Yeah I know remnants still exists, France still indirectly controls a lot of african nations' currency etc but why did they have to relinquish direct control?
Europe 1945. Infrastructure gone, everybody is broke, everybody is dead. Your Colonies are rising up and demanding freedom, and administering them is getting more and more expensive. The Red Army is having an extended vacation in Germany. European workers are restless, in some countries they're taking up arms!
What do?
Enter the US, now a military/economic Goliath, with a deal. "If you give your Colonies freedom and enter this new Breton Woods thing, we'll help you get back on your feet and keep away the scary Communists!" You know you'll have a hard time putting down those uppity Colonies, more and more of your workers are radicalized, and the Yankees are probably right about the pre-war European system being suicidal given modern technology.
But then you realize: they're only asking you to give up direct political control. You can keep the existing economic power relation, only now secured primarily with intelligence services/proxies instead of your foreign legion. It sounds too good to be true, until the American starts telling you about his work in Guatemala.
You smile, shake his hand and become part of the liberal international order :)
This is compressing the timeline quite a bit. Bretton Woods happened towards the end of the war (negotiated in '44, effective in '45), but decolinization didn't really happen in earnest for another decade or two. France and Britain definitely tried to hold onto their empires after the war (with the major exception being British India). France fought colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria, for instance (the latter ending in '62), and a lot of British colonies only achieved independence in the 60s.
It was more of a slow collapse than a deliberate shift to a less direct form of exploitation.
Well yeah of course, I mentioned Guatemala and that wasn't until the mid 50s. I'm trying to give OP a picture of why someone would accept decolonization.
Harry Dexter White, the man who negociated the Bretton Woods treaty, was a communist spy. Why he didn't attempt to wreck the agreement is beyond me. He could have done in the capitalist system right then and there.
it just became too expensive. colonialism transformed as it was realised that you actually don't need to directly rule over people, you can own their mineral wealth and control them politically through debt/finance and geo political means while the governments themselves do the day to day admin of statecraft. European occupation was never liked anywhere, nobody wanted Europeans to rule over them. and it was very easy to unite people against them in rebellions, why deal with that when you can still get all their shit without the cost of rebellions?
Basically for the same reason we had to get out of afghanistan.
The only real way to defeat an insurgency is to do genocide, but then you run into labor shortage problems, which is why you then have to do settler-colonialism. That can take a very long time depending on the scope of the project; Israel has been doing it since the 50s and it still isnt a done deal and they've been trying to extract as much labor out of the apartheid second class citizens as they can in the mean time. There just isnt a political will or the time to meet capital's demands for either of these, nor is there a "morally neutral" option like smallpox to annihilate peoples like what happened in the Americas. It's much simpler to just quietly and insidiously control the populations by mystifying class and by slightly integrating these colonial bourgeoisie so resources and labor can be extracted. It's also what has been happening on a cultural level as well in America; broadly, but falsely, represent the will of oppressed people by propping up false prophets like Obama or whitewashed MLK.
The only real way to defeat an insurgency is to do genocide
Alternately -- and this is what China appears to be attempting in Xinjiang -- you can invest in the area and its people, and treat remaining insurgents relatively lightly (compare the scope and conditions of incarceration in Xinjiang, whatever they may be, to the constant, indiscriminate drone warfare/operator terrorism the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan).
The "problem" with this method is that it runs counter to the exploitative aims of colonialism.
Its not merely that it was too expensive, it was too expensive while Britain and France were massively in debt to the US. This also gave the US great influence to pressure Britain and France to decolonize, because in the late 40s and 50s FDR-style aspirational liberal internationalism still held sway that favored decolonization.
From what I understand it was partially just expense, but partially that a lot of colonial subjects fought in the war; So now you have a ton of military trained men who just fought and died in your stupid war, good luck telling them "Welp, back to your basically slave existence!"
There were also expectations (and I think explicit promises?) in some cases that fighting for the metropole would be rewarded with independence. So you either follow through on that (and transition to more neocolonial forms of exploitation) or balk and face resistance.
Other factors include:
- Increasing connectedness/understanding/media exposure. It's easier to exploit some Orientalized far away peoples when you rarely see or hear about the fight; it gets harder when you have more interaction with them, you have prominent people questioning a lot of the colonial tropes that have been used as justification, and you have greater media exposure of the fighting.
- The Nazis did a colonialism on imperial countries, which made it harder to justify doing colonialism on the imperial periphery. The British could invent concentration camps in Africa in the first part of the 20th century, but once the reality of what a concentration camp actually entails is brought home, popular support for those sorts of practices will drop.
- Unprecedented opposition to the colonial order via aid and public criticism from the USSR, and to a lesser extent the whole project of the UN and a (weak, fleeting, but superficially radical) "commitment" to the concept of human rights.
Hell for Britain concentration camps had become a serious issue on the home front before WW1. It harmed the military's reputation and Kitchener being given power leading up to WW1 was protested from Socialists to liberals. The world was shrinking, people had expectations, it was just never gonna go back to the old days so they had to change
Needed to rebuild on the home front after WWII. Reallocation of resources.
Because the empires cost more to maintain than they made in profit.
It was fine when they had plenty of other money, the country lost but individual capitalists and especially banks won. That was good enough. But they spent all their money on war, and the cupboard was bare. Something had to go.
Untenable expenses to suppress rebellions after getting wrecked? :soviet-hmm:
