Both World War I & II resulted in millions of deaths and destruction of Europe, but most importantly, a bunch of imperialized colonies started to think for themselves. They fought in the war, after all-- why shouldn’t they be independent? And if European leaders were hoping to use the profits of their colonies to buy their way back to power, they would be disappointed. The people living in their colonies were now ready and able to end colonial rule in their own lands. In addition, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were left largely undamaged by the war, whereas Western Europe was totally destroyed. This left both of them primed to become world powers. As for the rest of Europe, those powers had been devastated by WW II and the massive death tolls due to war and genocide. So maybe it's no surprise that the two great powers that emerged from the conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union. However, China, a rising power, was even farther away. But whether they were described as Cold War struggles or decolonization depended on perspective. If you had been a colonial subject in Africa, for example, your attempts to create your own country would feel like a decolonization struggle. From this perspective, calling for US or Soviet help was just a way to get the support you needed. Thus, while the Cold War and the decolonization process are often studied separately, in this unit, we ask how studying them together gives us a different and possibly more illuminated understanding of this era. However, throughout each of these two parts of this unit, the stories we explore are never strictly decolonization stories or strictly Cold War stories.