Newly Independent States
Driving Question: How did newly independent states respond to post-colonial life?
Big empires rise and fall, pushed and pulled by what's happening inside and outside their borders. Leaders of newly-independent countries faced a variety of problems and used different tools to keep things in order, but their goals, methods, and overall success varied depending on various socio-political and cultural factors.
Learning Objectives
- Explain how political changes in the period from c. 1900 led to territorial, demographic, and nationalist developments.
- Use close reading skills to analyze the effects of decolonization on newly liberated regions.
Vocab Terms:
Revisit the Question Parsing Tool to help figure out what prompts are asking you to do.
Why did so many great empires lose their colonies after the Second World War? This article gives you a global view of the post-war transformation that brought together all of the different regional stories you have encountered and will encounter in this unit.
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Guiding Questions
This article gives students an introduction to the newly independent states that arose during the era of decolonization, helping them understand the movements that were successful and the problems with which these states had to contend.
Between 1945 and 1997, an unprecedented number of former colonies became independent. Explore this worldwide movement—from India and the Middle East to Africa.
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Guiding Questions
You’ve seen the many ways that the Cold War and decolonization were entangled. Use this activity to start pulling the threads apart.
This video provides students with a useful illustrative example to help them understand the learning objective and historical developments for this topic, including how newly independent states often guided economic life to promote development.
Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country. But her time as Pakistan’s Prime Minister was controversial. Was she an icon of progress for women’s rights? Or is her legacy tarnished by corruption and misrule?
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Guiding Questions
You can use OER Project source collections in different ways. If your students aren’t ready to analyze multiple sources just yet, have them focus on one of the sources in this collection by asking them to analyze the historical context and the author’s purpose, point of view, or audience to help them practice their sourcing skills.
Sociopolitical changes help fuel various independence movements around the world. In this exercise, you will use primary sources to find out what those changes are. We recommend you use the Quick-Sourcing Tool to complete this exercise.
Find evidence of how nationalism was used in decolonization movements.