Module 6: The End of the Empire

3) What international circumstances and social changes contributed to the end of colonial empires?
The world wars weakened Europe and it discredited any sense of European moral superiority. Both the United States and the Soviet Union opposed the older European colonial empires even as they created empire-like international relationships of their own. The United Nations provided a prestigious platform from which to conduct anticolonial agitation. All this contributed to the global illegitimacy of the empire. By the twentieth century in Asia and the mid-twentieth century in Africa, a second or third generation of Western-educated elites, mainly male, had arisen throughout the colonial world. The young men were very familiar with European culture and were aware of the gap between their values and practice. They didn’t view the colonial rule as a vehicle for their peoples’ progress as their fathers had. There were also a lot of growing numbers of ordinary people who were also receptive to this message.


4) What obstacles confronted the leaders of movements for independence?
Leaders had to organize most of the political parties, recruit members, plot strategy, develop an ideology, and negotiate both with one another and with the colonial power to secure the transition to independence. Deliberate planning for colonization included gradual political reforms, investments in railroads, ports, and telegraph lines, the holding of elections and the writing of constitutions. These reforms and independence itself occurred only under considerable pressure from mounting nationalist movements. Beneath the common goal of independence, anti-colonial groups struggled with one another over questions of leadership, power, strategy, ideology, and the distribution of material benefits.

6) What was the role of Gandhi in India’s struggle for independence?
Gandhi pioneered active and confrontational, though nonviolent, strategies of resistance that underpinned the Indian independence movement. He became a leader in the Indian National Congress during the 1920s and 1930s. He played a critical role in turning the INC into a mass organization. Gandhi also developed a concept of India that included Hindus and Muslims alike and pioneered strategies of resistance he would later apply to in India itself. His emerging political philosophy, known as satyagraha, was confrontational, though the nonviolent, approach to political action. He did not call for social revolution but sought the moral transformation of individuals. He worked to raise the status of India’s untouchables, the lowest and most ritually polluting groups within the caste hierarchy, but he launched no attack on caste in general and accepted support from businessmen and their socialist critics alike.