Settler Colonies
A rise in "settler colonialism", accompanied the Age of Imperialism as settlers displaced indigenous peoples to claim land for themselves. This process had been underway in North and South America but continued during the 19th century as new settler colonies sprang up in Africa.
The Decolonization of Settler Colonies
While settler colonies outside Africa with their large white majorities gradually transitioned into de facto sovereignty and became independent states,69 for the settler minorities in Africa, decolonization posed an existential threat. They reacted by aggressively separating themselves from the majority and with a militarization that increased as the settlers' power to influence the "mother country," which had already decided to decolonize, disappeared.
The most extreme case was Southern Rhodesia, which separated from Great Britain by means of a unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 to prevent an anticipated transfer of power to the black majority population. In all settler colonies, decolonization involved guerrilla wars70 fought by militant independence movements against the settlers, with the colonial power often supporting the settlers militarily until the international situation or a political realization led to a rethink in the metropole, as occurred in the case of Algeria after 1958.
In some colonies, such as Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, and Kenya, the settlers left the country after independence.71 In the others, including South Africa, after 1994, they lost their political power and became a tolerated minority. But there was no guarantee of this tolerance, as developments in Zimbabwe since 2000 have shown, where White farmers were forcibly dispossessed, and the White minority as a whole came under threat.
With the exception of smaller territories like the Falkland Islands or New Caledonia, European settler colonies are a thing of the past. The great settler colonies of the Americas, northern Asia, and Australia had little difficulty, once indigenous populations had been marginalized, in establishing themselves as nation-states or becoming part of such states. The settler colonies of Africa tended to meet their end in long, bloody conflicts in which the previously oppressed majority population took power. This is not to say that there will never again be settler colonies, but it seems unlikely that they would be vast territorial states or populated by Europeans.