After the First World War, a wave of political unrest swept through the colonial world. It was of such force that the historical period rightfully deserves to be called the ‘spring of the colonial nations’ as an analogy with the wave of nationalist agitations that crossed Europe in 1848, and which similarly ended with severe blows to the nationalist cause. After the Great War, as far as the Middle East and North Africa were concerned, this wave included, besides Sudan, the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, the Great Iraqi Revolt of 1920, the Great Syrian Revolt between 1925 and 1927, and last but not least, the wars from 1919 to 1923 that led to the creation of the independent Republic of Turkey. Besides these kinds of agitation, which sought direct confrontation with colonial forces, milder forms of resistance also developed in the Mediterranean area. Various political movements were created or restructured during this period that sought increased political rights for national citizens, and in some cases independence. Examples of this may be found in Tunisia, with the reorganization of the Young Tunisians into the Dustour party by ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Tha‘ālbī and others in 1921, or in Algeria, with the ‘Mouvement pour l’Egalité et la Reforme’, which was founded in 1919 by Khālid Bin El-Hāshimī (also known as the ‘Emir Khalid’); this would later lead to the foundation of the most important Algerian nationalist party, the ‘Étoile Nord-Africaine’.

Revolts and protests were by no means confined to the shores of the Mediterranean or the Middle East, however. In 1921, after a wave of mass demonstrations and violence, Gandhi launched the Ahimsaa, the nonviolence movement, in India; one year later the Irish Free State became independent after a war of liberation that had begun in 1919. In 1922, millions of Koreans participated in peaceful demonstrations to protest against Japanese occupation in the name of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. In 1920, in Accra, the National Congress of British West Africa was formed to discuss reforms in the Gold Coast, while in Kenya in 1921, the Young Kikuyu association (soon to be renamed the East African Association) was founded by Harry Thuku in order to ask for more political rights for Kenyan people.