Chapter Twenty-Two: The End of Empire

Hello Historians,

Overview-

During the 1900s, European empires in Africa and Asia were permanent features of the world's political landscape. Before the end of the twentieth-century, they disappeared. The major breakthrough occurred in Asia and in the Middle East in the late 1940s, when the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel achieved independence.

The End of Empire in World History-

The process was the latest case of imperial dissolution, something that had overtaken earlier empires, including those of the Assyrians, Romans, Arabs, and Mongols. But never before had the end of empire been associated with the mobilization of masses around a nationalist ideology; nor had these earlier cases generated a cause for nation-states, each claiming an equal place in a world of nation-states. More comparable was the first decolonization, in which the European colonies in the Americas threw off British, French, Spanish, or Portuguese rule during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Like the earlier counterparts, the nations of the twentieth century have claimed an international "status" that was matched up to their former rulers (i.e. Europeans) However, in the Americas many, many of the people who were colonized were of some European descent, sharing much of their culture and colonial rule.
To much to their dismay, the African and asian struggles were very different. While in the Americas, the natives had it a little easier than most native people, the natives in Africa and Asia, because they not only asserted political independence, but also they retained the vital-ness of their cultures. Empires without territories, made a powerful impact and influence on the United States. An intrusive U.S. presence was certainly one factor that stimulated the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910.


Explaining African and Asian Independence-

When the twentieth century came to a close, the end of European empires seemed almost an inevitable phenomenon, for colonial rule had lost any credibility as a form of political order. One approach of explaining the end of the colonial empires, which primarily focused its attention on fundamental contradictions in the entire colonial enterprise. At the same time, social and economic circumstances that were within the colonies generated the human raw material for the anti colonial movements. By the early twentieth century in Asia and the mid-twentieth century in Africa, there became a second and third generation of Western educated elites, mainly men, they had risen throughout the colonial world.
The men were very familiar with European culture and their intention of spreading the european culture throughout the world. These men were deeply aware of the HUGE gap between the values and its practices; thus, making it no longer the main point for colonial rule.
These pressures became increasingly large in size and scale, it put colonial rulers on their defenses. As the twentieth century continued, the colonial rulers began to plan their tactics; hoping to form some new political relationship with their Asian and African counterparts. The colonies had been integrated in to a global economic network and local elites were largely committed to maintaining those ties.


The Case of South Africa: Ending Apartheid-

South Africa's freedom struggle was very different from that of India. In the twentieth century, that struggle was not waged against an occupying European colonial power, for South Africa had in fact been independent of Great Britain since 1910. Independence, however, had been granted to the government that has been controlled by a white settling minority, which represented less than 20 percent of the total population. The country's black African minority had no political rights whatsoever within the central state. Black South Africans' struggle therefore was against this internal opponent rather than against a distant colonial authority. Economically, the most prominent whites were of British descent. They or their forebears had come to South Africa during the nineteenth century, when Great Britain was the ruling colonial power.
The politically dominant section of the white community, known as Afrikaners,was descended from the early Dutch settlers, who had arrived in the mid-seventeenth century. The term "Afrikaner" reflected their image of themselves as "white Africans," permanent residents of the continent rather than colonial intruders.