Interwar Years: Part 3

1. Interwar Years:Part 3 Reza Shah inspects newly acquire ships from Italy. In the background is the Iranian gunboat "Babr," Leopard sunk by the British during World War II

2. Imagining anIndian Nation • World War I and its aftermath led to full-blown challenges to British rule. • During the 1920s and 1930s, the nationalists, led by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948), transformed the Indian National Congress into a mass party and laid the foundations for an alternative, anti-colonial movement. • Non-violent resistance • Faced with Indian self-reliance and self-control pursued nonviolently, eventually Britain would have to leave.

3. Gandhi and the Road to Independence • A British massacre of peaceful protesters in 1919 in the Punjab left 379 Indian civilians dead and more than 1,200 wounded. • This and other conflicts spurred the nationalists to oppose cooperation with government officials, to boycott the purchase of goods made in Britain, to refuse to send their children to British schools, and to withhold their taxes. • Salt March (1930) and international attention • Gandhi formed a Hindu-Muslim alliance and turned the Indian National Congress into a mass organization.

4. Progress and Divisions • Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) • Believed that only by embracing science and technology could India develop as a cosmopolitan, modern nation. • Religion, too, threatened to fracture Gandhi’s hope for anti-colonial unity. • The Hindu-Muslim alliance began to splinter. • The Government of India Act of 1935 • The British granted India provincial assemblies, a bicameral national legislature, and a self-governing executive. • Enlarged the electorate to 18% of population. • Separated Burma from India and provided with the Burmese with self-government comparable to India.

5. A Post-Imperial Turkish Nation • Until 1914, the Ottoman empire was a colonial power. But having fought on the losing German side, it collapsed. • The Treaty of Sevres, which ended the war between the Allies and the Ottoman empire, reduced the sultan’s realm to a part of Anatolia. • Military leaders turned to Turkish nationalism and began to launch a state-led drive for modernity. • Peace of Lausanne (1923)

8. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk(1881-1938) • Aiming to replace the image of Turkey as ' the Sick Man of Europe ' with that of a dynamic and self-renewing non-imperialist country capable of winning the respect of its more advanced European neighbors, he led his country out of the Middle Ages into the twentieth century in a mere couple of decades. • He achieved this through a coordinated series of sweeping reforms, all directed towards the creation in Turkey of a western-style democracy.

9. Turkish Modernity • 1922 - Sultan deposed. • 1924 - Turkey proclaimed a republic, whose supreme authority would be in an elected House of Assembly. • Modernity • European-style surnames adopted. • Adoption of the Latin alphabet. • Western (Christian) calendar. • Swiss civil code replaced Muslim religious law. • Turkish women enfranchised, schools become secular. • In forging a Turkish nation, Kemal looked to construct a European-like secular state and to eliminate Islam’s hold over civil and political affairs.

10. The Middle East • After World War I, Arab lands of the dissolved Ottoman empire fell under French (Lebanon and Syria) or British (Iraq and Palestine) “mandates.” • Result of a wartime agreement: Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916)

11. Palestine and the Jews • Before World War I, a group of European Jews, known as Zionists, had argued that only an exodus from existing states to their place of origin in Palestine could lead to Jewish self-determination. • Zionists advocated the creation of a Jewish state. • The Balfour Declaration (1917) • The British promised a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. This encouraged the immigration of Jewish settlers into the country. • At the same time however, it also guaranteed the rights of indigenous Palestinians. • This set the stage for a conflict between fledgling Jewish and Arab nations.

12. Palestine and the Jews • Contrary to Zionist assertions, a substantial Arab population already lived in Palestine, and the Palestinian Arabs joined their Arab neighbors to oppose a Jewish political entity. • They proclaimed their own right to self-determination as Palestinians. • When Hitler came to power in Germany, European Jews looked to Palestine as a haven. • The British, increasingly mindful of Arab opposition and the strategic oil wealth of the Arab states, vacillated over supporting Zionist demands for greater immigration.

13. Iran (Formerly Persia) • Reza Khan overthrew the Qajar dynasty in 1921. • Similar to Turkey, a move was made to Westernize and secularize the nation. • Nationalism, modernization, and a critical attitude towards the intrusion of religion into public life. • Maintained the institution of monarchy and was succeeded by his son. • The Pahlavi dynasty ruled Iran until the Islamic Revolution of 1978 and the founding of the Islamic Republic.

15. Africa and Anti-Colonialism • Africa contained the most recent territories to come under the control of the European powers, and as such, anti-colonial nationalist movements were just getting under way. • Excluded from representative bodies, Africans began to experiment with various forms of protest. • Opposition was still not massive in Africa.

16. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt • When Britain refused to grant Egypt independence at Versailles, the country burst into revolt. • In 1922, Britain proclaimed Egypt (nominally) independent, though it retained the right to station British troops on Egyptian soil and thus continued to influence Egyptian politics. • An Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, attacked liberal democracy as a facade for middle-class, business, and landowning interests. • Anti-colonial, Anti-British • Must renounce the West and return to a purified form of Islam. • A “return to Islam” through a nation-state created yet another model of modernity.

17. Egypt at the End of WWI