 Decolonization presented a second occasion for rethinking the concept of progress.  In the twenty years after World War II, the European powers relinquished  the vast majority of the non-European colonies still in their possession  (Hunt et. al. 1995, 996–99). Scholars from the former European colonies,  reflecting on the colonial past, have noted that European apologists for  colonialism claimed that it modernized the supposedly backward non-European world.  In other words, the apologists situated colonialism in a progress narrative.  Implicitly or explicitly, postcolonial critics hold that this use of the concept  of progress calls it into question.    