The great transformations experienced by peoples around the world following the Second World War can best be compared to the age of revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 22). In both eras peoples rose up to undertake the political, economic, social, and cultural transformation of their societies, and in both eras history seemed to accelerate as a quick succession of events had impacts across the globe. As in the age of revolution, which saw the independence of the United States and most of Spanish America as well as the Haitian and French Revolutions, people swept aside old notions of authority tied to kings and empires. In Asia the Chinese Revolution and the independence of India and Pakistan marked the accelerating pace of liberation movements that dismantled European colonialism and ushered in new political ideologies and economic systems.

Liberation movements spanning the globe sought not only to end imperial domination and remove social boundaries imposed by white racism, but also to make deeper changes in how peoples perceived themselves and their societies. As radical and new as these ideas were, they nonetheless owed much to the Enlightenment ideals about liberal individual rights that were promoted by the ideologues of the French and American Revolutions.

Though the social revolutions in countries like China and Cuba and the independence movements across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East brought unprecedented deep and fast changes, they were only the first steps in remaking societies that had been created by centuries of colonialism. Uprooting the legacies of colonialism — in the form of poverty, continued domination of economies by foreign powers, limited industrialization, and weak states — remained a daunting challenge that societies continued to face in the future.