COLONIALISM.

The term colonialism encompasses all of the diverse efforts by which colonizers seek to maintain their rule over colonized territory and to benefit from this exercise of power. Colonialism entails the reduction or elimination of autonomy for colonized people and the concomitant extension of control by the colonizers. These developments, almost by definition, take place in terms of political independence. In the narrowest possible sense, this means that one state (called the metropole) legally defines a territory it has taken over as a colony, claims sovereignty over it, and administers it. However, events since 1914—the beginning of World War I—demand that the term include diverse policies and practices by which the government of one state exercises its sovereignty to impose limitations on the actions of the elites and inhabitants of another territory. Alongside explicitly political questions of self-rule, the ways in which modern Europeans, in particular, pursued colonialism require that the concept include not just political domination but also the domination of economics, education, culture, and language. What distinguished modern colonialism from the empires or forms of domination exercised in other times and by other cultures, to quote the historian David Abernethy, was "the persistent effort of Europeans to undermine and reshape the modes of production, social institutions, cultural patterns, and value systems of indigenous peoples" (p. 10). Closely related to that was the role that sharp and institutionalized distinctions between colonized and colonizers played in European overseas colonialism.

THE COLONY AND THE METROPOLE

Whether it is judged by the narrowest or the broadest definition, twentieth-century colonialism was inextricably linked to the existence, expansion, and then almost total disappearance of the overseas empires that a number of European states acquired as part of the "new imperialism." The late nineteenth century saw the reinvigoration of assertions by political leaders and pundits throughout Europe that their state should seek to control and govern other areas of the globe. This process of building or expanding an empire is called imperialism. By 1914 the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal—along with the non-European latecomers the United States of America and Japan—together had divided up and were ruling almost all of Africa and South, Southeast, and East Asia, along with most of Oceania. In addition to territories that they had conquered under the ideological promptings of the new imperialism, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal also continued to control and govern previously conquered overseas territories. The most notable were areas where large-scale European settlement had taken place, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, andSouth Africa (the so-called white dominions of the British Empire), French Algeria, the Dutch East Indies (in present-day Indonesia), and Portuguese holdings on the African coast.

The growth, maintenance, and eventual decline of these modern empires not only shaped the world outside of Europe, the practices and certainties of colonial rule also helped form the institutions that connected modern European states to their own people, including nationality, citizenship, parliamentary rule, and popular sovereignty. As the twentieth century opened, all Europeans struggled to navigate the conflicts that the institutionalization of liberal ideas such as individual rights, rational debate, the will of the people, representative government, and universalism provoked. In the overseas colonies, governments that at home embraced liberal principles (to varying degrees) ruled over people who had little access to citizenship or its attendant rights. The existence of large empires offered various ways to defuse such tensions (above all through nationalist mobilization at home), terrains from which resources to support metropolitan ambitions could be drawn (whether Indochinese rubber, Congolese precious metals, or colonial conscripts and recruits), and laboratories where solutions to metropolitan problems could be tried out (in areas ranging from urban design in French-ruled Morocco to legal reform and crowd control in British India).

Beginning at the end of World War I and accelerating after World War II, the resistance of colonized peoples to their limited options and lack of autonomy received international attention. Their struggles both suggested that Europeans had betrayed their ideals in the pursuit of empire and, more radically, that the practice of empire revealed many of the contradictions inherent in European modernity.

JUSTIFICATIONS FOR COLONIALISM

As the twentieth century opened, colonialism continued to enjoy a largely positive reputation among European statesmen and among most of the writers who paid attention to it. Discussions centered less on exploiting the economic and military potential that empire offered than they had in previous decades. The concept of careful and respectful colonialism now overshadowed that of openly ambitious and rapacious imperialism. Most arguments for maintaining European control in overseas territories asserted that it was good for all involved and that it both offered proof of and contributed to the dynamism, vision, and strength of the colonizing society. They pointed to economic and strategic concerns and claimed that colonialism increased patriotic unity and moral regeneration at home.

