Postwar decolonization swept away direct colonial rule across three continents

Evidence

The postwar moment was one of intense anti-colonialism. The Pan- African Congress of 1945, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, significantly brought together almost every future leader of major postcolonial liberations. India and Pakistan attained independence and statehood. Israel came into being. China quickly followed with its long march to its own revolution. Independence movements swept across Africa: Ghana, Kenya, Algeria, and so on. British, French, Portuguese colonies in more or less that order were swept away. Cuba threw off its yoke of gringo economic colonialism. Direct rule of the nineteenth century gave way to indirect rule in the first half of the twentieth. The latter was swept aside for independence by mid-century. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1776

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from direct to indirect rule to independence is a classic imperial-history throughline (see Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject). — connects to: Decolonization unfolded in distinct political phases across a thirty-year span — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 136; Eight MENA states threw off colonial rule between 1932 and 1962; Postwar genuine revolutions occurred on three continents beyond Europe. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1084