Decolonization

Decolonization refers to the dismantling of the formal empires assembled by European powers, the United States, and imperial Japan, and the transfer of sovereignty to the peoples of the former colonies. The term is most commonly used to describe the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1990s, although the underlying movements and ideas stretch much further back. Earlier waves of colonial separation had already reshaped the Americas, including the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, the Latin American wars of independence in the 1810s and 1820s, and the independence of the United States in 1776.

The twentieth-century wave was different in scale and speed. Between 1945 and 1975, more than one hundred new states joined the community of nations. The British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, and Italian overseas empires were largely dismantled, the United States granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, and imperial Japan lost its colonial possessions after its defeat in 1945. The Spanish empire, reduced long before by the Latin American independence movements, retained only a few territories in Africa and the Pacific into the twentieth century. Membership of the United Nations grew from 51 founding states in 1945 to 193 today, with the overwhelming majority of the new members coming from formerly colonized regions.

The process was neither uniform nor tidy. Some transfers of power were achieved through negotiated settlement, others through prolonged wars of independence, and still others through a combination of both. Decolonization involved mass mobilization, international diplomacy, ideological transformation, and, in many places, violence on a large scale. It also left open questions that remain contested in the twenty-first century, including the borders of postcolonial states, the legacies of colonial economic structures, the status of remaining non-self-governing territories, and the moral weight of colonial injustice.

This page presents decolonization as a global process rather than a series of isolated national stories. It follows the chronological arc from early anticolonial thought and the impact of the world wars to the rapid independence movements of the mid-twentieth century, and then to the remaining questions of self-determination, reparation, and memory in the present. The aim is encyclopedic breadth, with links to individual country profiles for deeper reading on specific national experiences.

Although the wave of independence that followed the Second World War was unusually rapid, its intellectual and political roots extend deep into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, in which enslaved Africans overthrew French colonial rule and established the second independent republic in the Americas, is widely regarded as the first successful anticolonial revolution of the modern era. The Latin American independence movements of the 1810s and 1820s dismantled most of the Spanish empire on the mainland. In Asia, the Philippine Revolution of 1896 to 1898 challenged Spanish rule and then, briefly, United States occupation. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, grew into one of the longest-running organized anticolonial movements in history, while the African National Congress was founded in 1912 in what became South Africa.

The First World War weakened the European empires financially and politically. Colonial soldiers from India, Algeria, Senegal, Vietnam, and many other colonized territories fought in Europe and returned with a transformed sense of what was possible. United States President Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric of self-determination, although applied selectively to the successor states of the defeated European empires, was rapidly adopted by anticolonial activists around the world. The League of Nations mandate system that replaced German and Ottoman imperial possessions promised eventual self-government, although in practice it often functioned as colonial rule under a new name.

The Second World War proved decisive. The European colonial powers were exhausted militarily and economically. Japanese occupation of European possessions in Southeast Asia between 1941 and 1945 shattered the prestige of the colonial order and created armed nationalist movements that later refused to accept the return of European rule. The Atlantic Charter, issued by the United Kingdom and the United States in 1941, declared the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they would live. The Charter of the United Nations, signed in 1945, enshrined the principle of self-determination. In the immediate postwar years, labor movements, student organizations, veterans associations, and nationalist parties from Accra to Jakarta combined domestic political pressure with appeals to these new international norms.

The independence of India and Pakistan in August 1947 marked the beginning of postwar decolonization on a global scale. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, had spent more than half a century building a mass movement for self-rule. Under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Congress pioneered the use of organized nonviolent resistance, or satyagraha, as a political method. The Salt March of 1930, in which Gandhi led followers on a 240-mile walk to the sea in protest against the colonial salt tax, became an international symbol of civil resistance. The Quit India movement launched in 1942 demanded an immediate end to British rule.

The All-India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, pressed for a separate state for Muslim-majority regions, citing concerns about political representation in an independent, Hindu-majority India. Negotiations among the British colonial administration, the Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League ultimately produced the 1947 partition of British India into two independent states. The partition was accompanied by massive population displacement, with estimates commonly ranging from roughly 10 to 15 million people crossing the new borders. The violence that accompanied partition produced death toll estimates that vary widely, with published figures ranging from approximately 200,000 to as many as two million people. The disparity reflects both the chaotic conditions of the displacement and the political sensitivity of the question in India, Pakistan, and the international historiography.

The independence of India and Pakistan was quickly followed by others in South Asia. Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, became independent on February 4, 1948. Burma, now Myanmar, achieved independence on January 4, 1948. The speed and relative legitimacy of the South Asian transitions, together with the enormous symbolic weight of Indian independence, reshaped expectations elsewhere in the colonized world and placed pressure on the remaining imperial powers to prepare for similar transfers in their own territories.

