Hi, I’m John Green,
this is Crash Course World History
and today we’re going
to talk about decolonization.
The empires European states formed
in the 19th century proved about
as stable and long-lasting
as Genghis Khan’s,
leading to so many of the nation states
we know and love today.
Yes, I’m looking at you, Burundi.
DID YOU EVER KNOW YOU’RE MY BURUNDI?
YOU’RE EVERYTHING--
[Stan brings Karaoke house down with his version
of WindBeneathMyWings? Not kidding]
STAN, DON’T CUT TO THE INTRO!
I SING LIKE AN ANGEL!
[BEST]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[EVAR]
So unless you’re over 60--
and let’s face it, Internet, you’re not--
you’ve only ever known a world
of nation states.
But as we’ve seen from Egypt
to Alexander the Great to China
to Rome to the Mongols,
who, for once, are not the exception here,
[lackadaisical layabouts listen to their legion's
lamentations, lounging no longer.]
to the Ottomans and the Americas,
empire has long been the dominant
way we’ve organized ourselves politically--
or at least the way that
other people have organized us.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green!
So to them Star Wars would’ve been, like,
a completely different movie.
Most of them would’ve been like,
Go Empire! Crush those rebels!
Yeah,
also they’d be like what is this screen
that displays crisp moving images of
events that are not currently occurring?
[failing to imagine MFTP's ideas complexly]
Also, not to get off-topic,
but you never learn what happens AFTER
the rebel victory in Star Wars.
And, as as we’ve learned from the
French Revolution to the Arab Spring,
revolution is often the easy part.
[tell that to residents of Alderaan]
I mean,
you think destroying a Death Star is hard?
Try negotiating a trade treaty with gungans.
[oh Naboo you di'int!]
Right, anyway. So, the late 20th century was
not the first time that empires disintegrated.
Rome comes to mind. Also the Persians.
And of course
the American Revolution ended
one kind of European imperial experiment.
But in all those cases,
Empire struck back...
heh heh, you see what I did there?
I mean, Britain lost its 13 colonies,
but later controlled half
of Africa and all of India.
And what makes the recent decolonization
so special is that at least so far,
no empires have emerged to
replace the ones that fell.
And this was largely due to World War II
because on some level,
the Allies were fighting
to stop Nazi imperialism:
Hitler wanted to take over Central Europe,
and Africa, and probably the Middle East--
and the Ally defeat of the Nazis
discredited the whole idea of empire.
So the English, French, and Americans
couldn’t very well say to the colonial
troops who’d fought alongside them,
“Thank you so much for helping us to
thwart Germany’s imperialistic ambitions.
As a reward, please hand in your rifle and
return to your state of subjugation.”
[a little awkward, that]
Plus, most of the big colonial powers--
especially France, Britain, and Japan--
had been significantly
weakened by World War II,
by which I mean that large
swaths of them looked like this:
So, post-war decolonization
happened all over the place:
The British colony that had once been
“India” became three independent nations.
By the way, is this Gandhi or is this
Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi?
In Southeast Asia, French Indochina
became Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
And the Dutch East Indies became Indonesia.
But of course when we
think about decolonization,
we mostly think about Africa
going from this to this:
So we’re gonna oversimplify here,
[got that, commenters?]
because we have to,
[not because we hate and/or forgot you]
but decolonization throughout Afro-Eurasia
had some similar characteristics.
Because it occurred
in the context of the Cold War,
many of these new nations
had to choose between
socialist and capitalist influences,
which shaped their futures.
[and their future color-coding]
While many of these new countries
eventually adopted some form of democracy,
the road there was often rocky.
Also decolonization often
involved violence,
usually the overthrow of colonial elites.
But we’ll turn now to
the most famous nonviolent--
or supposedly so, anyway--
decolonization: that of India.
So the story begins,
more or less, in 1885
with the founding of
the Indian National Congress.
Congress Party leaders and
other nationalists in India
were usually from the elite classes.
Initially,
they didn’t even demand
independence from Britain.
But they were interested in creating
a modern Indian nation
rather than a return to some
ancient pre-colonial form,
possibly because India was--
and is--hugely diverse
and really only unified into a
single state when under imperial rule
by one group or another,
whether the Mauryans, the Guptas,
the Mughals, or the British.
Okay, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
The best known Indian nationalist,
Mohandas K. Gandhi,
was a fascinating character:
[and a fabric-draping genius]
A British educated lawyer born
to a wealthy family,
he’s known for making his own clothes,
his long fasts,
and his battles to alleviate poverty,
improve the rights of women,
and achieve a unified Indian
independence from Britain.