For the British, whose control of some one-fourth of the world's habitable territory dwarfed that of its competitors, the empire often appeared as a structure that, if the right men ran it according to proper rules, could reinforce traditional hierarchies at home. Most of the men whom the Colonial and India Offices recruited to run imperial affairs were members of the aristocratic and Oxford- and Cambridge-trained elites; their practice of colonial governance helped ensconce powers and privileges that the extension of capitalism, popular democracy, and mass culture were undermining within the British Isles. Despite the intense struggles within Britain for female suffrage, for example, women were barred from virtually all posts in the India Office.

The colonizers' "civilizing mission" provided the most popular moral explanation for colonial rule. Some advocates couched their arguments in terms of obligations—what the British writer Rudyard Kipling identified as the "white man's burden" to assist the darker, and supposedly lesser, peoples of the world. Others, such as French defenders of the mission civilisatrice, insisted that their nation, thanks to its universalist values, was willing and able to reshape and improve other peoples and societies by making the colonized more like their colonizers. Colonialists were certain that Europeans alone could bring the building blocks of progress to the backward people whom they, through conquest, had made their wards. At the most basic level, colonialists pointed to the benefits of modern technology and European-imposed order—what a British medical official in Kenya called "the railroad and the hall of justice."

The pursuit of truth, and particularly of scientific knowledge, offered another justification of colonial rule. Its proponents spoke in terms of the interest of all humanity. European governments and businesses, eager to exploit the economic potential and consolidate political control of their overseas possessions, supported scholars and scientists whose work facilitated these endeavors. In this way, colonialism directly shaped the questions that ground modern Western universities, while, fortuitously, the universities in return lent it scientific authority. Studying the colonized world catalyzed the formation of new disciplines such as anthropology and revitalized others, including orientalism and geography. The flourishing field of imperial history, as the British historian Dane Kennedy notes, although often rigorous in its research methods, had as its main purpose "to contribute historical insights into past exercises in overseas power that could be used to inform and inspire contemporaries to shoulder their obligations as rulers of a world-imperial system" (p. 345).

Through analogies drawn from the natural sciences, European scholars created a systematized depiction of the world that explained why those countries that ruled were, in virtually every domain, superior to those whom they ruled. For example, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, both social Darwinism and a pseudoscientific form of racism proposed and espoused the recognition of hierarchies among racially distinguished populations, hierarchies that they claimed were anchored in nature and demonstrable by science. Most other social models inspired by scientific methods also offered strong support for European colonialism.

PRACTICES OF RULE: DEFINING TERRITORY

The ways in which twentieth-century metropoles ruled their colonial holdings varied within empires as well as between them. A key concern was how to define the land in question. The diversity of colonial legal frameworks can be explained less by the exigencies of rationality or efficiency than by the metropolitan powers' efforts to convince their own citizens that colonial suzerainty was natural and necessary. Other noteworthy factors included the need to convince colonial subjects of the same and tensions between different government bureaucracies over who had the authority to exercise colonial control. Existing legal frameworks ranged from annexation to diverse forms of protectorate status. France proclaimed the area around the North African port city of Algiers, which it had seized from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, to be an extension of France, and after 1848 French governments managed Algeria through domestic ministries. However, the French designated other holdings as colonies, including Cochin China, the Indochinese provinces that the Second Empire conquered in 1862 as part of Emperor Napoleon III's efforts to re-create Napoleonic glory. The British Empire defined many of its possessions as crown colonies, which gave the British government, through the Colonial Office, control over all areas of government. The French eventually governed most other parts of Indochina as protectorates, in which the colonizers had legally guaranteed privileges concerning, for example, religion and economics and controlled foreign affairs.

