Decolonization

Decolonization refers to the dismantling of the formal empires assembled by European powers, the United States, and imperial Japan, and the transfer of sovereignty to the peoples of the former colonies. The term is most commonly used to describe the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1990s, although the underlying movements and ideas stretch much further back. Earlier waves of colonial separation had already reshaped the Americas, including the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, the Latin American wars of independence in the 1810s and 1820s, and the independence of the United States in 1776.

The twentieth-century wave was different in scale and speed. Between 1945 and 1975, more than one hundred new states joined the community of nations. The British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, and Italian overseas empires were largely dismantled, the United States granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, and imperial Japan lost its colonial possessions after its defeat in 1945. The Spanish empire, reduced long before by the Latin American independence movements, retained only a few territories in Africa and the Pacific into the twentieth century. Membership of the United Nations grew from 51 founding states in 1945 to 193 today, with the overwhelming majority of the new members coming from formerly colonized regions.

The process was neither uniform nor tidy. Some transfers of power were achieved through negotiated settlement, others through prolonged wars of independence, and still others through a combination of both. Decolonization involved mass mobilization, international diplomacy, ideological transformation, and, in many places, violence on a large scale. It also left open questions that remain contested in the twenty-first century, including the borders of postcolonial states, the legacies of colonial economic structures, the status of remaining non-self-governing territories, and the moral weight of colonial injustice.

This page presents decolonization as a global process rather than a series of isolated national stories. It follows the chronological arc from early anticolonial thought and the impact of the world wars to the rapid independence movements of the mid-twentieth century, and then to the remaining questions of self-determination, reparation, and memory in the present. The aim is encyclopedic breadth, with links to individual country profiles for deeper reading on specific national experiences.