How Thin the Empire Really Was

CHAPTER 1 · THE COLONIAL MAP OF 1945 · The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994

Look at the map in 1945: almost the whole continent belongs to Europe. Blue for British, grey-tan for French, tan for the Portuguese, Belgian, Spanish and Italian holdings — only Ethiopia, Liberia and nominally-independent Egypt stand apart in parchment. It looks total. It was not. Nigeria, some thirty million people, was administered by roughly 1,200 British officials; a single district officer might govern a million. Empire ruled through African chiefs, African clerks and African soldiers, on a shoestring — and that thinness is the first thing to understand about how fast it would fall.

The turn: Brazzaville, January 1944.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.