The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia between 1941 and 1945 had already fatally undermined European rule across the region. On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. The Netherlands attempted to restore its authority, triggering a four-year armed conflict known in Indonesia as the National Revolution and in Dutch historiography as the police actions. International pressure, including a United States threat to withhold Marshall Plan aid, finally brought the Netherlands to a formal transfer of sovereignty in December 1949.

In Vietnam, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France on September 2, 1945, the same day Japan formally surrendered aboard the USS Missouri. France rejected the declaration and attempted to reassert control over French Indochina, leading to the First Indochina War from 1946 to 1954. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the subsequent Geneva Accords produced independent states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, although Vietnam was divided pending elections that were never held, setting the stage for the later Vietnam War.

The Philippines became independent from the United States on July 4, 1946, on a schedule that had been set before the war under the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934. The Federation of Malaya, later joined by former British Borneo territories to form Malaysia, achieved independence in 1957. Singapore, which had briefly been part of Malaysia, separated and became an independent republic in 1965. Brunei remained a British protected state until full independence in 1984.

North Africa and the Horn of Africa were the first regions to regain independence. Libya, formerly an Italian colony administered under a United Nations trusteeship, became independent in 1951. Sudan gained independence from the Anglo-Egyptian condominium in 1956, followed by Morocco and Tunisia in the same year. Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, became the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve independence on March 6, 1957, setting a template that nationalist movements across the continent would cite as evidence that rapid transition was possible.

The year 1960 has come to be called the Year of Africa because seventeen countries became independent within its twelve months, the largest single-year expansion of sovereign states in the United Nations era. Kenya followed in 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta after an extended state of emergency during the Mau Mau uprising from 1952 to 1960, during which British authorities operated a detention camp system that has become a central case study of colonial counterinsurgency. Algeria achieved independence in 1962 following an eight-year war of independence against France. Casualty estimates for the Algerian war vary widely between French and Algerian official sources, with credible ranges from several hundred thousand to well over one million Algerian dead, depending on methodology and political perspective.

Portugal retained its African colonies longer than any other European power. Independence for Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe came only in 1974 and 1975 after the Carnation Revolution ended the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in Lisbon. Zimbabwe achieved internationally recognized independence in 1980 after a lengthy liberation struggle that followed Southern Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. Namibia, the former German South-West Africa administered by South Africa, became independent in 1990. The end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 is often discussed alongside African decolonization, although it is formally a question of internal political transformation rather than independence from a foreign colonial power.

The Arab world's path out of colonial and mandate rule began before 1945 and continued into the 1970s. The League of Nations mandate system established after the First World War placed Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq under British administration, and Syria and Lebanon under French administration. Iraq became nominally independent in 1932, although British influence continued. Egypt, formally independent since 1922, only fully asserted sovereignty after the Free Officers revolution of 1952 and the Suez Crisis of 1956, during which the Egyptian leadership under Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and withstood a coordinated military intervention by France, the United Kingdom, and Israel.

Lebanon declared independence from France in 1943, and French troops completed their withdrawal in 1946. Syria likewise became independent in 1946. Jordan formally ended the British mandate in 1946. The State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, at the close of the British mandate for Palestine. The accompanying war and associated events produced what Palestinians call the Nakba, during which an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes, a figure drawn from United Nations and later scholarly estimates. The Gulf states gained independence more slowly: Kuwait in 1961, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in 1971. South Yemen achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1967 after an armed struggle.

Caribbean decolonization differed in character from the larger-scale independence movements of Asia and Africa. Populations were small, economies were often reliant on a single crop or tourism, and geography placed new states close to major powers. The short-lived West Indies Federation, intended to unite British Caribbean colonies, dissolved in 1962. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent the same year. Barbados followed in 1966, the Bahamas in 1973, Grenada in 1974, Dominica in 1978, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 1979, and Belize on the Central American mainland in 1981. Suriname became independent from the Netherlands in 1975.

Several Caribbean territories chose constitutional arrangements other than full independence. Puerto Rico remains a commonwealth associated with the United States, with unresolved debates over statehood, enhanced autonomy, or independence. The French overseas departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana are integrated into the French state and elect representatives to the National Assembly. Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten are constituent countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The United Kingdom retains several British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean, including the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, and Montserrat. Haiti, which had won independence in 1804 as the first free Black republic, was not part of this later wave but remained a reference point for Caribbean political thought.

