Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.
So today we’re talking about the rejection of European rule in colonies, which resulted
in a process called decolonization.
By the 1970s the majority of Europe’s colonies had gained independence and formed new nations.
And areas like China that were less formally controlled but did feel the heavy hand of
European domination similarly had loosened ties to Europe and the United States.
During the second World War, Europeans continued to confiscate goods, seize colonized peoples
for forced labor, and in many cases, decimate their homes and farmland.
“The Lord is my shepherd and I am in want,” one African wrote about postwar life.
And then after World War II, literally millions of colonized subjects rose up, in differing
ways, to achieve independence.
And in doing so, they brought the colonization of the world’s peoples, which had filled
Europeans with pride and profits, to an end.
Sort of.
[Intro] So there was no one decolonization process.
It was sometimes prolonged and often extremely violent; at other times it was accomplished
quite quickly.
The first big pieces of the postwar empire to achieve independence were India and Pakistan,
which became independent nations in August 1947, after decades of civil disobedience
and independence activism.
So, although the British had claimed South Asia as a single colony, they had also stirred
up Muslim-Hindu rivalries on the subcontinent with the aim of preventing people from a unified
movement for independence.
That divide to continue conquering strategy persisted even as many in South Asia raged
at being dragged into World War II, a war fought on behalf of their colonizers, and
also at the imposition of high wartime taxes, and at the constant British excuses for not
granting home rule, and most horrifyingly at the British-created Bengal famine of 1943.
The Partition, the name of the South Asian settlemen of 1947, arranged for the creation
of two new nations--India a majority Hindu state, and Pakistan, a majority Muslim one--but
it led to a violent nightmare.
Religious and other South Asian interest groups organized their own ad hoc
armies to lay claims to land and resources.
Sexual violence and murder were so common during the contested Partition that, as one
woman explained, “My three sisters swallowed poison—our hospital compounder distributed
poison to anyone who wanted it.”
Other women escaped rape and torture through other methods of suicide.
That same person also recalled, “My bua [that is aunt] gave the signal to the other
women to jump by jumping off the bridge first.
Then other aunts, my bhabis [that is aunts, cousins], six in all, killed themselves.
No one tried to stop them, not even my father.”
More than a million people would die in the wars that followed partition, and eventually
the two countries became three--with Bangladesh becoming independent in 1971.
India would become--and remains--the largest democracy in the world.
China threw off the informal grip of the European and U.S. powers when Mao Zedong and his Communist
forces first helped in the World War II defeat of Japan and then took control from the opposing
Nationalists in October 1949.
This victory heightened Cold War tensions as the new People’s Republic of China initially
allied itself with the USSR.
Communist forces aimed to defeat U.S. and Western European influence in Vietnam and
Korea in the postwar period.
The Korean and Vietnamese wars are often seen as proxy wars between the superpowers, but
if you shift perspectives, they can also seen as wars of liberation.
Less violent scenarios also materialized, with activists launching strikes, civil disobedience,
or negotiations to achieve independence.
Ghana, Morocco, and Tunisia are examples of comparatively peaceful liberation.
In contrast, where there were numerous white settlers like Algeria or Kenya, Europeans
fought tenaciously to keep their colonies.
They employed torture, confiscated farms and houses, and incarcered surviving local people
in concentration camps with very high mortality rates.
Kenyans, for example, swore solemn oaths to fight for freedom and in doing so became part
of the Land and Freedom Army or Mau Mau movement.
The British fought back, destroying villages and massacring the population while driving
others into those lethal concentration camps.
One Kenyan teenager, returning home from school in another town, was walking absentmindedly
along the road toward his house when “instinct suddenly tells me that I have gotten home.
. . or where home should be.
. . . Our homestead is a rubble of burnt dry mud, splinters of wood, and grass.
. . . I suddenly realize that the whole village of homesteads has disappeared.”
But despite Britain’s wars to retain colonies, they eventually had to grant Kenya independence
in 1963.
In the war to liberate Algeria, where some three million Europeans had settled on the
land of local people, French military resistance to the National Liberation Front of freedom
fighters was especially vicious.
The FLN, as it was known, was weak in armed power compared to the French, so it gained
its strength from simply depicting the French torture of local people in detail.
It ensured, for instance, that militant Algerian nationalist Djamila Boupacha’s account of
her torture, for example, reached a worldwide audience in February 1960.
Now, some of this account is too barbaric to repeat here but I will share an abridged
version, with the caveat that some listeners may want to skip ahead thirty seconds:
She wrote, “I received terrible blows that made me fall to the ground.
That was when the soldiers, led by a parachutist captain, crushed my ribs with their boots.”
Boupacha was then transferred to “receive the second decree.
I soon found out what that meant: electric torture to begin with.
. . then they burned me in the same way on my legs, groin, genitals, and face.
Electric torture alternated with cigarette burns, punches with fists, and water torture:
suspended over a full bathtub, I was made to drink until suffocating”
And those reports did shape French public opinion, especially after being amplified
by French intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir.
The President of France Charles de Gaulle ended the war in 1962, and Algeria gained
its independence.
