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“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Depression, taxation revolts, urbanization, labor movements
- Why did the interwar years (1919–1939) mark the beginning of the end of European colonialism, even though empires reached their greatest territorial expansion after World War I?
- What was Pan-Africanism?
- How did the contradictions between Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination and continued colonial rule contribute to the rise of anti-colonial nationalism?
- How did economic crises, especially the Great Depression, weaken colonial systems and increase resistance movements across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East?
- How did anti-colonial movements change during the interwar period from isolated rebellions into organized struggles involving political parties, labor unions, women’s organizations, and nationalist movements?
- What does the Aba Women’s War of 1929 reveal about the nature of colonial resistance and the weaknesses of British indirect rule in Nigeria?
Table of Contents
What, why it changed
While European empires reached their peak size right after World War I, the interwar years (1919–1939) marked the beginning of the end for colonialism. Beneath that apparent expansion, however, countless lives were being upended. Economic crashes, fierce anti-colonial uprisings, organized labor strikes, and new global ideologies did not just weaken the perceived legitimacy of imperial rule in abstract terms —they emerged from, and in turn deepened, everyday experiences of hunger, displacement, racial violence, and political repression. For millions of people living under empire, this rocky twenty-year stretch was felt as a period of profound uncertainty, courage, and loss, one that ultimately set the stage for the rapid collapse of these imperial systems after WWII.
The root of the interwar colonial crisis lay in a massive betrayal of expectations after World War I. Millions of colonial soldiers had fought and bled for European powers, naturally assuming their sacrifice would earn them basic rights and a voice in their own governance. Instead, they returned home to the same old story: heavy-handed repression, economic exploitation, and blatant racial inequality. Combine that deep-seated resentment with the spreading rhetoric of self-determination, energized nationalist movements, and the sheer financial ruin of the Great Depression, and the moral foundation of colonial rule completely evaporated —paving the way for the post-WWII collapse.
The victorious Allies carved up former German and Ottoman territories using the League of Nations’ new «mandate system» —a fancy term that effectively handed control over to nations like Britain, France, Belgium, and Japan, as well as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. By the early 1920s, this massive land grab meant that European empires held sway over nearly 85 per cent of the entire globe.
The League of Nations Mandate System
A principle that stops at a border is not a principle but a policy
The League of Nations Mandate System presented itself as a break with the old imperialism. Its territories were not to be possessions but trusts, held in stewardship for populations said to be not yet capable of holding themselves. The vocabulary had changed; that was, in fact, the innovation. Where conquest had once spoken plainly, it now spoke in the language of guardianship, and the difference between the two was mostly a difference of tone.
The system arranged the world into three grades of readiness. Class A took in the former Ottoman provinces —Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon— judged nearly ready for independence, which is to say ready to be told they were not yet ready. Class B covered African territories such as Tanganyika, Cameroon, and Togo, where a firmer European hand was thought necessary. Class C applied to sparsely populated regions, Namibia and a scattering of Pacific islands, administered as extensions of the governing power with no serious pretense of transition. The tiers measured nothing about the peoples they classified. They measured how quickly the metropole expected to be asked to leave.
What the mandates accomplished, then, was not the dismantling of empire but its registration. Colonial rule acquired a filing system, an oversight commission, and a periodic report. Critics at the time said what has been said since: this was colonialism under international supervision, and supervision was the whole of the reform. The supervising body was the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva (1921), staffed largely by former colonial officials, forbidden to visit the territories, dependent on reports written by the administrations it reviewed, and answerable to a League Council on which Britain, France, Italy, and Japan —four mandatory powers— held permanent seats.
The contradiction became unmanageable at the moment it was most loudly denied. Woodrow Wilson’s principle of national self-determination, proclaimed as a universal truth, operated within a boundary no one was willing to name. It applied to Poles and Czechs and Serbs; it did not apply to India, Egypt, Korea, Vietnam, to Africa or the Caribbean. A principle that stops at a border is not a principle but a policy, and the colonized world understood this immediately.
Understanding it, they used it. The double standard supplied anti-colonial movements with an argument their rulers could not answer in their own vocabulary. If nationality conferred a right to govern oneself, the demand was simply to know on what grounds the right had been distributed so selectively —and the only honest answers available were the ones the new language had been invented to avoid. The Mandate System had not resolved the contradiction of a liberal empire. It had written it down.
