Honors World History Unit 10 Review: Decolonization and the Third World's Rise

India became independent from Britain on August 15, 1947, after about six decades of organized nationalism. The Indian National Congress (INC), founded in 1885, began by asking for reforms within British rule. By the 1920s it was demanding swaraj, or self-rule.

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi turned the movement from an elite organization into a mass one. His method, satyagraha, used nonviolent civil disobedience to make British rule look unjust and unworkable. The non-cooperation movement (1920-1922) boycotted British courts, schools and cloth. Gandhi called it off after protesters killed 22 police officers at Chauri Chaura, because he believed violence would destroy the movement's moral authority.

In 1930 he led the Salt March, walking about 240 miles to the sea at Dandi to make salt in defiance of Britain's salt monopoly. The 1942 Quit India movement demanded immediate British withdrawal and led to the arrest of nearly the entire Congress leadership.

Nonviolence alone did not end British rule. World War II left Britain deeply in debt, the 1946 Royal Indian Navy mutiny raised concerns about unrest in parts of the colonial armed forces, and Clement Attlee's Labour government was committed to transferring power. Jawaharlal Nehru became independent India's first prime minister.

Independence in 1947 came with Partition, the division of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Pakistan had two parts about 1,000 miles apart, and East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971.

The roots go back decades. The All-India Muslim League formed in 1906, and British separate electorates, which organized voting by religious community, reinforced political divisions between Hindus and Muslims. Under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League promoted the Two-Nation Theory, and its 1940 Lahore Resolution called for independent states in Muslim-majority regions, a demand that developed into the campaign for Pakistan. Gandhi and Nehru wanted a united, secular India. Nehru and other Congress leaders accepted Partition in 1947 as communal violence spread, while Gandhi remained opposed in principle but reluctantly acquiesced.

Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, moved the handover up to August 15, 1947. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never visited India, had about five weeks to draw borders through Punjab and Bengal, and his line was published two days after independence. Roughly 14 to 15 million people crossed the new borders, and estimates of the dead range from about 200,000 to 2 million.

Kashmir was a princely state with a Muslim-majority population and a Hindu ruler. Pakistan-backed tribal forces invaded in October 1947, after which the ruler signed the Instrument of Accession to India and India sent troops. The conflict became the first India-Pakistan war. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948.

China was never fully colonized, but after the Opium Wars foreign powers controlled treaty ports and held special legal rights there, so historians often call it semi-colonial. The civil war decided who would rebuild China after that century of foreign pressure.

The Nationalists, or Kuomintang (KMT), under Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong cooperated in the First United Front until April 1927, when Chiang's forces massacred Communists in Shanghai. Surrounded by Nationalist armies, the Communists began the roughly 6,000-mile Long March in 1934. Only about 7,000 to 10,000 of roughly 80,000 to 100,000 original marchers reached northern Shaanxi in 1935. The march strengthened Mao's position within the party, and Yan'an became the Communist headquarters in 1937.

Japan's full-scale invasion of China in 1937 forced the Nationalists and Communists into a Second United Front. The Nationalists took the heaviest losses in large conventional battles, while Communist guerrillas expanded behind Japanese lines and built support among peasants. After Japan surrendered in 1945, the civil war resumed.

The CCP won because land reform earned peasant loyalty, while the KMT lost support through corruption, hyperinflation and falling morale despite US aid. Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, and Chiang retreated to Taiwan. A communist China pushed the US to resist communism more aggressively across Asia.

Algeria shows why settler colonies were the hardest to decolonize. France invaded in 1830 and later made northern Algeria legally part of France, organized like French departments. About one million European settlers, the pieds-noirs, held the best land and most political power over roughly nine million Muslim Algerians.

Algerian veterans came home from World War II to the same unequal system. When a march at Sétif in May 1945 turned violent, French forces and settler militias killed thousands of Algerians. On November 1, 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched coordinated attacks across the country, starting the war.

In the Battle of Algiers (1956-1957), French paratroopers broke the FLN's urban network using systematic torture. France won militarily but lost politically, because reports of torture turned opinion in France and abroad against the war. In 1958 the crisis brought down France's Fourth Republic and returned Charles de Gaulle to power.

De Gaulle moved toward negotiation, survived a failed coup by French generals in April 1961, and agreed to the Évian Accords in March 1962. Algeria became independent on July 5, 1962, and most pieds-noirs left for France. Estimates of Algerian deaths range from about 300,000 to the Algerian government's figure of 1.5 million.

