[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.