Leopold II
See «‘For the sake of civilization’: the great tyrant of European colonialism.» or «For the Sake of Civilization.»
The Congo-Ocean Railway (1921)
The Congo-Ocean Railway (Chemin de fer Congo-Océan, or CFCO) was conceived as another triumph of progress —one more metallic vein opened through the body of Africa in the name of civilization and commerce. Stretching 502 kilometers between the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville, the railway was designed to circumvent the rapids of the lower Congo River, allowing colonial trade to flow uninterrupted from the ocean into the immense arterial system of Central Africa. From Brazzaville, boats could navigate the Congo and its tributaries —including the Oubangui River toward Bangui— extending the reach of an empire that measured geography not in cultures or peoples, but in extractive possibilities.
Like so many colonial infrastructures celebrated in European narratives as symbols of modernity, the railway concealed beneath its steel tracks the silence of coerced labor, dispossession, and the conversion of human lives into expendable fuel for imperial expansion.
The Congo–Ocean Railway required, by the most careful estimates available, somewhere between 127,000 and 140,000 laborers over 13 years, most of them conscripted under the euphemism of prestation and marched for weeks before the work itself began; of these, some 14,000 to 20,000 died of dysentery, malaria, malnutrition, and the plain exhaustion of cutting rock and earth by hand through the Mayombe forest, without machinery the colonial budget had judged unnecessary. The arithmetic, crude as it is, comes to roughly one death for every seven or eight kilometers of track —a unit of measurement no engineer would recognize, though it is the one that mattered.
The figures entered French public knowledge through French writer André Gide, whose account of 1927 produced a parliamentary debate and no interruption to the construction, which continued for seven more years. It is the pattern common to the colonial ledger: the cost is documented, deplored, and paid anyway, because the line on the map runs from the ocean to the interior, and someone else’s body is what fills the distance between the two points.
Rise of Anti-Colonial Nationalism and The Evolution of Resistance
During the first decades of the 20th Century, the most influential anticolonialist intellectuals and activists were: Mohandas Gandhi (India), V.I. Lenin (Russia), Mark Twain (USA) W.E.B. Du Bois (USA), José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru), Aimé Césaire (Martinica), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), and Mohammad Hatta (Indonesia).
During the interwar years, anti-colonial resistance underwent a massive structural shift, evolving from isolated, reactionary rebellions into highly organized nationalist movements. Rather than just fighting back against specific colonial abuses, a new wave of political parties, newspapers, trade unions, student groups, women’s associations, and religious reform movements allowed colonial populations to articulate broader demands for full citizenship, constitutional governance, and outright independence.
Africa: Nationalist sentiment matured gradually across the continent during these decades, largely driven by Western-educated elites who pushed for political representation, equal rights, an end to forced labor, and a real seat at the governing table. This era saw the rise of a new generation of leaders, particularly in French West Africa, who began laying the organizational groundwork for the independence struggles that would erupt decades later.
Egypt: The Egyptian Revolution of 1919, spearheaded by Saad Zaghloul, stands as one of the earliest major nationalist breakthroughs of the era. While Britain did grant Egypt a form of limited independence in 1922, the concession felt hollow to many nationalists, as London stubbornly maintained control over the country’s defense, foreign policy, and the strategic Suez Canal. This canal was opened by the French in 1869 and bought by the British in 1875, due to the debt of the Egyptian rulers who had financed its construction.
South Africa: As the white-minority government steadily codified racial segregation, the devastating impacts of the Native Land Act deepened. In response, Black political organizations began to consolidate their strength. Though the African National Congress (ANC) remained relatively small at the time, its persistent campaigns against discriminatory laws built the foundational framework of resistance that would later confront the formal apartheid system after 1948.
India: Under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, India built one of the most sophisticated anti-colonial movements of the modern era. Through massive, coordinated efforts like the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–1922) and the iconic Salt March (1930), Gandhi demonstrated the immense power of boycotts, civil disobedience, and disciplined nonviolence against British rule. Even when London offered a concession via the Government of India Act of 1935—granting limited provincial autonomy and elections—it fell short for Indian nationalists, who noted that Britain still held the keys to defense, foreign affairs, and finance.
