It's been a commonplace here that ITTL the breakup of the great colonial empires will slow down relative to OTL because the Entente nations will be less exhausted after the war and under less pressure from the U.S. to decolonize.
It occurred to me this morning that there is direct evidence for this proposition: the Portuguese Empire. The Portuguese weren't belligerents in WWII, never came under serious American pressure, and their colonial period didn't end until 1975. This suggests that larger, wealthier colonial powers such as ITTL England and France could, if the will were present, hold on to their Imperial systems even longer than that.
But thinking about it further I now consider 30-40 more years before imperialism becomes unviable to be an underestimate. Why? Because there was another major factor in OTL imperial crackups - Communist agitprop and Soviet material support. The OTL Soviets expended substantial effort over generations (Patrice Lumumba University, anyone?) to train anti-colonial revolutionaries and terrorists, many of whom became leading figures in pro-Soviet post-Colonial governments. And all those AK-47s did not spontaneously generate in the local soil.
For several reasons already discussed here, the ITTL post-war Soviets will have less prestige and less ability to influence the world outside their borders than in OTL. There will have been no "Uncle Joe" propaganda to soften Western opposition to communism. Communist movements are unlikely to ever successfully position themselves as "anti-fascists". The Cold War will be harder, with Western governments making more effort to root out not only Soviet spies but Soviet agents of influence. As a consequence of the latter, there will be a lot fewer apologias for Communist insurgencies uttered.
In this political environment, I think decolonization will slow down substantially even relative to the OTL Portuguese example. Not everywhere - I can't see the timetable for Canadian and Australian independence changing by much because those were already mature civil societies at PoD; correspondingly, Communist influence on their exit from the British imperial system was nil. Nor were the Communists much of a factor in the Indian independence movement.
But elsewhere? If think the postwar history of Africa and Indochina in particular will look very, very different. I can easily see direct imperial rule by the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese persisting into the 1990s, perhaps even past century's end. Yes, eventually peaceful pressure from nascent civil societies in the colonies will tell (likely sooner in Asia than in Africa). But it could be a long time coming.
And maybe that'd be a good thing. I suspect that with more time to build institutions and a larger middle class, we'd see fewer post-colonial regimes collapsing into tribalism and thug politics. The association from "third world" to "shithole" might not become so automatic. Or, at least, that we might have fewer Zimbabwes and more Mexicos.
