AMSCO 7.5 Unresolved Tensions After World War I Notes

Overview

AMSCO Topic 7.5, Unresolved Tensions After World War I (AMSCO p.493-499), covers how the war's end failed to deliver self-determination to colonized peoples, and how that failure fueled nationalist movements across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The winners of World War I (European powers and Japan) kept or even expanded their colonial holdings through the League of Nations mandate system, while anti-imperial resistance grew through the Indian National Congress, the May Fourth Movement in China, the March First Movement in Korea, and strikes in French West Africa. This topic sits in the middle of Unit 7 (1900 to the present) and explains why the interwar years planted the seeds of decolonization, even though independence mostly arrived after World War II.

Timeline of unresolved events after World War I. Image courtesy of Riya.

Effects of the War on Colonial Lands

World War I raised colonial peoples' hopes for independence, then the Paris Peace Conference crushed those hopes. That gap between expectation and reality is the engine driving everything in this chapter.

Here's why expectations rose:

• African and Asian colonies sent thousands of soldiers to fight for the Allies. Nationalists hoped this sacrifice would earn respect and start a decolonization process.
• The war's devastation showed colonized peoples that imperial powers like Britain and France were not invincible.
• Wilson's Fourteen Points promoted self-determination, and colonized peoples assumed that principle applied to them too.

It didn't. The Big Three at the peace conference (David Lloyd George of Britain, Woodrow Wilson of the US, and Georges Clemenceau of France) had no interest in freeing colonies. Self-determination was granted only to white countries in Eastern Europe. India, nearly all of Africa, and most of the Middle East stayed under European control. Wilson even refused to meet a group of Vietnamese nationalists that included a young Ho Chi Minh. That rejection strengthened nationalist movements across southern Asia and parts of Africa.

One important wartime example: between November 1915 and September 1916, villages in French West Africa (in what later became Burkina Faso) united to try to drive out the French. France crushed the revolt at great cost, but the rebellion forced the French to acknowledge obligations to the people they colonized.

The economic picture varied too. The United States prospered from selling war materials and farm products to the Allies, while the European countries that took the worst damage were economically devastated. For more on the interwar economic crisis, see the AMSCO 7.4 Economy in the Interwar Period notes.

The Mandate System

The mandate system was colonialism with a new label. Through the League of Nations, the Allies took control of the colonies and territories of the defeated Central Powers instead of granting them independence. Article 22 of the League charter claimed colonized peoples in Africa and Asia needed "tutelage" from more "advanced" nations.

What that looked like on the map:

• Former Ottoman lands (Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq) became League of Nations mandates, virtual colonies of Britain and France.
• Former German colonies in Africa went to the Allies. Cameroon, for example, was divided into separate French and British mandates.
• Japan seized the German-held islands of the Western Pacific.

Arab rebels were especially furious. They had been promised self-rule for fighting alongside the Allies against the Ottomans, and the Allies broke that promise. The betrayal fueled Pan-Arabism, an ideology calling for the unification of all lands in North Africa and the Middle East.

A second source of conflict came from the Balfour Declaration (1917), in which the British government stated that Palestine should become a permanent home for the Jews of Europe. Supporters of a Jewish homeland were called Zionists, and after the war European Jews moved to British-controlled Palestine in large numbers, setting up tensions that would last for decades.

Anti-Colonialism in South Asia

The disappointment of the Paris Peace Conference pushed Indian anticolonial activists to redouble their efforts. The Indian National Congress, formed in the late 19th century to air grievances against colonial rule, had become a strong voice for independence by 1918.

The Amritsar Massacre

In spring 1919, Indian nationalists gathered peacefully in a public garden in Amritsar, Punjab, during a Sikh festival, protesting the arrest of two freedom fighters. The British had recently outlawed such gatherings. Colonial forces fired hundreds of shots into the unarmed crowd, killing an estimated 379 people and wounding 1,200 more. The massacre radicalized many Indians and convinced moderate Congress members that full independence was the only way forward.

Gandhi and Satyagraha

By the 1920s, Mohandas Gandhi (called Mahatma, "the great soul") had brought the Congress's cause to the Indian masses. His satyagraha ("devotion-to-truth") movement used civil disobedience: deliberately breaking unjust laws and accepting jail time to expose the injustice of British rule to the world. He led a boycott of British goods and wore the homespun cotton dhoti instead of Western suits, protesting British fabrics made from Indian cotton and sold back to Indians at inflated prices.