Protectorate status entailed leaving established local rulers in place, as France did with the sultan of Morocco after 1912; it also meant that the authority of the colonial power, although usually great, did not include actual sovereignty. The British used the protectorate model both in areas long under their control, such as Biafra (in present day Nigeria), and in more recent colonial possessions, such as Zanzibar (off the coast of southeast Africa). With the transfer by the British Foreign Office of authority over Zanzibar to the Colonial Office in 1913, its previous role in governing protectorates came to an end. Sudan, the only territory where the Foreign Office still governed after 1913, was called a condominium, meaning that the British shared sovereignty with Egypt, which itself was under British domination after 1882, and became a protectorate in 1914.

Well into the twentieth century, British privileges in some protectorates continued to be managed by royal chartered companies, such as the British South Africa Company, which officially governed Southern Rhodesia until 1922, when it became a colony. Chartered companies were given the right to exploit any sources of profit they could find and in return were expected to exercise effective administrative control over the territory. Through this mechanism, metropolitan officials sought to avoid having to spend money while still holding onto ultimate control. By the early twentieth century, the failure of these efforts had become apparent: in order to squeeze out profits, the companies had proved willing to engage in the violent brutalization of local populations, which metropolitan public opinions were no longer ready to support.

A final type of colonial domination arose after World War I, when the new League of Nations established a system of mandates, which assigned sovereignty over territories formerly ruled by Germany and the Ottoman Empire to states in the victorious alliance. For example, Belgium took over governance of the former German colony Rwanda-Burundi, and Britain became the mandatory power for the former Ottoman province of Palestine. Unlike protectorates, where the colonizing power simply assumed control of another polity's sovereignty, the mandate system assigned the mandatory power formal responsibility for the subjects or citizens of its mandate but assigned ultimate responsibility over the territory to the League of Nations. In practice, however, the mandatory powers treated their mandates as they did their other colonies.

DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT RULE

However the colonizers defined the lands in question, the two most important models under which European states claimed to govern their colonial possessions were direct and indirect rule. Under the direct model, officials in the metropole determined the approaches and rules used to govern the colonies and colonial officers worked to displace traditional local authorities. Direct rule was most often associated with the French Empire, but in the early twentieth century it was also proclaimed by the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies; Belgium after it transformed the Congo Free State into the Belgian Congo in 1908; Germany until it lost its colonies after 1918; and Portugal, which defined its African colonies as overseas provinces. Germany and Portugal both used direct rule in hopes of transforming their southern African colonies through settlement. In Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, white settlers had almost feudal powers over the administration of justice, administrative and police powers, and taxation. France, however, claimed to embrace direct rule in order to transform inhabitants in its new colonies either into French people or into people who would be like the French. In protectorates, such as Laos or Tonkin (in Indochina), France left in place some traditional authorities as figureheads but filled all administrative jobs with French functionaries. In the Belgian Congo, under the guise of a deeply paternalistic policy of direct rule, a combination of Belgian government officials, the Catholic Church, and Belgian private companies established the most extensive colonial administration in sub-Saharan Africa.

British leaders proclaimed that the principle of indirect rule underwrote their relationship with the inhabitants of their empire. Distinct but overlapping administrations—the Colonial Office, the India Office, and the Foreign Office—oversaw such policies in specific territories around the world, and each had its attendant corps of civil servants. To manage the empire's "crown jewel," India, the British had established a viceroy, called the raj, with an associated India Office and India Service, which governed India, Ceylon, and Burma, and later much of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean territories. Britain directly administered substantial parts of the Indian subcontinent while leaving roughly one-third of the territory under the control of some five hundred princely states. Relying on what imperialist scholars identified as "traditional" social structures, indirect rule both made local leaders into crucial elements of imperial government and placed groups of the local population into rigidly defined and distinct groups. As in the United Kingdom, the British imposed a strict hierarchy among people in India. In South Asia, this meant taking an existing but spottily and unevenly applied form of social organization, the caste system, and strengthening and generalizing its workings. An official warrant of precedence assigned dozens of strictly hierarchized ranks to everyone in the Raj, British or "native." At the top of this hierarchy, the British monarch held the title of emperor (or empress) of India. In this way, the British proclaimed that their rule was the legitimate continuation of the Mughal Empire, which they had conquered and ousted. The belief that they were strengthening traditional forms affirmed legitimacy among the colonized and reassured the British elites that respect for status played a crucial role in the superiority of Britain over other countries.

