Key takeaways
- The United Nations records that around 750 million people — nearly a third of the world's population — lived in territories dependent on colonial powers when it was founded in 1945.
- General Assembly Resolution 1514, adopted in 1960, declared that colonialism should be brought to a speedy and unconditional end and affirmed the right of all peoples to self-determination; a Special Committee on Decolonization followed in 1962.
- Eighty former colonies have become independent since the UN's creation, and fewer than two million people now live in the seventeen remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories.
- Ronald Hyam's account of British decolonisation covers transfers of power from India in 1947 to Swaziland in 1968 and stresses international pressure and imperial overextension rather than a policy of voluntary withdrawal.
- Independence was not uniformly negotiated: in Kenya, Aoife Duffy's analysis of newly released colonial files describes detention laws that built custodial violence into the system, with an accountability deficit as the lasting legacy.
- Formal independence did not dissolve every colonial structure — borders, fiscal arrangements, legal codes and archives all outlasted the flags, and the UN still runs a decolonisation programme, currently in its fourth international decade to 2030.
Decolonisation after 1945 was not a handover. It was a contested, uneven process that took four decades, proceeded by several different routes at once, and left a great deal of the colonial apparatus standing after the flags came down.
The scale is worth stating first. The United Nations records that when it was founded in 1945, around 750 million people — nearly a third of the world's population — lived in territories dependent on colonial powers. Eighty of those former colonies have since become independent. Fewer than two million people now live in the seventeen territories the UN still lists as Non-Self-Governing.
What actually shifted after 1945
Two things changed at once, and they are easy to conflate.
The first is capacity. Ronald Hyam's study of British decolonisation, published by Cambridge University Press, covers 1918 to 1968 and frames the post-1945 acceleration around international pressure and an empire whose commitments had outrun its means. That is an argument about the metropole, and it explains timing better than it explains direction.
The second is legitimacy, and that shifted through anticolonial politics in the colonies themselves and then, formally, through international law. In 1960 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 1514, declaring that colonialism should be brought to a speedy and unconditional end and affirming the right of self-determination for all peoples. A Special Committee on Decolonization was established in 1962 to monitor implementation.
The order matters. Resolution 1514 did not start decolonisation — India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ghana and others were already independent. It registered a change that had happened and made it harder to resist elsewhere.
Three routes, running at the same time
It helps to distinguish the mechanisms rather than treating them as stages.
Negotiated transfer. Constitutional talks, elections, a date, a ceremony. Hyam's survey runs from India in 1947 to Swaziland in 1968 and makes clear that even the negotiated cases were shaped by pressure that had already been applied — strikes, boycotts, mass parties and, often, earlier violence.
Armed anticolonial war. Where a colonial power judged its stake to be high — settler populations, strategic bases, resources — it fought. These wars were long, and the counterinsurgency methods used in them were frequently at the centre of later legal claims.
Partition at withdrawal. In several cases the departing power divided territory as it left. The National Archives' account of Indian independence records the sequence: the Cripps Mission of 1942, the failed Cabinet Mission of 1946 under Attlee's government, Mountbatten's decision to advance the departure date from June 1948 to August 1947, the announcement of the partition plan on 3 June 1947, and Sir Cyril Radcliffe given six weeks to draw the boundaries. Approximately one million people died in the violence that followed, over 75,000 women were subjected to sexual violence, and ten million were displaced.
No one of these is the template. An account of decolonisation built entirely from the negotiated cases produces a story about enlightened withdrawal; one built entirely from the wars produces a story in which negotiation never mattered. Both are partial.
The violence, and the records of it
Kenya is the case where the documentary situation is clearest, because the documents were concealed and then released.
Aoife Duffy's analysis in Law and History Review examines detention camps in colonial Kenya through the Hanslope disclosure: more than 8,000 files, relating to thirty-seven former colonies, found in 2011 at a Foreign and Commonwealth Office facility at Hanslope Park and transferred to the National Archives between 2012 and 2013. Her argument is that emergency detention legislation created an architecture of destruction with custodial violence built into it, sustained by administrative concealment, suppression of evidence, official denial and a sophisticated propaganda operation that controlled the public account. The British government's 2013 settlement of claims followed decades of that denial and of deliberate record destruction.
Two implications follow for anyone studying the period. First, the absence of documentation of colonial violence is sometimes itself evidence of policy rather than evidence of absence. Second, the history of late empire is still being rewritten as files emerge, which means confident narratives written before 2011 need checking rather than citing. That is a good working habit generally, and our guide to studying history on your own covers how to build it into a reading routine.
It is equally necessary to say that violence did not stop at independence in every case. Some post-independence settlements were themselves imposed by force, and some new governments used the emergency powers they inherited. Treating 1947, 1957 or 1960 as a moral end point is a periodisation choice, not a finding.
What outlasted the transfers
Borders drawn in European capitals stayed drawn. Legal codes, administrative structures, currency arrangements and trade dependencies frequently survived the change of sovereignty, and in several cases were written into the independence agreements themselves. Archives were removed, destroyed or retained by the departing power — the Hanslope files are one instance of a wider pattern.
The historiography also had to be rebuilt. UNESCO's General History of Africa was initiated in 1964, as African states were becoming independent, and now runs to eleven volumes produced over sixty years by more than 550 historians and specialists under a committee composed primarily of African members, with the explicit goal of reframing the continent's history from an African perspective. That project is itself part of decolonisation: political independence did not automatically change who was writing the past.
And the process is not formally complete. The UN's decolonisation programme continues, with 2021–2030 designated the Fourth International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism.
Reading forty years of overlapping chronologies
The practical difficulty is that decolonisation is dozens of national timelines running in parallel, each with its own turning points, and reading them in sequence produces a false sense of a single wave. Laying them side by side is the only approach that works.
World History Timeline Sim, our own app built by Reign Creative, is designed for that kind of reading: thousands of dated events with region and era filters, records for the states and wars involved, and curated sequences covering decolonisation specifically, so the Asian, African and Caribbean transitions can be compared rather than narrated one after another. It is an index rather than an authority — it carries no citations and no external review, and its own disclaimer says it does not replace textbooks, peer-reviewed scholarship or primary sources. Every figure above comes from the five cited works. The World History Timeline Sim app page lists what it covers, the major historical events hub gathers related articles, and the rest of our history writing sits in the education and brain training section.
Finally, a comparison worth making. Our article on why Rome fell examines four explanations for the end of one empire and shows how much depends on what the historian counts as "the end". Modern decolonisation has precise legal dates and ceremonies — and still resists a clean ending, for reasons that are about power rather than about evidence. For the opposite problem, where even the sequence is uncertain, see what caused the Bronze Age collapse.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
How did decolonization happen?
What is UN Resolution 1514?
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Is decolonisation finished?
Sources
- Decolonization (opens in a new tab)United Nations — accessed
- Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (opens in a new tab)Cambridge University Press — accessed
- Legacies of British Colonial Violence: Viewing Kenyan Detention Camps through the Hanslope Disclosure (opens in a new tab)Law and History Review (Cambridge University Press) — accessed
- Indian Independence (opens in a new tab)The National Archives (UK), Education service — accessed
- General History of Africa (opens in a new tab)UNESCO — accessed
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