Decolonization: Seeds Planted by WWII
How World War II fatally weakened European empires and accelerated the independence movements that would transform the map of the world within two decades.
Empires Under Strain
In 1939, the European colonial empires collectively controlled most of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific. By 1965, most of these territories were independent nations. World War II did not cause decolonization by itself — independence movements predated the war — but it fatally accelerated the process by simultaneously weakening the colonizers and empowering the colonized.
The war shattered the myth of European invincibility. Japan's rapid conquest of British Malaya, Singapore, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies in 1941-1942 demonstrated that Asian armies could defeat European forces. The fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942, when roughly 80,000 British and Commonwealth troops surrendered to a smaller Japanese force, was particularly devastating to British prestige. As the historian Christopher Bayly noted, the sight of white soldiers surrendering to Asian troops permanently altered the psychology of colonized peoples across Asia.
The war also physically and financially exhausted the colonial powers. Britain, France, and the Netherlands emerged from the war economically devastated, with neither the resources nor the will to maintain expensive colonial administrations and suppress growing independence movements. Britain's national debt reached 250% of GDP by 1945. Maintaining the British Empire in India alone required a substantial military garrison that the bankrupt postwar state could no longer afford.