Introduction

Barbara Tuchman has called World War I a "burnt path across history." By that she means that this event was so wide-ranging and compelling that it affected a broad cross section of the world's people. In so doing it linked together the destinies of many diverse peoples in a way never seen before. Neither the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century nor the great plague epidemic of the fourteenth century had tied together the fate of so many. European imperial nations hung on, through mandates, to former colonies and extended them by dismembering the old Ottoman holdings. European hypocrisy only lent righteous indignation to African and Asian nationalist feeling.

World War II completed the process of laying the groundwork for de-colonization. Too many peoples, all at once, were ready to try their wings as free nations, drawing confidence in part from the colonial infrastructures built during the past hundred years. They drew together the negative impulse of anti-imperialism and the positive optimism that the new countries they would create could better serve their people. The catalog of exploitations gave them a handy list of what they did not want for the future. The Western imperialists, exhausted from the war, could not militarily or morally stand up to the wave of de-colonization that ensued.

Nationalist movements in the Middle East and Africa became perhaps the best examples of how the seeds of imperialism would develop into independent states fashioned on European model but states which would, for the most part, be plagued with challenges and controversies that came about as a direct result of their colonial heritage.