The years between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 are often remembered for economic turmoil, cultural experimentation, and the rise of political extremism. Yet for Indigenous nations and marginalized communities across the globe, the interwar period was not merely a chapter of instability—it was an era when state‑led policies of assimilation, racial segregation, economic exclusion, and social engineering intensified on an unprecedented scale. The collapse of old empires, the redrawing of borders, and the search for national identity after the war created conditions that threatened the survival of distinct cultures, languages, and lifeways. Understanding this period reveals the deep roots of many present‑day struggles for justice, land rights, and recognition.

Global Political and Economic Shifts After the First World War

The armistice of 1918 did not bring a simple return to peace. The Austro‑Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Russian empires disintegrated, leaving power vacuums and a wave of new nation‑states that often defined citizenship in narrow ethnic or religious terms. The Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent minority protection treaties overseen by the League of Nations attempted to safeguard some populations, but enforcement was weak and colonial holdings frequently changed hands without the consent of the Indigenous inhabitants. When the Great Depression struck in 1929, governments slashed social spending and doubled down on land appropriation and cheap labor, disproportionately harming already vulnerable groups. These macro‑trends created a hostile environment in which marginalized communities were forced to navigate both new political realities and the lingering legacies of conquest.

The Plight of Indigenous Communities Worldwide

Indigenous peoples in settler‑colonial states, tropical dependencies, and remote hinterlands all felt the tightening grip of central governments. Policies that had begun in the nineteenth century were now expanded with the backing of modern bureaucracies, scientific racism, and a missionary zeal to “civilize.” In many regions, the interwar years marked a high point in the removal of children, the outlawing of ceremonial practices, and the enclosure of communal lands.

North America: Residential Schools and Forced Assimilation

In Canada, the Indian Act was amended repeatedly during the 1920s and 1930s to strengthen federal control over First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. Attendance at residential schools—church‑run, state‑funded institutions—became compulsory for Indigenous children, and parents who resisted faced legal penalties. The explicit goal, as stated by government officials of the era, was to “kill the Indian in the child.” Children were separated from their families, forbidden to speak their languages, and subjected to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Malnutrition and disease were rampant, and the death rates in many schools were alarmingly high. The trauma of this cultural genocide would reverberate for generations, disrupting kinship networks and severing the transmission of traditional knowledge.

In the United States, the off‑reservation boarding school system continued to expand in the 1920s, modeled after the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Native American children were stripped of their clothing, given new names, and trained for menial labor. At the same time, the Allotment Act (Dawes Act) policies had already fractured reservation lands, and during the Depression, tribal resources were further depleted. While the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act attempted to reverse some assimilationist measures by restoring tribal governance, it imposed Western‑style constitutions that often conflicted with traditional decision‑making processes, leaving mixed legacies. (Source: National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation).

Australia: The Stolen Generations and State Control

In Australia, the interwar period cemented the legal framework for the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. State‑based Aborigines Protection Acts gave extensive powers to government‑appointed “Protectors,” who could decide where Indigenous people lived, what work they did, and whether their children should be institutionalized. The 1937 National Conference on Aboriginal Affairs made official the policy of biological absorption, aiming to “breed out” Aboriginal identity by removing light‑skinned children and raising them in missions or foster homes to become members of the white working class. This practice, which continued for decades, created what is now known as the Stolen Generations. The loss of family, language, and connection to Country inflicted psychological wounds that Australian society is still grappling with today. Many of those who survived these institutions later became leaders in the fight for land rights and formal recognition. (Further reading: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies).

Latin America: Indigenous Labor and Land Encroachments

In Mexico, the Revolution (1910‑1920) had promised land and dignity to Indigenous campesinos, and the post‑revolutionary state under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934‑1940) did carry out significant land redistributions. However, the official ideology of indigenismo often sought to integrate Indigenous peoples into a unified national identity rather than preserve their distinct cultures. The state promoted Spanish‑language education and sanitation campaigns that sometimes suppressed traditional medicine and communal rituals. In the Amazon basin, the interwar rubber boom continued to drive horrific exploitation; Indigenous groups in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia were subjected to debt peonage, forced relocation, and epidemic diseases that decimated populations. Remote tribes that had avoided contact were actively pursued by developers and missionaries, setting a pattern of frontier violence that accelerated in later decades.

