, divided global politics between them. Colonial rulers, to avoid driving nationalists into Soviet hands, made major concessions to nationalist critics after 1945. Equally important in prompting such reforms was the need to maintain support from the Americans, a need that was clearly shown in the experience of Britain and France in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Moreover, U.S. global dominance after 1945, with its stress on open markets and free trade, showed that the age of European empires, at least in a formal sense, was dead. In its place came institutions like the Commonwealth and the French Union.