Unit 8.5 — Decolonization After 1900

Topic 8.4 covered how communism spread through different local paths. Topic 8.5 covers a parallel and often overlapping story: how the colonial empires built up across Units 4 and 6 finally came apart after World War II. This topic's root causes trace directly back to Topic 7.5's betrayed self-determination and Topic 7.3's colonial troop mobilization — decades of accumulated grievance finally converting into independence.

A spectrum of methods, not one uniform process

The exam's central organizing point: decolonization happened through genuinely different methods depending on the specific colony and colonizer. Some colonies achieved independence through violent revolution or war — China (Topic 8.4's revolution), Algeria, Vietnam, and Palestine are the exam's standard cases. Others achieved nonviolent, negotiated independence — India, Ghana, and Turkey are the standard cases here. Still others, including Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa, saw a genuine mix of both violent and nonviolent methods within a single independence struggle. Sorting a specific decolonization case into the correct category is the core skill this topic tests.

India: Gandhi's nonviolent resistance and the trauma of partition

Mohandas Gandhi's central strategic idea, satyagraha ("truth force"), refused the British government the everyday Indian cooperation — tax payments, purchases of British goods, simple non-resistance — that let it rule India cheaply, through campaigns built to make colonial administration visibly, publicly untenable. The Salt March of 1930 put that theory into action at national scale: over 24 days, Gandhi and his followers walked roughly 240 miles to the coast to make salt by hand in open defiance of Britain's salt monopoly, a deliberately tiny "crime" that let millions of ordinary Indians join a single act of mass civil disobedience. Independence finally came in 1947, but not peacefully: partition split the subcontinent into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, and the resulting sectarian violence left roughly a million dead and some fifteen million displaced — proof that a nonviolent path to independence carried no guarantee of a nonviolent transfer of power.

Ghana: negotiated independence and a symbolic first

Educated in the United States and Britain, Kwame Nkrumah returned home to found the Convention People's Party, a mass party that pressured the colonial government through worker strikes and organized boycotts instead of taking up arms. That pressure campaign paid off in 1957, when Britain granted Ghana independence with essentially no armed conflict — and because it got there first, Ghana became the model every other sub-Saharan colony's independence movement would look to as the 1950s turned into the 1960s and one territory after another followed its path.

Algeria: one of the era's most violent decolonizations

Algeria's path to independence stands in sharp contrast to Ghana's. Starting in 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) fought an eight-year war against French rule that bled into the cities themselves — bombing campaigns hit French civilian areas of Algiers, and the French military answered with mass roundups, torture, and reprisal killings against the Algerian population, leaving a death toll historians still argue over. Algeria is the exam's clearest case for how violently a decolonization struggle could unfold when a colonizing power (in this case France, which treated Algeria as an integral part of France itself rather than an ordinary colony) refused to negotiate independence.

Why this matters for the exam

Topic 8.5 rewards placing specific decolonization cases correctly on the violent-to-nonviolent spectrum and explaining why each took its particular path: India's Gandhi-led nonviolent movement (still producing violent partition), Ghana's negotiated first-mover independence under Nkrumah, and Algeria's guerrilla war against a colonizer unwilling to negotiate. A strong essay traces these methods back to Topic 7.5's roots — the same betrayed wartime promises of self-determination that first activated nationalist organizing there are what these movements finally converted into actual independence decades later.