The varied models under which colonizing powers claimed to govern did not reflect significant differences in how the colonized experienced their colonization, or in the extent to which colonial officials interfered in the affairs of local peoples. Both had far more to do with the colonial power's interest in a given area, with how many Europeans were there, and with who those Europeans were. Administrative and academic efforts to define both the policies used and the people ruled in colonial possessions had as much, if not more, to do with the debates and developments within Europe than with actual practice or existing reality in the colonies. The idea that there was a stark opposition between direct and indirect forms of colonial rule resulted, above all, from competition between European states as each sought to identify the strengths and weaknesses of its colonial system, and thus its version of European modernity, by comparing them to others.

PRACTICES OF RULE: CONTROLLING PEOPLE

The European conquest of power had been relatively easy, especially during the massive late-nineteenth-century expansion into Africa, since machine guns, telegraph lines, other forms of technology, and a disregard for African lives allowed European armies and their local allies to kill or devastate everyone who stood in their way. In most new colonies, however, very few Europeans actually remained in place to maintain control, and so the colonizers relied on local collaborators to exercise sovereignty. Divide-and-rule policies proved a particularly efficient way to maintain colonial dominance. At a basic level, the boundaries that European countries agreed upon between their colonies often both lumped mutually hostile groups together into one territory and split up communities who previously had enjoyed close connections. A dramatic example of the latter phenomenon took place in the Horn of Africa, where the Somali people found themselves divided among British, Italian, French, and Ethiopian control.

The Belgian claim that two elements of the social structure of Rwanda-Burundi were distinct "ethnic groups," Tutsis and Hutus, highlights a slightly more subtle form of divide and rule. The Belgians celebrated the Tutsis as natural rulers, just as French republicans in Morocco and Algeria considered the Berbers more democratic, more egalitarian, and less imbued with Islamic religiosity than the Arabs. In each case, the colonizers took popularly recognized traits and created a stereotype that would legitimize stark differences in treatment, privileges, and possibilities between groups. Members of privileged groups who decided to participate had special access to the benefits that colonial administrations offered, including education, entry into the administration or armed forces, and economic opportunities.

Peoples who, on the contrary, sought to resist colonial rule, or even just unfair decisions, suffered directly and brutally. In German Southwest Africa (Namibia), the 1904 revolt by the Herero people against the favoritism shown to colonial settlers was met by massive violence, in which some two-thirds of the population died, the state seized all Herero lands, and the surviving Herero were banned from owning livestock. The British, as they sought to impose their League of Nations mandate in Iraq, responded to violent resistance by first Arabs and then Kurds with history's first large-scale use of aerial bombing in 1920–1921. The number of victims, and in particular the number of civilians killed and mutilated, led even British officials who wholeheartedly supported the takeover of Iraq (for example, Gertrude Bell) to protest the tactics' inhumanity. Even nonviolent protest could inspire harsh retribution, as it did, for example, when British troops killed 379 of Gandhi's followers who had dared to demonstrate for home rule in Amritsar, India, in 1919. Such tactics gave support to complaints that colonialism, by turning nonwhites into lesser forms of humanity, did not bring civilization but undermined it.

WORLD WAR I AND MODERN COLONIALISM

World War I brought to bear on Europeans the troops, the tools (such as machine guns), and the tactics (in particular the targeting of civilian populations) that had contributed so much to European colonial expansion. Even more dramatically, the competition between different European economic and political systems, which had often been invoked to explain the necessity for imperialism abroad to European publics, was now used to explain the need for total victory at any cost. Types of devastation and violence that had occurred in the colonial world on a smaller scale, and that remained largely out of the metropolitan public eye, were applied to and decimated Europeans. Oddly, one of the war's effects was to reinvigorate colonialism. Most obviously, the Versailles Treaty brought the Arab lands of the now defunct Ottoman Empire under the control of France and Great Britain, expanding European colonial practices into the Near and Middle East and turning Germany's overseas empire in Africa and Oceania over to the control of the victorious alliance's members. Also important was the use the victors made of their overseas empires during the fighting, in particular the participation in combat of colonial troops from Britain's "white dominions" and from French West and North Africa.

