*At the Treaty of Versailles, one of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points was the right to self-determination—the right of ethnic groups to have their own nation-states if they so chose.  This allowed the creation of new states in Eastern Europe, and limited freedom for some Arab kingdoms as well as the creation of a new Turkish republic in the Middle East and some British support for Zionism, but the silent, sullen peoples of Europe's colonial empires hoped that it might apply to them, too.

*One of the best-organised independence movements was both the most peaceful and the most dangerous, because it was in the crown jewel of the British Empire, India.

*Many Indians had wanted independence from Britain, or at least more local rights and power, but they had little success, despite promises of reforms from the British government during World War I, when over a million Indians served overseas.

*India did have political pressure groups, particularly the Indian National Congress (formed in 1885), but like many colonial independence movements, it was led by middle-class people with European educations and little personal connection with the lower classes.  In fact, the Congress party did not initially even seek independence, just a greater voice for Indians in India.

*The Indian independence movement had a number of leaders and many moments to inspire it, such as the British massacre of Indian protesters at Amritsar in 1919, but it would not find true success until Mohandas Gandhi (also called Mahatma, or 'great soul') returned to India and became the leader of the Congress Party.

*Gandhi was born in 1869 as a member of the Vaishya caste.  He had an arranged marriage at the age of 14 to a 15-year old bride.  They later had five children, of whom four sons lived to adulthood.  At 19 Gandhi went to London to study law.  His mother told him to be good while he was gone, and while he had never been seriously interested in philosophy or theology before, he now studied many religions and became deeply interested in and devoted to principles of vegetarianism, non-violence, truth, and freedom.

*He went home to India, but had trouble starting a law practise, so he went to South Africa instead, where he had more success.  He served in the Ambulance Corps during the Boer War.  However, he faced discrimination in South Africa.  He was thrown off trains for his race, ordered to remove his turban in court, and was once nearly lynched.  He organised the Indian community in South Africa into a unified political force, then went home to India in 1915 after 21 years in South Africa, and by 1921 had become leader of the Congress party.

*Gandhi was committed to the principles of ahisma (non-violence) and non-co-operation.  He refused violent revolt or protest, and encouraged Indians to boycott British products, refuse to serve in any position of employment by the British government, reject any titles granted by the British, go to Indian (not British) schools, and avoid British courts of law.  As part of his encouragement of boycotts, he said that all Indians ought to spend some time each day weaving homespun cloth, and when India became independent, a spinning wheel was put in its centre.

*In December 1928, Gandhi and the Congress party asked the British government to make India a dominion or face a new movement with complete independence as its goal.  This was ignored.

*In January 1930, the Indian National Congress declared India's independence, and Gandhi led the Salt March, with 78 people marching 240 miles to the sea.  Along the way crowds came to watch them march, hear Gandhi speak, and sometimes join them.  When they reached the sea, they boiled salty mud in seawater, producing salt without paying the British salt tax.  In response the British imprisoned 60,000 people.

*Indians continued to protest, and Gandhi began to fast, refusing to eat (but in a very public way) until the British made a deal when the world saw a peaceful man starving and British soldiers beating peaceful protesters with clubs on the newsreels.  In return for the Raj releasing political prisoners, the Congress party stopped protests for the moment, but neither side was fully satisfied.  The negotiations had been partly mediated by a Dalit who was also a cricket player, and afterwards, Gandhi began to demand equality for the Dalits, and even an end to the caste system, which made him unpopular with some Indians.  Nonetheless, his principles of non-violence and peaceful civil disobedience would later inspire Martin Luther King, junior, and other civil rights leaders, and would eventually lead to India's independence, but not until after World War II.

*Egypt did gain its independence in 1922, but it was still largely controlled by Britain, who supported (and controlled) Egypt's kings, because Britain could not afford to lose control of the Suez Canal, which it still owned.  Many Egyptians wanted true independence, though, and some joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a Pan-Arab movement that wanted independence for all Arabs under Islamic leadership.

*Iraq became an independent kingdom in 1932, but other Middle-Eastern colonies and mandates would not get their independence until the 1940s or later.

*Other British colonies also sought independence, but with less success.  Many Africans desired independence.  Jomo Kenyatta led Kenya's independence movement.  Ibo women in Nigeria rebelled against the British government.  Leopold Senghor worked for independence in Senegal.  In South Africa the African National Congress demanded rights for Black and Coloured people in South Africa (but saw their rights diminish in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s).  There, many rural blacks were forced onto 'reserves' or 'bantustans' in the lease fertile and productive parts of the country, while urban blacks were forced into townships and denied many services available to their white neighbours.  Many of these groups became loosely united in the Pan-African movement, which would even spread to the US.

*In the United States, W.E.B. DuBois, a famous scholar and activist, tried to organise co-operative efforts to win civil rights and independence for blacks in the United States, Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere.  This was done partly through a joint celebration of African culture and heritage known as the negritude movement.

