1919: A Year of Anti-Colonial Uprisings

The year 1919 saw a remarkable wave of nationalist protest across Asia and Africa, inspired partly by talk of self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference. In Egypt, a British protectorate since 1914, the arrest and exile of the nationalist leader Saad Zaghlul in March sparked a revolution of strikes and demonstrations involving peasants, students, workers and women; Britain eventually declared Egyptian independence, with major limits, in 1922.

In Korea, under Japanese rule since 1910, activists read a Declaration of Independence on 1 March, and peaceful demonstrations spread nationwide before being harshly suppressed. In China, students protested in Beijing on 4 May against the peace conference's decision to transfer German rights in Shandong to Japan, launching the May Fourth Movement. In India, troops fired on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar in April, killing hundreds.

These movements largely failed to win immediate independence, but they turned nationalism into a mass force and convinced many activists that freedom would have to be won rather than granted.