what happenned to the British Empire we learnt about at school?

Answer 1

I heard that the UK started getting rid of all of its colonies including India b/c it became too overwhelming to try to keep them all under control and was just as advantageous to just use them as places to run profitable businesses instead of trying to maintain political dominance there. So they set up little federations and democracies in all of their old colonies and once they established a friendly government, they set the colonies free.

Answer 2

The same thing that happened to other similar empires such as the Spanish Empire. Eventually, colonies began to see the need for self-determination and they took steps to disengage themselves from the motherland. Additionally, I believe there came a time when the economic system that underpinned the Empire became unsustainable. Events such as the abolition of the trans-atlantic slave trade, and eventually slavery itself, would have made it difficult for the empire to continue to profit from the ventures that it sought to maintain in the New World, examples being the sugar plantations. For more information you might like to do some reading. I checked online and the book that comes up most often is one called, "The Fall of the British Empire, 1918-1968" by Colin Cross. Your local library may have it. Hope this helps.

P.S. "Learnt" is a word in every English-speaking country but the United States.

Answer 3

Britain ran out of money, the locals learnt liberal ideas from the British, and the game was up.

Answer 4

The disintegration of the British Empire essentially began in 1867 when a legal framework was set up to allow the North American colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the United Province of Canada to unite into a single new entity called a "dominion". What this meant was these colonies were allowed to function somewhat like their own country but would still be subject to the will of the mother country in areas like foriegn and military policy or overseas trade. When this political device showed immediate signs of success, by 1873 it was extended to include those lands administered by the Hudson's Bay Company and the Crown Colonies of Prince Edward Island and British Columbia. Altogether over the next few years the move proved to be a positive one as the new Dominion of Canada went into a period of massive economic growth and immigration as it continued to cost less and less for the mother country to keep as a part of the empire.

Come the 1890s talk began to surface of extending an institution like this to the South Seas settler or "white" colonies and by 1901 the colonies of Western Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales, Southern Australia, and Queensland had united in the new Dominion of Australia. They were also joined as a dominion by the newly united islands of New Zealand who formed their own state for fear of being junior partners in a greater south seas union with Australia. Within ten years the conquered Boer states along with the Cape and Natal Colonies were formed into a Dominion as well. Later both the Colony of Newfoundland and the island of Ireland gained this distinction following the Great War.

It was in the aftermath of the Great War however that another phenomenon began to occur. Territory was now beginning to leave the British Empire entirely. This of course refers primarily to the failure of the new Dominion of Ireland which resulted in civil war and the division of the island into the two entities there today, but also includes the establishment of Middle Eastern states such as Iraq which relinquished their "mandate" or protectorate status given to them following the war. This was soon followed by the Staute of Westminister in 1932 which relinquished all means of control over the earlier established Dominions and made them each into sovereign and separate states that now only had the Crown in common with each other.

It was following the Second World War that the tide really turned for the British Empire. The military and economy had both been pushed to the limit and the desire to assert colonial authority over peoples that were beginning to chafe against it was gone. Throughout the late 1940s this led to a withdrawal from the Middle East and India (both of which fractured into smaller political units and semi regular warfare) which was followed a pattern of withdraws from entral and eastern Africa in the fifties which progressed further south into the sixties. Retreat from several Carribean and South Pacific colonies soon followed in the late sixties and into the seventies while their last continental possession in the Americas Belize took until 1981 to assume its own independence. Then of course there was the surrender of Hing Kong to China in 1997 which constituted the most recent imperial territory to be surrendered.

Now with all that said, it is important to note that in many forms the British Empire has not died out. There are still several countries like the Bahamas, Canada, Australia, and Jamaica which have retained the Queen as their head of state. There are also several institutions run through the Commonwealth which aid the exercise of sovereignty in many of the smaller spun off states. As well there are several overseas possessions that still remain in the hands of the British like the Falkland Islands, St. Helena, or Gibraltar which in many respects still count and are run as Imperial possessions.

Hope that didn't prove too confusing or overwhelming.

Answer 5

Greed and complacency combined with a superiority complex was its undoing.

Answer 6

well you clearly never WENT to school
"learnt" is not a word
but "learned" is

Answer 7

They slowly let their holdings get independance