A weird thought occurred to me recently - I started thinking about the British Empire, empires in general and wars of independence. And then I realized that it seems to me that most wars of independence seem to occur due to some ethnic-power tension, where the colonizer is clearly an Other that came in and took control of the power structure.

Eventually the natives turn on them and there's a war. We see this in India, Africa, etc.

However when I look at histories of colonies where the white power structure included large white populations - Algeria, Angola, Mozambique - you see that the white populations were NOT in favor of independence and in fact often resisted it to the last day.

Yet it seems like the British Empire managed to accomplish this twice - both in Ireland and the USA there were wars for independence. I can't think of similar wars for the Portuguese or the French empires.

On the topic of South America, outside of Brasil, my knowledge is really limited. So I'm wondering whether the revolutions led by Simon Bolivar were in fact also guided by the white power class. Still it's fascinating that something happened relatively rarely (I think).

So I guess my question is - is this something that seemed to happen more often with the British Empire? or is this just a question of my lack of knowledge about other colonies that followed similar paths?

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Thanks