[BoxOfRain]

> India must remain an integral portion of the British Empire so long as the British nation continues to be predominant at home.

It was well-understood in those days how much of the British Empire existed to defend or facilitate trade with what would have then been British India. After India was successful in the pursuit of its independence, it wasn't surprising the British Empire entered a terminal decline and Britain's superpower status was convincingly lost by the 1950s - a relatively fast decline. India was the land which economically justified a lot (but not all) of the whole imperial undertaking.

It's interesting, although perhaps not unexpected, that the LLM has captured this important geopolitical notion of its day.

[bandrami]

One of the most fascinating facts about this (to me at least) is that in 1850 Manchester was the second richest city in the empire and the world's largest textile producer, while by 1900 Bombay was both of those things (though the American Civil War also plays into that switch for weird path-dependent reasons).

[eru]

> India was the land which economically justified a lot (but not all) of the whole imperial undertaking.

The Empire was a moneylosing operation for Britain.

I suspect it's not so much that losing India caused the Empire to go down, but that a general (relative) decline in Britain expressed itself via the loss of India and the other declines you see.

[jjmarr]

It was profitable in a mercantilist world in which one must establish an empire ruled by force in order to obtain free trade. The British Empire had the largest free trade zone and made the most money as a result.

After the Great Depression was aggravated by tariffs like Smoot-Hawley, the United States decided this wasn't sustainable.

After World War 2, the United States was in a position to dictate the global economic system. At Bretton Woods they instituted a system of voluntary free trade.

Now that Britain had voluntary free trade agreements with the rest of Europe, there was no reason to keep British India. Even if France or the United States conquered it, they would still export raw materials to the UK and import manufactured goods.

This was true for the rest of the empire as well.

Meanwhile the costs of maintaining the empire skyrocketed. The military was depleted from WW2. It was easier to grant independence than to rebuild the military.

[archdang]

It's a narrow and poorly supported view that it truly was money-losing.

Such claims systematically ignore the $45 trillion (current value) extraction from India, and treat the counterfactual of Britain with no Empire incoherently. The captive markets the Empire forced mattered enormously and are too often obfuscated now. Certainly a big part of Empire was about transfering wealth to the elites, so the layperson, or perhaps "Britain" as the state alone if that is your meaning, did not see as much of a direct monetary benefit as they might have.

[djhn]

Is there a book for a lay person you could recommend on this? Something a bit more rigorous than Yuval Harari, Bill Bryson and the like but not aimed at fellow historians only.

[KnuthIsGod]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/british-empire...

Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India

[chimprich]

I enjoyed "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company" by Dalrymple, which has a specific focus, but conveys a fascinating history of British involvement with India.