- 17 Jan 2023 01:52
#15262313
...Was only *allowed* in small, remote regions like Greenland.
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Patrickov wrote:
self-rule
...Was only *allowed* in small, remote regions like Greenland.
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The empires’ last stand
Mao’s victory, coming so soon after the British evacuation of India, added to the feeling in the colonies everywhere that imperialism could be beaten. There had already been stirrings of revolt in French Algeria and an attempt to establish an independent government in Vietnam. A nationalist movement had begun to grow in the huge Dutch colony of the East Indies before the war. Its leaders had taken advantage of the Japanese occupation to extend their base of support, half-collaborating with the occupying forces and proclaiming themselves the government of a new country, Indonesia, when Japan left. Now they fought the attempt to reimpose Dutch colonialism, achieving independence in 1949 under President Sukarno. In Malaya the local Communist Party, which had formed the backbone of the British-backed resistance to Japan, prepared to wage a war for freedom from Britain. Various students from Africa and the West Indies such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Eric Williams, who had known each other in London in the 1930s, returned home to agitate for independence too. In the Arab capitals of Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo a new, young middle class generation, sometimes strategically positioned within the officer corps of the state, began to plot to achieve real independence and to dream of a united ‘Arab nation’ from the Atlantic to the Gulf.
The instinct of the colonial powers was to react to the liberation movements as they had in the past, with machine-guns, bombing raids and concentration camps. This was the reaction of France in Vietnam, Madagascar, Algeria, and its west African colonies; of Britain in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden and the Rhodesias276; and of Portugal in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau.
But it became clear, sooner or later, that this approach was counterproductive, serving only to deepen popular hostility to European interests. A growing number of rulers saw that a better policy would be to cultivate local figures who would faithfully serve their interests as heads of ‘independent’ governments. Britain adopted this approach in much of the Middle East, in west Africa and in the West Indies. In Malaya, Britain used heavy repression against the Communist-led liberation movement (troops cut off the hands and even the heads of dead ‘terrorists’ and forcibly resettled half a million people in villages surrounded by barbed wire). But it also promised independence to ‘moderate’ Malay politicians, who built support by playing on racial distrust of the Chinese minority. Even where Britain did try and stand firm against making concessions to the ‘natives’—as in Kenya, where it bombed villages and herded people into concentration camps where many died, and in Cyprus, where troops used torture—it ended up negotiating a ‘peaceful’ transfer of power to political leaders (Jomo Kenyatta and Archbishop Makarios) whom it had previously imprisoned or exiled.
France was eventually forced to adopt this approach in Vietnam and Algeria. But it only did so after spending vast sums and killing huge numbers of people in wars it could not win. The poison infected French politics as disaffected colonialist generals attempted a succession of military coups in the years 1958-62 (resulting in the National Assembly granting near-dictatorial powers to General de Gaulle in 1958). The eventual agreement to Algerian independence led to a million Algerian settlers decamping to France and a wave of right wing bombings by the OAS terrorist group in Paris.
Western Europe’s most backward capitalism, Portugal, tried to hold on to its colonies, but was eventually forced to abandon them in 1974-75 when the cost of subduing them provoked a revolutionary upheaval in Portugal itself. All that remained were the two white racist settler regimes in southern Africa—Southern Rhodesia, which was eventually forced to accept black majority rule as Zimbabwe in 1980, and South Africa, which finally followed suit in 1994.
The retreat of the West European powers from direct rule over half of Asia and almost all of Africa was a process of epochal importance. It marked the end of almost two centuries during which the line of world history passed through London and Paris. However, it did not mark the end of imperialism, in the sense that much of the world remained dominated by interests centred in a few economically advanced countries. Bitter conflicts in the Americas, south east Asia and the Middle East would repeatedly testify to this fact.
Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 556-558
- By Tainari88
- By wat0n
- By litwin