The postwar moment was defined by sweeping anti-colonial independence

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Confronted, then, with multiple signs of discontent, the Government General sought first to contain those deemed a danger to its own authority, which policy the Ministry of Colonies fully sanctioned. Such repression provides telling proof of a heightened vulnerability among the colonizers, but it was not the only way the French attempted to reassert their hegemony in West Africa in the postwar decade. Equally striking was a new emphasis in the rhetoric of French officials on how different Africans were from French, and how important it was now to keep the two races separate. These expressions took on a variety of forms. Most revealing, perhaps, was a reconsideration of French naturalization policy toward the colonized and in a more racialized direction; colonial officials now began to wonder whether anyone not born on metropolitan soil could become French. Greater consciousness of race, however, emerged in other ways as well. Sexual relations between French and Africans, which the administration had once encouraged, were now increasingly condemned in favor of white wives and families. And the French worried more about miscegenation and its consequences for French rule. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 566 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anticolonial independence movements doubled UN membership by the 1966 covenants — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 227; Postwar welfarism and colonial economic exploitation were simultaneous, not opposed. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 236; Postwar America had to persuade a decolonizing world of its leadership — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 897 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Postwar decolonization swept away direct colonial rule across three continents #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1776
• Postwar French colonial policy shifted toward racial separation and away from assimilation #complicates (0.72) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 566