Decolonization and the new nations

In 1914 European powers and their offshoots controlled most of the world's land surface. Britain alone ruled about a quarter of the world's population. Colonial rule was justified with claims of civilising missions, but it rested on force, economic extraction and racial hierarchy.

Resistance never stopped. Colonised peoples revolted, formed political parties, and built nationalist movements, often led by people educated in colonial or European schools who turned European ideas about self-government and rights against the empires themselves.

• The Second World War exhausted Britain, France and the Netherlands financially and militarily.
• Japanese conquests in Asia had shattered the image of European invincibility.
• The United States and the Soviet Union, the new superpowers, both opposed old-style colonial empires, for different reasons.
• The United Nations Charter endorsed self-determination, and new member states pushed for independence.
• Nationalist movements had grown larger, better organised and harder to suppress.

India's independence movement, led by the Indian National Congress with figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, used mass non-violent campaigns against British rule. In August 1947 British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Partition was accompanied by terrible communal violence and the displacement of roughly 15 million people.

Indonesia declared independence from the Netherlands in 1945 and won recognition in 1949 after years of fighting. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh's forces defeated France at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but the country was divided, leading to further war.

Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, became the first sub-Saharan colony to win independence from Britain, in 1957. In 1960 alone, seventeen African countries became independent, most of them former French colonies, and the year became known as the Year of Africa.

Some transitions were violent. Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a long and brutal war. Kenya's path included the Mau Mau uprising and its harsh suppression. Portugal held on to Angola and Mozambique until 1975, after a revolution in Lisbon ended its dictatorship.

New states inherited borders drawn by colonial powers, which often grouped rival communities together or split peoples between countries. Colonial economies had usually been built to export raw materials, not to develop local industry, and many countries had few trained administrators.

Cold War rivalry meant superpowers backed friendly governments regardless of how they ruled. Several new nations experienced coups, civil wars or one-party rule, while others built lasting democracies. Many newly independent states joined the Non-Aligned Movement, founded in 1961, to avoid taking sides in the Cold War.

The United Nations began in 1945 with 51 members. By the 1980s it had more than 150, most of them former colonies. Decolonization transformed international politics, giving a voice to countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean that had previously been ruled from abroad.

The debates it raised continue: about economic dependence, the legacy of colonial borders, reparations, the return of cultural objects taken during colonial rule, and how colonial history is taught.