*A more radical Pan-Africanist in America was Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey.  He led the Back-to-Africa movement in the western hemisphere.  He tried to found businesses run by African-Americans to promote black wealth and to give African-Americans somewhere to do business so they could boycott white-owned businesses.  He published a newspaper, Negro World, and had plans to found factories, grocery stores, restaurants, and more—he began a cruise line, the Black Star Line, in 1919.  With this wealth, he and his followers planned to develop Liberia as a new homeland for African-Americans.  All this was seen as dangerous by the US government, and the FBI managed to get spies into his organisation, and eventually charged Garvey with mail fraud.  After serving part of a five year term, he was freed early and left the US for Jamaica.  DuBois felt that Garvey was a genius, but a dangerous one—by trying to do so much so quickly (and with quite a bit of corruption involved) he might frighten the other races with whom the black race had to work (as demonstrated by FBI efforts to undermine Garvey's work).  Garvey also met with the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, because he felt they understood each other—each wanted their races to be completely separate (besides, Garvey thought every white man was a Klansman inside).

*The Ku Klux Klan was also an expression of American nationalism.  It was a reborn Klan, the original having died out as Reconstruction ended in the South after the Civil War.  It was all-American, waving American flags, promoting patriotism, supporting public schools, and protecting traditional values (in East Tennessee, where there were few minority to persecute, the Klan tended to go after prostitutes and other public nuisances),  but also was firmly racist, but with an expanded mission of hate:  the Klan did not just hate blacks in the 1920s, they also hated Jews, Catholics, Communists, and most immigrants.  Lynch mobs killed over 40 African-Americans between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, when the Klan finally declined as its similarities to Nazism became too apparent.  At its peak in the early 1920s, however, the Klan had over four million members, nearly chose the Democratic nominee for president in 1924, and rumours have always existed that President Harding may have been a member.

*Ireland had long wanted independence from Great Britain, which had ruled it (at least in theory) since 1155 when Pope Adrian IV (the only English pope) gave it to King Henry II.  Britain had brutally oppressed the Irish people and strongly encouraged settlement of the island in the 1600s, particularly in Ulster.  In the 1880s, some Whigs (like Gladstone) had supported Home Rule for Ireland, but it had not been instituted.

*With the support of Germany, Irish nationalists rebelled against British rule in the Easter Rising of 1916, but were brutally crushed.  The Irish Republican Army survived, though, and in 1918 Irish nationalists in the Sinn Fein party created the Dail Eirrean (an Irish nationalist parliament not recognised by the British government), which soon declared independence again.  In 1919, IRA members shot to royal policemen, and Britain cracked down, beginning the Irish War of Independence, which lasted until 1922 when Britain recognised Ireland’s independence.

*Some people in north-eastern Ireland did not want to leave Britain, and each of the nine counties in Ulster got to vote, and six ended up as part of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, although terrorism by both the IRA (although actually a different group with the same name) and the Ulster Unionists continued until the late 1990s.

*Otherwise, the Republic of Ireland created a democratic government for the 26 counties remaining in Ireland.

*Post-war nationalism was not confined to the English-speaking world.  Many of France's colonies in Africa and Asia sought independence.  Among the most important were in Algeria and Indo-China.

*Algeria had been a French colony since 1834, and since 1848 an integral part of France.  However, many Algerians (who were not treated as well as people of European descent) wanted independence, but after World War I, many Algerian veterans of the French Army had the skill and will to resist, and were funded by Algerians working in France and sending their pay home.  However, Algerians would not seriously fight for independence until after WWII

*In Indo-China, a young man born as Nguyễn Sinh Cung but later known as Ho Chi Minh.  Born and raised in Viet-Nam, he received a French education and later went to work in the US.  There he came to admire America's independence leaders like George Washington and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  He also worked in London and Paris  When the Treary of Versailles was created, he petitioned for self-determination for Viet-Nam, but was ignored.  He turned to Communism, began using the name Ho Chi Minh, and began working for independence for Indo-China, although often through work and study in other countries, including work with the Communists in China.

*China had become a republic following the successful Wuchang Uprising in 1912 with Sun Yat-Sen (Sun Xixian) as its first president.  He was a Chinese nationalist, but distrusted by some because he was also a Christian.  Furthermore, China was a chaotic place, with local warlords often making it impossible for the central government to run the country.  This, combined with famine (partly caused by fighting among warlords), made China poor and weak.

*When WWI ended, China, although one of the Allies, felt cheated because Japan had been given control of German trading posts in China.  Japan also gained influence over China during the war, when it threatened to invade unless China gave in to its demands to make China essentially a Japanese protectorate.

*After the War, many Chinese wanted to strengthen their country.  Protests in Peking in 1919 led to the May Fourth movement, as Chinese students, intellectuals, and many members of the middle class (particularly women) worked to reject China's traditions and adopt Western ideas and science in order to modernise as Japan had done in the late 1800s.

*Many Chinese also turned to Communism, which was supported by the Soviet Union.

*In the 1920s, the Kuomintang (KMT; also called the Guomindang) under the leadership of Sun Yat-Sen's successor, Chiang Kai-Shek, worked with the Communists to put down local warlords and bring peace to China.  Chiang was not especially interested in democracy, and once the Kuomintang was in power, he turned against the Communists, slaughtering thousands of them in 1927.

*The surviving Communists, led by Mao Tse-Tung, tried to escape.  Many of them undertook the Long March in 1934 and 1935, hiking over 6,000 miles into the remote mountains and deserts of north-eastern China, fighting a guerilla was against the KMT along the way.  This forged the Communist Part of China into a strong, cohesive, and dedicated group under the control of Mao.  The Nationalists and Communists fought each other, and the Japanese, until 1949.

*Although few European colonies would gain independence before World War II, World War I inspired many to try, and Europe's increasing weakness would allow them to succeed after the Second World War.