India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel won independence in the late 1940s. African independence came between mid-1950s and mid-1970s. Imperial breakup wasn’t new; the novelty was mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology and creation of a large number of new nation-states. World War I and World War II ended with the collapse of Austrian, Russian, German and Japanese empires.
India ended British rule before 1900. Few people of the Indian subcontinent thought of themselves as “Indians”, but British rule promoted a growing sense of Indian identity. In1885, the Indian National Congress INC was established. Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) had studied law in England and wasn’t a very successful lawyer, but he became a leader of the INC. He attacked not just colonial rule but also mistreatment of India’s untouchables and the evils of modernization. Not everyone agreed with Gandhi, and in1948 a Hindu extremist assassinated him.
The relationship between Western-style modernity and tradition has been an issue across the developing world, the case of Islam: Turkey and Iran approached the issue of how Islam and modernity should relate to each other very differently. Turkey emerged in the wake of World War I, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk 1881–1938, as a secular nation, whereas Iran became the center of Islamic Shia’a revival in 1970s.
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