Customer Reviews:
 Cutting and Running October 18, 2007
The story of the dismantlement of the Empire is usually told piece-meal and selectively, focussing on the more dramatic areas: Ireland, India, Palestine, Suez. But it is a subject that benefits from being treated as a whole, because there is a certain unity to it, as this excellent collection (for me, the best of the series) points out.
It was clear to successive British governments after World War 1 and its aftermaths in Ireland and Amritsar that there were neither the funds available, nor the stomach to police any part of the Empire in the face of serious civil disobedience, so that policy between the wars was to try to paper over such uncomfortable facts. The failure to construct the planned Singapore naval base and create a Pacific fleet meant that such inadequacies were made evident when Japan launched its assaults.
The task after 1945 therefore was to try to portray the withdrawal from Empire as a planned process. Mostly there weren't any plans, and even those that were made - for federations in the Caribbean, East Africa and Rhodesia and Nyasaland for intance - came to nothing.
There is a success story. Given its limited objectives, the Commonwealth functions extremely well, with countries with no connection to the Empire queuing for admission. But the current structure of the Commonwealth wasn't planned either. Fitting really.
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