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In the late summer of 1939 the British elite ruled a state-empire system¹ that embraced territories and peoples spanning the globe, an empire upon which "the sun never set", within which an identity was available to all — "British" — and where, amongst that elite, various problems notwithstanding, the future health of "the Empire" was taken for granted. Yet six years later, in the summer of 1945, it was clear that the system could no longer be sustained; the metropolitan core elite could command neither the economic resources, nor the military capability, nor the politico-intellectual convictions that were necessary to sustain their state-empire and within a few years it was dissolved. In the hitherto peripheral territories a number of new states were formed — in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean — and their place within the wider evolving industrial-capitalist system ordered under the rubric of state formation, nation-building and economic advance, or, in brief, development, where the precise pursuit of this goal was inflected by sometimes violent disputes, both local and international, as to the most effective course of action. All this is reasonably familiar: the empire dissolved, some parts did well, others, not so well. The other part of the tale, events in the hitherto core, are not so well known.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137023834_1

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