Vietnam: In Southeast Asia, Ho Chi Minh shaped the anti-colonial landscape by fusing traditional Vietnamese nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology to fight French rule. By founding the Indochinese Communist Party, he effectively tied the struggle for national independence to a broader global socialist movement. France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the subsequent Geneva Accords ended direct French colonial rule, dividing Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The United States, which had already been funding the French war effort, moved into the vacuum over the following decade, backing the South Vietnamese government and steadily escalating its own military involvement until the introduction of US combat troops in 1965 marked the full transition from France’s colonial war to America’s.
Indonesia: A parallel struggle unfolded in the Dutch East Indies, where Indonesian nationalism rallied around figures like Sukarno. His Indonesian National Party demanded complete independence, democratic representation, and sweeping social reforms, though the Dutch colonial government routinely met these demands with harsh crackdowns and mass arrests.
The Middle East: Across the region, the mandates provoked exactly the resistance they claimed to be preparing populations to outgrow. In Iraq, the 1920 revolt was large enough to force Britain’s hand, and Britain answered with a measure of autonomy —a concession, but a calculated one. France answered differently. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 to 1927 was met not with concession but with artillery, and the war against Jabal al-Druze, Damascus, and the surrounding countryside left, by most estimates, six to 10,000 dead, with some counts reaching 20,000 once the full three years are added up. Reprisal did most of the killing: villages burned, populations collectively punished, the distinction between rebel and civilian treated as an inconvenience rather than a rule. Twice France bombarded Damascus itself, in October 1925 and again in May 1926, killing between one and fifteen hundred people in the city alone and reducing whole quarters of the old town, the historic souk among them, to rubble. The bombardment was not a battle. It was a lesson, delivered to a population that had made the mistake of taking self-determination at its word.
Meanwhile, in Palestine, a volatile mix of British imperial policy, Arab displacement, and surging Zionist immigration sparked the Arab Revolt (1936–1939), turning land, immigration, and political representation into a fierce battleground.
Great Depression
The financial collapse of 1929 dealt a devastating blow to the stability of global empires, hitting export-dependent colonies the hardest as commodity prices cratered. As global demand plummeted for essential goods like cocoa, rubber, copper, and palm oil, colonial economies imploded —leaving local populations to face a grim reality of bankruptcy, mass unemployment, widespread hunger, and crushing debt. Rather than easing this economic burden, many colonial governments doubled down. In a desperate bid to protect their own balance sheets, they hiked taxes, demanded higher output, slashed wages, and relied even more heavily on forced labor. This severe mismanagement only served to deepen local grievances, turning economic despair into a powerful accelerant for anti-colonial resistance.
The Working Class and Rebellious Undercurrents
Despite the formal abolition of slavery, forced labor remained a pervasive reality across the colonial world, particularly within French Africa, the Belgian Congo, and Portuguese territories. Colonial authorities routinely conscripted local populations under brutal conditions to construct the physical infrastructure of empire —roads, railways, plantations, and mines. However, the economic devastation of the Great Depression catalyzed a massive wave of labor activism. Dockworkers, railway workers, and miners increasingly organized strikes and formed unions. Over time, these purely economic demands for fair wages and labor rights began to merge with broader nationalist movements, transforming workplace grievances into a fight for political representation.
In response to this growing unrest, European powers attempted to manage the crisis by introducing superficial colonial reforms. They established advisory councils, expanded basic education, offered minor voting rights, and instituted limited health and labor regulations. Yet, these concessions were never meant to pave the way for true equality or independence; they were calculated measures designed to pacify the public and preserve the status quo.
Instead, the interwar period became a crucible for political and intellectual transformation, heavily influenced by a convergence of global ideologies. Movements were energized by ideas ranging from liberal democracy, socialism, and communism to Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism.
Pan-Africanism, championed by figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Jamaican Marcus Garvey (Pan-Africanist, later separatist), built a powerful transnational network connecting activists across Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe in a unified demand for racial equality and self-governance. At the same time, women became indispensable to these struggles, driving labor protests, leading market organizations, and participating in high-profile civil disobedience—from the women who marched alongside Gandhi during the Salt March to West African women organized against unfair colonial taxation.
