Chapter 22 The End of Empire (pp.1087-1119)

The End of the Empire was during the twentieth century which had an immense significance for the struggle for independence or decolonization. This became to be seen as a dramatic change for nation states were able to gain control to rule themselves finally after being controlled by empires that ran the world's political life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The declining legitimacy of both empire and race as a credible basis for political or social life was signaled by decolonization. Decolonization helped not only bring national freedom but also personal dignity, abundance, and opportunity. Within these newly independent nations there would be changes in the political, economic, and cultural experiments, but also new challenges: changing the legacies of empire, the devision of language, ethnicity, religion, and class; the rapidly growing number in their population; and the competing demands of the capitalist West and communist East; tasks of building a more modern economy, stable politics, and coherent nations; then finally being able to compete with other nations that were already industrialized. European colonial empires in Africa and Asia at first appeared as permanent features of the world's political landscape in 1900. However this would quickly change by a breakthrough of countries in Asia and the Middle East in the late 1940s. These nations were the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel who all achieved independence. There would be more than fifty colonies gaining independence in Africa from he mid-1950s through the mid-1970s which would lead to a change in history. At last South Africa would be able to put an end to the apartheid. This struggle in South Africa was not against a European colonial power, since they had gained their independence from Great Britain since 1910. Their independence was granted by a government that consisted of white settler minority, which was made up of less than 20 percent of the total population. While the black South Africans' struggled since they had no political rights whatsoever within the central state even though they made up a majority of the population. South Africa was able to develop a mature industrial economy by the early twentieth century that was first based off of gold and diamond mining, then included secondary industries such as steel, chemicals, automobile manufacturing, rubber processing, and heavy engineering. This comes to show that their economy did not rely upon one certain product and was very vast. Thanks to foreign investment and loans the economy benefited since the 1960s. The people working in the urban industries or mines, provided labor for white-owned farms consisted of black Africans who were all involved in the complex modern economy. This came to show that there was a very high dependence upon Africans for the white-controlled economy which left individuals highly vulnerable to repressive action, but the threat to withdraw their essential labor also gave them an advantage of using their weapon. Even though South Africa was able to gain its independence from the empire there was still much that the nation needed to change and improve. With time though there would be progress to move forward and change the way of life for the people for the better.