Africa and Asia: Colonial Extractive Economies

European colonial powers viewed their African and Asian possessions primarily as sources of raw materials and cheap labor. Indigenous communities such as the San in southern Africa, the Maasai in East Africa, and the hill tribes of Southeast Asia saw their grazing lands and forests carved up for mines, plantations, and settler farms. Colonial regimes imposed hut taxes that compelled men to seek wage work far from home, destabilizing traditional economies and family life. The First World War had already recruited tens of thousands of African and Indian soldiers, and during the interwar period, colonial administrations extracted even more resources to service war debts. Movements of resistance—from the Mau Mau precursors in Kenya to the Pan‑African Congresses—gathered strength, though harsh reprisals kept many communities in a state of simmering discontent. The colonial project’s demand for orderly administration also meant the systematic erasure of Indigenous legal systems, with native courts replaced by European‑style tribunals that could not accommodate communal land tenure or customary law.

Marginalized Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Minorities

The interwar era was saturated with racial pseudo‑science, eugenics, and nationalist ideologies that cast certain groups as biologically inferior or culturally backward. This intellectual climate legitimized segregation, disenfranchisement, and even extermination. The consequences were felt acutely on every continent.

African Americans and the Jim Crow Era

In the United States, the Great Migration saw over a million African Americans move from the rural South to northern cities between 1916 and 1930. While they escaped the worst of the southern lynching epidemic and sharecropping dependency, they encountered de facto housing segregation, job discrimination, and racial violence in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district—known as “Black Wall Street”—leaving hundreds dead and thousands homeless. The interwar period was also the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan, which claimed millions of members and targeted not only African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Despite these conditions, this was also a time of extraordinary cultural and political vitality: the Harlem Renaissance produced literature, music, and art that asserted Black dignity and identity, while organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) litigated against segregation and lynching, laying the groundwork for the mid‑century civil rights movement. (See: NAACP History).

Anti-Semitism and the Rise of Nazism

In Europe, anti‑Semitism had deep historical roots, but the interwar period transformed it into a central organizing principle of the Nazi state. The false “stab‑in‑the‑back” legend blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in 1918. After 1933, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jewish citizens of their rights, prohibited marriages between Jews and gentiles, and defined Jewishness in racial terms. The 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom saw synagogues burned, businesses destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jewish men arrested. Other European states also enacted discriminatory measures, and many closed their borders to Jewish refugees attempting to flee. The intellectual and cultural devastation was immense—scores of scientists, artists, and scholars were driven into exile, while millions who remained faced the impending genocide. The interwar period demonstrated how legitimized hatred, when combined with bureaucratic power, could pave the way for atrocity. (Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Colonial Subjects and the Color Bar

Throughout the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires, racial hierarchies were enforced through both law and custom. In British India, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which troops fired on unarmed protesters, inflamed anti‑colonial nationalism. The Indian National Congress under Mahatma Gandhi launched non‑cooperation movements in the 1920s and civil disobedience campaigns in the 1930s that challenged the empire’s legitimacy. Across Africa, colonial officers assumed that “natives” were incapable of self‑rule and maintained a rigid color bar that restricted access to skilled trades, higher education, and public spaces. In French West Africa, subjects could theoretically earn citizenship by abandoning their culture and adopting French legal norms, but in practice very few were allowed to rise. The contradictions of fighting a war for democracy in 1914‑1918 only to return to subjugation embittered a generation of veterans who would later lead independence movements. Their organizational skills and political consciousness were forged in the crucible of interwar injustice.

Women’s Struggles Between Two Wars

The First World War had thrown open factory gates and offices to women, but with the return of men from the front, many governments and employers worked to push women back into domestic roles. Nevertheless, the interwar period witnessed significant breakthroughs in the fight for political equality. In the United States, the 19th Amendment (1920) enfranchised women after decades of suffrage activism. In the United Kingdom, women over 30 gained the vote in 1918, and full equal suffrage arrived in 1928. Many European and Latin American countries followed suit.

