The British Empire broke up over about half a century, mostly between the independence of India and Pakistan in August 1947 and the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997. At its largest, in 1920, it covered 35.5 million km² (13.7 million sq mi), roughly 24 per cent of the Earth’s land, and in 1913 it ruled about 412 million people, 23 per cent of the world’s population. The breakup ran in clear waves: the settler dominions won self-government between 1867 and 1931; South Asia left in 1947–48; Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya followed in the 1950s; most of Africa, the Caribbean and the Gulf went in the 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1945 and 1965 alone, the number of people under British rule outside the United Kingdom fell from about 700 million to 5 million. What survives is fourteen British Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association of 56 states, most of them former British territories.
1775–1783: Boston, Yorktown and the First Empire Lost
The empire had already been broken once before the great twentieth-century retreat. Its oldest populous colonies, the Thirteen Colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, rebelled in 1775, with the first fighting around Boston. After the Franco-American victory at Yorktown in Virginia in October 1781, Britain opened talks in Paris, and the Treaty of Paris of 3 September 1783 recognised the United States as independent. Britain kept British North America, the later Canada, and its Caribbean islands, but the loss redirected its ambitions. Expansion swung towards Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
The second empire rested on Asia and the sea routes to it. India was taken piece by piece by the East India Company and then ruled directly by the Crown. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, became what contemporaries called the jugular vein of the empire, and in 1875 Benjamin Disraeli’s government bought the Egyptian ruler’s 44 per cent shareholding in it for £4 million. Egypt itself was occupied in 1882. After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles added about 4.7 million km² and 13 million people as League of Nations mandates, among them Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Tanganyika and parts of Cameroon and Togoland. The empire’s largest extent came at the very moment Britain had stopped being the world’s leading industrial power.
1867–1937: Ottawa, Melbourne, Dublin and the Statute of Westminster
The first pieces to drift away did so legally and slowly. The provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were united as the Dominion of Canada on 1 July 1867. The Australian colonies federated as the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901, and New Zealand and South Africa followed as dominions. These were the settler colonies, governed largely by people of British descent, and Britain granted them self-rule that it denied to India and the African colonies.
Ireland was different. Sinn Féin won most Irish seats in the 1918 general election, declared independence in Dublin and fought the War of Independence. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 created the Irish Free State, a dominion established in December 1922, while six of the 32 Irish counties, as Northern Ireland, stayed in the United Kingdom. In 1937 the Free State adopted a republican constitution and renamed itself Ireland.
Egypt received formal independence in 1922, though British troops stayed, and Iraq, a British mandate since 1920, became independent in 1932. Meanwhile the dominions pressed for equality. The Balfour Declaration of 1926 called Britain and the dominions autonomous communities, equal in status, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 gave that legal force: the parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland could no longer be overruled by Westminster. Some legal threads survived for another half-century: the Canada Act 1982 patriated Canada’s constitution, and the Australia Act 1986 cut the remaining legislative ties with the Australian states.
1947–1948: Delhi, Karachi, Colombo and Rangoon
The Second World War left Britain close to bankrupt; only a US$3.75 billion American loan in 1946 averted insolvency. Japan had overrun Burma, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, shattering the idea that British power was unbeatable in Asia. India, the most valuable and most populous possession, went first.
Under the Indian Independence Act 1947, British India was divided into two dominions, India and Pakistan, which came into existence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947. The provinces of Punjab and Bengal were split along district majorities, Muslim on one side, Hindu and Sikh on the other, and Pakistan was created in two separate wings on either side of India, the eastern one later becoming Bangladesh. About 14.5 million people crossed the new borders. The violence that accompanied the move killed somewhere between 200,000 and two million people, a range that historians still dispute. The princely states were released from their treaties with the Crown and left to choose between India and Pakistan, which led straight to the Kashmir dispute.
Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, became independent on 4 February 1948, and Burma left the same year, choosing not to join the Commonwealth. In Palestine, where Britain had failed to reconcile Arab and Jewish claims under its mandate, it simply withdrew; the State of Israel was declared on 14 May 1948, hours before the mandate expired at midnight, and war followed. The full story of the subcontinent is told in our guide to the partition of India.
1956–1960: Suez, Accra and Macmillan’s Cape Town Speech
For a few years British leaders believed that the empire could carry on in a new shape. Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956, but the base on the Suez Canal still seemed to anchor British power in the Middle East. In July 1956 Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal. Prime Minister Anthony Eden colluded with France and Israel to retake it, but the United States refused its support, and its Treasury prepared to sell part of the American government’s sterling bond holdings. British and French troops withdrew under American and United Nations pressure, and Eden resigned. The Suez Crisis showed that Britain could no longer act as an imperial power without Washington’s consent.
The African wave began in Accra. On 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence, led by Kwame Nkrumah. The Federation of Malaya followed on 31 August 1957, in the middle of a guerrilla war, the Malayan Emergency, that ran from 1948 to 1960. In February 1960 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament in Cape Town that a wind of change was blowing through the continent. Nigeria, today the most populous country in Africa, became independent on 1 October 1960, and the 1960s added nearly ten times as many newly independent former colonies as the 1950s had.
1952–1980: Nairobi, Aden, Salisbury and the Wars of Withdrawal
Britain is often said to have left its empire peacefully compared with France in Algeria or Portugal in Angola, but the retreat was violent in several places. In Kenya the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952–1960 pitted the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, mainly Kikuyu, Meru and Embu fighters, against the colonial government. Its suppression cost Britain £55 million and caused at least 11,000 deaths among the Mau Mau and other forces, with some estimates far higher, alongside mass detention of civilians. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963.
In the Middle East, Kuwait became independent in 1961 and the British left Aden in 1967 after an insurgency. On 16 January 1968, weeks after devaluing the pound, Harold Wilson’s government announced that British forces would leave their major bases East of Suez, chiefly in Malaysia and Singapore, by the end of 1971. Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates became independent that year. Singapore had already left Malaysia in 1965 to become a city-state.
Southern Africa produced the longest dispute. On 11 November 1965 the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia, a self-governing colony since 1923, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence rather than accept majority rule. Fifteen years of sanctions and guerrilla war followed. The Lancaster House conference in London, held from 10 September to 15 December 1979, agreed a settlement, and Robert Mugabe won the 1980 election as the newly independent Zimbabwe’s first prime minister. The partition of Africa that made these colonies in the first place is covered in our guide to the scramble for Africa and decolonisation.
1997 and After: Hong Kong, Fourteen Territories and a Commonwealth of 56
By the 1980s the largest remaining colony was Hong Kong. Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula had been ceded to Britain outright by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, but most of the colony’s land, the New Territories, was held on a 99-year lease signed in 1898 and due to expire in 1997. Margaret Thatcher travelled to Beijing in September 1982 hoping to keep British administration, but China refused. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 turned Hong Kong into a special administrative region of China under the formula of one country, two systems, promised for 50 years. The handover at midnight on 1 July 1997 ended 156 years of British rule, and many, including the then Prince of Wales who attended, described it as the end of empire.
It was not quite the end. Fourteen British Overseas Territories remain, from Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands to Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Pitcairn and the British Antarctic Territory, so that Britain still holds territory on every continent except Australia. Even this residue keeps shrinking: on 22 May 2025 Britain signed an agreement to transfer the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, with the island of Diego Garcia leased back for at least 99 years.
The bigger legacy is on the map itself. The Radcliffe Line between India and Pakistan was drawn by a British lawyer, the borders of former mandates such as Iraq and Jordan were fixed under British administration, and many of today’s African boundaries trace lines agreed between colonial powers. English is spoken by about 1.5 billion people as a first, second or foreign language. And the Commonwealth, which began as the club of self-governing dominions, now has 56 member states, with fifteen of them, including the United Kingdom, still sharing King Charles III as head of state; our list of Commonwealth countries shows which former colonies chose to stay in it.