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Okay, yeah, since I'm not writing a university essay on all the factors affecting decolonisation, of course there's a lot missing... main factors I'd add were, weakening of European colonial powers by World War II and rise of US and USSR, European powers losing their aura of invincibility through the Japanese invasions in WW2, guerrilla movements stemming directly from the anti-Japanese struggle taking on returning Europeans or seizing power (e.g. Burma, Indonesia, China), guerrilla tactics succeeding in China and being copied elsewhere, Soviet and Chinese support for "national liberation movements", the popularity of import-substitution industrialisation and state-led development in the 1950s-60s, the discrediting of racism and torture and concentration camps during WW2 and the consequent backlash against colonial atrocities, the spread of media coverage (not yet corralled into embedded journalism) so atrocities could no longer be covered-up so easily, economic cost/unprofitable nature of many of the colonies and high costs of developing them enough to be profitable for colonisers, the Cold War context as driver for proxy wars and opportunity-structure for rebels, the strategic pivot to Europe and East Asia, the election of Labour in Britain, the strength of Communist Parties in western Europe... probably some others I've forgotten as well.

Still, I think the big difference is that there were new nationalist movements and a cascade of effective resistance starting with the Indian National Congress and a few others. I think the main driver of decolonisation was the aspirational "native" middle-class of so-called evolues (i.e. modernised/Europeanised) who oriented to the national scale because their upward mobility in imperial bureaucracies was blocked; they organised the by-then widespread discontent among workers and peasants to press for independence.

The western powers were terrified of a scenario where anti-colonial movements "radicalise" in the face of obduracy or atrocities, turn communist or anti-western, get Soviet support, and capture the colonies for the eastern bloc. This had been narrowly avoided in Malaya, but the west had lost China, and kinda half-lost Vietnam and Korea. Other countries were at an earlier stage in the movement curve and still had moderate reformist or nonviolent leadership, but it was anticipated they would radicalise if the pattern repeated and the west could find itself surrounded by hostile Soviet-aligned countries. And the pattern *did* repeat in cases where colonial powers (Portugal; France in Algeria) or local settlers (Zimbabwe) held onto colonies through repression. So an attempt was made to instead rush lots of countries to independence under the leadership of moderate nationalists or astroturfed movements led to colonial-power cronies - an attempt started early by the British state and somewhat later (after Algeria) by the French. In some cases there were then coups or assassinations to remove leaders who proved too radical. Then colonisers encouraged trade and lent lots of money for capitalist-oriented development projects, culminating in the debt crisis and imposition of structural adjustment in the 1980s. So decolonisation succeeded in winning independence but failed to break the dependency/unequal trade system. Postcolonial states include a large group where political power was simply handed over to western puppets (e.g. Cote d'Ivoire), another large group where it was handed over to very nascent independence movements without any real struggle (e.g. Nigeria), a third group where it was handed over to moderates after a social struggle (e.g. India), and a small group who had full independence wars (e.g. Algeria).

It's amazing how rarely unequal trade and dependency come up in idpol discourse, considering how important they were for Fanon, Maoists, etc. They seem to have been replaced by "epistemic privilege".