section_path: Independence movements
section_name: Independence movements
paragraph_text: Independence movements
  
  In the two hundred years following the American Revolutionary War in 1783, 165 colonies have gained independence from Western imperial powers. Several analyses point to different reasons for the spread of anti-colonial political movements. Institutional arguments suggest that increasing levels of education in the colonies led to calls for popular sovereignty; Marxist analyses view decolonisation as a result of economic shifts toward wage labor and an enlarged bourgeois class; yet another argument sees decolonisation as a diffusion process wherein earlier revolutionary movements inspired later ones. Other explanations emphasize how the lower profitability of colonization and the costs associated with empire prompted decolonization. Some explanations emphasize how colonial powers struggled militarily against insurgents in the colonies due to a shift from 19th century conditions of "strong political will, a permissive international environment, access to local collaborators, and flexibility to pick their battles" to 20th century conditions of "apathetic publics, hostile superpowers, vanishing collaborators, and constrained options". In other words, colonial powers had more support from their own region in pursuing colonies in the 19th century than they did in the 20th century, where holding on to such colonies was often understood to be a burden.
  
  A great deal of scholarship attributes the ideological origins of national independence movements to the Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment social and political theories such as individualism and liberalism were central to the debates about national constitutions for newly independent countries. Contemporary decolonial scholarship has critiqued the emancipatory potential of enlightenment thought, highlighting its erasure of Indigenous epistemologies and failure to provide subaltern and Indigenous people with liberty, equality, and dignity.