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Frank
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MeisterEckhart wrote on May 10 th, 2025 at 3:38pm: Frank wrote on May 10 th, 2025 at 3:31pm: MeisterEckhart wrote on May 10 th, 2025 at 2:57pm: Frank wrote on May 10 th, 2025 at 2:11pm: MeisterEckhart wrote on May 10 th, 2025 at 10:34am: The way Britain managed the dissolution of its empire was also due to its cost.
As far back as the mid-18th century, Britain began granting dominion status to some of its colonies, with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, and the Irish Free State (now Ireland).
In 1948, Britain formally ended the British Empire and abolished the monarch's Imperial title, although its true end came a few years later after Eisenhower publicly demanded the British withdraw from the Suez.
Since then, the only vestige of its former Imperial role has been in the monarchy and the Privy Council, with the British monarch being retained in as many former colonies as their respective people desire, but reigns in name only, and the Privy Council being retained as the independent state wishes.
The cost was fighting Nazism, not the cost of colonial public service. France, surrendering to Germany pronto, did not lose its empire at the end of the war. Decolonisation after 1945 was a natural continuation of fight for liberation from Nazi Germany in Europe spreading to the rest of the world, as liberation from various, now-liberated colonial powers like Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany itself. The decolonisation of British settler countries like Canada, Australia, NZ and the US, of course, began much earlier. How ready the coloured chappies of Africa and Asia were for independence is another question, still debatable today. The inevitable crushing cost of running its empire dawned on the British establishment by the mid-19th century, which is the primary reason why the colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa were granted dominion status. The US agreed to British demands that its empire be returned to it after WW2 with one unegotiable condition: that it grant independence to every colony and possession that demanded it. Churchill, himself, was contemplating reneging on the promise of Indian independence, but he was quickly disabused of that notion. So if it was so crushngly costly for Britain to bring civilisation to every corner of the globe, it should demand compensation from India, Africa, Asia, the Americas. Yep, well, try running that by the indigenous populations! The fact is that India, in particular, was so stacked with riches, the British establishment would rather have cut off their own balls than lose it. To this day, the gold Indic peoples accumulated over thousands of years of trade is still largely in private Indian hands... the British literally could not bleed the country dry, and not from want of trying. Britain's resentment at having to relinquish its possessions in India has long been suspected by Indians (and it's largely their firm belief) to be the real reason why Britain partitioned the subcontinent - the world's most egregious act of spite. So it was the crushing, unsustainable cost of controlling stacked riches. So why dont they reunite, now that they are independent? And why arent they rich?
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