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.