32.23.02 · world-history / decolonization

Decolonization — the end of European empires and the Third World

shipped3 tiersLean: none

Anchor (Master): Westad 2005 The Global Cold War; Frederick Cooper 2002 Africa Since 1940 (Cambridge UP); Raymond Betts 2004 Decolonization (Routledge); Prasenjit Duara 2004 Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (Routledge)

Intuition Beginner

After 1945, the European empires that had ruled most of Africa and Asia fell apart in a single generation. In 1939, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal together controlled roughly a third of the world's people. By 1975, almost all of those people lived in independent states. An empire that took four centuries to build came down in about thirty years.

The companion survey 32.23.01 told this story country by country: India, Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Indonesia, Ghana, Palestine. This unit steps back and asks the structural questions instead. Why did the empires fall when they did, and so fast? Who actually forced the issue — the colonizer choosing to leave, or the colonized refusing to stay ruled? And what did independence deliver, versus what it left unchanged?

The phrase "the Third World" was coined in 1952 by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy. He meant a third path, neither American capitalism nor Soviet communism, just as the "third estate" of the French Revolution had been neither clergy nor nobility. The label stuck as a name for the bloc of newly independent, mostly poor, mostly formerly colonized states that tried to walk that third path together.

Visual Beginner

Figure: The three waves of decolonization, 1945-1990. The Asian wave (1945-1949) produced India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, and an independent Indochina. The African wave (1957-1960) began with Ghana and crested in the "Year of Africa," 1960. The final wave (1974-1990) took in the Portuguese colonies, Zimbabwe, and Namibia.

Wave	Years	Representative transitions
Asian	1945-1949	India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, Indochina
African, first	1957-1960	Ghana, Guinea, and the 17 states of the "Year of Africa" (1960)
African, later	1960-1968	Nigeria, Congo, Kenya, Tanganyika, Zambia
Settler and guerrilla	1961-1980	Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe
Final	1974-1990	Portuguese colonies (1974-1975), Zimbabwe (1980), Namibia (1990)

Worked example Beginner

The fastest way to feel the scale of decolonization is to count. Take the African wave, which crested in 1960.

Step 1 — list the year's independence acts. In 1960, seventeen African territories became independent: Cameroon, Togo, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Dahomey (Benin), Niger, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, and Mauritania.

Step 2 — put it against the total. Africa today has fifty-four recognized states. Seventeen in a single year is roughly thirty-one percent of the continent's present-day nations transferred to sovereign status in twelve months.

Step 3 — set the human cost beside it. The 1947 Partition of British India uprooted an estimated twelve to fifteen million people, and one to two million were killed in the communal violence around the new border. Those are the numbers hiding behind the single clean word "independence."

Step 4 — read the lesson. Decolonization compressed into roughly thirty years a change that had taken four centuries to build, and it did so at a human cost that the neat phrase "transfer of power" works hard to conceal.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

This section fixes the vocabulary used in the rest of the unit. The terms are political-scientific, and several of them encode contested claims; the contestation is flagged in the definition rather than hidden behind it.

Decolonization denotes the process by which a colonized territory passes from being governed by a metropolitan power to being self-governing, together with the accompanying renegotiation of economic, legal, and cultural relations. The minimal formal event is the transfer of sovereignty — an independence act, a treaty, a flag-raising. The maximal process is the long restructuring that the flag-raising only begins. The literature disagrees on where the boundary sits, and that disagreement is the subject of the Master-tier section below.

Settler colonialism denotes a colonial formation in which a substantial population of metropolitan-origin settlers occupies land and holds decisive political weight in the metropole, so that decolonization threatens the settlers' homes and status directly. Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa are the canonical African cases; Israel/Palestine is argued over in exactly this register. Settler colonies decolonize through the most violent and protracted struggles, because one side has no acceptable exit.

Neocolonialism, in the sense fixed by Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), denotes a condition in which a state is formally independent but remains economically, militarily, and politically subordinated to external powers, so that the substance of sovereignty has been transferred in form only. The term is normative — it names a diagnosis Nkrumah wanted acted upon — and it is contested: liberal economists reject the diagnosis and read the same facts as ordinary integration into a global market.

