ABSTRACT
Economic trends coalesced with Britain's shifting strategic interests: the new world dominated by the superpowers increasingly exposed the military redundancy of colonial empires. Despite awareness of the growing mismatch between overseas commitments and economic capacity, the empire remained highly prized by the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden between 1951 and 1957. The 1940s and the early 1950s had been a period of integrated in Britain, sterling-area economic development in which colonial economies were expected to produce commodities which would earn or save dollars while, simultaneously, absorbing metropolitan manufactures. The force of the 'wind of change' that the Labour government of Harold Wilson which broke the 13 years of Tory rule in 1964 was faced with a 'settler revolt' in November 1965, when the white-dominated government of Southern Rhodesia refused to succumb to 'African majority rule' and made its unilateral declaration of independence (UDI).