His most famous campaign was the Salt March of 1930. Britain had made it illegal for Indians to produce their own sea salt because it wanted a salt monopoly. Gandhi led thousands of Indians to the Arabian Sea and simply picked up grains of salt in open defiance.

Jinnah and the Two-State Idea

Independence leaders disagreed about India's national identity. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a Muslim leader in the mostly Hindu Indian National Congress, originally favored Hindu-Muslim unity but later proposed a separate Muslim state, Pakistan, covering the heavily Muslim western and eastern parts of South Asia. He feared Muslim interests would be overwhelmed in a Hindu-majority India. The proposal worried Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (who would become independent India's first prime minister). Independence for India and Pakistan didn't come until after World War II, but the interwar years built the foundation.

Nationalism in East Asia

Korea, China, and Japan were never formally colonized by Europe, but they still experienced foreign domination, and the desire for self-determination spread there too.

The March First Movement in Korea

Japan took control of Korea in 1910. After the war, Japanese influence looked likely to grow, and the mysterious death of the Korean emperor pushed resentment over the edge. Starting March 1, 1919, as many as 2 million Koreans (out of a population of 17 million) joined protests against Japanese rule. Japan cracked down harshly, killing several thousand Koreans, but the movement showed the power of Korean nationalism.

The May Fourth Movement in China

China supported the Allies in World War I, with nearly 150,000 Chinese hired by Britain and France for factory work, trench digging, and other labor. China expected the Allies to return German-controlled land on the Shandong Peninsula. Instead, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Britain and France gave it to Japan. Furious Chinese intellectuals and workers launched anti-Japanese demonstrations on May 4, 1919. The May Fourth Movement symbolized rising Chinese nationalism, and the betrayal pushed many Chinese away from Western-style government and toward the Marxist model of the Soviet Union.

Communists vs. Nationalists

Two groups then fought for control of China:

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921 and eventually led by Mao Zedong, who believed China's revolution would come from peasants (the vast majority of the population) rather than urban workers.
• The Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), led by Sun Yatsen, who wanted full independence and industrialization and allied with the Communists to fight warlords and foreign domination. After Sun died in 1925, Chiang Kaishek took over. Chiang deeply distrusted communism, and in 1927 his forces attacked and nearly annihilated Mao's, starting the Chinese Civil War.

In 1934, Chiang attacked Mao's army in rural Jiangxi, triggering the Long March, a year-long, 6,000-mile retreat across mountains, marshes, and deserts. Of the 80,000 or more who started, only about 10,000 reached northern China in 1935. The CCP was weakened, but peasants admired the marchers' stamina and commitment, and that support later proved decisive. Meanwhile Chiang's Nationalists ruled much of China in the 1930s but alienated many by promoting Confucianism, suppressing free speech, and tolerating corruption.

Japan, Manchukuo, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere

Seeking natural resources, Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931. When the League of Nations condemned the invasion, Japan quit the League and seized more land. In 1932 it set up the puppet state of Manchukuo, placing the last Chinese emperor on its throne to fake independence. The Japanese threat was serious enough that in 1935 the Nationalists and Communists suspended their civil war to unite against it. Japan kept expanding until 1945, seizing the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, Burma, and Pacific islands, calling the whole project the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japan claimed it was liberating Asia from Western imperialism; the people in those territories experienced Japan as a conqueror. This expansion feeds directly into the causes of World War II.

Resistance to French Rule in West Africa

African pro-independence movements began with European-educated intellectuals who saw their homelands' racial discrimination more clearly from abroad. Jomo Kenyatta, future leader of Kenya, studied in London. Léopold Senghor, future leader of Senegal, studied in Paris. Most of the educated elite worked for colonial governments or as attorneys and doctors.

Workers resisted too. Black workers in French West Africa staged strikes, including a railway workers' strike in 1917 and a general strike in 1946, spreading across Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. Strikers protested discriminatory wage and benefit policies, and in some cases won demands through compromise settlements.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

Pair these notes with the Topic 7.5 Unresolved Tensions After World War I study guide, which approaches the same material from the course framework side. The big skill here is continuity and change: imperial powers kept or expanded territory between the wars (mandates, Manchukuo) while anti-imperial resistance grew (Indian National Congress, West African strikes). That's the comparison the AP exam wants you to make.

Test yourself with AP World guided practice questions, drill writing with FRQ practice and instant scoring, and browse the full set of AMSCO Unit 7 notes to keep moving through the unit. Up next: AMSCO 7.6 Causes of World War II.