Decolonization in the Pacific unfolded across an ocean of small states and territories, often from very small populations and at the end of long administrative tails of the former empires. Western Samoa, administered by New Zealand under a League of Nations mandate and then a United Nations trusteeship, was the first of the small Pacific states to become independent, in 1962. Fiji followed in 1970. Tonga ended its status as a British protected state the same year. Papua New Guinea achieved independence from Australia in 1975. Solomon Islands followed in 1978, Tuvalu the same year, and Kiribati in 1979. Vanuatu, formerly the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides, became independent in 1980.

The United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, administered by the United States on behalf of the trusteeship system, was progressively broken up into separate self-governing arrangements: the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands in 1986, and Palau in 1994. The independence of Palau ended the United Nations trusteeship system and the Trusteeship Council suspended operations. New Caledonia remains a French special collectivity under an ongoing constitutional process, with three independence referendums held between 2018 and 2021. French Polynesia, Guam, American Samoa, and several other territories remain on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories.

Decolonization produced a generation of leaders whose careers shaped their countries and the international system. Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt led mass movements and then new states. In Africa, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and Samora Machel in Mozambique combined organizational leadership with the articulation of new national identities. Nelson Mandela, although the South African transition is often classed separately from decolonization, was an inescapable reference point for anticolonial and liberation movements globally.

Alongside the political leadership, a wide body of intellectual and literary work gave decolonization its vocabulary. Frantz Fanon, a Martinican-born psychiatrist and political theorist whose books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth examined the psychology of colonized peoples and the use of violence in anticolonial struggle, became a globally influential reference for liberation movements. Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor developed the literary and philosophical movement known as Negritude, which affirmed African and diasporic cultural identity. W. E. B. Du Bois organized a series of Pan-African Congresses from 1919 onward and mentored a generation of African nationalist leaders. Later scholars, including the historian Walter Rodney and the literary critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, extended these arguments into postcolonial political economy and linguistic self-determination.

The leaders also built new international structures. The Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 brought together twenty-nine newly independent states and was widely seen as a turning point in the emergence of a coherent political voice for the decolonizing world. It was followed by the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, convened by Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, and the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito. The Tricontinental Conference held in Havana in 1966 connected liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, setting up the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Organization of African Unity, founded in 1963 and succeeded by the African Union in 2002, pursued continental coordination, including a commitment to the existing colonial borders to prevent disputes among new states.

Decolonization is sometimes presented as a natural or inevitable transition, but in many places it was contested by armed force. Wars of independence were fought in Indonesia from 1945 to 1949, in Indochina from 1946 to 1954, in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, in Kenya from 1952 to 1960 during the Mau Mau emergency, in Angola from 1961, in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique from 1964, and in southern Rhodesia and Namibia into the 1970s and 1980s. These conflicts produced substantial military and civilian casualties, displaced populations, and left long-lasting trauma. Casualty figures for several of these wars remain contested among historians, and official figures from colonial and postcolonial governments frequently diverge. The Algerian war of independence in particular continues to produce very different casualty estimates depending on the source, and historians routinely flag such differences in their writing.

Colonial counterinsurgency produced systematic abuses that have been investigated by later inquiries, public history projects, and court cases. In Kenya, British administration during the Mau Mau emergency operated a network of detention camps in which detainees were subjected to forced labor, physical abuse, and, in some cases, torture. The killing of eleven detainees at the Hola camp in 1959 became an important case in British public debate and later in litigation brought by Kenyan survivors against the United Kingdom Government, which concluded with a formal statement of regret and a compensation settlement announced in 2013. In Algeria, the French army's use of torture and the treatment of civilian populations during the war of independence have been the subject of official French acknowledgments and academic studies, including research drawing on the Archives nationales d'outre-mer.

Decolonization also produced mass displacement and intercommunal violence that occurred alongside rather than in direct combat against colonial forces. The partition of British India in 1947, the displacement of Palestinians during and after the 1948 war, and the departure of European settler populations from several formerly colonized countries after independence all involved large-scale movement of people under conditions of fear and, in many cases, open violence. The human costs of these events are recorded in a growing body of survivor testimony held by national archives, oral-history projects, and human-rights organizations, and are essential to any full accounting of the period.

Independence did not automatically resolve the problems created by colonial rule. Colonial borders had been drawn by European officials, often without regard to existing ethnic, linguistic, or religious boundaries, and many of the conflicts that followed independence can be traced in part to this inheritance. The Biafran war in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970, the civil wars in Sudan, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and the continuing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir all draw on legacies that predate independence. At the same time, postcolonial leaders made their own decisions, and serious historical analysis generally avoids reducing later conflicts to colonial causes alone.

