ABSTRACT
The scholarly literature on the end of the British Empire is brimming with all kinds of evocative metaphors. If a sixty-year implosion sounds something like a contradiction in terms, perhaps we can think instead of a sequence of implosions, possibly ultimately detonating each other. Certainly, the years 1947–1948 looked rather like an implosion with rapid decolonisations in India, Pakistan, Burma and Sri Lanka, the departure of Ireland from the Commonwealth, and the scuttle, implosion and explosion all at once in Palestine leading to the dramatic formation of the state of Israel. The Indian Empire was an old empire inherited in 1858 from a commercial company. Since the 1830s, the so-called Anglicist school, led by Lord Macaulay, had trumpeted that Indian independence, under the leadership of Indians who were English in tastes, in morals and in intellect, would be the greatest day in English history.
