Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1997

Download or read book Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1997 written by George Boyce and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-09-20 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.