By 1980, most areas around the world had gained their freedom from European rule, but often
at great cost.
Already weak infrastructure was at times further damaged by struggles for independence, and
many of these new nations were left with systems designed only to facilitate the extraction
of resources, rather than the improvement of communities.
Building infrastructure that didn’t focus on resource extraction would prove an exceptionally
difficult and costly facet of decolonization--one that continues to be a problem for many impoverished
post-colonial states today.
But that’s only one facet of decolonization.
The end of empire affected Europe and the world enormously in many different ways.
The Caribbean-born physician Frantz Fanon wrote globally influential books on race and
the need for those ruled by Europeans to decolonize not just their countries but also their minds
of the many European influences forced upon them.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
Along these lines, liberation leader Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
and other African women returned to traditional clothing,
rejecting British dress codes and claims to cultural superiority.
For Ransome-Kuti this meant wearing Yoruba garments;
others chose various local forms of cotton garb and headpieces.
Frantz Fanon also argued that freedom fighters used violence because that was all they knew
about conducting their lives.
Europeans had ruled with violence,
so violence endured in many newly independent nations as they struggled to create governments
and societies
out of the economic and psychological wreckage of colonial rule.
Some decolonizing people migrated to Europe to escape this turmoil and the impoverishment
of their regions.
Britain legislated that they could do so.
And economically this migration was a big blessing for the receiving countries,
because in most places, including the United States, immigrants could be taken advantage of
which meant governments and businesses could cut costs.
In Europe, immigrants staffed the lowest levels of the welfare state, becoming janitors and
sanitation workers even when they were trained and certified doctors and nurses.
They also helped Europe rebuild its war-torn buildings, and roads, and railroads, and other
infrastructure.
For decolonizing countries, the loss of these workers was more complex,
because in many cases,
new nations lost their best-educated and most highly skilled workers.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
The exploitation of these immigrants continued that of empire itself.
As immigrants from the colonies arrived in Europe, European racism swelled and became
an integral part of decolonization and its politics.
In 1958 in Nottingham, whites rioted when a black man struck up a conversation with
a white woman.
In 1968 British politician Enoch Powell gave his “Rivers of Blood” speech, announcing
that because of immigrants’ (specifically people of color) presence in Britain, whites saw
their property values decline and their access to health care given to immigrants.
So, anti-immigration came to stand for curtailing the arrival of people of color.
but to be clear, again, receiving nations benefited from this immigration.
Meanwhile, new forms of imperialism, called neo-imperialism, developed, as newly independent
governments needed to borrow money and sought experienced advisors to build the elements
of statehood such as schools, and hospitals, and harbors, roads, and railroads.
European and U.S. financiers and technicians exercised enormous control over these efforts,
and often manipulated “development” to support ongoing dependence that if not exactly
colonial was, at least, neo-colonial--hence the term.
Now, I know there remains a widespread belief that communities were somehow “better off”
as colonies than as newly independent nations, but the data just doesn’t back this up.
Average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa in 1953 was under 40; by 1980, it was over
50.
Rates of malnutrition declined, while far more children learned to read and attended
school for longer.
The same was true in South Asia and East Asia.
Some Europeans stayed in the former colonies to continue their businesses and some administrators
stayed to serve as advisors.
But many also used the uncertain times to retrieve funds from colonies to begin the
system of offshore banking—
In the meantime, the superpowers targeted these new nations to gain their allegiance
in the cold war.
Egypt was an early pawn when it sought funds for the Aswan Dam, first obtaining them from
the USSR.
And then the British, French, and Israelis invaded the nation in 1956 in a failed attempt
to prevent the leader Gamal Abdel Nasser from nationalizing the Suez Canal,
the United States stopped the invasion by cutting off funds to the British.
They did this out of fear of strengthening the Soviet hand: emerging nations might worry
about similar attacks by U.S. allies and seek out the Soviets for protection.
The superpowers continued taking sides by providing competing groups in Africa and Asia
with funds, perpetuating turmoil and ensuring that the newly independent countries would
remain weak and at the mercy of super-power aid.
And this gets at something really important, which is that during the cold war, aid wasn’t
really designed to, like, minimize human suffering, or to build infrastructure.
Really, it was designed to increase dependence on either one way of thinking, the communist
way, or another way, the capitalist way.
And in that process, the superpowers encouraged not just big proxy wars such as those in Korea
and Vietnam but also smaller local conflicts.
But despite all this turmoil, as diversity and multiculturalism accelerated, so did the
exchange of ideas.
To cite just one famous example, late in the 1950s, Trinidadian immigrant Lord Woodbine
(Harold Phillips) took in aspiring musicians to learn steel band instruments, calypso,
and the blues.
Two white boys he trained used the imported musical style to break off and become the Beatles.
Immigrant writers from around the world shared stories of colonial and post-colonial life
and in doing so began to give voice to those who’d been structurally silenced.
And so the Columbian Exchange continued, despite the ongoing racism and discrimination.
More exchange--this time in the realm of science and technology--was also taking place.
That’s for next time.
I’ll see you then.