Dependency and its generalization, world-systems theory (A. Gunder Frank; Cardoso and Faletto; Wallerstein), denote the claim that the global economy is structured as a core that processes and a periphery that exports raw materials, and that incorporation into this system as a periphery reproduces underdevelopment rather than relieving it. This is the analytical backbone of the "economic legacies" debate taken up below.

The Third World denotes, after Sauvy (1952), the bloc of states belonging neither to the US-led first world nor to the Soviet-led second. As a political project it crystallized at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement founded at Belgrade in 1961. As a description of income and development it is now obsolete; as a name for a historical political constellation it remains indispensable.

The post-colonial state, in Frederick Cooper's phrase the "gatekeeper state," denotes the state that inherits at independence the borders, the administrative machinery, and usually the armed forces of the colonial predecessor. The structural feature that matters most is that the new rulers control the point of contact between inside and outside — the "gate," meaning customs, the currency, foreign concessions, the capital — while commanding little of the productive base behind that gate.

Comparative framework Intermediate+

The wave structure makes the comparison tractable. Decolonization arrived in three pulses, each with a characteristic mechanism, and the differences between the pulses are more instructive than their similarities.

The Asian wave (1945-1949). The war broke European prestige and European treasuries at the same moment. Japan's 1942 conquests had shown that Europeans could be beaten on the battlefield by an Asian power; returning colonizers found nationalist movements already armed and organized. India and Pakistan (1947), Ceylon and Burma (1948), and Indonesia (recognized 1949) followed within four years of the Japanese surrender, with the First Indochina War already underway. The mechanism here was a mixture of negotiated transfer — the British in South Asia, calculating that the cost of holding India now exceeded the return — and short armed struggle, as the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indochina tried and failed to re-impose rule by force.

The African wave (1957-1960). Ghana (1957) and Guinea (1958) opened the sub-Saharan transition, and 1960 brought seventeen independence acts in a single year. The mechanism was constitutional rather than military: the colonial power had concluded that the cost of holding on exceeded the cost of leaving, and the transfer ran through elections, constitutional conferences, and flags lowered at midnight. The exception — the Congo, also in 1960 — showed what happened when the colonial power had deliberately done nothing to prepare the ground, then withdrew in weeks from a territory with fewer than twenty university graduates.

The settler and guerrilla wars (1961-1980). Where a settler population or an especially extractive colonizer refused to leave, decolonization came only through prolonged armed struggle: the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau (independence 1974-1975, after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon ended the Salazar regime's wars), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe, 1980), and the Algerian war already analyzed in the companion unit. These cases are the empirical core of the Fanon-versus-Arendt debate over the ethics of decolonizing violence.

The final tail (1974-1990). The last European colonies in Africa fell late. The Portuguese territories went in 1974-1975; Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980 after a fifteen-year guerrilla war; and South West Africa, seized by South Africa in defiance of the United Nations, became independent Namibia on 21 March 1990. Namibian independence is the conventional endpoint of African decolonization.

Bridge. This wave structure builds toward the contested question of who actually drove decolonization, and it appears again in the Master-tier treatment of the economic legacies debate. The foundational reason the waves matter analytically is that each pulse had a different dominant mechanism, and this is exactly why no single explanation — metropolitan exhaustion, nationalist pressure, or Cold War competition — fits all three; putting these together, the bridge is a comparative claim that the colonizer's willingness to leave set the timing of each wave, even if it never set the outcome.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 2 (short answer). Match each term to its definition: (a) neocolonialism, (b) settler colonialism, (c) the gatekeeper state, (d) the Third World.

(i) A state whose rulers control the interface with the outside world but little of the productive base behind it.
(ii) Formal political independence combined with continuing economic and political subordination to external powers.
(iii) A colonial formation in which metropolitan-origin settlers hold land and political weight, blocking a negotiated exit.
(iv) The bloc of states outside the US-led and Soviet-led camps, named by Sauvy in 1952.

