Who Killed the British Empire? an Inquest

Who killed the British Empire? Why did history’s largest imperial system collapse dramatically in the years following the Second World War? In this book, George Woodcock seeks to uncover the conspiracy of human wills and impersonal circumstances that brought the Second British Empire to its sudden end.The book opens in 1930with the Empire at the point of its greatest expansion. Unexpectedly, three events in that year were to have a cataclysmic effect and start the Empire on an irreversible decline —Gandhi’s Salt March, the surrender of Weihaiwei to the Chinese nationalists, and the negotiations leading to the Statute of Westminster, in which Canada was the leading advocate of dominion progress towards virtual independence.Conducting the reader along the great imperial sea-routes to visit the territories of the Empire at its height, Professor Woodcock shows how lands were swallowed up in order to protect the route to India and to the great market of the China Coast, and then as expediently abandoned when their useful role had expired. He explains how, in Canada, the first serious challenges to the integrity of the Empire were made in the struggle for responsible government, which later developed into the struggle for dominion status and virtual independence. He then examines the reasons for the loss of India, the possession in which British Imperial prestige was most concentrated, and in the final chapters he shows how the collapse of the Em