Decolonization as Aftermath

Abstract

There is, then, a sense of inevitability, of epitaph, about the great era of decolonization after 1945. Not that the full force of the political tsunami was immediately obvious. In 1945 Britain, France, even Holland and Belgium, were ranged with the victor powers. By 1950 they were richer than ever before. They freed most of their colonies well before anyone might have forced them to do so. Yet, between 1945 and 1960 some 800 million people in forty countries became independent; and by the mid-1960s the empires had ceased to exist. The Philippines became sovereign in 1946; India and Pakistan followed in 1947; Ceylon, Burma and Israel followed in 1948; Indonesia in 1949. Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia became sovereign in the same year but remained in the French Union until 1954. Two years later Tunisia and Morocco left that Union, Britain evacuated the Sudan, while Malaya became sovereign a year later still. The French Union was finally dissolved in 1960. Two years later again, a long and cruel North African war ended with Algerian independence.