The 1956 Suez Crisis showed that Britain and France could no longer sustain a major imperial intervention against strong US opposition. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and by the 1950s about two-thirds of Western Europe's oil passed through it. Britain became the largest shareholder in the Suez Canal Company in 1875 and occupied Egypt from 1882.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the army officers who overthrew King Farouk in 1952, became the face of Arab nationalism. When the US and Britain withdrew their offer to fund the Aswan High Dam, Nasser nationalized the canal company on July 26, 1956, and said canal revenue would pay for the dam.

Britain, France and Israel secretly planned a response. Israel invaded the Sinai on October 29, and British and French forces then attacked Egypt, claiming they were separating the two sides. British, French and Israeli forces made rapid military gains, but Britain and France failed to regain lasting control of the canal and faced intense financial and diplomatic pressure. Eisenhower, angry at being kept in the dark and worried about pushing Arab states toward Moscow, put heavy financial pressure on Britain, and the Soviet Union threatened intervention.

The UN arranged a ceasefire and created the UN Emergency Force, the first armed UN peacekeeping force, to supervise the withdrawal. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned in January 1957, and Nasser came out as a hero across the Arab world and the decolonizing world.

Most of Africa won independence between 1957 and 1975. Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, led the way on March 6, 1957, under Kwame Nkrumah, who used strikes, boycotts and mass party organizing to push Britain into negotiating. In 1958 Guinea, led by Sékou Touré, voted to leave France's empire outright. In 1960, often called the Year of Africa, 17 African countries became independent.

Where there were few European settlers, as in Ghana, Nigeria (1960) and most of French West Africa, independence usually came through negotiation. Where settlers held land and power, it took war. In Kenya, Britain put down the Mau Mau uprising (1952-1960) brutally but still granted independence in 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta as leader. Portugal fought in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau until a 1974 revolution in Lisbon ended its empire. White-minority Rhodesia held out until it became Zimbabwe in 1980.

New states inherited borders drawn by Europeans during the Scramble for Africa, often cutting across ethnic groups. Congo became independent from Belgium in June 1960 and fell into crisis within weeks. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was killed in Katanga in January 1961 by Congolese captors with direct Belgian involvement. The US had supported efforts to remove him, but available evidence does not show that US officials directly organized his killing. Pan-Africanists like Nkrumah helped found the Organization of African Unity in 1963.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was a coalition of mostly new nations that refused to join either the US-led or the Soviet-led bloc. Its roots are in the Bandung Conference of April 1955, where 29 Asian and African countries met in Indonesia. Host Sukarno, India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser and China's Zhou Enlai attended, and the conference endorsed respect for sovereignty, non-interference in other countries' affairs and peaceful coexistence.

The NAM formally began at the 1961 Belgrade summit with 25 member states. Its best-known founders were Tito of Yugoslavia, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and Ghana's Nkrumah. Tito is the surprise on that list. Yugoslavia was a communist country in Europe, but it had split with Stalin in 1948 and refused to take orders from Moscow.

Non-alignment did not mean staying quiet. Members spoke out against colonialism, apartheid in South Africa and nuclear testing, and they used the UN General Assembly to press their case. They also accepted help from both sides; India received Soviet weapons and US food aid.

The movement had real limits. Members disagreed and sometimes fought each other, and India, a founder, lost a border war with China in 1962 and signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971.

French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined "Third World" in 1952 by analogy with France's Third Estate, the commoners who were ignored before 1789 but then claimed power. He used it for economically underdeveloped countries outside the two dominant Cold War power centers, including many former colonies and long-independent Latin American countries. Later, people often used the term as a broad label for poor countries, so many historians now prefer "Global South," though the terms are not exact synonyms.

Decolonization changed the UN. Membership grew from 51 in 1945 to 127 by 1970, so new nations soon formed a majority in the General Assembly. In 1960 the Assembly passed Resolution 1514, declaring that colonial rule denied basic human rights. In 1964 developing countries formed the Group of 77 to bargain together on trade, and in 1974 they pushed the UN to call for a New International Economic Order.

Independence brought hard problems. Many economies still depended on exporting one or two raw materials, such as cocoa or copper, to former colonizers, a pattern Nkrumah called neocolonialism in a 1965 book. Weak institutions and colonial borders contributed to one-party governments, military coups and internal conflicts. The superpowers turned local conflicts into proxy wars in places like Congo, Vietnam and Angola. In 1973, Arab oil exporters acting through OAPEC imposed an oil embargo while OPEC members raised prices, showing what raw-material producers could gain by cooperating.