Introduction

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CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The End of Empire

The Global South on the Global Stage
 
1914–Present

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Independence and Development: In the eyes of most Asians and Africans, the struggle for national independence from European colonial rule was but a prelude to and prerequisite for the even greater struggle for modern development, symbolized here by Nigerian students in a computer classroom. (BBC Images)
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“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”1

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s nationalist leader, first uttered these words in 1964 at his trial for treason, sabotage, and conspiracy to overthrow the apartheid government of his country. Convicted of those charges, he spent the next twenty-seven years in prison, sometimes working at hard labor in a stone quarry. Often the floor was his bed, and a bucket was his toilet. For many years, he was allowed one visitor a year for thirty minutes and permitted to write and receive one letter every six months. When he was finally released from prison in 1990 under growing domestic and international pressure, he concluded his first speech as a free person with the words originally spoken at his trial. Four years later, in 1994, South Africa held its first election in which blacks and whites alike were able to vote. The outcome of that election made Mandela the country’s first black African president, and it linked South Africa to dozens of other countries all across Africa and Asia that had thrown off European rule or the control of white settlers during the second half of the twentieth century.

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VARIOUSLY CALLED THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE OR DECOLONIZATION, that process carried an immense significance for the history of the twentieth century. It marked a dramatic change in the world’s political architecture, as nation-states triumphed over the empires that had structured much of the world’s political life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It mobilized millions of people, thrusting them into political activity and sometimes into violence and warfare. Decolonization signaled the declining legitimacy of both empire and race as a credible basis for political or social life. It promised not only national freedom but also personal dignity, abundance, and opportunity.

SEEKING THE MAIN POINT

In what ways did the experience of the “global south” during the past century register on the larger stage of world history?

What followed in the decades after independence was equally significant. Political, economic, and cultural experiments proliferated across these newly independent nations, which faced enormous challenges: the legacies of empire; their own deep divisions of language, ethnicity, religion, and class; their rapidly growing numbers; the competing demands of the capitalist West and the communist East; the difficult tasks of simultaneously building modern economies, stable politics, and coherent nations; and all of this in a world still shaped by the powerful economies and armies of the wealthy, already industrialized nations. The emergence of these new nations onto the world stage as independent and assertive actors has been a distinguishing feature of world history in this most recent century.

A Map of Time

1915 Gandhi returns to India from South Africa
1923–1938 Turkey’s secular modernization initiated under Kemal Ataturk
1928 Muslim Brotherhood established in Egypt
1947 Independence of India/Pakistan
1948 Establishment of state of Israel; apartheid formally established in South Africa
1949 Independence of Indonesia; communist victory in China
1955 Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations
1957–1975 Independence of African countries
1959 Cuban revolution
1960–1970s Wave of military coups in Africa and Latin America
1967 Six-day Arab/Israeli war
1973 OPEC oil embargo
1979 Revolution in Iran
1980s–1990s Growth of democratic movements and governments in Africa and Latin America
1994 End of apartheid in South Africa; genocide in Rwanda
2011 Arab Spring in the Middle East