The economic structures of colonial rule also proved difficult to dismantle. Many new states inherited economies organized around the export of a small number of commodities to the former metropole, transport and banking systems controlled by foreign firms, and a narrow industrial base. Structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s, debt crises, and volatile commodity prices shaped the development trajectories of many postcolonial states. A significant flow of professionals from newly independent countries to Europe and North America, sometimes described as brain drain, constrained the growth of local institutions. Language policy was also inherited: English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish continue to serve as official or administrative languages in many former colonies, enabling participation in international institutions while raising questions of equity for speakers of local languages.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries produced a renewed public debate about colonial legacies. European governments and former colonial institutions have, in some cases, issued formal statements of regret and, in a smaller number of cases, paid reparations or returned cultural objects. The return of the Benin Bronzes from several European museums to Nigeria beginning in the late 2010s, debates over the Parthenon Marbles held by the British Museum, and the removal or recontextualization of colonial-era statues and place names in Europe, Africa, and the Americas are all expressions of this debate. Academic centers such as SOAS University of London, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the Oxford University African Studies Centre, the Harvard University Center for African Studies, and the UCLA International Institute continue to produce research in this area.

The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization maintains a list of non-self-governing territories, drawn from the obligations set out in Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter. As of the most recent published lists, seventeen territories remain on the list, although the exact composition has been revised over time and individual entries are subject to political contestation. The administering powers include France, the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, and, in the disputed case of Western Sahara, the question of which state administers the territory is itself part of the ongoing political question. Territories currently on the list include Western Sahara, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and associated dependencies (known in Argentina as the Malvinas), Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Saint Helena and associated dependencies, Guam, American Samoa, the United States Virgin Islands, Tokelau, and Pitcairn.

Each remaining case has its own political context. Western Sahara has been the subject of a United Nations-led settlement process since the 1991 ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front. New Caledonia has conducted three referendums between 2018 and 2021 under the Nouméa Accord. Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands have both held referendums on their relationship with the United Kingdom. Puerto Rico, although not on the United Nations list because it is considered a matter of internal United States constitutional politics, has held several referendums on its own political status. For most remaining territories, the political choices discussed at the United Nations are full independence, free association with an existing state, or integration on terms of political equality. Territory counts and classifications change from year to year and readers consulting this page should check current United Nations publications for the most recent figures.

Detailed citations, data references, and institutional sources for all CountryReports content are listed on the Sources page. The following international bodies, national archives, and academic institutions are the primary authorities we rely on for content on decolonization. Each link points to the institution's homepage.

United Nations and International Bodies

• United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization (C-24) — Mandate documents, annual resolutions, and the current list of non-self-governing territories.
• United Nations Archives and Records Management Section — Founding documents of the United Nations, drafting records, and materials from the Trusteeship Council.
• United Nations Trusteeship Council historical records — Chapter XII and XIII materials, including the administration of former League of Nations mandates and trust territories.

National Archives and Libraries

• The National Archives (United Kingdom) — Colonial Office records, Foreign and Commonwealth Office files, and declassified counterinsurgency documentation.
• Archives nationales d'outre-mer (France) — Records of the French colonial administration, including extensive holdings on Algeria, Indochina, and sub-Saharan Africa.
• Bibliothèque nationale de France — Published works, press archives, and digitized collections on French imperial history and decolonization.
• Bundesarchiv (Germany) — German colonial records, including material on German South-West Africa (Namibia) and Togoland.
• Archivo General de Indias (Spain) — Holdings on the earlier Spanish empire, useful for long-run background on Latin American and Philippine history.
• Library of Congress (United States) — Government documents on Philippine independence, the Pacific trust territory, and United States engagement with decolonizing states.
• National Archives of Nigeria — Records of colonial administration and early postcolonial government in one of Africa's most populous states.
• National Archives of India — Records of the Government of India, including the Transfer of Power papers and partition-era materials.

Foundations and Research Centers

• Nelson Mandela Foundation — Archives of the former South African president, including documents on the liberation struggle and the post-apartheid transition.
• South African History Archive (SAHA) — Documents on the anti-apartheid struggle and related liberation movements across southern Africa.
• Harvard University Center for African Studies — Scholarship on African political, economic, and cultural history.
• Oxford University African Studies Centre — Seminars, publications, and archives on the colonial and postcolonial history of Africa.
• SOAS University of London — Teaching and research on Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including a long tradition of scholarship on decolonization.
• Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London) — Research on the Commonwealth of Nations and on decolonization within the former British empire.
• UCLA International Institute — Area studies programs covering Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and related research on global history.

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