The Rise of Nationalism in the Colonies

Colonial nationalism was the principal cause of imperial decline, in the straightforward sense that it produced the political pressure without which no imperial power would have conceded independence. The British Empire did not fall because London grew tired of ruling; it fell because a succession of mass movements, organised in the institutions the empire had created, refused any longer to be ruled. Between 1947 and 1980, more than 40 British colonies and protectorates became independent. The movements that produced these states are the heart of the story.

The First Generation: Western Education and Political Awakening

The first generation of colonial nationalists was typically Western-educated and rooted in the institutions the empire had created. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was the work of English-speaking professionals excluded from the senior ranks of the Indian Civil Service. The same pattern repeated itself across the empire: clerks, lawyers, and teachers, formed in mission schools and colonial universities, were the first to demand a share of the political power that their education had equipped them to exercise. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), would later describe the colonial elite as “the white man’s achievement” — produced by imperialism, and turned against it.

Pan-Africanist ideas, articulated in the diaspora by Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, fed back into African movements. The Fifth Pan-African Congress of October 1945, held in Manchester, brought together a generation of future leaders: Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, Peter Abrahams, Amy Ashwood Garvey. The Congress resolved to “fight ceaselessly for the freedom of Africa,” and the resolution framed the political work of the next two decades. The earlier congresses had been largely diaspora affairs; the 1945 meeting was, for the first time, a congress of Africans and West Indians from the colonies.

The Indian National Movement

The Indian National Congress was the model and the test case. The 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar radicalised Indian opinion; the 1930 Salt March brought the Congress under Gandhi to mass international attention. By 1946, with the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, communal violence, and an economy in crisis, the Attlee government concluded that the cost of repression was greater than the cost of departure. The result, on 15 August 1947, was the partition of India into the Dominions of India and Pakistan. The settlement resolved the political question of Indian independence; it created the enduring trauma of partition, in which perhaps 200,000 people were killed and 15 million displaced. The British left with a moral stain that no amount of post-imperial hand-wringing has lifted.

The African Revolt

African nationalism emerged more slowly, but by the late 1940s it had become an unstoppable force. In Ghana, Nkrumah transformed the United Gold Coast Convention into the Convention People’s Party and won the 1951 election from prison. The 1956 election gave him an overwhelming mandate for independence, and on 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve independence. In Kenya, the Kenya African Union and the related Mau Mau movement challenged settler interests with both constitutional pressure and armed struggle. Nigeria moved through constitutional conferences to independence on 1 October 1960; Tanganyika followed in 1961; Uganda in 1962; and Kenya in 1963.

The Caribbean and South-East Asia

Caribbean nationalism was shaped by small island size, sugar-plantation economies, and majority African populations. The People’s National Movement in Trinidad, led by Eric Williams, won the 1956 election and led the country to independence in 1962. Jamaica followed later that year, after the collapse of the West Indies Federation of 1958–1962. In South-East Asia, Aung San negotiated Burma’s independence in 1947, only to be assassinated six months before the transfer of power. The Federation of Malaya, led by Tunku Abdul Rahman and the Alliance coalition, secured independence on 31 August 1957 after a decade of insurgency.

The Achievement and Its Discontents

The colonial nationalist movements achieved the dismantling of the British Empire and the creation of more than 30 new states. Nationalism was both the cause of the empire’s end and the principal form in which the empire’s institutions — Westminster systems, common-law courts, English-language bureaucracies, and the convention of loyal opposition — were carried forward. The post-independence record is uneven. Ghana’s Nkrumah drifted into a one-party state and was overthrown in 1966. Kenyatta’s Kenya became a regional anchor. Many of the new states, in Fanon’s bleakest prediction, inherited the boundaries drawn in European chancelleries and the economies built for extraction. The independence movements won political freedom; the structures of metropolitan economic dependence proved harder to dislodge, and the politics of reparations, debt, and racial justice that animate the contemporary Commonwealth are the unfinished business of the 1950s.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of colonial nationalism is divided. Nationalist historians, in the tradition of Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957) and Julius Nyerere’s essays, treat the movements as a story of awakening and achievement. The “decolonisation” school, associated with Frantz Fanon and later Frederick Cooper, has stressed the violence and the limits of the post-colonial state. John Lonsdale, in essays collected in Dreams from My Mother and Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (with Bruce Berman, 1996), gave colonial nationalism its most sophisticated account: a provincial, multi-stranded politics, deeply rooted in local inequalities, that the British consistently misread as derivative. The post-2000 scholarship, influenced by Steven Pierce and Emma Hunter, has turned to the everyday life of the movements — the trade unionists, the women’s organisations, the welfare associations — and shown that independence was the work of a much wider social layer than the towering figures of the official story.

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