Answer

Answer. (a)-(ii), (b)-(iii), (c)-(i), (d)-(iv).

Hint. Nkrumah fixed (a); Cooper fixed (c); Sauvy fixed (d).

Feedback. Note that (a) and (c) are analytic claims about structure, while (a) is also a normative diagnosis. Conflating the descriptive and prescriptive senses of "neocolonialism" is the most common slip in this vocabulary.

Exercise 3 (medium). In roughly 150 words, contrast the dominant mechanism of the Asian wave (1945-1949) with that of the African wave (1957-1960). Why did the Asian wave involve more armed struggle than the African?

Answer guide

A strong answer notes that the Asian wave came immediately after a war that had destroyed European prestige and left colonial forces already in armed motion (the Viet Minh, the Indonesian republicans), so several transitions required the metropole to be defeated in the field before it would negotiate. The African wave, by contrast, came a decade later, after the colonial powers had already calculated that holding on cost more than leaving, so most transitions ran through constitutional conferences and midnight flag-lowerings rather than battles. The Congo is the instructive exception that proves the rule: a constitutional transfer with no preparation produced immediate collapse. The mechanism difference tracks the colonizer's prior decision, not the colonized's degree of desire.

Exercise 4 (numeric). Rank the following settler or guerrilla wars by duration in years, shortest to longest: the Algerian War (1954-1962); the Rhodesian Bush War (1965-1979); the First Indochina War (1946-1954); the Guinea-Bissau war (1963-1974).

Answer

Answer. Algeria: 8 years; First Indochina: 8 years; Rhodesia: 14 years; Guinea-Bissau: 11 years. Shortest to longest: Algeria (8, 1954-1962) and First Indochina (8, 1946-1954) tie, then Guinea-Bissau (11), then Rhodesia (14).

Hint. Subtract start year from end year. Note the tie.

Feedback. The point of the ranking is that settler-colonial and guerrilla decolonizations ran to roughly a decade or more, against the weeks or months of a constitutional transfer — a quantitative measure of how much cost a settler population or an intransigent metropole could impose.

Exercise 5 (medium). Apply Cooper's "gatekeeper state" concept to one post-colonial state of your choice (for example, the Congo in 1960 or Ghana under Nkrumah). What did the new rulers control at the "gate," and what did they not control behind it?

Answer guide

A strong answer identifies the gate — customs duties, the currency, mining concessions, diplomatic recognition, foreign loans, the capital city — as the thing independence handed over, while noting that behind the gate the state commanded little productive capacity, few trained administrators, and often a fragmented or coercive local base. In the Congo case, the gate (Katanga's mineral concessions, the army, the central bank) was precisely what foreign intervention and secession seized upon. The concept explains why formally sovereign states remained structurally vulnerable: the rulers held the chokepoint but not the hinterland.

Exercise 6 (hard). The unit presents two positions on what drove decolonization: metropolitan withdrawal versus nationalist pressure. In 400-500 words, argue which position better explains the timing of the African wave (1957-1960), and then explain why neither position is sufficient on its own.

Answer guide

A strong essay does three things. First, it takes a position and defends it with dated evidence — for example, that metropolitan calculation (the ledgers, the Suez humiliation of 1956, the cost of fighting Kenya and Malaya) sets the timing, because nationalist pressure had been continuous since the 1940s without producing transfers. Second, it grants the opposing position its real explanatory weight: without sustained nationalist mobilization, the metropole would have had no reason to recalculate, so pressure is a necessary cause even if it does not set the date. Third, it explains the asymmetry: withdrawal explains why 1957-1960 rather than 1927-1930; pressure explains why any transfer happened at all rather than being deferred. Essays that reduce the question to one cause fail the synthesis.

Exercise 7 (hard). Set out the liberalization position and the dependency position on the economic legacy of decolonization. What empirical evidence does each side cite, and where does the contemporary literature stand between them?

