The Decline of European Colonialism

Abstract

Joseph Chamberlain was of the opinion, in 1904, that ‘the day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.’ In less than a lifetime the exact opposite proved true. By the 1960s, there remained upon the world map very few traces of the empires with which he had been familiar. Some had been destroyed from without by the forces of defeat in war; some disintegrated from within, by violent revolution. A few were transformed, no less effectively but more peacefully, by a process of change mutually agreed between rulers and ruled. Gone from the atlas were those blocks of pink, of mauve, of orange, of green, which traditionally had coloured the overseas colonial empires of Europe. In their place, in Asia, in the Caribbean and in Africa especially, was a mosaic of self-ruling states more numerous, and many of them smaller in size, than the past had ever known.