Yet these victories were often limited in practice. Women of color, Indigenous women, and poor women frequently remained excluded from the ballot through poll taxes, literacy tests, or outright prohibition. In the workplace, female employees were routinely paid less than men and were the first to be dismissed during the Depression. Women’s organizations and trade unions campaigned for maternal health care, birth control information, and equal pay, but progress was uneven. Nordic countries pioneered family allowances and welfare reforms, while in southern and eastern Europe women were frequently confined to traditional peasant economies. The interwar period also saw the emergence of female pilots, scientists, and politicians who challenged stereotypes, proving that the “first wave” of feminism had not exhausted its momentum.

Economic Disenfranchisement: The Working Class and the Great Depression

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 sent shockwaves through the global economy, triggering mass unemployment, bank failures, and deflation. For working‑class families, many of whom were already living at subsistence levels, the Depression was catastrophic. In the United States, unemployment reached 25 per cent, and in industrial regions of Europe the figures were similar. Shantytowns—known as “Hoovervilles” in America—sprang up on the edges of cities. Hunger marches and strikes became common.

Marginalized workers were hit hardest. African American and Latino laborers were often the last hired and the first fired. Indigenous workers on reservations or in migrant farm labor experienced extreme poverty. The Bonus Army of 1932, when thousands of unemployed First World War veterans marched on Washington, D.C., to demand early payment of bonuses, ended in a violent crackdown that exposed the state’s capacity for repression. Yet these hardships also fostered solidarity. Communist and socialist parties gained members, labor unions grew more militant, and the experience of collective suffering planted seeds for the New Deal in the United States, the Popular Front in France, and other welfare‑state innovations. The fight for a social safety net was forged in the crucible of interwar deprivation.

LGBTQ+ Communities in the Interwar Years

In a handful of cosmopolitan cities, the 1920s offered a small window of relative visibility for same‑sex‑loving and gender‑nonconforming people. Berlin’s Weimar culture, for example, became famous for its cabarets, scientific study of sexuality, and early advocacy for gay and lesbian rights under figures like Magnus Hirschfeld. His Institute for Sexual Science (1919‑1933) provided counseling, advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality, and collected a vast library on gender and sexuality. This fragile progress was ruthlessly destroyed when the Nazis came to power; Hirschfeld’s institute was looted and its books burned in 1933, and homosexual men were later systematically persecuted in concentration camps.

In most other parts of the world, LGBTQ+ people lived under constant threat of exposure, arrest, and medicalization. British law criminalized male homosexual acts, and similar statutes enforced in colonies remained on the books for generations. In the United States, police raided gay and lesbian bars, and the psychiatric profession often treated homosexuality as a disorder that required “cure.” Despite these dangers, small subcultures persisted in port cities and metropolitan centers, and personal letters and diaries from the period testify to the quiet networks of affection and support that would ultimately grow into the post‑war movement for sexual liberation. The interwar era therefore represents both a lost promise and a testament to the resilience of marginalized identities.

Lasting Legacies and Lessons for Today

The cumulative effect of interwar policies on Indigenous and marginalized communities cannot be overstated. Residential schools and child removal programs fractured families in ways that still affect health, education, and economic outcomes. The racial legislation of the 1930s provided the template for later apartheid systems and institutional discrimination. The Depression’s ravages discredited laissez‑faire economics and gave rise to the welfare states that would later, albeit imperfectly, attempt to blunt inequality. Women’s suffrage and the early civil rights victories laid institutional foundations for the second‑wave feminisms and decolonization movements of the mid‑twentieth century.

Memorialization and truth‑telling have become central to healing. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Australia’s National Sorry Day, and the international movement to return colonial‑era artifacts and remains all trace their moral urgency back to the injustices that crystallized in the 1920s and 1930s. Understanding this history is not an academic exercise; it is a prerequisite for genuine reconciliation and for crafting policies that do not repeat the errors of forced assimilation and cultural erasure. The interwar period stands as a stark reminder that periods of rapid change can either crush diversity or, if met with resistance and solidarity, give rise to movements that expand the circle of human dignity.

When we examine the treaties broken, the children stolen, and the voices silenced between the two world wars, we confront a legacy that still shapes the boundaries of belonging in nations around the world. Recognizing that legacy is the first step toward repairing it. The stories of survival, advocacy, and defiance from that era are not merely records of suffering—they are blueprints for the ongoing work of building societies that honor the dignity of all peoples.