Their colonial subjects' role in the war reaffirmed for European politicians the importance of their empires, but the conflict also catalyzed resistance to colonialism. Both colonized elites and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the colonies witnessed the disconnect between colonialist propaganda about European civilization and the war's savagery. Germany's defeat and Britain and France's near-defeat gave encouragement to their critics in the colonies. More directly, the minimal recompense that French and British politicians offered for the blood debt of colonial troops vitiated any hope in the colonies for an extension of British liberty in India, or assimilation as equal members into the French Republic. These three understandings played key roles in catalyzing subsequent criticism of colonial rule.

At the same time, by leading to the disappearance of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, World War I seemed to sound the death knell for land-based empires and affirmed the triumph of the nation-state model of governance. U. S. president Woodrow Wilson's 1917 and 1918 proclamations of peoples' right to self-determination helped guarantee that one of the most durable effects of modern colonialism would be the extension of the nation-state model of government throughout the lands that Europeans had colonized. National independence became the rallying cry of anticolonial militants across the globe.

Other goals and ideals also mobilized critics of colonial rule, although nationalism eventually overshadowed them. Christianity, Islam, pan-Africanism, and trade unionism, among others, catalyzed various groups to protest imperial abuses or to reject colonial rule altogether. In 1919, for example, African American activists and intellectuals brought together a Pan-African Congress in Paris. In Africa, and notably in South Africa and Kenya, labor movements played increasingly crucial roles in nurturing anticolonial thinking. The organizational model and the message of the Bolshevik revolution (1917) also offered inspiration. More concretely, the Third International, or Comintern (founded in 1919), provided guidance, training, and connections, which allowed communists to invigorate, take over, or lead many anticolonial movements, particularly in Asia. Until the mid-1930s, communist activists within Europe also worked aggressively to advance critiques of overseas colonialism.

THE INTERWAR PERIOD (1918–1939)

In the 1920s and 1930s, as Britain and France continued to expand their empires, they also sought to consolidate them. In the 1920s they did this by privileging arguments about the beneficial effects of colonial rule on the colonized. These arguments took on new importance when the Great Depression, which hit colonized territories exceptionally hard, made it clear that, despite claims that European rule uplifted backward native societies, colonialism had done little to modernize the colonial economies.

The British embrace of the concept of developmentalism sought to counter evidence that colonial rule was impeding both economic and political progress. The French proclaimed that their efforts aimed to "realize the potential" (mise en valeur) of their overseas possessions, not just economically, but through the establishment of new infrastructures, such as schools, transportation networks, and hospitals, and by bringing enlightenment through education. The British had extended substantial autonomy to the settler-controlled governments of their "white dominions" and, under pressure from anticolonial nationalists, now moved to extend limited versions of autonomy to India and elsewhere. By the 1930s, the end of colonialism was the acknowledged goal of both the British and the French empires, the former imagining a distant future when Britain would husband the independence of all of its colonies, the latter evoking an equally distant future when all its subjects would become citizens of Greater France. To these ends, in all the French and British colonies of sub-Saharan Africa, forced labor continued to be used in order to pursue the "development" (or mise en valeur) of the colonial societies.

In the early 1930s, in the midst of international economic catastrophe, metropolitan discussions of colonialism celebrated the benefits it provided for everyone involved. This was spread through many films and novels and by political decisions such as the publicity campaigns trumpeting the new British Commonwealth or "one hundred million Frenchmen," and the costly promotion of Colonial Expositions in London (1924) and Paris (1931). The latter both gloried in the rainbow of peoples within Greater France, from the reproduction of Angkor Wat to the "African" village complete with villagers, and depicted the empire as a harmonious society that saved its subjects from violence and brought them into progress.