In terms of decolonization,
he stands out for his use of nonviolence
and his linking it to a somewhat
mythologized view of Indian history.
I mean, after all,
there’s plenty of violence in India’s
past and in its heroic epics,
but Gandhi managed to hearken back to a
past that used nonviolence to bring change.
Gandhi and his compatriot Jawaharlal Nehru
believed that a single India could
continue to be ruled by Indian elites
and somehow transcend the tension
between the country’s Hindu majority
and its sizable Muslim minority.
In this they were less practical than their
contemporary, Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
the leader of the Muslim League who felt--
to quote historian Ainslie Embree--
"that the unified India of which the
Congress spoke was an artificial one,
created and maintained
by British bayonets.”
Jinnah proved correct
and in 1947 when the British left,
their Indian colony was partitioned
into the modern state of India
and West and East Pakistan,
the latter of which became
Bangladesh in 1971.
While it’s easy to congratulate both
the British and the Indian governments
on an orderly and nonviolent
transfer of power,
the reality of partition was
neither orderly nor nonviolent.
About 12 million people were displaced
as Hindus in Pakistan moved to India
and Muslims in India moved to Pakistan.
As people left their homes,
sometimes unwillingly, there was violence,
and all tolled as many as
half a million people were killed,
more than died in the bloody
Indonesian battle for independence.
So while it’s true that
the massive protests that forced
Britain to end its colonization of India
were nonviolent,
the emergence of the independent
states involved really wasn’t.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
All this violence devastated Gandhi,
whose lengthy and repeated hunger strikes
to end violence had mixed results,
and who was eventually assassinated
by a Hindu nationalist
who felt that Gandhi was
too sympathetic to Muslims.
Oh, it’s time for the open letter?
[we should just add wheels
to the throne, maybe?]
An Open Letter to hunger strikers.
But first,
let’s see what’s
in the secret compartment today.
A cupcake?
Stan, this just seems cruel.
[and delicious. DFTB delicious.]
These are from Meredith the Intern
to celebrate Merebration,
the holiday she invented to celebrate
the anniversary of her singleness.
[no good can come of this, John…]
Dear hunger strikers,
Do you remember earlier when I said that
Gandhi hearkened back to a
mythologized Indian past?
Well it turns out that hunger striking
in India goes back all the way to,
like, the 5th century BCE.
Hunger strikes have been
used around the world
including
British and American suffragettes,
who hunger struck to get the vote.
And in pre-Christian Ireland,
when you felt wronged by someone,
it was common practice to sit on their
doorstep and hunger strike
until your grievance was addressed.
And sometimes it even works.
I really admire you, hunger strikers.
But I lack the courage of your convictions.
Also, this is an amazing cupcake.
Best wishes,
John Green
Since independence,
India has largely been a success story,
although we will talk about the complexity
of India’s emerging global capitalism
next week.
For now, though,
let’s travel east to Indonesia, [by map?]
a huge nation of over 13,000 islands
that has largely been ignored
here on Crash Course World History due to
our long-standing bias against islands.
Like, we haven’t even mentioned
Greenland on this show.
The Greenlanders, of course, haven’t
complained because
they don’t have the Internet.[about to show
how much internet they have in comments...]
So, the Dutch exploited their island
colonies with the system of kultuurstelsel,
[gesundheit!]
in which all peasants had to set aside
one fifth of their land to grow cash crops
for export to the Netherlands.
This accounted for 25% of
the total Dutch national budget
and it explains why they have
all kinds of fancy buildings
despite technically living underwater.
[flippers > wooden shoes]
They’re like sea monkeys.
This system was rather less popular
in Indonesia, and the Dutch
didn’t offer much in exchange.
They couldn’t even defend
their colony from the Japanese,
who occupied it for most of World War II,
during which time the Japanese furthered
the cause of Indonesian nationalism
by placing native Indonesians in
more prominent positions of power,
including Sukarno, who became
Indonesia’s first prime minister.
After the war, the Dutch--
with British help--
tried to hold onto their Indonesian
colonies with so-called “police actions,”
which went on for more than four years
before Indonesia finally won
its independence in 1950.
Over in the French colonies of IndoChina,
so called because they were
neither Indian nor Chinese,
things were even more violent.
The end of colonization was
disastrous in Cambodia,
where the 17-year reign of Norodom Sihanouk
gave way to the rise of the Khmer Rouge,
[Pol Pot definitely prime candidate
for the Evil Baby Orphanage]
which massacred a stunning 21%
of Cambodia’s population
between 1975 and 1979.
