EMERGING NATIONAL MOVEMENTS IN ASIA AND AFRICA, 1920s1950s

1
CHAPTER 27

• EMERGING NATIONAL MOVEMENTS IN ASIA AND AFRICA,
  1920s-1950s

2
World War Is Effect

• Barbara Tuchman has called World War I a "burnt
  path across history."
• By that she meant that this event was so
  wide-ranging and compelling that it affected a
  broad cross section of the world's people.

3
World Destinies Linked

• WWI linked together the destinies of many diverse
  peoples in a way never seen before.
• Neither the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth
  century nor the great plague epidemic of the
  fourteenth century had tied together the fate of
  so many.

4
Interwar Years 1920s and 1930s

• Brought bitter disappointment to colonial peoples
  who shared the common appeal to universal
  principles of common humanity that WWI had
  seemingly been fought for
• equality
• individual worth
• self-determination of peoples.

5
European Imperialism Persists

• European imperial nations hung on, through
  mandates, to former colonies and extended them by
  dismembering the old Ottoman holdings.
• European hypocrisy only lent righteous
  indignation to African and Asian nationalist
  feeling.

6
Nationalism in Colonies

• In several ways the West contributed to the
  growth of nationalism in the colonized world.
• Schools and missions created a small native elite
  who would hold Europe to its own ideals.
• No better example of Western ideals coming back
  to haunt them.

7
De-Colonization

• World War II completed the process of laying the
  groundwork for de-colonization.
• Too many peoples, all at once, were ready to try
  their wings as free nations.

8
De-colonizing Forces

• Colonies drew confidence from the colonial
  infrastructures built during the past hundred
  years.
• They drew together the negative impulse of
  anti-imperialism and the positive optimism that
  the new countries they would create could better
  serve their people.

9
De-Colonization At Last

• The catalog of exploitations gave them a handy
  list of what they did not want for the future.
• The Western imperialists, exhausted from the war,
  could not militarily or morally stand up to the
  wave of de-colonization that ensued.

10
Western Reaction

• Britain gave in with some good grace in Africa
  and India.
• France, Holland and Portugal carried on longer.
• Particularly in Southeast Asia this would produce
  a last round of bitter struggle in Indonesia and
  Indochina.

11
YOU SHOULD UNDERSTAND

• Japan's imperialism in the Far East and its
  abortive steps toward a liberal democracy.
• China's struggle to overcome problems of
  division, poverty, over-population, and attack
  from Japan.
• Southeast Asia's faltering steps toward
  self-government.

12
YOU SHOULD UNDERSTAND

• India's nationalist movement.
• The Arab revolt against imperialism.
• Colonial Africa's incipient desires for
  independence while experiencing detribalization
  and segregation.