Answer guide

A strong essay states the liberalization position (colonial institutions were extractive and closed; open trade, property rights, and investment correct the inheritance, per modernization theory and the Bretton Woods institutions), then the dependency position (the global economy is structured core-and-periphery; raw-material exporters face adverse terms of trade, per Prebisch-Singer; Nkrumah, Frank, Cardoso and Faletto, Wallerstein). It cites the structural-adjustment record of the 1980s as evidence dependency defenders invoke, and the post-1970s growth of some East Asian and African economies as evidence liberalization defenders invoke. The honest contemporary position is that the dependency diagnosis has been modified — Cardoso himself later argued dependent industrialization could produce growth — but the core claim that global market structure conditions national development paths remains live. Essays that present only one side, or that treat either position as settled, fail the humanities requirement to mark contested claims as contested.

Competing perspectives Master

This section stages the two questions the survey unit 32.23.01 did not have room to contest. Each is presented with at least two live positions, named and attributed.

The driver: metropolitan withdrawal versus nationalist pressure

Position A — decolonization as managed withdrawal. On this reading the timing was set in European capitals. The war had bankrupted the metropolitan powers; the United States and the Soviet Union both opposed the old empires, the Americans for commercial and ideological reasons, the Soviets for ideological ones; and the colonial ledgers no longer balanced. Once holding the empire cost more than it returned, the European state chose to liquidate. The strongest versions of this view descend from the "official mind" tradition of British imperial history (Robinson and Gallagher) and from economic historians who read the 1940s and 1950s accounts.

Position B — decolonization as nationalist achievement. On this reading the timing was set in the colonies, by mass nationalist mobilization, armed struggle, and the collapse of the coercive reliability of colonial forces. The Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 is the emblematic event: when the coercive arm of empire can no longer be relied upon, empire is over whether or not the ledgers balance. Without sustained pressure the ledgers would have continued to balance for someone; empire is profitable to some party until resistance makes it unprofitable for the metropole as a whole. Fanon and the subaltern-studies tradition sit here, as does the empirical claim that no major territory was surrendered without first being demanded.

The synthesis the evidence supports is that the two positions identify different necessary conditions rather than rival sufficient ones. Metropolitan exhaustion explains why decolonization was possible in 1947 rather than 1927; nationalist pressure explains why it happened at all rather than being deferred indefinitely. Neither is sufficient alone, and the dishonest histories are those that pick one and drop the other.

The economic legacy: liberalization versus dependency

Position A — the liberalization and modernization view. On this reading the colonial inheritance is real but remediable. Post-colonial poverty reflects extractive institutions, closed markets, and distorted property regimes that open trade, secure property rights, and foreign investment can correct. This is the framework that animated the Bretton Woods institutions and classical modernization theory, and that continued to underwrite the policy advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund through the structural-adjustment era of the 1980s and 1990s.

Position B — the dependency and world-systems view. On this reading the colonial inheritance is structural and self-reproducing. Newly independent states enter a global economy already organized as core and periphery; they export raw materials and import manufactures, and the terms of trade move against the raw-material exporter over time (the Prebisch-Singer claim, advanced from the UN Economic Commission for Latin America from 1950). Nkrumah's neocolonialism, Frank's "development of underdevelopment," Cardoso and Faletto's dependency analysis, and Wallerstein's world-system are variants of the single claim that formal independence did not reach the economic substrate.

These positions are not symmetrical in the contemporary literature. The dependency diagnosis has been substantially modified — Cardoso himself, later president of Brazil, argued that dependent industrialization could produce growth under certain conditions — but the core claim that global market structure conditions national development paths remains live. The empirical record of structural adjustment in 1980s Africa, where liberalization often coincided with contraction rather than growth, is the principal evidence its defenders cite; the post-1990s acceleration of several Asian and some African economies is the principal evidence liberalization defenders cite back.

Synthesis. Putting these together, the foundational reason the two debates are inseparable is that the same event — the lowering of a colonial flag — counts as completed sovereignty from one position and as merely formal sovereignty from the other; this is exactly the disagreement that the Bandung and Non-Aligned project tried to adjudicate, and it generalises into the central insight of post-colonial political economy, that the bridge is between a political act of independence and an economic structure that the act does not by itself transform, which then appears again in the Cold War unit's treatment of superpower intervention in the newly independent states.

