Africa’s first modern nationalist hero, Kwame Nkrumah (KWAH-may ehn-KROO-mah) of Ghana, paraphrased a biblical quotation when he urged his followers, “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all these other things will be added unto you.” But would winning the political kingdom of independence or freedom from European rule really produce “all these other things”—release from state oppression, industrial growth, economic development, reasonably unified nations, and a better life for all? That was the central question confronting the new nations emerging from colonial rule. They were joined in that quest by already independent but nonindustrialized countries and regions such as China, Thailand, Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey, and Central and South America. Together they formed the bloc of nations known variously as the third world, the developing countries, or the Global South. Those countries accounted for about 90 percent of the fourfold increase in human numbers that the world experienced during the twentieth century. Between 1950 and 2000, the populations of Asia and Africa alone grew from 64 percent of the world’s total to 70 percent, with an estimated increase to 79 percent by 2050. (See Snapshot: World Population Growth.) That immense surge in global population, at one level a great triumph for the human species, also underlay many of the difficulties these nations faced as they conducted their various experiments with freedom.

Almost everywhere, the moment of independence generated something close to euphoria. Having emerged from the long night of colonial rule, free peoples had the opportunity to build anew. The developing countries would be laboratories for fresh approaches to creating modern states, nations, cultures, and economies. In the decades that followed, experiments with freedom multiplied, but the early optimism was soon tempered by the difficulties and disappointments of those tasks.