The end of empire came swiftly.

Between 1940 and 1980, eighty-one colonies and four quasi-colonies gained independence from a European metropole and were recognized as sovereign states. The story of decolonization in phase 5 is immensely complex, not least because so many territories in so many parts of the world were involved.

The sheer scope of imperial collapse and new-state formation has no prece­dent in history. Every metropole lost possessions. Between 1940 and 1980, forty-three colonies and four quasi-colonies of Britain became independent, as did twenty-five colonies of France, five of Portugal, three of Belgium, two each of Italy and Holland, and one of Spain.¹ Four territories that were European colonies in phase 3—the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Western Samoa, and Nauru—attained indepen­dence from non-European metropoles. Almost 40 percent of the world’s popula­tion—2.2 billion people in the year 2000—inhabits states that made the transition from colonial to independent status between 1940 and 1980. Decolonization took a different course for a half dozen colonies absorbed, by force or through diplomatic negotiation, into larger contiguous states.²

Decolonization had largely run its course by 1980. Of the remaining posses­sions most were small island chains in the Pacific. Between 1981 and 1999 five Euro­pean colonies and five former colonies administered by non-European powers be­came independent. Control over Britain’s Hong Kong and Portugal’s Macao passed to the People’s Republic of China. When the twentieth century ended only a few scattered territories, with minimal economic or strategic significance, were in Euro­pean hands.