- Define and explain Legacies of Empire in your own words
- Use key terms such as Decolonisation accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
This lesson focuses on Legacies of Empire: borders, migration and memory: how empire still shapes the world.
Borders, migration and memory: how empire still shapes the world.
Key ideas
Freedom brought new challenges
New nations inherited borders drawn by empires, dividing peoples and sowing conflict — partition in 1947 caused massive displacement and violence. Yet independence also brought pride, democracy movements and new voices in world affairs. Historians debate whether decolonisation was a triumph, a tragedy, or — most often — both.
The Second World War broke the empires
The war bankrupted Britain, shattered the myth of European invincibility — Japan's 1942 capture of Singapore stunned the British Empire — and armed colonial soldiers who returned home demanding rights. Empires that survived the war could not afford, politically or financially, to keep their colonies by force.
Key term — Decolonisation: The process by which colonies gained independence from imperial rule, peaking between 1945 and the 1970s.
Name two factors that weakened European empires after 1945.
The financial ruin of the Second World War and the spread of anti-colonial nationalism (also: superpower pressure, the Atlantic Charter's promise of self-determination).
Answer: The financial ruin of the Second World War and the spread of anti-colonial nationalism (also: superpower pressure, the Atlantic Charter's promise of self-determination).
- Assuming independence solved everything New states faced artificial borders, economic dependence and political instability. Decolonisation began new histories; it did not end them.
- Saying Britain simply 'gave' independence Independence was won through sustained pressure and struggle. 'Granting' independence misdescribes who drove the process.
Practice
Borders divided ethnic groups and forced rival peoples together, sowing conflict in new states.
The process by which colonies gained independence from imperial rule.
1947; partition was the division of British India into independent India and Pakistan.
The nationalist leader who led Ghana (the Gold Coast) to independence in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African colony to do so.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "Decolonisation"?
What is the historians' debate about decolonisation?
- Legacies of Empire: borders, migration and memory: how empire still shapes the world.
- Freedom brought new challenges: New nations inherited borders drawn by empires, dividing peoples and sowing conflict — partition in 1947 caused massive displacement and violence.
- Nationalism: The belief that a people should govern themselves as an independent nation.
- Watch out for: assuming independence solved everything