Ending empire became the twentieth century's largest remapping
Decolonization means closing colonialism—the domination of foreign territories by imperial metropoles. As independence politics it is often dated from the 1775 American Revolution, though the UN frames self-determination as the core right, exercisable with or without full statehood.
Scholars disagree about what exactly the word covers. Some concentrate on independence movements and the collapse of empires; the sociologist David Strang counts a territory as decolonised once it gains internationally recognised sovereignty or is fully absorbed into an existing state. A 1960 UN General Assembly resolution branded colonial rule a violation of human rights. Others extend the idea to intellectual decolonisation, shedding colonial ideas that made subject peoples feel inferior, a debate now often labelled decoloniality in the Americas and South Africa. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, shaped much of the later literature.
The first wave came in the Americas. Britain's thirteen colonies declared independence in 1776 and won the war that followed. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue a revolt in 1789 and a slave uprising in 1791 led to Haitian independence in 1804. Napoleon's invasions severed Spain's and Portugal's links to their American colonies: Spanish territories formed their own juntas, and the Portuguese court fled to Brazil in 1807, returning to Lisbon after an 1820 revolution. In the two centuries after 1783, some 165 colonies broke free of Western powers.
Explanations vary. Institutional accounts stress rising education fuelling demands for popular sovereignty, Marxist ones point to economics, and many historians trace the ideas to Enlightenment liberalism, though decolonial critics note its blindness to Indigenous knowledge. Britain, less ruthless toward dissent than Belgium, often negotiated with local politicians, typically holding constitutional conferences in London before handing over power.
The twentieth century brought the largest remapping. After the First World War, former German and Ottoman lands became League of Nations mandates. Egypt gained nominal independence in 1922 while Britain kept the Suez Canal, and the 1931 Statute of Westminster gave the dominions full legislative freedom. In India, reforms culminating in the 1935 Government of India Act failed to quell Gandhi's peaceful resistance, and across Africa, drawn fully into colonial rule only in the late nineteenth century, new nationalisms grew, with independent Ethiopia a beacon.
Source: Decolonization
