Decolonisation And The British Empire, 1775 1997

This analysis of the ideas and policy choices of British decolonization shows how the political tradition of experience over abstract theory meant that the Empire was regarded as being painlessly transformed rather than lost. It discusses decolonization in its wider 20th-century context. This book combines an analysis of the ideas and policies that governed the British experience of decolonization. It shows how the British, perhaps more correctly the English, political tradition, with its emphasis on experience over abstract theory, was integral to the way in which the empire was regarded as being transformed rather than lost. This was a significant aspect of the relatively painless British loss of empire. It places the process of decolonization in its wider context, tracing the twentieth-century domestic and international conditions that hastened decolonization, and, through a close analysis of not only the policy choices but also the language of British imperialism, it throws new light on the British way of managing both the expansion and contraction of empire.