wefullpac

1. African Independence Map

The rise to independence of 17 sub-Saharan African countries in 1960 is in part the result of a long process that began fifteen years earlier in the tumult of World War II. At the end of the war, Africans involved in pro-independence movements put pressure on colonial powers, reminding them of promises made to secure their support in the war effort. The colonising countries, chaperoned by the United States, were thus obliged to let their colonies go. In 1944 in Brazzaville, General de Gaulle suggested that it was time for France to take “the road of a new era”. Two years later, the French colonial empire was replaced by the French Union, which in turn became the French Community in 1958.

At the same time on the African continent, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Ghana, and Guinea won their independence, while the unrest in Algeria continued to exhaust and damage France’s reputation.

African Independence Map

After three centuries of colonial rule, independence came rather suddenly to most of Spanish and Portuguese America. Between 1808 and 1826 all of Latin America except the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico slipped out of the hands of the Iberian powers who had ruled the region since the conquest. The rapidity and timing of that dramatic change were the result of a combination of long-building tensions in colonial rule and a series of external events. The reforms imposed by the Spanish Bourbons in the 18th century provoked great instability in the relations between the rulers and their colonial (100 of 38231 words).