The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire
Peter Clarke
Penguin, Rs 750
The british Empire, at its zenith in 1939, was the largest and the most widely flung that the world had ever seen. Yet, by 1945, two of its most important components, India and Palestine, were on the road to independence, signalling the empire was now in its death throes.

How did this come about? How did Britain, supposedly the most powerful country in the world, suddenly find itself once again an island, minus its vast possessions? This is the question that Cambridge University historian Peter Clarke — best known for the vivid life of Labour Party millionaire maverick Sir Stafford Cripps — inquires in a book based on rock-solid research (including diaries and letters of protagonists) and written with his customary fluency of style.

In a legendary statement in 1942, British prime minister Winston Churchill had proclaimed, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Yet, as Clarke shows, Churchill’s actions, in many ways, opened the way for the liquidation to take place. At the time Churchill made his statement, the war against the Axis powers was still very much in the balance. He had only recently seen his hope — that the US would be on Britain’s side in the war — materialise. He had also put aside his decades-long antipathy to Soviet Russia, and joined hands with Stalin when Hitler attacked the world’s only communist state.

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