South and Southeast Asia led the post-war wave. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, and Burma and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) followed in 1948. Burma chose not to join the Commonwealth when it became independent in January 1948, a sign of how deep anti-British feeling ran after the war. But the most dramatic stories came from the Dutch and French colonies, where the old rulers tried to return by force.

The Japanese interlude

Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Malaya and Burma during the war. Its rule was often brutal, and forced laborers died by the hundreds of thousands. Yet Japan also jailed or expelled European officials, armed and trained local youth groups, and in some places promoted nationalist leaders. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, a power vacuum opened before European forces could return, and nationalists moved into it.

Indonesia

Two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed an independent Republic of Indonesia. The Netherlands refused to accept it. British and then Dutch troops arrived, and four years of war and negotiation followed. The Dutch called their two large offensives, in 1947 and 1948, "police actions," a name that presented a colonial war as a domestic matter of law and order.

The Dutch won most battles but could not end the guerrilla resistance. The decisive pressure came from abroad. The UN Security Council called for a ceasefire, and in 1949 the United States threatened to cut off Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands unless it negotiated. Washington had also noticed something important: the Indonesian Republic had crushed a communist revolt at Madiun in 1948, which convinced American officials that the nationalists were not Soviet allies. At a conference in The Hague, the Netherlands agreed to transfer sovereignty, which it did in December 1949.

The Dutch held on to western New Guinea until 1962. The territory then passed to Indonesia, a change confirmed in 1969 by an "Act of Free Choice" in which about a thousand selected representatives voted for integration. Many Papuans and outside observers have rejected that vote as unrepresentative, and the dispute continues.

Indochina

In Vietnam, the communist-led Viet Minh declared independence in September 1945. France returned, and from 1946 it fought an eight-year war. The French war in Indochina ended after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, where Viet Minh forces hauled artillery into the hills around a French base and forced its surrender. A conference at Geneva that year confirmed the independence of Laos and Cambodia. The Geneva conference divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel, with national elections promised for 1956. The elections never took place, and the division hardened into the Vietnam War, a story that belongs as much to the Cold War as to decolonization.

Malaya

Britain's colony of Malaya faced a communist insurgency from 1948, led by the Malayan Communist Party, whose members were mostly ethnic Chinese. The British called the conflict an "Emergency," partly, it is often said, so that London insurers would keep covering planters' losses, which a declared war might not have allowed. To cut the guerrillas off from food and recruits, the Briggs Plan resettled about half a million rural people, mostly Chinese squatters, into guarded "New Villages."

British commanders, especially General Gerald Templer from 1952, combined force with efforts to win over the population: land titles, clinics, schools and citizenship. They also promised independence, which undercut the communists' main appeal. Malaya became independent in August 1957 under Tunku Abdul Rahman, while the Emergency was officially ended in 1960.

Malaya was later held up as a model of successful counterinsurgency. Critics point to the other side of the record: curfews, collective punishments for whole villages, detention without trial and the killing of 24 unarmed villagers by British soldiers at Batang Kali in December 1948. Recent historians stress that the campaign relied heavily on coercion, not only on persuasion, and they warn against treating it as a gentle formula to copy.

Worked example: the Netherlands looks back

For decades the Dutch remembered the Indonesian war mainly as a sad but necessary effort to restore order. Veterans who spoke of atrocities were sometimes treated as traitors. In 2005 the Dutch foreign minister attended Indonesia's independence day celebrations and said the Netherlands accepted the 1945 proclamation politically and morally. A large government-funded study by three Dutch research institutes, published in 2022, concluded that Dutch forces had used extreme violence systematically and that the government had tolerated it. Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized. In 2023 he went further and said the Netherlands recognized 17 August 1945 as Indonesia's day of independence fully and without reservation.

The case shows why dates matter in decolonization. To accept 1949 as the start of independence is to treat the war years as an internal Dutch matter. To accept 1945 is to say the Dutch were fighting a sovereign people. How a former empire tells the story shapes what it believes it owes the people it once ruled.