In Vietnam, the French fought
communist-led nationalists,
especially Ho Chi Minh from almost
the moment World War II ended until 1954,
when the French were defeated.
And then the Americans learned that
there was a land war available in Asia,
so they quickly took over from the French
and communists did not
fully control Vietnam until 1975.
Despite still being ostensibly communist,
Vietnam now manufactures all kinds of
stuff that we like in America,
especially sneakers.
More about that next week, too,
but now to Egypt.
You’ll remember that Egypt
bankrupted itself in the 19th century,
trying to industrialize and ever since
had been ruled by an Egyptian king
who took his orders from the British.
So while technically Egypt
had been independent since 1922,
it was very dependent independence.
But, that changed in the 1950s,
when the king was overthrown by the army.
The army commander who led that coup was Gemal
Abdul Nasser,
who proved brilliant at playing the US
and the USSR off each other
to the benefit of Egypt.
Nasser’s was a largely secular nationalism,
and he and his successors saw one of
the other anti-imperialistic nationalist
forces in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood,
as a threat.
So once in power, Nasser and the army
banned the Muslim Brotherhood,
forcing it underground, where it would disappear
and never become an issue again.
[not exactly]
Wait, what’s that?
...Really?
And finally let’s turn to
Central and Southern Africa.
One of the most problematic legacies
of colonialism was its geography.
Colonial boundaries became redefined
as the borders of new nation states,
even where those boundaries were
arbitrary or, in some cases, pernicious.
The best known example is in Rwanda,
where two very different tribes,
the Hutu and the Tutsis
were combined into one nation.
But, more generally,
the colonizers’ focus on value
extraction really hurt these new nations.
Europeans claimed to bring civilization and
economic development to their colonies,
but this economic development focused
solely on building infrastructure
to get resources and export them.
Now whether European powers deliberately
sabotaged development in Africa
is a hot-button topic we’re going
to stay well away from,
but this much is inarguably true:
when the Europeans left,
African nations did not have the
institutions necessary to thrive
in the post-war industrial world.
They had very few schools, for instance,
and even fewer universities.
Like, when the Congo achieved independence
from Belgium in 1960, there were sixteen college
graduates in a country of fourteen million
people.
Also, in many of these new countries,
the traditional elites had been
undermined by imperialism.
Most Europeans didn’t rule
their African possessions directly
but rather through the
proxies of local rulers.
And once the Europeans left,
those local rulers, the upper classes,
were seen as illegitimate collaborators.
And this meant that a new group of rulers
had to rise up to take their place,
often with very little
experience in governance.
I mean, Zimbabwe’s long-serving dictator
Robert Mugabe was a high school teacher.
Let that be a lesson to you.
YOUR TEACHERS MAY
HAVE DICTATORIAL AMBITIONS.
But most strongmen have emerged, of course,
from the military:
Joseph Mobutu seized power in the Congo,
which he held from 1965 until
his death in 1997.
Idi Amin was military dictator
of Uganda from 1971 to 1979.
Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya
from 1977 until 2011.
The list goes on, but I don’t want to give
the wrong impression about Africa.
Because while the continent
does have less freedom
and lower levels of development
than other regions in the world,
many African nations show strong
and consistent signs of growth
despite the challenges of decolonization.
Botswana for instance has gone from
70% literacy to 85% in the past 15 years
and has seen steady GDP growth over 5%.
Benin’s economy has grown
in each of the past 12 years,
which is better than
Europe or the US can say.
In 2002, Kenya’s life expectancy was 47;
today it’s 63.
Ethiopia’s per capita GDP
has doubled over the past 10 years;
and Mauritania has seen its infant
mortality rate fall by more than 40%.
Now, this progress is spotty and fragile,
but it’s important to note that
these nations have existed, on average,
about 13 years less than my dad.
Of course, past experience with the fall
of empires hasn’t given us cause for hope,
but many citizens of these new nations
are seeing real progress.
That said,
disaster might lurk around the corner.
It’s hard to say.
I mean, now more than ever, we’re trying
to tell the story of humans...
from inside the story of humans.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed
by Stan Muller.
Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko.
[single, yes, but waaay too cool for you]
The associate producer is
Danica Johnson.
The show is written by my high school
history teacher, Raoul Meyer,
and myself.
And our graphics team is Thought Bubble.
[is it true what they say about Winnipeg?]
Last week’s phrase of the week was
“Meatloaf’s Career.”
If you want to guess at this week’s
phrase of the week or suggest future ones,
you can do so in comments
where you can also ask questions
about today’s video that will
be answered by our team of historians.
Thanks for watching Crash Course
and as we say in my hometown,
don’t forget to
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
[outro]