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?

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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!"

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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:

      1. 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.
      2. 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.
      3. 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.
      • Vncredleader
        ·
        3 years ago

        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