Connections Master

Colonialism and imperialism 32.15.01. Decolonization is the second half of the sentence whose first half is colonialism. The wave structure analyzed above only becomes legible against the type of colonial regime — extractive versus settler, direct versus indirect — that the colonialism unit distinguishes, and the post-colonial state's inheritance of colonial borders and the colonial apparatus is a direct carry-over from the institutions analyzed there.
World War II 32.22.01. The war is the hinge of the whole process. Japanese victories demolished the prestige of European invincibility; colonial troops returned trained and cynical about the empires that had used them; the metropolitan treasuries were emptied; and the Atlantic Charter's promise of self-determination, however cynically intended by Churchill and Roosevelt, became a weapon in colonized hands. The Asian wave is unintelligible without the war's disruption.
Cold War 32.24.01 and its depth treatment 32.24.02. Superpower rivalry did not cause decolonization, but it redistributed the outcomes. It converted Vietnam, the Congo, and Angola from national struggles into theatres of a global contest, and it furnished both Washington and Moscow with the means to install or remove regimes. The Non-Aligned project was, in significant part, a collective refusal of exactly this conversion.
Sub-Saharan African kingdoms 32.12.01. The Pan-Africanism of the decolonization era drew its prestige from a deep precolonial history of state formation — Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Great Zimbabwe, Kongo — that refuted the colonial claim that Africa had no political history before the European arrival. The depth unit's economic-development debate turns, in the end, on whether that precolonial institutional capacity was destroyed outright or merely suppressed and therefore recoverable.
The companion survey 32.23.01. This unit is the analytical complement to the country-by-country survey. Where the survey establishes what happened in India, Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Indonesia, Ghana, and Palestine, this unit asks why it happened in waves rather than as isolated events, and what independence did and did not change in the structure of the post-colonial world.

Historical and philosophical context Master

Bandung, 1955

The Asian-African Conference held at Bandung in April 1955 brought twenty-nine delegations to Indonesia, representing roughly half the world's population and most of its colonized or newly independent people. Its final communiqué endorsed human rights, national sovereignty, racial equality, non-aggression, and peaceful coexistence, and it became the constitutional document of what would formalize as the Non-Aligned Movement at Belgrade in 1961. The significance of Bandung was symbolic before it was institutional: for the first time, states that had been the objects of European diplomacy convened as its subjects and spoke in their own voice.

The organizers — Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Tito of Yugoslavia — were not unanimous. Nehru and the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai pushed a doctrine of non-alignment; others wanted a harder anti-colonial line and a firmer stance against remaining colonial powers. The conference held because the shared experience of having been ruled overrode the ideological differences that would later fracture the movement once the colonial question receded. ^{[Duara 2004]} reads Bandung as the moment at which "decolonization" became a single global process rather than a set of parallel national stories, and that reading is now the standard one in the historiography.

Nkrumah and neocolonialism

Kwame Nkrumah's Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, published in 1965, fixed the term that organizes the economic-legacies debate staged above. Its thesis is stated in its opening pages: the essence of neocolonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty, but in reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. ^{[Nkrumah 1965]}. The book was published the year after Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state and the year before he was overthrown by a military coup while on a state visit to Hanoi, and it should be read as a political intervention by an embattled leader as much as a work of detached analysis. Its publication prompted a severing of American aid to Ghana, a fact that records how sharply the diagnosis cut at the time.

Fanon on violence

Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written from a hospital in Blida and a platform with the Algerian FLN, supplies the philosophical vocabulary in which the violent cases of decolonization were argued. Fanon's claim that colonialism is itself a system of structural violence, and that the colonized's counterviolence is therefore reactive rather than initiatory, is the most-cited line of argument in the anti-colonial canon. ^{[Fanon 1961]}. Hannah Arendt's On Revolution (1963) pressed the opposite case: that revolutionary violence, once legitimated as a founding force, tends to consume the institutions it was meant to found, and that the Fanonian position provided ideological cover for the authoritarian regimes that emerged in many post-colonial states. The Fanon-Arendt exchange is not resolvable; it is the form in which the ethics of decolonizing violence is still argued.

Bibliography Master

@book{westad2005global,
  author    = {Westad, Odd Arne},
  title     = {The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  year      = {2005}
}

@book{cooper2002africa,
  author    = {Cooper, Frederick},
  title     = {Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  year      = {2002}
}

@book{betts2004decolonization,
  author    = {Betts, Raymond F.},
  title     = {Decolonization},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  year      = {2004}
}

@book{duara2004decolonization,
  author    = {Duara, Prasenjit},
  title     = {Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  year      = {2004}
}

@book{brendon2007decline,
  author    = {Brendon, Piers},
  title     = {The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997},
  publisher = {Knopf},
  year      = {2007}
}

@book{fanon1961wretched,
  author    = {Fanon, Frantz},
  title     = {The Wretched of the Earth},
  publisher = {Grove Press},
  year      = {1963},
  note      = {Trans. Constance Farrington; original French edition 1961}
}

@book{nkrumah1965neocolonialism,
  author    = {Nkrumah, Kwame},
  title     = {Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism},
  publisher = {Thomas Nelson and Sons},
  year      = {1965}
}

@book{arendt1963revolution,
  author    = {Arendt, Hannah},
  title     = {On Revolution},
  publisher = {Viking},
  year      = {1963}
}

@book{wallerstein1974modern,
  author    = {Wallerstein, Immanuel},
  title     = {The Modern World-System I},
  publisher = {Academic Press},
  year      = {1974}
}

@book{cardosofaletto1979dependency,
  author    = {Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Faletto, Enzo},
  title     = {Dependency and Development in Latin America},
  publisher = {University of California Press},
  year      = {1979}
}

@incollection{robingallagher1953imperialism,
  author    = {Robinson, Ronald and Gallagher, John},
  title     = {The Imperialism of Free Trade},
  booktitle = {The Economic History Review},
  year      = {1953}
}

Primary sources cited inline above include Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961/1963), Nkrumah's Neo-Colonialism (1965), and the Bandung Conference's Final Communiqué (24 April 1955). The interpretive positions attributed to Westad, Cooper, Betts, and Duara draw on the secondary works listed above; the dating of events follows the standard chronology used across that literature.

Prerequisites

32.22.01
32.23.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Piers Brendon 2007 The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Knopf), part IV — a plain-English narrative of how the postwar empire ended within a generation
intermediate: Odd Arne Westad 2005 The Global Cold War (Cambridge UP) ch. 1-2, and Piers Brendon 2007 — the formal framing of the Third World and comparative decolonization
master: Westad 2005 The Global Cold War; Frederick Cooper 2002 Africa Since 1940 (Cambridge UP); Raymond Betts 2004 Decolonization (Routledge); Prasenjit Duara 2004 Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (Routledge)

References

Westad, O.A. — The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge UP, 2005) · Ch. 1-2: the Third World as a Cold War theatre; the convergence of decolonization and superpower rivalry.
Cooper, F. — Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge UP, 2002) · Ch. 2-4: the colonial state as gatekeeper; the political arithmetic of independence.
Betts, R. — Decolonization (Routledge, 2004) · Ch. 1-3: the waves of decolonization; metropolitan versus nationalist explanations.
Duara, P. (ed.) — Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) · Introduction: decolonization as a single global process crystallizing at Bandung.
Fanon, F. — The Wretched of the Earth (Grove, 1963, trans. Farrington; orig. 1961) · Ch. 1: colonialism as a system of structural violence; the casuistry of decolonization.
Nkrumah, K. — Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Nelson, 1965) · Ch. 1: defining neocolonialism as formal independence without economic sovereignty.
Brendon, P. — The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Knopf, 2007) · Part IV: the postwar retreat from India, Africa, and the Middle East.

Estimated time

beginner: 30 min
intermediate: 55 min
master: 85 min