Decolonisation Timeline
The independence process began during the XVIIIth century and continues up to modern history with the Independence of South Sudan in 2011. Most of the independence movements are coming from the decolonization of European empires. The temporal evolution of the number of independence declared presents interesting causes for those movements, with the observation of various waves of independencies. The first one happens during the first half of the XIXth century. It is correlated with the Latin American Wars independence which were initiated by the example of the French and American revolutions. The independences from Spain and Portugal also occurred when Napoleon Bonaparte’s occupation of those european countries happened, questioning the allegiance of the colonies.
Then the movement slew down during the second half of this century. The First World War manifests a new spike of independencies, before the biggest wave that occurred after the Second World War. It began as a first batch directly after the war, until a second that occurred in the 1960s. The main decolonizations finished at the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.
It is informative to link major historic events to the process of decolonization as it could explain some of the pattern that we observe. However, another interaction needs to be taken into account to better understand the wave process, the countries spatial proximity. The map presented above regroup the different dates of decolonization through the years. First, we observe that the first decolonization mainly occurred in the Americas during the end of the XVIIIth and the first half of the XIXth century. Then came a wave of English independencies with Canada, Australia, South America and Egypt during the second half of the XIXth century. It appears that Africa declared its independence after the Second World War almost as a block. The different empires fell down in a short amount of time, as big administrative regions were cut into different countries. The last independencies happened at the fall of the Soviet Union, with the independence of Ukraine, the Balkans, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Through war and peaceful processes, the former colonies achieved independence, experiencing full control over their economy and foreign diplomacy. Local conflicts were now made possible depending on old tensions, or even colonialist borders creations. We will discuss this subject by looking at the conflicts post-decolonization.