The rise of fascist powers in Europe partly explains the urgency with which the French and British embraced their empires in the 1930s. In the same context, European Communist Parties dropped their commitment to ending colonialism immediately in favor of antifascist mobilization to defend democracy and the Soviet Union. Across the world, Japan's conquest of Manchuria in 1931 began a stunning series of colonialist expansions by what would become members of the fascist Axis: Japan conquered most of China after 1937; Italy conquered Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936; Germany conquered central, western, and then eastern Europe after 1939; and Japan expanded into Oceania and Southeast Asia after December 1941. These years marked the farthest extension of colonial rule in modern times. Fascist ideological explanations for their expansion, which combined depictions of each state's colonial designs as preordained—the Nazi Lebensraum; the Italian Fascist Mare Nostrum; the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—and highly elaborate definitions of racial hierarchies, affirming the racial superiority of the colonizer, pushed to their extremes preexisting justifications for European colonialism.

RACE AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY COLONIALISM

In the twentieth century, arguments for continued European domination constantly referred to supposedly scientific racial categories. Race also became the most important marker of difference between people within the colonial world. Even critics of colonialism participated in affirming racial difference. One of the best known depictions of the horror associated with European overseas rule is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), based in part on the author's experiences on the Congo River in 1890. Conrad's novella undeniably sought to reveal the evil inherent in colonial rule. As the Nobel Prize–winning Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe pointed out in 1977, however, it was also typical of the wildly popular genre of colonial travel narratives and follows the genre's convention of presenting the colonial world as a space where the white protagonist could come to terms with greater truths. Conrad's narrative depends on his readers' identification with Marlow, the narrator, whose struggles and moral enlightenment occur against a background provided by dehumanized black bodies—often just black limbs glimpsed at the edge of the river. Although explicitly critical of colonial practices, The Heart of Darkness inevitably celebrated the new possibilities for growth and reflection that colonialism offered to the colonizers and wholly dismissed any possibility that the colonized Africans could be historical actors.

Other forms of difference, such as status, continued to matter intensely in the colonies, and in the metropoles race was often less important in shaping popular thought and legal categorization than class or gender. After 1900, however, all empires witnessed the growing importance of racial thinking. One immediate and self-reinforcing result was that the number of interactions across the legal categories dividing colonizers from colonized declined. Sexuality was one of the most important areas where the need for separation could be staked out, a situation the English writer E. M. Forster captured well in his 1930s novel A Passage to India, with its miscommunications, its sexual tensions, its obscure caves, and its hint of rape. In societies such as the Dutch East Indies, official and elite acceptance of marriages and sexual relationships across racial lines receded. Forms of white solidarity also increased as connections and shared concerns among Europeans in diverse colonies increasingly overcame divisions of class, status, gender, or ethnicity. In British settler colonies, such as Kenya and Rhodesia, as well as in India, fears, often overwrought, about the potential for anticolonial violence—with sexual attacks against white women the primary fantasy—led British authorities to distribute guns to white men and women and to organize basic training in armed self-defense.

The interwar period saw the role of race and European-ness consolidated by both the increasing certainties of racist political movements within Europe and the growth of nationalist movements that rejected the domination of Europeans in the colonies. By working to overcome ethnic and language differences among citizens of the same European state and emphasizing a struggle for survival between nations, imperialism had in part created the possibility for European nationalist ideologies to become attached to racial communities. The flourishing of British identity is the best known example: In the metropole, nationalist propaganda fomented popular support by presenting imperial rule as a natural trait of all British—rather than English—people, at the same time that Scottish, Welsh, and Irish people played a disproportionate role in the overseas military, economic, and settlement activities that formed the second British Empire. As they emerged to dominate political life within Europe, fascist and right-wing nationalist organizations gained in popularity among Europeans overseas. In Java, the Dutch colonial community, long mocked by racists because racially mixed children and marriages were widespread at all economic levels, saw the growth of Fatherlands Clubs and of membership in the National Socialist Union. In French Algeria, anti-Semitic bile targeting indigenous Jews, who had gained full French citizenship in 1870, offered fertile grounds for racist nationalist groups born in the metropole and provided arguments that blocked reform projects, such as the Blum-Violette Bill of 1936, aimed at giving French citizenship to more Muslims.