The entire imperial framework was undone by its own internal contradictions. European empires claimed to be agents of civilization, democracy, progress, and human rights, yet their actual rule depended entirely on censorship, systemic racism, forced labor, and political repression. This profound hypocrisy shattered the moral legitimacy of colonial rule, turning the demand for independence from a radical idea into an inevitability.
By the late 1930s, European empires looked massive on paper, but their internal foundations were utterly hollowed out. A volatile mix of surging nationalism, highly organized local elites, aggressive labor movements, and deep economic vulnerabilities had pushed colonial rule into a state of permanent crisis. The moral and political legitimacy of empire had eroded past the point of recovery. When World War II finally erupted, it didn’t create these structural fractures—it simply exposed them, violently accelerating the inevitable collapse of European imperial power.
Pan-Africanism
Pan-Africanism began as an argument about geography before it became one about power: the conviction that the fate of a sharecropper in Georgia, a laborer in Kingston, and a subject in the Gold Coast were not separate histories but chapters of the same one, artificially divided by the empires that had done the dividing. W.E.B. Du Bois gave the idea its first institutional form, convening Pan-African Congresses in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927 that brought African and diaspora delegates into the same room to say, in effect, that the peace conferences settling Europe’s borders had no comparable interest in settling anyone else’s. The demand was modest on paper and radical in implication: consultation, representation, an end to the assumption that Africa’s future could be decided everywhere except Africa.
Marcus Garvey pursued the same conviction by a different route, one closer to spectacle than to petition. Where Du Bois wrote memoranda, Garvey built a movement —the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a shipping line, a uniform, a flag— organized around the idea that dignity was not something to be requested from the colonizer but something to be built independently of him. The two men despised each other’s methods, which is itself instructive: Pan-Africanism was never one doctrine but a shared premise argued over by people who agreed on almost nothing else.
What both approaches shared, and what outlived their quarrel, was the refusal to treat colonial rule as a series of local grievances. A revolt in Syria and a revolt in the Gold Coast were not, in this view, coincidentally similar; they were the same system meeting resistance in two of its provinces. That premise —modest in 1919, self-evident by 1945— is the thread that runs from Du Bois’s congresses through Nkrumah’s Ghana and into every liberation movement that followed, all of them insisting on what should never have needed insisting: that the map was not the territory, and the territory belonged to the people who lived on it.
«Sitting on a man»
The 1929-1931 Women’s Riot in British Nigeria
The Aba Women’s War of 1929 stands out as one of the most remarkable acts of African resistance during the entire interwar era. In southeastern Nigeria, thousands of Igbo women rose up to directly challenge British colonial authority, shattering the myth that anti-colonial struggle was exclusively the domain of Western-educated male elites. Instead, this rebellion proved that ordinary farmers, market traders, and community organizers were central to the fight.
The immediate trigger for the uprising was a widespread fear that a new British census was merely a prelude to taxing women and tightening imperial control over their economic lives. Under Britain’s system of indirect rule, colonial administrators had spent years propping up handpicked local chiefs, imposing heavy taxes, dictating trade terms, and dismantling traditional political structures —a combination that had already brought local resentment to a boiling point.
Starting in November 1929, tens of thousands of women mobilized, weaponizing traditional forms of collective social protest. They utilized public demonstrations, satirical songs, mass shaming, and the traditional practice of «sitting on a man» to paralyze colonial infrastructure. Horrified by the scale of the unrest, the British administration retaliated with overwhelming military force, ultimately killing more than 50 protesters and wounding dozens of others.
While the British managed to violently suppress the rebellion, the victory was hollow. Around 50 to 55 women were killed by rifle fire and machine guns turned on unarmed crowds. The uprising exposed the fundamental flaws of indirect rule, forced London to completely rethink its governance strategies in Nigeria, and offered a masterclass in the power of mass political mobilization. Ultimately, the Aba Women’s War became a defining symbol of how economic greed, political alienation, and the stark hypocrisies of empire galvanized resistance across the African continent between the wars.
«Sitting on a man,» or ikpo onye n’ala in some Igbo communities, was a traditional form of collective protest used by Igbo women in southeastern Nigeria before and during the colonial period. It was not a literal act of sitting on a person; it was a public form of social pressure, humiliation, and community enforcement used to punish men —or sometimes officials— who violated accepted social norms. Hundreds of women could assemble outside the offender’s home.
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