THE POST-1945 FAILURE OF DERACIALIZED COLONIALISM

In the years after World War II, official European colonialism sought to distance itself from any reliance on racism. To leaders in Britain and France, their empires were crucial to claiming an important role on a world stage, which increasingly appeared to have room for only two principals: the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Although most British and Dutch colonies across Asia almost immediately gained independence (1947–1949), the French in Indochina and all colonial powers in Africa sought to hold on to their possessions. The British and especially the French aggressively sought to introduce limited forms of democracy and provide social welfare possibilities as the anchors for a new, deracialized colonialism. The French in sub-Saharan Africa extended full social rights to people who all were now citizens of the new French Union. This meant that African labor unions were able to obtain minimum wage rates and family allowances for their members at the same levels as metropolitans.

Such reforms did not quell demands for the end of colonialism, however, but neither the French nor the British gave up easily and the chilling number of colonized people who died as a result highlights the continued importance of racist presumptions. In the best known exercise of brute force, the French killed at least 250,000 Muslim Algerians in failed efforts to crush the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962). Early-twenty-first-century work suggests that British repression against the Kikuyus in Kenya, pursued under the guise of defending British civilians against Mau Mau depredations (thirty-two white settlers died), led totens of thousands of Kikuyu deaths. But by 1963, with Kenya's independence, some forty-two former colonies had entered the United Nations.

In contrast, the Portuguese continued to embrace racist explanations, and to hold Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau until 1974, and white minority regimes maintained and strengthened colonial-era racial policies in Rhodesia until it became Zimbabwe in 1979 and in South Africa, which the African National Congress finally freed from apartheid in 1991. With the British departure from Hong Kong in 1997, all of the most significant European colonies had been decolonized.

THE COLD WAR AND COLONIALISM

The Cold War put an end to twentieth-century colonialism, in part by creating a new context and in part by redefining what colonialism meant. In order to affirm its anticolonial bona fides and pursue its international aims, the United States intervened to force its British and French allies (along with the Israelis) to end their 1956 takeover of the Suez Canal and to convince the French to sign a treaty with Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam in 1954. The Soviets, particularly under Nikita Khrushchev, moved to embrace Third World struggles and numerous postcolonial regimes in order to consolidate their own revolutionary claim to be on the side of the oppressed. It was also the Cold War that narrowed the general understanding of colonialism, focusing on formal independence, as the Americans and Soviets both sought to claim victory with each transfer of power in the former colonies.

Left-wing analysts subsequently argued that the continued influence of the former colonial powers amounted to neocolonialism. Examples of this included the presence of large numbers of troops in former colonies, French control of the currency of most in its former African colonies, as well as the economic and military activities of the United States in Latin America and Indochina. Liberal and right-wing politicians and writers targeted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, which the 1956 invasion of Hungary consolidated as an empire in the same months as the Suez Crisis erupted. It was not until the Cold War ended that the latter claim, at least in institutional terms, was widely accepted. Indeed, as the post–Cold War world continues to develop, we may see a redefinition of colonialism. Already, scholarly work on Russian expansion in the nineteenth century emphasizes the need to think more rigorously about whether there was something distinct about overseas imperialism. As some scholars take up the tasks of the earlier imperialist historians—providing material to support, for example, the extension of American control over Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003—while others interrogate the continued influence of colonialist thinking, new questions will certainly arise.

See alsoAlgeria; Algerian War; British Empire; British Empire, End of; Cold War; Communism; Fascism; French Empire; German Colonial Empire; League of Nations; Portuguese Empire; Russian Revolutions of 1917; Suez Crisis; Versailles, Treaty of; World War I; World War II.

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Todd Shepard